Bernard Williams
Encyclopedia
Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (21 September 1929 – 10 June 2003) was an English moral philosopher
, described by The Times as the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.
As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Cambridge
and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to reorient the study of moral philosophy to history and culture, politics and psychology, and in particular to the Greeks. Described as an analytic philosopher with the soul of a humanist, he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed increasingly unable to communicate with one another. He rejected scientism
, and scientific or evolutionary reductionism
, calling "morally unimaginative" reductionists "the people I really do dislike." For Williams, complexity was irreducible, beautiful, and meaningful.
He became known as a supporter of women in academia, seeing in women the possibility of a synthesis of reason and emotion that he felt eluded analytic philosophy. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum
said he was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be." He was also famously sharp in conversation. Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle
once said of him that he "understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your sentence."
, Essex, the only son of a civil servant. He was educated at Chigwell School
, and read Greats
(Classics) at Balliol College, Oxford
, graduating in 1951 with a congratulatory first-class honours degree, before spending his year-long national service
in the Royal Air Force
flying Spitfire
s in Canada. While on leave in New York, he met his future wife, Shirley Brittain-Catlin—daughter of political scientist George Catlin
and novelist Vera Brittain
—who was studying at Columbia University. At the age of 22, after winning a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford
in 1951, Williams returned to England with Shirley to take up the post. They were married in 1955.
, where he worked from 1959 until 1964. He was later appointed Professor of Philosophy at Bedford College
, while his wife worked as a journalist for the Financial Times. For 17 years, the couple lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife. During this time, described by Williams as one of the happiest of his life, the marriage produced a daughter, Rebecca, but the development of his wife's political career kept the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal values—Williams was a confirmed atheist
, his wife a devout Catholic
—placed a strain on their relationship, which reached breaking point when Williams had an affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian Quentin Skinner
. Williams and Skinner subsequently married and had two sons. Shirley Williams said of her marriage to Williams:
Williams conceded that he could be tough. "I like to think that this is usually when I'm confronted with self-satisfaction. In philosophy the thing that irritates me is smugness, particularly scientistic smugness." He was appointed Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1967, vacating the chair to serve as Provost of King's College from 1979 until 1987. He left England in 1988 to become Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
, citing the relative prosperity of American academic life, and the so-called "brain drain
" from England of academics moving to the U.S. He told a British newspaper at the time that he could barely afford to buy a house in central London on his salary as an academic. He told The Guardian in November 2002 that he regretted his departure becoming so public: "I was persuaded that there was a real problem about academic conditions and that if my departure was publicized this would bring these matters to public attention. It did a bit, but it made me seem narky." Bemoaning the challenge of cross-cultural adjustment, he observed "it's harder to live out there with a family than I supposed."
He held several positions at Berkeley (1986–2003) where he was Mills Professor (1986–1988), Sather Classics Lecturer and Sather Professor (1988–1989), and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy (1988–2003), and also served, at the same time, as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford (1990–1996), eventually becoming a Fellow of All Souls College again in 1997.
s and government committees. He chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship
, which reported in 1979 that: "Given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that one can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any hint at all that pornography was present in the background." The Committee's report was evidently influenced by the liberal thinking of John Stuart Mill
, a philosopher greatly admired by Williams, who used Mill's principle of liberty to develop what he called the "harm condition," whereby "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone." Williams concluded that pornography could not be shown to be harmful, and that "the role of pornography in influencing society is not very important ... to think anything else is to get the problem of pornography out of proportion with the many other problems that face our society today." The committee reported that, so long as children were protected from seeing it, adults should be free to read and watch pornography as they see fit. Margaret Thatcher's first administration put an end to the liberal agenda on sex, and nearly put an end to Williams's political career too; he was not asked to chair another public committee for almost 15 years. Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining the role of British private schools in 1965–70, drug abuse in 1971, gambling in 1976–78, and social justice in 1993–94. "I did all the major vices," he said.
for 20 years. He wrote the entry for "opera" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, and a collection of his essays, On Opera, was published in 2006, edited by his widow, Patricia.
and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters
(Litt.D.) by the University of Cambridge in 2002. He died on 10 June 2003 while on holiday in Rome. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma
, a form of cancer. He was survived by his wife, Patricia, their two sons, and a daughter from his first marriage.
In Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), he wrote that "whereas most moral philosophy at most times has been empty and boring... contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing issues at all." The study of morality, he argued, should be vital and compelling. He wanted to find a moral philosophy that was accountable to psychology, history, politics, and culture. In his rejection of morality as what he called "a peculiar institution," by which he meant a discrete and separable domain of human thought, some people have seen a resemblance to the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
. Despite at first seeing Nietzsche as a crude reductionist, Williams came to admire him, once remarking that he wished he could quote him every twenty minutes.
Although Williams's disdain for reductionism could make him appear a moral relativist
, he argued in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy that moral concepts could be "thick
" or "thin". The former—such as courageous or cruel—are about real features of the world, and disputes about them can be resolved objectively.
position, the simplest version of which is that actions are good only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
One of his best-known arguments against utilitarianism centers on Jim, a botanist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator. One day Jim finds himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 Indians who have been randomly captured and tied up as examples of what will happen to rebels. The captain who has arrested the Indians says that if Jim will kill one of them, the others will be released in honor of Jim's status as a guest, but if he does not, all the Indians will be killed. For most consequentialist theories, there is no moral dilemma in a case like this; all that matters is the outcome. Simple act utilitarianism would therefore favour Jim killing one of the men. Against this, Williams argued that there is a crucial moral distinction between a person being killed by me, and being killed by someone else because of an act or omission of mine. The utilitarian loses that vital distinction, turning us into empty vessels by means of which consequences occur, rather than preserving our status as moral actors and decision-makers. He argued that moral decisions must preserve our psychological identity and integrity.
We do not, in fact, judge actions by their consequences, he argued. To solve parking problems in London, a utilitarian would have to favour threatening to shoot people who parked illegally. If only a few people were shot for this, illegal parking would soon stop; thus the utilitarian calculus could justify the shootings by the happiness the absence of parking problems would bring. Any theory with this as a consequence, Williams argued, should be rejected out of hand, no matter how plausible it feels to argue that we do judge actions by their consequences. In an effort to save the utilitarian account, a rule utilitarian — a version of utilitarianism that promotes not the act, but the rule that tends to lead to the greatest happiness of the greatest number — would ask what rule could be extrapolated from the parking example. If the rule were: "Anyone might be shot over a simple parking offense," the utilitarian would argue that its implementation would bring great unhappiness. For Williams, this argument simply proved his point. We do not need to calculate why threatening to shoot people over parking offenses is wrong, he argued, and any system that shows us how to make the calculation is one we should reject. Indeed, we should reject any system that reduces moral decision-making to a few algorithms, because any systematization or reductionism will inevitably distort its complexity.
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One of the main alternatives to utilitarian theory is the moral philosophy of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant
. Williams's work throughout the 1970s and 1980s outlined the basis of his attacks on the twin pillars of utilitarianism and Kantianism. Martha Nussbaum wrote that his work "denounced the trivial and evasive way in which moral philosophy was being practised in England under the aegis of those two dominant theories".
Kant's Critique of Practical Reason
and Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals expounded a moral system based on what he called the categorical imperative
, the best known version of which is: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become, by an act of will
, a universal law of nature." This is a binding law, Kant argued, on any rational being with free will
. Williams argued against the categorical imperative in his paper "Persons, character and morality". Morality should not require us to act selflessly, as though we are not who we are in the circumstances in which we presently find ourselves. We should not have to take an impartial view of the world, he argued. Our values, commitments, and desires do make a difference to how we see the world and how we act; and so they should, he said, otherwise we lose our individuality, and thereby our humanity.
and even selfishness are not contrary to moral action, is illustrated in his "internal reasons for action" argument, part of what philosophers call the "internal/external reasons" debate. Philosophers have tried to argue that moral agents can have "external reasons" for performing a moral act; that is, they are able to act for reasons external to their inner mental states. Williams argued that this is meaningless. For something to be a "reason to act," it must be "magnetic"; that is, it must move people to action. But how can something entirely external to us—for example, the proposition that X is good—be "magnetic"? By what process can something external to us move us to act? Williams argued that it cannot. Cognition
is not magnetic. Knowing and feeling are quite separate, he wrote, and a person must feel before they are moved to act. He argued that reasons for action are always internal, whether based on a desire to act in accordance with upbringing, peer pressure, or similar, and they always boil down to desire.
as a tool of explanation and critique. Although part of his intention was to attack those he felt denied the value of truth, the book cautions that, to understand it simply in that sense, would be to miss part of its purpose; rather, as Kenneth Baker wrote, it is "Williams' reflection on the moral cost of the intellectual vogue for dispensing with the concept of truth." The Guardian wrote in its obituary of Williams that the book is an examination of those who "sneer at any purported truth as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power, class bias and ideology".
writes that Williams wanted to understand human beings as part of the natural world, and that the fundamental starting point of moral reflection had to be the individual perspective, the internal reasons for action. To try to transcend one's point of view, Williams argued, leads only to self-deception.
