In this article, I examine a distinctive position in moral philosophy that, following Bernard Williams, I label “postanalytic”. In one of his final essays, “What Might Philosophy Become?”, Williams sets out a program for extending moral philosophy beyond its traditional “limits” in a way that will transform it into an embodied, historical, and political form of reflective practice.1 This programmatic intent has been shared by a number of moral philosophers since, some of whom are expressly influenced by Williams’s late work. (...) In what follows, I limit myself to a discussion of just two: Raimond Gaita and Christopher Hamilton, contemporary moral philosophers who are wedded to the... (shrink)

I confess to finding the term ‘supererogation’ ugly and unpronounceable. I am also generally suspicious of technical terms in moral philosophy, since they are vulnerable to self-serving definition and counter-definition, to the point of obscuring whether there is a single phenomenon about which to disagree. It was surely not accidental that J.O. Urmson, in his classic 1958 article that launched the contemporary Anglophone debate, eschewed the technical term in favour of the more familiar concepts of saints and heroes. Since then, (...) however, the term Supererogation has bedded down to encompass a number of more or less clear-cut philosophical debates, one of which concerns precisely the extent to which saintliness and heroism exhaust the supererogatory. And it has to be admitted that the word ‘saint’ has certain theological connotations that might be misleading in a secular philosophical discussion, while the word ‘hero’ has potentially limiting associations with knights and soldiers and other forms of testosterone-driven accomplishment. (shrink)