A Shelter from Luck: The Morality System Reconstructed

Far from being indiscriminately critical of the ideas he associated with the morality system, Bernard Williams offered vindicatory explanations of its crucial building blocks, such as the moral/non-moral distinction, the idea of obligation, the voluntary/involuntary distinction, and the practice of blame. The rationale for these concessive moves, I argue, is that understanding what these ideas do for us when they are not in the service of the system is just as important to leading us out of the system as the critique of that system. I then show how regarding the aspiration to shelter life from luck as the system’s organizing ambition explains why the system elaborates and combines these building blocks in the way it does. Finally, I argue that the ultimate problem with the resulting construction is its frictionless purity. It robs valuable concepts of their grip on the world we live in, and, by insisting on purity from contingency, threatens to issue in nihilism about value and scepticism about agency

Projective representations of mapping class groups in combinatorial quantization

Let $\Sigma_{g,n}$ be a compact oriented surface of genus $g$ with $n$ open disks removed. The graph algebra $\mathcal{L}_{g,n}(H)$ was introduced by Alekseev--Grosse--Schomerus and Buffenoir--Roche and is a combinatorial quantization of the moduli space of flat connections on $\Sigma_{g,n}$. We construct a projective representation of the mapping class group of $\Sigma_{g,n}$ using $\mathcal{L}_{g,n}(H)$ and its subalgebra of invariant elements. Here we assume that the gauge Hopf algebra $H$ is finite-dimensional, factorizable and ribbon, but not necessarily semi-simple. We also give explicit formulas for the representation of the Dehn twists generating the mapping class group; in particular, we show that it is equivalent to a representation constructed by V. Lyubashenko using categorical methods.Comment: 32 pages; minor corrections and improvements; new section and new theorem adde

Williams’s Pragmatic Genealogy and Self-Effacing Functionality

In Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams sought to defend the value of truth by giving a vindicatory genealogy revealing its instrumental value. But what separates Williams’s instrumental vindication from the indirect utilitarianism of which he was a critic? And how can genealogy vindicate anything, let alone something which, as Williams says of the concept of truth, does not have a history? In this paper, I propose to resolve these puzzles by reading Williams as a type of pragmatist and his genealogy as a pragmatic genealogy. On this basis, I show just in what sense Williams’s genealogy can by itself yield reasons to cultivate a sense of the value of truth. Using various criticisms of Williams’s genealogical method as a foil, I then develop an understanding of pragmatic genealogy which reveals it to be uniquely suited to dealing with practices exhibiting what I call self-effacing functionality—practices that are functional only insofar as and because we do not engage in them for their functionality. I conclude with an assessment of the wider significance of Williams’s genealogy for his own oeuvre and for further genealogical inquiry