¹ Reprinted in Williams, Jack K., Duelling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980), pp. 87–104.Google Scholar

² Wilson, p. 99. I can't help but wonder what J. L. Austin would have done with that principle.Google Scholar

³ Wilson, p. 99.Google Scholar

⁴ Wilson, p. 98.Google Scholar

⁵ Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985, Chapter 10.Google Scholar

⁶ Immanuel, Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 161.Google Scholar

⁷ Kiernan, V. G., The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy, (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 306.Google Scholar

⁸ See Greenberg, Kenneth S., Masters and Statesman: The Political Culture of American Slavery, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), Chapter 2: ‘The Duel as Social Drama’. See also Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, Oxford University Press, 1982, although he is less careful than Greenberg to show the ties between Southern honour and slavery.Google Scholar

⁹ Wilson, p. 89.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Wilson, p. 88; emphasis added.Google Scholar

¹¹ Frankena, W. K., ‘The Concept of Morality’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 63(1966) p. 688. Alan Gewirth writes of this list in ‘Must One Play the Moral Language Game?’ reprinted in his Human Rights, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 82, that ‘W. K. Frankena has provided a convenient summary of recent attempts at such elucidation [of the general concept of a morality]’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² Wilson, p. 94.Google Scholar

¹³ Jacobs, Harriet A. shows the practical side of the theoretical problem in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Yellin, Jean Fagan (ed.), (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Jacobs reports that her grandmother had laid up three hundred dollars, which her mistress one day begged as a loan, promising to pay her soon. The reader probably knows that no promise or writing given to a slave is legally binding; for, according to Southern laws, a slave, being property, can hold no property. When my grandmother lent her hard earnings to her mistress, she trusted solely to her honor. The honor of a slaveholder to a slave! (p. 6) The money was never repaid.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Harvey, Wish, ed., Ante-bellum: Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on Slavery, (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1960), p. 128.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, originally published 1883, Ch. 46.Google Scholar

¹⁶ I am grateful to Amelie Rorty for help here.

¹⁷ Amelie, Rorty, Mind in Action, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), pp. 274–75.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 284.

¹⁹ Along these lines see ‘Moral Luck’, Chapter 2 in Bernard, Williams, Moral Luck, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), especially pages 21–22.Google Scholar For a relevant comparison between Aristotle and Kant which was influenced by Williams, see Jonathan, Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chapter 5, especially pages 152–55.Google Scholar

²⁰ Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, originally published 1894, Chapter 12.Google Scholar

²¹ Bertram, Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 289; emphasis added.Google Scholar

²² Those who hold a realist code of honour would take exception to this.

²³ Wilson, p. 97.Google Scholar

²⁴ p. 398.

²⁵ In a recent book, Henry Allison notes how similar this attack on Kant is to the older Hegelian one, and summarizes Williams's point in Hegelian language: ‘[i]n short, [Williams] maintains that the requirements of an impersonal morality alienate us from others as well as from ourselves’, Kant's Theory of Freedom, p. 193. Allison goes on to defend Kant against both Williams and Hegel. (Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

²⁶ Reprinted in Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

²⁷ See Foot, pp. xiii-xiv.

²⁸ Foot, p. 159.

²⁹ Foot, p. 172.

³⁰ Foot, p. 160.

³¹ Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 188.Google Scholar

³² Ludwig, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. f Anscombe, 3rd ed., Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, Ltd., 1958, remark; 437; and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, G. E. M. Anscombe (eds), trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, rev. ed., (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), Part I, remark 121, p. 84.Google Scholar

³³ David, Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company), p. 16/Sec. I.Google Scholar

³⁴ Hume, p. 68/Sec. VIII.Google Scholar

³⁵ Hume, pp. 98–99/App. IV. Hume lists as possible criteria of differentiation the usual dichotomies: voluntary v. involuntary, social v. nonsocial, moral v. intellectual, and heart v. head. In each case, by the use of counter-examples, he shows that the dichotomy fails to draw the desired boundaries between a virtue and a talent, a vice and a defect. Hume then says, ‘It is fortunate, amidst all this seeming perplexity, that the question, being merely verbal, cannot be of any importance’ (Ibid., p. 99). To Hume, this is not an admission of defeat, but an accusation.

³⁶ Foot, Virtues and Vices, p. 6.Google Scholar

³⁷ Foot, p. 7.

³⁸ Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Chapter I, p. 398.Google Scholar

³⁹ I am grateful for helpful advice from Lydia Goehr, Ken Greenberg, Amelie Rorty, Sally Sedgwick, and especially Jenny Gerrard.