In a secular humanist
tradition, with no appeal to the external moral authority of a god, his ideas strike at the foundation of conventional morality, namely that one sometimes does good even if one does not want to, and can be blamed for a failure to do so. Timothy Chappell writes that, without external reasons for action, it becomes impossible to argue that the same set of moral reasons applies to all agents equally, because an agent's reasons can always be relativized to their particular lives, their internal reasons. In cases where someone has no internal reason to do what others see as the right thing, they cannot be blamed for failing to do it, because internal reasons are the only reasons, and blame, Williams wrote, "involves treating the person who is blamed like someone who had a reason to do the right thing but did not do it." Chappell writes that learning to be yourself, to be authentic and to act with integrity, rather than conforming to any external moral system, is arguably the fundamental motif of Williams's work. "If there's one theme in all my work it's about authenticity and self-expression," Williams said in 2002. "It's the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren't ... The whole thing has been about spelling out the notion of inner necessity." He moved moral philosophy away from the Kantian question, "What is my duty?" and back to the issue that mattered to the Greeks: "How should we live?"
Papers
Posthumously published
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
, described by The Times as the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.
As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy
Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy
The Knightbridge Professorship of Philosophy is the senior professorship in philosophy at the University of Cambridge.One of the oldest professorships in Cambridge, the chair was founded in 1683 by John Knightbridge, fellow of Peterhouse....
at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to reorient the study of moral philosophy to history and culture, politics and psychology, and in particular to the Greeks. Described as an analytic philosopher with the soul of a humanist, he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed increasingly unable to communicate with one another. He rejected scientism
Scientism
Scientism refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the systematic methods and approach of science, especially the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints...
, and scientific or evolutionary reductionism
Reductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...
, calling "morally unimaginative" reductionists "the people I really do dislike." For Williams, complexity was irreducible, beautiful, and meaningful.
He became known as a supporter of women in academia, seeing in women the possibility of a synthesis of reason and emotion that he felt eluded analytic philosophy. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum , is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics....
said he was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be." He was also famously sharp in conversation. Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle , was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the...
once said of him that he "understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your sentence."
Early life and education
Williams was born in Westcliff-on-SeaWestcliff-on-Sea
Westcliff-on-Sea is a suburb of Southend-on-Sea, a seaside resort in the East of England and unitary authority in Essex. It is situated on the northern bank of the Thames Estuary and about 34 miles east of London.-Geography:...
, Essex, the only son of a civil servant. He was educated at Chigwell School
Chigwell School
Chigwell School is an English co-educational independent school/public school in Chigwell, in the Epping Forest district of Essex. It was founded in 1629 by Samuel Harsnett, a former Archbishop of York . There are around 730 pupils aged between 7 and 18 years...
, and read Greats
Literae Humaniores
Literae Humaniores is the name given to an undergraduate course focused on Classics at Oxford and some other universities.The Latin name means literally "more humane letters", but is perhaps better rendered as "Advanced Studies", since humaniores has the sense of "more refined" or "more learned",...
(Classics) at Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
, graduating in 1951 with a congratulatory first-class honours degree, before spending his year-long national service
National service
National service is a common name for mandatory government service programmes . The term became common British usage during and for some years following the Second World War. Many young people spent one or more years in such programmes...
in the Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...
flying Spitfire
Supermarine Spitfire
The Supermarine Spitfire is a British single-seat fighter aircraft that was used by the Royal Air Force and many other Allied countries throughout the Second World War. The Spitfire continued to be used as a front line fighter and in secondary roles into the 1950s...
s in Canada. While on leave in New York, he met his future wife, Shirley Brittain-Catlin—daughter of political scientist George Catlin
George Catlin (political scientist)
Sir George Edward Gordon Catlin was an English political scientist and philosopher. A strong proponent of Anglo-America cooperation, he worked for many years as a professor at Cornell University and other universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. He preached the use of a natural...
and novelist Vera Brittain
Vera Brittain
Vera Mary Brittain was a British writer, feminist and pacifist, best remembered as the author of the best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth, recounting her experiences during World War I and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.-Life:Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Brittain was the...
