Bernard Williams: Philosophy, Quotes & Legacy

Biography

Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was born on September 21, 1929, in Westcliff-on-Sea, England. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was among the most brilliant students of his generation, and he went on to hold chairs at Cambridge (where he was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy), Oxford, Berkeley, and University College London. He was known for his wit, his breadth — he moved between philosophy, history, tragedy, and opera with equal ease — and his refusal of the systematic: the moral theories that promised to reduce the moral life to a method were, he argued, both false and dangerous. His most famous works are Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and Shame and Necessity (1993). He was knighted in 1999 and died on June 10, 2003, in Rome.

Historical Context

Williams worked in the analytic tradition that he both practiced and criticized. The context was the dominance of the systematic moral theory — the utilitarianism and the deontology that promised a method for every case — and Williams's career was a sustained attack on the pretensions of both. Against the utilitarianism, he developed the famous examples of integrity: the man who must choose between the dirty hands of the one action and the guilt of the other, and whose integrity is violated by the utilitarian arithmetic that treats his deepest projects as mere preferences to be weighed. Against the deontology, he argued that the moral theories misunderstand the texture of the moral life — the thick concepts, the emotions, the luck, the tragedy. His philosophy belongs to the same reaction as Anscombe's and Foot's — the recovery of the moral life from the systems — but Williams was the most radical of the three: where they built alternatives, he insisted that the alternatives too were false promises.

Core Ideas

Moral Luck

Williams's most famous contribution is the analysis of moral luck: the problem that the moral assessment of the agent depends on factors beyond the agent's control — the drunk driver whose carelessness kills is judged more harshly than the drunk driver who happens to hit nothing, though the intention and the carelessness are the same. The problem challenges the Kantian assumption that the moral worth of the action depends only on the will: if the moral assessment depends on luck — on the outcome, the circumstances, the constitution — then the moral life is not the sanctuary of the autonomous will that the tradition claimed. Williams's response was not to resolve the problem but to make it visible: the moral life is not safe, the luck is real, and the theories that deny it are false to the experience.

The Critique of the Theory

Williams's deepest conviction was that the ambition of the moral theory — the system that decides every case by the method — is a mistake. The moral life is too various for the system: the thick concepts (cruelty, betrayal, courage, integrity) carry the real moral substance, and they cannot be reduced to the thin concepts (right, wrong, ought) of the theory. The theory distorts the life it claims to guide: the utilitarian arithmetic and the deontological formalism both miss what matters — the projects that give the life its meaning, the relations that make the person who they are, the integrity that the system would violate.

The Ethics of the Thick Concepts

The positive alternative is the attention to the thick concepts: the moral vocabulary of the ordinary life — the cruelty, the betrayal, the cowardice, the integrity — in which the moral substance is carried. The thick concepts connect the description and the evaluation: to call an act cruel is at once to describe it and to condemn it. The moral life, on Williams's account, is the life lived in the thick concepts, and the philosophy of ethics is the attempt to understand them — not the attempt to replace them with the system.

Philosophy

Williams's philosophy is the refusal of the false system in the name of the real life. The moral life is not a domain of pure reason but a human practice, subject to the luck, the circumstance, and the tragedy. His ethics of authenticity: the person lives from their own projects and commitments — the ground projects that give the life its meaning — and the moral theories that would override them in the name of the aggregate or the rule violate the integrity of the person. His account of the ancient ethics: in Shame and Necessity (1993), he argued that the Greeks understood the ethical life better than the moderns — the shame, the necessity, the luck of the tragic vision are truer to the human condition than the Kantian autonomy. The philosophy is demanding and liberating: demanding, because it refuses the easy answers of the system; liberating, because it returns the moral life to the person who lives it.

Major Works

Williams's major works are Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), the brilliant introduction that still reads as a manifesto; Problems of the Self (1973); Moral Luck (1981), the collection that includes the famous papers on moral luck, integrity, and persons; Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), his most systematic statement; and Shame and Necessity (1993), his account of the Greek ethics.

Famous Quotes

Williams's most quoted lines are from his account of the theory: "The moral philosophy of the modern period has tried to find a method of settling every moral question, and it has failed." His account of integrity: "The man who is committed to a project is not to be thought of as a mere preference-satisfier, to be weighed against the preferences of others." And his account of the limits: "Ethics is not a science, and the hope that it could be is the illusion that has distorted the moral philosophy of the modern period."

Related Thinkers

Williams belongs to the British critics of the systematic theory with Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. His attack on the Kantian system engages Kant at every point; his account of the ancient ethics recovers Aristotle and the Greek tradition; and his skepticism about the theory connects him to Nietzsche, whose genealogical suspicion he shared and admired.

Sources

• Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
• Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana, 1985.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Bernard Williams" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard)