The English moral philosopher whose Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy mounted the most powerful late twentieth-century critique of the systematic moral theory inherited from Kant and the utilitarians, and whose work on moral luck, the morality system, integrity, and the relativism of distance reshaped Anglophone moral philosophy.
bernard-williams
English moral philosopher (1929–2003), Cambridge Knightbridge Professor and Oxford White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, whose Problems of the Self, Moral Luck, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Shame and Necessity, and Truth and Truthfulness defended a humanistic moral philosophy against both the Kantian deontological and the utilitarian-consequentialist traditions.
Life
Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was born on 21 September 1929 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, into a middle-class English family. His father Owen Pasley Denny Williams was a civil servant; his mother Hilda Day Williams shaped his early education. He was educated at Chigwell School in Essex from age twelve, then at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1947 to 1951, reading Greats (Classics with philosophy and ancient history) and graduating with the highest first of his year.
After Oxford Williams did his national service in the Royal Air Force, qualifying as a fighter pilot — the experience he would later describe as among the few in his life when he felt completely capable. From 1955 he was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; from 1959 a fellow of New College; from 1967 to 1979 Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and a fellow of King's. In 1979–87 he served as Provost of King's College, Cambridge — the principal college administrative position. In 1987 he moved to California as Sather Professor of Classical Literature at Berkeley, before returning to Oxford in 1990 as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, the position he held until his retirement in 1996.
The early marriage to the political philosopher Shirley Catlin (later Shirley Williams, the Labour and Social Democratic politician) lasted from 1955 to 1974. The second marriage to Patricia Skinner from 1974 was a continuous personal and intellectual partnership; the couple had two children. Williams was knighted in 1999.
Williams's public-intellectual work included extensive committee service. He chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (the Williams Report of 1979, which recommended the broadly liberal regulatory framework that has shaped subsequent British practice), the Royal Commission on Gambling, and several other public bodies; he gave the annual McTaggart Lectures and other public addresses; he was a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books on philosophical and political subjects.
He died on 10 June 2003 in Rome, of complications from multiple myeloma, aged 73.
The Critique of the Morality System
Williams's central philosophical concern, sustained from the early essays through the late work, was the critique of what he called the morality system: the modern Western framework that treats moral obligation as a special category of practical reasoning, sharply demarcated from other considerations and demanding overriding priority, that descended from the Christian-Kantian tradition into modern analytic moral philosophy.
The critique runs through several interconnected lines:
The critique of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism: For and Against (1973), the famous joint volume with J. J. C. Smart, contains Williams's extended attack on utilitarian moral theory. The central objection: utilitarianism's demand that the agent treat his own projects and commitments as bare items in a calculation alongside the projects and commitments of others — weighing his own life against the lives of strangers in the same impersonal balance — destroys the integrity of the agent, the conditions under which a person can have a coherent moral identity sustained over time through projects and attachments that constitute his being someone in particular.
The critique of Kantian deontology. Several essays develop the parallel critique of Kantian moral theory. The Kantian demand that moral motivation be detached from inclination, that the moral law be universalizable, that moral worth depend on motivation from duty alone, similarly fails to take seriously the embedded character of human moral life. The Kantian agent is no agent at all in the recognizably human sense; the abstraction has been made at the cost of what makes ethical reflection ethically interesting.
Moral luck. The 1976 essay Moral Luck (collected in Moral Luck, 1981) is one of Williams's most-cited contributions. The Kantian tradition had insisted that moral assessment must be entirely insulated from luck — only what is under the agent's control can be morally evaluated. Williams argued that this insulation is impossible: in many cases the agent's actual situation of moral assessment depends on circumstances over which she had no control. Gauguin's leaving his family to develop his painting in Tahiti turns out to have been justified by his success as a painter; if he had failed, his decision would have been unjustified. The justifiability depends on luck. The Kantian morality system, in attempting to exclude luck from moral evaluation, fails to register what moral evaluation actually involves.
Internal and external reasons. The 1980 essay Internal and External Reasons developed the influential thesis that genuine reasons for action must be internal to the agent's existing motivational set — must be reasons the agent can come to recognize from where she already is, through correct deliberation. "External" reasons — reasons supposedly applicable to an agent regardless of her existing motivations — are not really reasons at all. The thesis has been continuously debated; the internal reasons position remains a significant minority view in contemporary metaethics.
