The Moral Significance of Class, first published in 2005, analyses the moral aspects of people's experience of class inequalities. Class affects not only our material wealth but our access to things, relationships, and practices which we have reason to value, including the esteem or respect of others and hence our sense of self-worth. It shapes the kind of people we become and our chances of living a fulfilling life. Yet contemporary culture is increasingly 'in denial' about class, finding it embarrassing to acknowledge, even though it can often be blatantly obvious. By drawing upon concepts from moral philosophy and social theory and applying them to empirical studies of class, this fascinating and accessible study shows how people are valued in a context in which their life-chances and achievements are objectively affected by the lottery of birth class, and by forces which have little to do with their moral qualities or other merits.

https://bilder.buecher.de/zusatz/14/14718/14718604_vorw_1.pdf

The Moral Significance of Class

Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law

Preface: a renaissance of virtue 1. Joining the hunt 2. Character and consistency 3. Moral character, moral behavior 4. The fragmentation of character 5. Judging character 6. From psychology to ethics 7. Situation and responsibility 8. Is there anything to be ashamed of?

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Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior

Neutralization theory, though a popular framework for understanding deviant behavior, remains badly underdeveloped. Few attempts have been made to connect it to narrative and sociocognitive research in psychology and related fields. From this wider perspective, one reason neutralization theory has received only mixed empirical support is that it has been understood as a theory of criminal etiology. This makes little sense (how can one neutralize something before they have done it?) and makes the theory difficult to test. Neutralization should instead be seen as playing a role in persistence in or desistance from criminal behavior. The theory's central premises need to be substantially complicated. The notions that all excuses or justifications are "bad" and that reform involves "accepting complete responsibility" for one's actions are not tenable.

What Have We Learned from Five Decades of Neutralization Research

Preface and acknowledgements 1. Introduction: a relation to the world of concern 2. Values within reason 3. Reason beyond rationality: values and practical reason 4. Beings for whom things matter 5. Understanding the ethical dimension of life 6. Dignity 7. Critical social science and its rationales 8. Implications for social science Appendix: comments on philosophical theories of ethics Bibliography Index.

Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams' original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. In a new foreword A.A. Long explores the impact of this volume in the context of Williams' stunning career.

Shame and Necessity

Chapter I of this book is an important contribution to the discussion of formulas. Parry has convinced most of us that the Homeric poet had a stock of metrical units, fixed phrases, which he would employ whenever the need arose, so that Odysseus, for instance, would be polymetis when he had to complete a line in the nominative case from the caesura in the fourth foot, polymecbanos when he had to do the same in the vocative case, and so on. If this is so, the epithets can have no relevance to the particular situation, although they naturally do have relevance to the general character of the hero. Austin shows by the clearest analysis that it is not so. Polymetis signifies 'intelligent', and is virtually always used in the introduction to speeches (63 times out of 66 in the Odyssey); it is never used by either the suitors or Telemachos to describe Odysseus (one can see that in the mouths of either it would sound condescending or improper). Polymechanos is found in peculiar situations: it is used fourteen times out of sixteen by creatures from other worlds, gods or the dead, once by Eumaios, and once in an imaginary tale by Odysseus himself. His own family do not address him in the vocative with this epithet. Similarly, Telemachos pepnumenos, which we might suppose was a free-floating formula for the young hero, tilling the space between the end of the first foot and the bucolic diaeresis, from position A to position C on the Frankel/Porter/Kirk scale, is in fact invariably found in a line introducing a speech (46 times out of 46); Telemachos is not described as pepnumenos on other occasions. So the stock epithets are not meaningless building blocks; their use is related to the context of their occurrence. Here is a really important corrective to our view of formulaic composition. It does not destroy the concept, but it must greatly modify it. One is only sorry that Austin's evidence comes exclusively from the Odyssey. He shows a blithe lack of concern as to whether the evidence of the Iliad is the same. Chapter II, which appeared previously in Anon, is mainly a discussion of Homer as an example of primitive and pre-scientific thought (Snell's The Discovery of the Mind). Austin disagrees. Chapters III and IV deal with well-known problems of the Odyssey, including the relevance of the individual adventures and the questions raised by the reunion and mutual recognition of Odysseus and Penelope. They contain some of the most delightful reading on these subjects that one could meet, overlapping to some extent with the much praised Studies in the Odyssey by B. Fenik (1974; Fenik's book appeared too late for Austin to take it into account). But Austin is more readable than Fenik. His depth of understanding is a most valuable corrective to the destructive criticism and overconfident judgements of some other writers on the Odyssey. He perceives, for example, the significance of the interplay between Odysseus and Penelope before the recognition, and how previous scenes in the epic (Telemachos and Helen, Odysseus himself and Arete) are advance variants of the meeting of the queen and the incognito stranger. The book deserves to be widely read, and the exaggerated Introduction (pp.1— 9) and the above-mentioned disregard of the Iliad in the formulaic argument should not prevent it from being taken very seriously. As to the title, it is simpler than might be supposed. The 'Dark of the Moon' is the lykabas (14.161, 19.306), the period between the old moon and the new, when there was a feast of Apollo (21.258); the archery is the archery of Odysseus.

Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer's Odyssey

Like the male heroes of epic poetry, Helen of Troy has been immortalized, but not for deeds of strength and honor; she is remembered as the beautiful woman who disgraced herself and betrayed her family and state. Norman Austin here surveys interpretations of Helen in Greek literature from the Homeric period through later antiquity. He looks most closely at a revisionist myth according to which Helen never sailed to Troy, but remained blameless, while a libertine phantom or ghost impersonated her at Troy. Comparing the functions of contradictory images of Helen, Austin helps to clarify the problematic relations between beauty and honor and between ugliness and shame in ancient Greece. Austin first discusses the canonical account of the Iliad and the Odyssey: Helen as the archetype of woman without shame. He next considers different versions of Helen in the Homeric tradition. Among these, he shows how Sappho presents Helen as an icon of absolute beauty while she defends her own preference of eros over honor and her choice of woman as the object of desire. Austin then turns to three major authors who repudiated the traditional Helen of Troy: the lyric poet Stesichorus and the dramatist Euripides, who embraced the alternative myth of Helen's phantom; and the historian Herodotus, who claimed to have found in Egypt a Helen story that dispenses with both Helen and the phantom. Austin maintains that the conflicting motives that prompted these writers to rehabilitate Helen led to further revisions of her image, though none have endured as a credible substitute for the Helen of epic tradition.

Helen of Troy and her shameless phantom

The digressions are not random results of oral parataxis, but in their paradigmatic function show a consistency in theme and development that is part of the overall ordering of the poem.

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Norman Austin

Papers

Shame and Necessity

Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer's Odyssey

Helen of Troy and her shameless phantom

The Function of Digressions in the Iliad

Name Magic in the "Odyssey"