Bernard Williams

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (21 September 1929 – 10 June 2003) was an English philosopher. His publications include Problems of the Self, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), 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 for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks. Described by Colin McGinn as an "analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist," he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it "come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life."

Williams was a strong supporter of women in academia; according to Nussbaum, he was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be." He was also famously sharp in conversation. Gilbert Ryle, one of Williams's mentors at Oxford University, said that he "understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, and all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your own sentence."

Life Early life and education

Williams was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, a suburb of Southend, Essex, to Hilda Amy Williams, née Day, a personal assistant, and Owen Pasley Denny Williams, chief maintenance surveyor for the Ministry of Works. He was educated at Chigwell School, an independent school, where he first discovered philosophy. In his first book, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), he quoted with approval Lawrence's advice to "ind your deepest impulse, and follow that."

Awarded a scholarship to Oxford, Williams read Greats (pure classics followed by ancient history and philosophy) at Balliol. Among his influences at Oxford were W. S. Watt, Russell Meiggs, R. M. Hare, Elizabeth Anscombe, Eric Dodds, Eduard Fraenkel, David Pears and Gilbert Ryle. He shone in the first part of the course, the pure classics (being particularly fond of writing Latin verses in the style of Ovid) and graduated in 1951 with a congratulatory first in the second part of the course and a prize fellowship at All Souls.

After Oxford, Williams spent his two-year national service flying Spitfires in Canada for the Royal Air Force. While on leave in New York, he became close to Shirley Brittain Catlin (born 1930), daughter of the novelist Vera Brittain and the political scientist George Catlin. He and Catlin continued seeing each other. She began working for the Daily Mirror and sought election as a Labour MP. Williams, also a member of the Labour Party, helped her with the 1954 by-election in Harwich in which she was an unsuccessful candidate.

The couple moved into a very basic ground-floor apartment in London, on Clarendon Road, Notting Hill. Given how hard it was to find decent housing, they decided instead to share with Helge Rubinstein and her husband, the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein, who at the time was working for his uncle, Victor Gollancz. In 1955, the four of them bought a four-storey, seven-bedroom house in Phillimore Place, Kensington, for £6,800, a home they lived in together for 14 years. Williams described it as one of the happiest periods of his life. In 1961, after four miscarriages in four years, Shirley Williams gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca.

Williams was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1963, The Sunday Times described the couple two years later as "the New Left at its most able, most generous, and sometimes most eccentric." Andy Beckett wrote that they "entertained refugees from eastern Europe and politicians from Africa, and drank sherry in noteworthy quantities." Shirley Williams became a junior minister and, in 1971, Shadow Home Secretary. Several newspapers saw her as a future prime minister. She went on to co-found a new centrist party in 1981, the Social Democratic Party; Williams left the Labour Party to join the SDP, although he later returned to Labour. In both his first and second marriages, he supported his wives in their careers and helped with the children more than was common for men at the time.

Shirley Williams's political career (the House of Commons regularly sat until 10 pm) meant that the couple spent much of their time apart. They bought a house in Furneux Pelham, Hertfordshire, near the border with south Cambridgeshire, while she lived in Phillimore Place during the week to be close to the Houses of Parliament. Sunday was often the only day they were together. The differences in their personal values – he was an atheist, she a Catholic – placed a further strain on their relationship. Rational agents must act on "principles of pure rational agency," writes Moore; that is, principles that regulate all rational agents. But Williams distinguished between thinking and acting. To think rationally is to think in a way compatible with belief in the truth, and "what it takes for one to believe the truth is the same as what it takes for anyone else to believe the truth," writes Moore. But one can act rationally by satisfying one's own desires (internal reasons for action), and what it takes to do that may not be what it takes for anyone else to satisfy theirs. Kant's approach to treating thinking and acting alike is wrong, according to Williams.

Williams argued that Kant had given the "purest, deepest and most thorough representation of morality," but that the "honourable instincts of Kantianism to defend the individuality of individuals against the agglomerative indifference of Utilitarianism" may not be effective against the Kantian "abstract character of persons as moral agents." We should not be expected to act as though we are not who we are in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Critique of utilitarianism

Williams set out the case against utilitarianism – a consequentialist position, the simplest version of which is that actions are right only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number – in Utilitarianism: For and Against (1973) with J. J. C. Smart. One of the book's thought experiments involves Jim, a botanist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator. Jim finds himself in a small town facing 20 captured Indian rebels. The captain who has arrested them says that if Jim will kill one, the others will be released in honour of Jim's status as a guest, but if he does not, they will all be killed. Simple act utilitarianism would favour Jim killing one of the men.

