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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Part I is about valuing fairness, II chiefly about not valuing it. Equally, I is about knowing fairness or taking yourself to know what it is, while II is chiefly about not knowing what it is: absolutely not knowing what it is, or not knowing what it is except when it is thought of in a narrow way. I want to know what all those states involve, e.g. whether knowing what fairness is involves valuing it, and most of all (in Part II) whether those two aforesaid ways of not knowing what fairness is involve some knowably undesirable kind of ignorance; in that sense, incur a cognitive penal sanction. But I begin elsewhere.
1 Foot, Philippa, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 17–18.Google Scholar
2 Some of the questions this raises are discussed towards the end.
3 Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 23–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar (Hare has, by the way, always stressed the non-identity of the grammatical concept of an imperative and the social concept of an order.)
4 Cf. Lovibond, Sabina, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Oxford: Black-well, 1983), 165–169.Google Scholar
5 Foot, , op. cit., xiv.Google Scholar
6 Foot, , op. cit., 175.Google Scholar
7 Foot, , op. cit., 123–124.Google Scholar
8 Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism, Chap. V.Google Scholar
9 Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, LXIII.Google Scholar
10 See Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970).Google Scholar
11 See Lovibond, , op. cit.Google Scholar, passim. Lovibond is however in no way involved in this argument concerning fairness that I now table.
12 Hardy, , op.cit., XXXV.Google Scholar
