Thick Aesthetic Concepts

The term 'thick concept' was introduced into philosophical discourse by Bernard Williams in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, in the context of a discussion of the fact-value distinction.1 He was interested in the extent to which this distinction is found in the linguistic data that drive a certain kind of moral theorist, rather than simply being imposed upon the data by his interpretation. What Williams had in mind were such concepts as courage, brutality, and gratitude, which "seem to express a union of fact and value. The way these notions are applied is determined by what the world is like (for instance, by how someone has behaved), and yet, at the same time, their application usually involves a certain valuation of the situation, of persons or actions."2 To call a woman brave or courageous is to characterize herher character, actions, dispositions, or demeanorin a certain way and to regard her as admirable or praiseworthy on that basis. To say that she is kind is also to hold her up as worthy of praise or admiration, but for quite different reasons, while calling her foolhardy may be disparaging her behavior on grounds not wholly dissimilar to those that would excite admiration as bravery. The terms that express these concepts, according to Williams, "certainly do not lay bare the fact-value distinction. Rather, the theorist who wants to defend the distinction has to interpret the workings of these terms, and he does so by treating them as a conjunction of a factual and an evaluative element, which can in principle be separated from one another."3 Williams refers in a general way to the work of R. M. Hare as paradigmatic of this kind of treatment. However, in his earlier writings (before Moral Thinking of 1981) Hare was chiefly concerned, not with uses of thick ethical terms (which he called "secondarily evaluative terms"),4 but wi h uses of more general, or thin, ethical terms like 'good,' 'right,' 'wrong,' and 'ought.' It was in connection with these that he first argued that heir use in a given context has both a descriptive an an evaluative meaning, which nevertheless can in principle always be distinguished. In an essay on "Descriptivism" he considers the use of the erm 'good' in the locution 'good wine.' Somee who says that Colombey-les-deux-eglises vintag 1972 is a good wine is doing so because it has a certain taste, bouquet, body, and so forth. However, the fact that there is not a name for the precise complex of descriptive qualities that makes it a good wine is no reason to suppose that the descriptive meaning of the term 'good wine' cannot be isolated. We can invent a word and teach anybody to recognize the taste denoted by the word. Hare believes that we could do this "whether or not he was himself disposed to think that these liquid tasted good, or that, if they were wines, they were good wines. He could, that is to say, learn the meaning of [the invented name] quite independently of his own estimation of the merit of wines having that taste."5 This strategy, Hare claims, works also "when, as in most moral and aesthetic cases, there is no one word which has just the descriptive meaning that we want, but a multitud of possible ways of describing, in greater r lesser detail, the sort of thing we have in mind." "It is," he continues, "very hard to say what it is about a particular picture which makes us call it a good one; but nevertheless what makes us call it a good one is a series of describable characteristics combined in just this way."6 In later writings, Hare explicitly considers the s rategy in relation to the more specific, substantive, or thick ethical concepts like cruel and rude.