Williams argued that there is a crucial distinction between a person being killed by Jim and being killed by the captain because of an act or omission of Jim's. The captain, if he chooses to kill, is not simply the medium of an effect Jim is having on the world. He is the moral actor, the person with the intentions and projects. The utilitarian loses that distinction, turning us into empty vessels by means of which consequences occur. Williams argued that moral decisions must preserve our psychological identity and integrity. We should reject any system that reduces moral decisions to a few algorithms.

Reasons for action

Williams argued that there are only internal reasons for action: "A has a reason to φ if A has some desire the satisfaction of which will be served by his φ-ing." An external reason would be "A has reason to φ," even if nothing in A's "subjective motivational set" would be furthered by her φ-ing. Williams argued that it is meaningless to say that there are external reasons; reason alone does not move people to action.

Sophie-Grace Chappell argues that, without external reasons for action, it becomes impossible to maintain that the same set of moral reasons applies to all agents equally. 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."

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. Jane O'Grady wrote in a Guardian 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." He became known for his dialectical powers, although he was suspicious of them too. Alan Code wrote that Williams had never been "impressed by the display of mere dialectical cleverness, least of all in moral philosophy":

In 1996, Martin Hollis said that Williams had "a good claim to be the leading British philosopher of his day," but that, although he had a "lovely eye for the central questions," he had none of the answers.

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, according to Sophie Grace Chappell. "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 (with Alan Montefiore, eds.) British Analytical Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. (with J. J. C. Smart) Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, London: Pelican Books, 1978. Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. (with Amartya Sen) Utilitarianism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Making Sense of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. The Great Philosophers: Plato, Abingdon: Routledge, 1998. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Posthumously published In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. Myles Burnyeat, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. A. W. Moore, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. On Opera, ed. Patricia Williams, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Essays and Reviews: 1959–2002, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2014.

Selected papers

"Morality and the emotions," in Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, 207–229, first delivered in 1965 as Williams's inaugural lecture at Bedford College, London. "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the tedium of immortality", in Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. "Pagan Justice and Christian Love," Apeiron 26(3–4), December 1993, 195–207. "Cratylus's Theory of Names and Its Refutation," in Stephen Everson (ed.), Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. "The Actus Reus of Dr. Caligari", Pennsylvania Law Review 142, May 1994, 1661–1673. "Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy," in John Cottingham (ed.), Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes's Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. "Acting as the Virtuous Person Acts," in Robert Heinaman (ed.), Aristotle and Moral Realism, Westview Press, 1995. "Ethics," in A. C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. "Identity and Identities," in Henry Harris (ed.), Identity: Essays Based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. "Truth in Ethics," Ratio, 8(3), December 1995, 227–236. "On Hating and Despising Philosophy", London Review of Books, 18(8), 18 April 1996, 17–18 (courtesy link). "Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look," in N. F. Bunnin (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, Blackwell, 1996. "History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection," in Onora O'Neill (ed.), The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge University Press, 1996. "Reasons, Values and the Theory of Persuasion," in Francesco Farina, Frank Hahn and Stafano Vannucci (eds.), Ethics, Rationality and Economic Behavior, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. "The Politics of Trust," in Patricia Yeager (ed.), The Geography of Identity, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. "The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics," in R. B. Louden and P. Schollmeier (eds.), The Greeks and Us, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996. "Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?" in David Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Exclusive Virtue, Princeton: 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 R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle and After, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement 68, 1997. "Tolerating the Intolerable," in Susan Mendus (ed.), The Politics of Toleration, Edinburgh University Press, 1999. "Philosophy As a Humanistic Discipline," Philosophy 75, October 2000, 477–496. "Understanding Homer: Literature, History and Ideal Anthropology," in Neil Roughley (ed.), Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Walter de Gruyter, 2000. , London Review of Books, 24(20), 17 October 2002 (courtesy link).