Christopher Donald Cordner

Against moral philosophers' traditional preoccupation with ‘ought’ judgments, Bernard Williams has reminded us of the importance of locutions such as ‘I must’, ‘I have to’ and ‘I can't’. He develops an account of the ethical necessity and impossibility these locutions are able to mark. The account draws on his thesis that all reasons for action are ‘internal’. I sketch the account, and then try to show that it is insensitive to important aspects of how the concepts of ethical necessity and impossibility inform our lives.

In their article ‘Unintended consequences of human research ethics committees: au revoir workplace studies?’, Greg Bamber and Jennifer Sappey set out some real obstacles in the practices and attitudes of some Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs), to research in the social sciences and particularly in industrial sociology. They sheet home these attitudes and practices to the way in which various statements in the NHMRC’s National Statement [1999] are implemented, which they say is often ‘in conflict with an important stream of industrial sociological research’ in Australia. They do not discuss the recently completed revision of the NS. We undertake to show that the revised National Statement meets their concerns about research in industrial sociology, and to draw attention to the resources of the revised National Statement that engage with those concerns. A more general aim is to display the greater scope, in the revised National Statement, for researchers to show to HRECs that their research is justified by virtue of its reflecting the established methodology and traditions of their discipline. The revised National Statement, we suggest, provides for a more flexible and responsive approach than its predecessor to the ethical review of many areas of research.

In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams describes the experience of guilt in terms of fear at the anger of an internalised other, who is a “victim or enforcer.” Williams says it is a merit of his account that it shows how our guilt turns us towards the victims of our wrongdoing. I argue that his account in fact misses the most important form of guilt's “concern with victims”– the experience of remorse. I consider, and reject, one way of trying to supplement this lack in Williams's account of guilt. Finally, I sketch some features of remorse that suggest that remorse belongs to a very different moral picture from the one painted by Williams.