—who was studying at Columbia University. At the age of 22, after winning a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford
All Souls College, Oxford
The Warden and the College of the Souls of all Faithful People deceased in the University of Oxford or All Souls College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England....
in 1951, Williams returned to England with Shirley to take up the post. They were married in 1955.
Career
Williams left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political ambitions, finding a post first at University College LondonUniversity College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
, where he worked from 1959 until 1964. He was later appointed Professor of Philosophy at Bedford College
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
, while his wife worked as a journalist for the Financial Times. For 17 years, the couple lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife. During this time, described by Williams as one of the happiest of his life, the marriage produced a daughter, Rebecca, but the development of his wife's political career kept the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal values—Williams was a confirmed atheist
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
, his wife a devout Catholic
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
—placed a strain on their relationship, which reached breaking point when Williams had an affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian Quentin Skinner
Quentin Skinner
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London.-Biography:...
. Williams and Skinner subsequently married and had two sons. Shirley Williams said of her marriage to Williams:
... [T]here was something of a strain that comes from two things. One is that we were both too caught up in what we were respectively doing—we didn't spend all that much time together; the other, to be completely honest, is that I'm fairly unjudgmental and I found Bernard's capacity for pretty sharp putting-down of people he thought were stupid unacceptable. Patricia has been cleverer than me in that respect. She just rides it. He can be very painful sometimes. He can eviscerate somebody. Those who are left behind are, as it were, dead personalities. Judge not that ye be not judged. I was influenced by Christian thinking, and he would say "That's frightfully pompous and it's not really the point." So we had a certain jarring over that and over Catholicism.
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, citing the relative prosperity of American academic life, and the so-called "brain drain
Brain drain
Human capital flight, more commonly referred to as "brain drain", is the large-scale emigration of a large group of individuals with technical skills or knowledge. The reasons usually include two aspects which respectively come from countries and individuals...
" from England of academics moving to the U.S. He told a British newspaper at the time that he could barely afford to buy a house in central London on his salary as an academic. He told The Guardian in November 2002 that he regretted his departure becoming so public: "I was persuaded that there was a real problem about academic conditions and that if my departure was publicized this would bring these matters to public attention. It did a bit, but it made me seem narky." Bemoaning the challenge of cross-cultural adjustment, he observed "it's harder to live out there with a family than I supposed."
He held several positions at Berkeley (1986–2003) where he was Mills Professor (1986–1988), Sather Classics Lecturer and Sather Professor (1988–1989), and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy (1988–2003), and also served, at the same time, as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford (1990–1996), eventually becoming a Fellow of All Souls College again in 1997.
Royal commissions
Williams served on a number of royal commissionRoyal Commission
In Commonwealth realms and other monarchies a Royal Commission is a major ad-hoc formal public inquiry into a defined issue. They have been held in various countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Saudi Arabia...
s and government committees. He chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship
Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship
The Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, better known as the Williams Committee, was a 1970s British Home Office committee chaired by Professor Bernard Williams...
, which reported in 1979 that: "Given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that one can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any hint at all that pornography was present in the background." The Committee's report was evidently influenced by the liberal thinking of John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
, a philosopher greatly admired by Williams, who used Mill's principle of liberty to develop what he called the "harm condition," whereby "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone." Williams concluded that pornography could not be shown to be harmful, and that "the role of pornography in influencing society is not very important ... to think anything else is to get the problem of pornography out of proportion with the many other problems that face our society today." The committee reported that, so long as children were protected from seeing it, adults should be free to read and watch pornography as they see fit. Margaret Thatcher's first administration put an end to the liberal agenda on sex, and nearly put an end to Williams's political career too; he was not asked to chair another public committee for almost 15 years. Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining the role of British private schools in 1965–70, drug abuse in 1971, gambling in 1976–78, and social justice in 1993–94. "I did all the major vices," he said.