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
The 1985 book, derived from the Kantian Lectures at Yale, is Williams's most ambitious systematic statement. The book argues that the entire project of modern moral philosophy, with its ambition of producing a systematic theory of right action and its claim to be the appropriate intellectual response to ethical questions, has been a mistake.
The critique proceeds on several levels. The book's central distinction is between morality (the narrow, modern, post-Kantian conception of a special domain of obligation) and the ethical (the broader Greek conception of how one should live, a question whose answer involves character, dispositions, attachments, projects, and the contingent specifics of a human life). The ambition of modern moral philosophy has been to produce a systematic theory of morality in the narrow sense, with general principles applicable to all rational agents. This project has failed and could not have succeeded; what is needed is a return to the broader ethical question of the good human life as the ancients understood it, which does not admit of systematic theorizing in the modern philosophical sense.
The book ends with the famous claim that "reflection can destroy knowledge" — the practice of moral philosophical reflection, in its systematic-theoretical form, can undermine the unreflective ethical knowledge that ordinary moral agents have in their actual ethical lives without supplying anything adequate to replace it.
Shame and Necessity
The 1993 book, derived from the Sather Lectures at Berkeley, reads the ethical psychology of archaic and classical Greek literature — principally Homer and the tragedians — against the dominant modern moral-philosophical reading that treats the Greeks as having a primitive shame-culture morally inferior to the modern guilt-culture of inner conscience. Williams argues that the modern picture is wrong: the Greeks' ethical psychology of shame, aidōs, necessity, and supernatural intervention is more accurate to actual human moral experience than the modern conception of autonomous moral agency, and the modern conception itself rests on metaphysical assumptions (free will, the autonomous self, the categorical distinction of moral from non-moral) that are dubious on their own terms and inadequate to the phenomena.
The book is one of the major late twentieth-century engagements between analytic moral philosophy and the classical literature on its own ethical-psychological terms. It complements MacIntyre's After Virtue without endorsing the constructive Aristotelian-Thomist position that MacIntyre develops; Williams's classicism is more skeptical, more pluralistic, more pessimistic about the possibility of recovering any particular ancient framework as a usable resource.
Truth and Truthfulness
The last major book (Princeton University Press, 2002) is Williams's most ambitious treatment of the ethics of belief and the value of truth. The book argues that the values of accuracy (caring whether what one believes is true) and sincerity (representing accurately one's beliefs to others) are essential virtues that no human community can do without; the post-modern critiques of truth as a value, when applied consistently, destroy the conditions of any human practice including the post-modern critique itself. The book proceeds through a sustained engagement with the genealogical method (Nietzsche, Foucault) and develops Williams's own genealogical reading of how the value of truthfulness has come to be the contested value it is in contemporary cultural conditions.
Reception
Williams's reception has been continuous and broad. The early essays of Problems of the Self (1973) and Moral Luck (1981) established him as one of the leading moral philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) generated extensive debate; the systematic critique it mounted has not been refuted but has shaped how subsequent moral philosophy poses its questions. The late work — Shame and Necessity, Truth and Truthfulness, the essays collected by Adrian Moore (Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Princeton University Press, 2006), the political essays collected as In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton University Press, 2005) — has continued to be widely read.
The Williams scholarship has grown substantially since his death. Mark Jenkins's Bernard Williams (Acumen, 2006), Daniel Callcut's edited Reading Bernard Williams (Routledge, 2009), Sophie-Grace Chappell and Marcel van Ackeren's Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Routledge, 2018), and Adrian Moore's Williams in the Philosophy Now series have produced the secondary literature within which Williams's continuing place in moral philosophy is now debated.
Significance
Williams's importance is dual. As critic of the modern morality system, the critique of utilitarianism on grounds of integrity, of Kantianism on grounds of impersonality, and of moral theory as such on grounds of its inadequacy to actual ethical life supplied the most rigorous late twentieth-century internal critique of the dominant analytic moral-philosophical traditions. As constructive ethical thinker, the recovery of the broader ancient ethical question (how should one live?), the emphasis on integrity, character, the contingencies of luck, the role of shame, and the irreducibility of value to system constituted a humanistic moral philosophy that has continued to inform Anglophone moral thinking.