Bernard Williams
Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (September 21, 1929 – June 10, 2003) was an English moral philosopher, arguably the most influential of his age.
Williams spent over 50 years seeking answers to one question: What does it mean to live well?, a question few Western analytic philosophers since the Greeks had asked, preferring instead to focus on the issue of moral duty. For Williams, moral duty, insofar as the phrase has any meaning, must be compatible with the pursuit of self-interest and the good life.
As the Knightsbridge professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge for over a decade, and the Provost of King's College, Cambridge for almost as long, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to return the study of moral philosophy to its foundations: to history and culture, politics and psychology and, in particular, to the Greeks.
Described as an "analytic philosopher with the soul of a humanist" [1], he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed no longer to know how to communicate with one another. He rejected scientific and evolutionary reductionism, once calling reductionists "the ones I really do dislike," because, he said, they are morally unimaginative. [2] For Williams, complexity was beautiful, meaningful and irreducible.
He became known as a great supporter of women in academia, seeing in women the possibility of that synthesis of knowledge, of reason and emotion, that he felt eluded most analytic philosophers.
The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum said Williams was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be." [3]
His life
Born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, England, Williams was educated at Chigwell School and read Greats (Classics) at Balliol College, Oxford, too young to be required to serve during the Second World War by only a couple of years. After graduating in 1951 with the rare distinction of a congratulatory first class honours degree, the highest award at this level in the British university system, he spent his year's national service in the Royal Air Force (RAF), flying Spitfires in Canada].
His time as a fighter pilot did not harm his image with members of the opposite sex. He met his future wife, Shirley Catlin-Brittain, the daughter of American political scientist and philosopher Sir George Catlin and novelist Vera Brittain, while on leave in New York. She was studying at Columbia. At the age of twenty-two, Williams won a Prize Fellowship at All Souls. He and his future wife returned to England together to take up the post, and were married in 1955. Shirley Williams, as she became known, was elected as a Labour Member of Parliament, then crossed the floor to become a founding member of the Social Democrats, a new political party whose manifesto was modelled on the ideas of American philosopher John Rawls. She was later ennobled, becoming Baroness Williams of Crosby.
Williams left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political ambitions, finding a post first at University College, London, then at Bedford College. 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 Williams' marriage was dissolved in 1974, then annulled, and Williams and Skinner were able to marry.
Williams became Knightsbridge professor of philosophy at Cambridge in 1967, then served as Provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1979-1987, later moving to the University of California, Berkeley to take up the post of Sather professor of classics from 1987-1990, because, he told a British newspaper, he could barely afford to buy a house in central London on his academic's salary. His public outburst at the low salaries in British academia made his departure appear part of the brain drain, as the British media called it, which was probably his intention. His departure from British academic life didn't last long, however, and he returned to England in 1990 to become the White's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, a post he held until 1996.
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, the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, 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, which appeared to be influenced by the liberal thinking of John Stuart Mill, a philosopher greatly admired by Williams, concluded 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 chidren were protected from seeing it, adults should be free to read and watch pornography as they saw fit. However, Margaret Thatcher's first administration put paid to the liberal agenda on sex and Williams was not asked to chair another public committee for almost 15 years.
Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining drug abuse in 1971; gambling in 1976-78; the role of British private schools in 1965-70; and social justice in 1993-94.
"I did all the major vices," said the moral philosopher. [4]
When he left for America in 1987, Williams was missed around King's College, where he was frequently seen walking around chatting to undergraduates. He was an energetic, charismatic man, throwing frequent garden parties in the summer, his eyes always glancing just over the shoulder of the person he was speaking to, in case there was anyone more stimulating nearby. During term-time, he instituted a series of evening talks in the Provost's Lodge for any member of King's who wished to attend, and these frequently found him surrounded by undergraduates, sitting on the floor at his feet, but giving no quarter.
Williams was famously sharp in discussion, "able to summarize other people's arguments better than they could themselves, and anticipate an antagonist's objections to his objections - and, in turn, his objections to hers before she had even finished her sentence," as the Guardian put it. [5]
He was knighted in 1999 and became a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He sat on the board of the English National Opera and wrote the entry for "opera" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
He died on June 10, 2003, while vacationing in Rome. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. He is survived by his wife, Patricia, and their two sons, Jacob and Jonathan; and by Rebecca, his daughter from his first marriage.
