Bernard Williams

Bernard Williams

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Sir Bernard Williams
Full name	Bernard Arthur Owen Williams
Birth	21 September 1929 Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex
Death	10 June 2003
School/tradition	Analytic
Main interests	Ethics
Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche · R.M. Hare, Philippa Foot
Influenced Jennifer Hornsby Martha Nussbaum Peter Goldie Myles Burnyeat

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams FBA (21 September 1929 – 10 June 2003) has been described as the most important British moral philosopher of his time.^[1]

Williams spent the bulk of his career at four academic institutions: Oxford, Cambridge, University College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. Early in his career at Cambridge,^[2] 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,"^[3] he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed increasingly unable to communicate with one another. He rejected scientific and evolutionary reductionism.^[4] For Williams, complexity was beautiful, meaningful, and irreducible.

Williams was renowned for being sharp in discussion, with Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle once saying 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."^[5] He also became known as a supporter of women in academia,^[6] seeing in women the possibility of that 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."^[6]

Life

Early life and education

Williams was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, 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 the rare distinction of a congratulatory first-class honours degree. He then spent his year-long national service in the Royal Air Force (RAF), flying Spitfires in Canada.

He met his future spouse, Shirley Brittain-Catlin, the daughter of political scientist and philosopher George Catlin and novelist Vera Brittain, while he was on leave in New York, where she was studying at Columbia University. At the age of 22, after winning a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, Williams returned to England with Shirley to take up the post, although not before she had had a brief relationship with four-minute-miler Roger Bannister.^[5] They were married in 1955. Shirley Williams, as she became known, was later elected as a Labour Member of Parliament, then crossed the floor as one of the so-called Gang of Four to become a founding member of the SDP, a centrist breakaway party.

Academic

Williams left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political ambitions, finding a post first at University College London, where he worked from 1959 until 1964, then 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,^[5] 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. The marriage was dissolved in 1974, and Williams and Skinner subsequently married; their marriage produced two sons.

Williams spent nearly 20 years at Cambridge, eight of them as Provost of King's College.

Williams was appointed Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1967, and subsequently vacated 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 became 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," adding "it's harder to live with a family out there [i.e. the U.S.] than I supposed."^[5]

Late in life, he held simultaneous positions as Deutsch Professor at Berkeley, and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, eventually becoming a Fellow of All Souls College once again.

Royal commissions

In addition to academic life, Williams chaired and served on a number of royal commissions and government committees.

In the 1970s, 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, and 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."^[5]

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 saw fit.

Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining the role of gambling, drug abuse, and private schools. "I did all the major vices," he said.^[1]

Fellowships and honours

Williams was knighted in 1999. He was also a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) by the University of Cambridge in 2002. He served on the board of the English National Opera and wrote the entry for "opera" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. A collection of his essays on opera was published in 2006.

Death

Williams died on 10 June 2003, while on holiday in Rome. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. He is survived by his wife, Patricia, their two sons, Jacob and Jonathan, and Rebecca, his daughter from his first marriage.

Work

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900. Williams said he wished he could quote him every twenty minutes.^[7]

Approach to moral philosophy

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 although, on the face of it, Nietzsche was quite the opposite, complaining, at the very end of Ecce Homo, that "in the concept of the good man common cause [is] made with everything weak, sick, ill-constituted, suffering from itself". Despite at first seeing the German philosopher as a crude reductionist, Williams came to greatly admire Nietzsche, once remarking that he wished he could quote him every twenty minutes.^[7]

Although Williams' disdain for reductionism sometimes made him appear a moral relativist, he argued that moral concepts could be "thick" or "thin"; the former – but not the latter – are "world-guided" in that they are related to real features of the world such that, in principle, disputes about them can be resolved objectively.

Critique of utilitarianism

Williams was particularly critical of utilitarianism, considering it a consequentialist theory, the simplest version of which argues that actions are good only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness.

A much discussed thought experiment of Williams', directed against utilitarianism, centres on Jim, a scientist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator. Jim finds himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 rebels, who are captured and tied up. The captain who has defeated them says that, if Jim will kill one of the rebels, the others will be released in honour of Jim's status as a guest. But if he does not, they will all be killed.^[8] Simple act utilitarianism says that Jim should kill one of the captives in order to save the others. For most consequentialist theories, there is no moral dilemma in a case like this; all that matters is the outcome.

