Bernard Williams

Hesitant Thoughts about Bernard Williams

I have never quite “got” the philosopher Bernard Williams. His range of erudition was vast; his writing style often dense or elliptic, reading like the extension of seminar or common room discussions at which one had not been present; and his programme in ethical philosophy hard to pin down (which was precisely the point).

Williams was a realist, in sense of taking persons as one finds them, and recognising that there are many ways of living lives. He considered that “ethics” consists more in learning and reasoning about the values of one’s particular culture and less in discovering some universal theory of life and seeking to apply it; still less in discovering a system of moral “oughts” which become binding rules for living.

Especially Williams emphasised  the “integrity” of each individual’s life – his or her specific concerns, relationships and values (all of which Williams called the individual’s “projects”). He saw moral systems as inimical to this fact about persons, mainly because, one way or another, they demand a large degree of impartiality to make the system concerned plausible – whereas Williams saw partiality as essential to lives as actually lived. In his wonderful book Morality (an introduction to ethics), written in 1972, Williams quotes with approval D H Lawrence- “find your deepest impulse and follow that”. William qualifies that advice by acknowledging there is another important dimension to life – “society", which indeed needs rules. But Lawrence’s injunction remained at the core of his views.

There are many themes in Williams’s work. To notice a few:

Luck

According to Williams, most moral theories consider that luck should have no role in morality. Whether or not justice is done should not be a matter of luck. One’s moral responsibility should not be a matter of luck. But, Williams points out, how one stands and reacts, and how others judge one, in relation to events can be very much a matter of luck. At a very basic level , one’s genes and upbringing may dispose one to uphold, or break, moral rules. At a more nuanced level, it may be a matter of luck that my single episode of careless driving results in a child’s death, whereas your lifetime of careless near misses results in no harm at all. But I shall be judged, by myself and others, more harshly.

More controversially, Williams claims that a clear moral failing can be justified, or at least excused, by the success of an agent’s enterprise (or project), in pursuit of which he committed  the moral transgression, such success being partly down to luck. He gives the example of the artist Gauguin (he is careful to say that his “Gauguin” is an artificial person given stipulated characteristics, but he is pretty close to the real man). Gauguin abandons his wife and young family to travel and paint. Whether or not he came to be recognized as great painter was to some extent a matter of luck. Had he failed, he would have been judged badly and no doubt have suffered great guilt. But he succeeded, and most of the world (if not his family – see further Moral cost below) are glad he made the choice he did.

A good recent example of moral luck might concern the decision to invade Iraq. Had the invasion resulted in a stable new democratic state, instead of appalling bloody chaos, the mendacious actions of the invasion’s instigators might have been forgiven or forgotten.

General rules are often spurious

Consider an agent who is faced with the choice of saving from a fire his or her spouse or a stranger. The agent saves the spouse and most would agree that it is permissible to do so. But does the agent reason “there is a principle that in certain situations one may permissibly favour one’s spouse, and this is an instance of that principle”? As Williams drily remarks, the spouse may validly object that here is a “thought too far”. The agent acts as he or she does because the potential victim is his or her spouse, not because he is applying a general moral rule.

Similarly, if one is passing a pond and leaps in to rescue a drowning child, the moral claim on one arises from the incidental relation in which one stands in respect of the child at that critical moment – “I am passing, I can rescue, no one else is able to”. The event, according to Williams, does not instance an impartial principle that one is obliged to relieve the suffering of children everywhere. A child fallen into a pond in a far off country is not in the same relation to me.

(As is demonstrated by his discussion of luck, and his stress upon the uniqueness and centrality of each person’s lives and projects, Williams rejects morality systems’ tendency to impose “impartial” universalist standards.)

There is usually a moral cost when a hard choice has to be made between competing claims

Williams considers the case where an agent must choose a course of action (for example in wartime or an emergency) which necessarily or very likely result in harm to, or even the deaths of, innocent persons (or even non-innocents who do not deserve such harm or death) but, all things considered, that course of action is the “right” one. Contrary to some theories  (the “Just War” theory might be one), Williams maintains that the claims of the victims do not thereby disappear. If one subscribes, for example, to a consequentialist morality that judges right or wrong by asking whether a better state of affairs (however one defines “better) has been produced by an action, then it may seem that if the “right” hard choice is made, no one has cause to complain and the agent has no cause for regret or self-reproach (which are moral feelings).

Williams rejects this view. It is rather true that moral claims can conflict and that such conflicts are not necessarily resolved or dissolved just because a choice must be made and the choice made is in some sense the “right” one. Consider the bomber pilot attacking a vital “legitimate” target who foreseeably causes civilian “collateral damage”; or the wartime destroyer commander who depth-charges an enemy submarine rather than pick up survivors from a ship the submarine has just sunk. Williams says that there is in such cases a moral cost: the victims’ (those who are not dead) “complaints are justified and they may quite properly refuse to accept the agent’s justification which the rest of us may properly accept. The idea that there has been a moral cost implies that something bad has been done, and very often that someone has been wronged…”.

A chapter title in Williams’ most acclaimed book, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, is Morality, the Peculiar Institution. The term was the euphemism in the Confederate States of America for slavery. Williams ends that chapter thus:

….morality makes people think that, without its very special obligation, there is only inclination; without its utter voluntariness [meaning immunity to luck; and the supposed equal access of every rational agent to correct moral reasoning], there is only force [to compel moral behaviour; instead of myriad forms of education and persuasion]; without its ultimately pure justice, there is no justice. Its philosophical errors are only the most abstract expressions of a deeply rooted and still powerful misconception of life.

June 2015