His moral philosophy
Williams' books and papers include studies of Descartes and Ancient Greek philosophy, as well as more detailed attacks on utilitarianism and Kantianism.
Williams was a systems destroyer. He attacked all "isms" with equal vigor. He turned his back on the meta-ethics studied by most moral philosophers trained in the Western analytic tradition -- "What is the Good?" and "What does the word "ought" mean?" -- and concentrated instead on practical ethics.
Williams tried to address the question of how to live a good life, with the emphasis on how to live it, not how to write an essay about it. He focused on the complexity, the "moral luck" of everyday life, and was highly critical of many of the moral philosophy books with their dry examples frequently encountered by philosophy undergraduates.
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 and to history; to politics and to 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 - Williams resembled the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and was a great admirer of his, often saying he wished he could quote Nietzsche on every page he wrote.
Although Williams' disdain for reductionism sometimes made him appear a moral relativist, he was far from that. He believed, like the Ancient Greeks, that the so-called "fat" moral concepts like courage and cruelty were real. What is brave and what is vicious is not relative, he argued. We do know these things when we see them.
His last book, Truth And Truthfulness (2002) examines how philosophers Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and other followers of political correctness "sneer at any purported truth as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power, class bias and ideology," wrote the Guardian in Williams' obituary.
Unusually for a philosophy book, the Guardian said, Truth and Truthfulness makes the reader laugh, then "want to cry." [6]
Critique of utilitariansim
Williams was particularly critical of utilitarianism, a consequentialist theory, the simplest version of which argues that moral acts are good only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, regardless of any issues of personhood or moral agency.
One of Williams' famous arguments against utilitarianism centres on Jim, a scientist doing research in a South America country led by a brutal dictator. One day, Jim finds himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 rebellion leaders, captured and tied up. The captain who has defeated them 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, they will all be killed (Utiliarianism: For and Against, 1973).
Simple act utilitarianism says that Jim should kill one of the Indians 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 humanity and of everything that makes human life worthwhile, 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 integrity and our psychological identity, he argued (ibid.).
An advocate of utilitarianism would reply that the theory can't be dismissed as easily as that. The Harvard 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, can be counted as consequences too. (For example, in Ethics and Economics, Blackwell, 1989 and Utilitariansm and Beyond edited with Bernard Williams, Cambridge, 1982)
For example, to solve parking problems in London, Williams wrote, a utilitarian might have to favor threatening to shoot anyone who parked in a prohibited space. If only a few people were shot for this, illegal parking would soon stop, and the shootings would be justified, according to simple act utilitarianism, 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 in terms of their consequences. We do not, argued Williams, and we must not.
But, as Sen and others argued, rule utilitarianism would ask what rule could be extrapolated from the parking example. If the rule is: "Anyone might be shot over a simple parking offense," the utilitarian would argue that the implementation of that rule would bring great unhappiness to Londoners, and that on those grounds threatening to shoot people would be wrong.
For Williams, however, this type argument simply proved his point. We do not need to calculate whether or why threatening to shoot people over parking offenses is wrong; and any system that shows us how to make the calculations is a system we should reject.
Critique of Kantianism
The utilitarian philosopher's main rival is the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
His Critique of Practical Reason and Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals expounded a moral system based loosely on the Golden Rule, a variant of which is "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
Kant developed a number of versions of his Categorical Imperative, as he called it, the best known 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 who has a free will. You must imagine, when you act, that the principle of your action, or 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, 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 husband have the right to kill their wives' lovers; and that will include you, should you become the lover of a married woman. You must univeralize your experience.
Williams argued against the Categorical Imperative in his paper "Persons, character and morality" (Moral Luck, CUP, 1981). Morality should not require us to act selflessly, as though we are not who we are; as though we are not in the circumstances we presently find ourselves.
We should not have to take an impartial view, or a Christian view, of the world, he said. Our values, commitments and desires do make a difference to how we see the world and how we act, and so they should, he argued. To do otherwise is to lose our individuality and thereby our humanity, the quality of human beings to be "ends-in-themselves," the very quality that Kant's moral philosophy was striving to preserve.
Williams took this superficially perverse idea of morality qua self-interest further with his "internal reasons for action" argument.
Reasons for action
Williams' insistence that morality is about people and their real lives, and that self-interest and even selfishness are not contrary to morality, is illustrated in what is called his "internal reasons for action" argument, part of what philosophers call the "internal/external reasons" debate.
Before Williams, philosophers tried to argue that moral agents had "external reasons" - by which they meant objective reasons, or reasons outside themselves - for performing a moral act. If action X was good, and was part of the Good, that alone was a reason to do X, a reason to act.
This is meaningless nonsense, argued Williams. For something to be a "reason to act" it must be magnetic; it must move us to action. But how could something entirely external to us -- for example, the proposition that X is good -- be magnetic? What would the process be by which it moves us to act?
It doesn't and it can't, said Williams. Cognition is not magnetic. Knowing and feeling are quite separate, and a person must feel before they are moved to act. Reasons for action are always internal, he argued. If I feel moved to do X, to do something good, it is because I want to, and for no other reason.
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 wish to act in accordance with my upbringing (something we might otherwise call conscience); or perhaps I want to look good in someone else's eyes; or perhaps I fear the disapproval of my community if I fail to do X. The reasons can be complex, but they are always internal, and they always boil down to desire.
With this argument, Williams left moral philosophy with the notion that goodness must always be selfish; that it springs only from the desire to be good, which might at any given moment, in any given person, be terrifyingly absent.
In a secular, humanist tradition, with no appeal to God or to any other moral authority, it seems that Williams removed our last moral foundation: that we would sometimes do good even if we did not want to because, to be rational, or to be God-like, we had to.
However, as the British moral philosopher Philippa Foot has argued, isn't it true that a person who wants to be good is a better person than someone who does not? Is desiring to be good such a bad thing?
To recognize that we act in accordance with our desires need not, after all, rob us of our idea of morality, Foot argued ("Reasons for Action and Desires" in Practical Reasoning, in Joseph Raz, ed., OUP, 1978). We are left with it as the only possible basis for morality in a secular philosophy: that good people are people who desire to do good, and that a selfish desire to do good does not detract from the morality of the act.
By iluminating these dark corners of moral philosophy -- corners not honestly explored in Western philosophy, because of the influence of Christianity, since Aristotle -- there is no doubt that Bernard Williams became one of the leading English-language philosophers of our time.
He pulled moral philosophy out of the lecture theatres, away from the dull meta-ethical discussions of the Good, and away from God, and brought it back into the arena of difficult lives being lived in difficult circumstances.
Few philosophers would disagree that his death was a great blow to the academic discipline.
Bibliography
Books
- Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1972)
- Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973)
- Utilitarianism: For and Against with J.J.C. Smart (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 UP, 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)
Papers
- "Philosophy As a Humanistic Discipline," Philosophy 75 (294), Oct. 00, 477-496.
- "Understanding Homer: Literature, History and Ideal Anthropology," in Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Neil Roughley, de Gruyter, 2000.
- "Tolerating the Intolerable," in The Politics of Toleration, ed. Susan Mendes, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
- "Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom," 56 Cambridge Law Journal, 1997.
- "Stoic Philosophy and the Emotions: Reply to Richard Sorabji," in Aristotle and After, ed. R. Sorabji, Bulletin Inst. Class Stud. London, Supplement 68, 1997.
- "Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look," in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, ed. N. F. Bunnin, Blackwell, 1996.
- "History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection," in The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O'Neill, Cambridge 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, ed. R. B. Louden and P. Schollmeier, Chicago University Press, 1996.
- "Truth, Politics and Self-Deception," Social Research 63.3 (Fall 1996).
- "Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?" in Toleration: An Exclusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd, Princeton 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.
- "Truth in Ethics," Ratio 8(3), 1995, 227-42.
- "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. Harris, Henry, Oxford University Press, 1995.
- "Cratylus' Theory of Names and Its Refutation," in Language, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- "Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy," in Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes's Metaphysics, ed. John Cottingham, Oxford University Press, 1994.
- "The Actus Reus of Dr. Caligari," 142 Pennsylvania Law Review, May 1994.
- "Pagan Justice and Christian Love," Apeiron 26 (3-4), 1993, 195-207.
External links
Obituaries
- In The Guardian
- In The Washington Post
- In The Economist
- InThe Daily Telegraph
- In The Times
- by Martha Nussbaum in the Boston Review