Opera
Williams was interested in opera from the age of 15, and served on the board of the English National OperaEnglish National Opera
English National Opera is an opera company based in London, resident at the London Coliseum in St. Martin's Lane. It is one of the two principal opera companies in London, along with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden...
for 20 years. He wrote the entry for "opera" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, it is the largest single reference work on Western music. The dictionary has gone through several editions since the 19th century...
, and a collection of his essays, On Opera, was published in 2006, edited by his widow, Patricia.
Honours and death
Williams was knighted in 1999. He became a fellow of the British AcademyBritish Academy
The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national body for the humanities and the social sciences. Its purpose is to inspire, recognise and support excellence in the humanities and social sciences, throughout the UK and internationally, and to champion their role and value.It receives an annual...
and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters
Doctor of Letters
Doctor of Letters is a university academic degree, often a higher doctorate which is frequently awarded as an honorary degree in recognition of outstanding scholarship or other merits.-Commonwealth:...
(Litt.D.) by the University of Cambridge in 2002. He died on 10 June 2003 while on holiday in Rome. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma
Multiple myeloma
Multiple myeloma , also known as plasma cell myeloma or Kahler's disease , is a cancer of plasma cells, a type of white blood cell normally responsible for the production of antibodies...
, a form of cancer. He was survived by his wife, Patricia, their two sons, and a daughter from his first marriage.
Approach to moral philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
. Despite at first seeing Nietzsche as a crude reductionist, Williams came to admire him, once remarking that he wished he could quote him every twenty minutes.
Although Williams's disdain for reductionism could make him appear a moral relativist
Moral relativism
Moral relativism may be any of several descriptive, meta-ethical, or normative positions. Each of them is concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures:...
, he argued in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy that moral concepts could be "thick
Thick concept
In philosophy, a thick concept is a kind of concept that both has a significant degree of descriptive content and is evaluatively loaded. Paradigmatic examples are various virtues and vices such as courage, cruelty, truthfulness and kindness...
" or "thin". The former—such as courageous or cruel—are about real features of the world, and disputes about them can be resolved objectively.
Critique of utilitarianism
Williams was particularly critical of utilitarianism, a consequentialistConsequentialism
Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness of that conduct...
position, the simplest version of which is that actions are good only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
One of his best-known arguments against utilitarianism centers on Jim, a botanist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator. One day Jim finds himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 Indians who have been randomly captured and tied up as examples of what will happen to rebels. The captain who has arrested the Indians says that if Jim will kill one of them, the others will be released in honor of Jim's status as a guest, but if he does not, all the Indians will be killed. For most consequentialist theories, there is no moral dilemma in a case like this; all that matters is the outcome. Simple act utilitarianism would therefore favour Jim killing one of the men. Against this, Williams argued that there is a crucial moral distinction between a person being killed by me, and being killed by someone else because of an act or omission of mine. The utilitarian loses that vital distinction, turning us into empty vessels by means of which consequences occur, rather than preserving our status as moral actors and decision-makers. He argued that moral decisions must preserve our psychological identity and integrity.
We do not, in fact, judge actions by their consequences, he argued. To solve parking problems in London, a utilitarian would have to favour threatening to shoot people who parked illegally. If only a few people were shot for this, illegal parking would soon stop; thus the utilitarian calculus could justify the shootings by the happiness the absence of parking problems would bring. Any theory with this as a consequence, Williams argued, should be rejected out of hand, no matter how plausible it feels to argue that we do judge actions by their consequences. In an effort to save the utilitarian account, a rule utilitarian — a version of utilitarianism that promotes not the act, but the rule that tends to lead to the greatest happiness of the greatest number — would ask what rule could be extrapolated from the parking example. If the rule were: "Anyone might be shot over a simple parking offense," the utilitarian would argue that its implementation would bring great unhappiness. For Williams, this argument simply proved his point. We do not need to calculate why threatening to shoot people over parking offenses is wrong, he argued, and any system that shows us how to make the calculation is one we should reject. Indeed, we should reject any system that reduces moral decision-making to a few algorithms, because any systematization or reductionism will inevitably distort its complexity.
Critique of Kantianism
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
. Williams's work throughout the 1970s and 1980s outlined the basis of his attacks on the twin pillars of utilitarianism and Kantianism. Martha Nussbaum wrote that his work "denounced the trivial and evasive way in which moral philosophy was being practised in England under the aegis of those two dominant theories".