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 what I do. The utilitarian loses that vital distinction, he argued, thereby stripping us of our agency and our humanity, turning us into empty vessels by means of which consequences occur, rather than preserving our status as moral actors and decision-makers with integrity. Moral decisions must preserve our psychological identity, he argued.

An advocate of utilitarianism would reply that the theory cannot be dismissed as easily as that. The Nobel Prize-winning philosopher of economics Amartya Sen, for example, argued that moral agency, issues of integrity, and personal points of view can be worked into a consequentialist account; that is, they can be counted as consequences too.^[9]

Sen and Williams also disagreed on the degree to which so-called "rule-utilitarianism" — a version of utilitarianism that promotes not the act, but the rule, that leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number — could solve the fundamental problems of utilitarian theory. For example, to solve parking problems in London, Williams wrote, a utilitarian would have to favour threatening to shoot anyone who parked in a prohibited space. If only a few people were shot for this, illegal parking would soon stop; thus the utilitarian calculus could justify the shootings because of the happiness the absence of parking problems would bring to millions of Londoners. Any theory that has this as a consequence, Williams argued, should be rejected out of hand, no matter how intuitively plausible it feels to agree that we do judge actions solely in terms of their consequences.

Sen and others argued that rule utilitarianism would ask what rule could be extrapolated from the parking example. The rule that we ought to "shoot those who commit parking violations" is unlikely, in the long run and considering all its consequences, to maximize good outcomes. For Williams, however, making the argument was itself a reason to reject rule-utilitarianism; we should already know that threatening to shoot people over parking offences is wrong, he argued, and any system that requires us to make that calculation is a system we should reject.

Critique of Kantianism

Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804. Williams rejected Kant's moral philosophy, arguing that moral principles should not require me to act as though I am someone else.

One of the main alternatives to utilitarian approaches is the moral philosophy of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Williams' work throughout the 1970s and 1980s outlined the basis of his attacks on the twin pillars of utilitarianism and Kantianism.^[10] 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."^[6]

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. You must imagine, when you act, that the rule underpinning your action will apply to everyone in similar circumstances, including yourself in future. If you cannot accept the consequences of this thought experiment, or if it leads to a contradiction, you must not carry out the act. For example, if you want to kill your wife's lover, you must imagine a law that says all wronged husbands have the right to kill their wives' lovers; and that will include you in future, should you become the lover of someone else's wife. In other words, Kant argued, you must universalize your experience.

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, or a Christian 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.^[11]

Reasons for action

Williams' insistence that morality is about people and their real lives, and that acting out of self-interest 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 us 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, and a person must feel before they are moved to act, he wrote, and as such he argued that reasons for action are always internal. If I feel moved to do something good, it is because I want to. I may want to do the right thing for a number of reasons. I may have been brought up to believe that X is good, and I may wish to act in accordance with my upbringing, or I may want to look good in someone else's eyes, or perhaps I fear the disapproval of my community. The reasons can be complex, but they are always internal and they always boil down to desire, he wrote.

Truth

Williams' last completed book, Truth And Truthfulness: An Essay In Genealogy (2002), attempts to defend a non-foundationalist attachment to the values of truth, which Williams identifies as accuracy and sincerity, by giving a vindicatory naturalistic genealogy of them.

The debt to Nietzsche is again clear, most obviously in the adoption of a genealogical method (a term in academic philosophy which essentially means studies based on the historical behaviour and thought of Mankind) as a tool of explanation and critique. Although part of Williams' 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, it "presents a ... challenge" to both "the fashionable belief that truth has no value" and "the traditional faith that [truth's] value guarantees itself."^[12] 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."^[7]

Posthumous works

Since Williams' death, three collections of essays, articles, and transcripts of lectures have been published. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (2005), on political philosophy; The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy (2006), a series of essays on the boundaries between philosophy and history; and Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2006), on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

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.
• Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton University Press, 2002.
• 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.

Papers and articles

• "Pagan Justice and Christian Love," Apeiron 26.3–4, 1993, pp. 195–207.
• "Cratylus' 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.

Styles (titles)

• Mr Bernard Williams (1929–1967)
• Prof. Bernard Williams (1967–1999)
• Prof. Sir Bernard Williams (1999–2003)

Notes

References

Further reading