Sunlight on the Sea: Reflecting on Reflections

摘要

I was an undergraduate at St Andrews, on Scotland's East Coast, where the philosophy building, appropriately named 'Edgecliffe', perched high on the rocky coast of the North Sea. Since then, living inland. I enjoyed the still waters of Norfolk lakes and the leafy riverbanks in Durham, but the moods and movement of sea and sky have a special draw for me, as they do for many. Much of contemporary ethics describes itself in the positive language of 'ought' and 'good', but is primarily concerned with the bad. It delineates areas of prohibition, and once that is achieved, we carry on without troubling ourselves too much about the ethical. The idea of 'good' (rather than merely 'not bad') tends to be external: on occasions where the 'goodness' of supererogation is mentioned, it is a self-sacrificing notion. In this atmosphere, it seems beyond the bounds of ethics to account for the significance in a personal experience of sunlight on sea. Such things are liable to appear trivial, even if this does not match our experience of them.