Kant's Critique of Practical Reason
Critique of Practical Reason
The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Immanuel Kant's three critiques, first published in 1788. It follows on from his Critique of Pure Reason and deals with his moral philosophy....
and Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals expounded a moral system based on what he called the categorical imperative
Categorical imperative
The Categorical Imperative is the central philosophical concept in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as modern deontological ethics...
, the best known version of which is: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become, by an act of will
Will (philosophy)
Will, in philosophical discussions, consonant with a common English usage, refers to a property of the mind, and an attribute of acts intentionally performed. Actions made according to a person's will are called "willing" or "voluntary" and sometimes pejoratively "willful"...
, a universal law of nature." This is a binding law, Kant argued, on any rational being with free will
Free will
"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
. Williams argued against the categorical imperative in his paper "Persons, character and morality". Morality should not require us to act selflessly, as though we are not who we are in the circumstances in which we presently find ourselves. We should not have to take an impartial view of the world, he argued. Our values, commitments, and desires do make a difference to how we see the world and how we act; and so they should, he said, otherwise we lose our individuality, and thereby our humanity.
Reasons for action
Williams's insistence that morality is about people and their real lives, and that acting out of rational self-interestRational egoism
In ethical philosophy, rational egoism is the principle that an action is rational if and only if it maximizes one's self-interest. The view is a normative form of egoism. However, it is different from other forms of egoism, such as ethical egoism and psychological egoism...
and even selfishness are not contrary to moral action, is illustrated in his "internal reasons for action" argument, part of what philosophers call the "internal/external reasons" debate. Philosophers have tried to argue that moral agents can have "external reasons" for performing a moral act; that is, they are able to act for reasons external to their inner mental states. Williams argued that this is meaningless. For something to be a "reason to act," it must be "magnetic"; that is, it must move people to action. But how can something entirely external to us—for example, the proposition that X is good—be "magnetic"? By what process can something external to us move us to act? Williams argued that it cannot. Cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
is not magnetic. Knowing and feeling are quite separate, he wrote, and a person must feel before they are moved to act. He argued that reasons for action are always internal, whether based on a desire to act in accordance with upbringing, peer pressure, or similar, and they always boil down to desire.
Truth
In his final completed book, Truth And Truthfulness: An Essay In Genealogy (2002), Williams identifies the two basic values of truth as accuracy and sincerity, and tries to address the gulf between the demand for truth, and the doubt that any such thing exists. The debt to Nietzsche is clear, most obviously in the adoption of a genealogical methodGenealogy (philosophy)
In philosophy, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by showing alternative and subversive histories of their development...
as a tool of explanation and critique. Although part of his intention was to attack those he felt denied the value of truth, the book cautions that, to understand it simply in that sense, would be to miss part of its purpose; rather, as Kenneth Baker wrote, it is "Williams' reflection on the moral cost of the intellectual vogue for dispensing with the concept of truth." The Guardian wrote in its obituary of Williams that the book is an examination of those who "sneer at any purported truth as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power, class bias and ideology".
Legacy
Williams did not propose any systematic philosophical theory; indeed, he was suspicious of any such attempt. Alan Thomas writes that his contribution to ethics was an overarching scepticism about attempts to create a foundation to moral philosophy, explicitly articulated in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and Shame and Necessity (1993), where he argued that moral theories can never reflect the complexities of life, particularly given the radical pluralism of modern societies. Jonathan LearJonathan Lear
Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.-Biography:...
writes that Williams wanted to understand human beings as part of the natural world, and that the fundamental starting point of moral reflection had to be the individual perspective, the internal reasons for action. To try to transcend one's point of view, Williams argued, leads only to self-deception.
