Philosopher
Bernard Williams
1929–2003
English moral philosopher who argued that ethical life is too untidy for any systematic theory, and who made integrity, moral luck and truthfulness central topics of ethics.
Bernard Williams was born in Essex in 1929 and read Greats at Balliol College, Oxford, where his tutor was R. M. Hare. Both left a lasting mark: the Greek way of doing philosophy attracted him all his life, and Hare’s way repelled him. He served on several government bodies, most famously chairing the 1979 Committee on Obscenity and Censorship, which applied Mill’s harm principle to the question. In 1987 he left for Berkeley in protest at the Thatcher government’s treatment of British universities, and in 1990 returned to Oxford to succeed Hare as White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy. He was knighted in 1999 and died of cancer in 2003.
From his first book, Morality (1972), he questioned the whole enterprise of moral theory, and his essays in Moral Luck (1981) and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) became landmarks. Shame and Necessity (1993) argued that our deepest ethical convictions are closer to those of the ancient Greeks than to the modern “morality system”, and his last book, Truth and Truthfulness (2002), defended the value of truth against its sceptics.
Key ideas
- Against ethical theory
- No tidy philosophical theory can give us a decision procedure for ethics. Systematising our ethical ideas distorts and loses them, and our real problem is not too many such ideas but too few.
- The “morality system”
- What we call morality is one peculiar outlook: it treats obligation as inescapable, insists that obligations never truly conflict, ties blame to the voluntary and is impersonal. Much of what makes life worthwhile lies outside its sharp alternatives.
- Integrity against utilitarianism
- Utilitarianism, as an impersonal system, ignores the separateness of persons and alienates people from the projects and commitments that give their lives meaning, as his examples of George and Jim show.
- Internal reasons
- To say someone has a reason to act implies that acting would serve some motive they already have, or could arrive at by deliberating. Claims of reasons that connect with none of a person’s motives are false.
- Truth and truthfulness
- Against those who deny that objective truth matters, such as Rorty and Derrida, every society needs to value truth, and to prize sincerity and accuracy as virtues, and this commitment needs no dubious metaphysics.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- England
- Period
- Contemporary
- Themes
- The good life
Influences
Influenced by
- Immanuel Kant1724–1804criticised
- John Stuart Mill1806–1873
- Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900
- Jacques Derrida1930–2004criticised
- Richard Rorty1931–2007criticised
Bernard Williams1929–2003
Influenced by
- Immanuel Kant1724–1804criticised
- John Stuart Mill1806–1873
- Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900
- Jacques Derrida1930–2004criticised
- Richard Rorty1931–2007criticised
Bernard Williams1929–2003
Where these links come from
- Bernard Williams argued against Immanuel Kant. Source: Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth, Bernard Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Bernard Williams drew on John Stuart Mill. Source: Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth, Bernard Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Bernard Williams drew on Friedrich Nietzsche. Source: Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth, Bernard Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Bernard Williams argued against Jacques Derrida. Source: Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth, Bernard Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Bernard Williams argued against Richard Rorty. Source: Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth, Bernard Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, 1972
- Moral Luck, 1981
- Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 1985
- Shame and Necessity, 1993
- Truth and Truthfulness, 2002
Sources
- Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth, Bernard Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy