ETHICS Williams began by recalling the way in which in the classical tradition happiness had been regarded as the product of self-sufficiency: what was not in the domain of the self was not in its control and so was subject to luck and the contingent enemies of tranquillity In more recent thought, the ideal of making the whole of life immune to luck was abandoned, but for Kant there was one supreme value, moral value, that could be regarded as immune: the successful moral life was a career open not merely to the talents but to a talent that all rational beings necessarily possess in the same degree Williams insisted that the aim of making morality immune to luck was bound to be disappointed There is the constitutive luck of the temperament we inherit and the culture into which we are born: this sets the conditions within which our moral dispositions, motives, and intentions must operate There is also—and Williams developed this theme in telling detail—the incident luck that is involved in bringing any project of moral importance to a successful conclusion As the century progressed philosophers began to focus their attention not so much on the higher-order questions such as the nature of moral language, or the relationships between principles, character, luck, and virtue, but on specific first-order issues such as the rightness or wrongness of particular actions: lying, abortion, torture, and euthanasia, for example Foot and Williams played a significant part in this change of emphasis, which was also reflected in universities in the growth of such courses as medical ethics and business ethics Both Foot and Williams taught on both sides of the Atlantic In the United States the most significant moral philosopher of the latter part of the twentieth century was John Rawls Like Foot and Williams, Rawls was an enemy of utilitarianism, a system that he believed provided no safeguard against many forms of unfair discrimination His project was to derive a theory of justice from the notion of fairness, which he did by introducing a novel version of social contract theory into ethics Since the major implications of his theory concern political institutions rather than individual morality, his work will be considered later, in Chapter 11 249