In a secular humanist
Secular humanism
Secular Humanism, alternatively known as Humanism , is a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, justice, and the search for human fulfillment...
tradition, with no appeal to the external moral authority of a god, his ideas strike at the foundation of conventional morality, namely that one sometimes does good even if one does not want to, and can be blamed for a failure to do so. Timothy Chappell writes that, without external reasons for action, it becomes impossible to argue that the same set of moral reasons applies to all agents equally, because an agent's reasons can always be relativized to their particular lives, their internal reasons. In cases where someone has no internal reason to do what others see as the right thing, they cannot be blamed for failing to do it, because internal reasons are the only reasons, and blame, Williams wrote, "involves treating the person who is blamed like someone who had a reason to do the right thing but did not do it." Chappell writes that learning to be yourself, to be authentic and to act with integrity, rather than conforming to any external moral system, is arguably the fundamental motif of Williams's work. "If there's one theme in all my work it's about authenticity and self-expression," Williams said in 2002. "It's the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren't ... The whole thing has been about spelling out the notion of inner necessity." He moved moral philosophy away from the Kantian question, "What is my duty?" and back to the issue that mattered to the Greeks: "How should we live?"
Publications
Books- Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Cambridge University Press, 1972.
- Problems of the Self. Cambridge University Press, 1973.
- (with J. J. C. Smart) Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press, 1973.
- Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. Harvester Press, 1978.
- Moral Luck. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
- Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1985.
- Shame and Necessity. University of California Press, 1993.
- Making Sense of Humanity. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- The Great Philosophers: Plato. London: Routledge, 1998.
- Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton University Press, 2002.
Papers
- "Pagan Justice and Christian Love", Apeiron 26.3–4, 1993, pp. 195–207.
- "Cratylus's Theory of Names and Its Refutation", in Language, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- "The Actus Reus of Dr. Caligari", Pennsylvania Law Review 142, May 1994.
- "Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy", in Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes's Metaphysics, ed. John Cottingham, Oxford University Press, 1994.
- "Acting as the Virtuous Person Acts", in Aristotle and Moral Realism, ed. Robert Heinaman, Westview Press, 1995.
- "Ethics", in Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject, ed. A. C. Grayling, Oxford University Press, 1995.
- "Identity and Identities", in Identity: Essays Based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford, ed. Henry Harris, Oxford University Press, 1995.
- "Truth in Ethics", Ratio 8.3, 1995, pp. 227–42.
- "Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look", in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. N. F. Bunnin (ed.), Blackwell, 1996.
- "History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection", in The Sources of Normativity. Onora O'Neill (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- "Reasons, Values and the Theory of Persuasion", in Ethics, Rationality and Economic Behavior, ed. Francesco Farina, Frank Hahn and Stafano Vannucci, Oxford University Press, 1996.
- "The Politics of Trust", in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yeager, University of Michigan Press, 1996.
- "The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics", in The Greeks and Us, R. B. Louden and P. Schollmeier (eds.), Chicago University Press, 1996.
- "Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?" in Toleration: An Exclusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd, Princeton University Press, 1996.
- "Truth, Politics and Self-Deception", Social Research 63.3 (Fall 1996).
- "Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom", Cambridge Law Journal 56, 1997.
- "Stoic Philosophy and the Emotions: Reply to Richard Sorabji", in Aristotle and After, R. Sorabji (ed.), Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 68, 1997.
- "Tolerating the Intolerable", in The Politics of Toleration. ed. Susan Mendus, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
- "Philosophy As a Humanistic Discipline", Philosophy 75, October 2000, pp. 477–496.
- "Understanding Homer: Literature, History and Ideal Anthropology", in Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Neil Roughley, ed. de Gruyter, 2000.
Posthumously published
- In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Princeton University Press, 2005.
- Philosophy As A Humanistic Discipline, ed. A. W. Moore, Princeton University Press, 2006.
- The Sense Of The Past: Essays In The Philosophy Of History, ed. Myles Burnyeat, Princeton University Press, 2006.
- On Opera, Yale University Press, 2006.
Further reading
- "A live chat with Bernard Williams", GuardianUnlimited, November 2002.
- Foot, Philippa. "Reasons for Action and Desires", in Raz, Joseph (ed). Practical Reasoning, Oxford University Press, 1978.
- McGinn, Colin. Isn't it the truth? New York Review of Books, 10 April 2003.
- Sen, Amartya. Ethics and Economics, Blackwell, 1989.
- Sen, Amartya; Williams, Bernard; and Ratoff Robinson, William (eds.). Utilitarianism and Beyond, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
- Thomas, Alan (ed.). Bernard Williams. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Williams, Bernard. "Why Philosophy Needs History", London Review of Books, 17 October 2002.
- Williams, Bernard and Alex Voorhoeve. "A Mistrustful Animal: A Conversation with Bernard Williams" in Conversations on Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2009.