Bernard Williams and the price of systematising morality

In the second half of the twentieth century moral philosophy was divided into two great camps: utilitarianism and Kantianism. One calculated consequences; the other tested principles.

Bernard Williams (1929-2003) put the same objection to both — and the objection changed the agenda of the subject for good.

The objection: the system leaves the person out#

Williams's claim was that each theory reduces moral thinking to a calculation carried out from an impartial point of view. Utilitarianism computes the sum of utility; Kantianism looks for the universalisable principle. In neither does the agent's own life, his attachments and his projects enter the reckoning with any special weight.

Yet this is not how people make moral decisions, nor should it be expected of them.

Williams's famous example runs as follows. A man can save one of two people who are drowning. One of them is his wife. The utilitarian sum says the two are of equal value; impartiality recommends tossing a coin.

At this point, Williams held, something has gone wrong. The man needs no calculation in order to think that he should save his wife. What the theory does here is to burden him with one thought too many.

The phrase has settled into the language of the subject. What it describes is this: by requiring us to think, in certain situations, about things we have no need to think about, a moral theory estranges us from our own lives.

Integrity#

From this comes Williams's notion of integrity.

A person's identity cannot be separated from the projects and attachments he holds. If a theory asks you to give up those projects for the sake of producing the right outcome, it is asking you not merely for an action but for yourself.

This is the strongest criticism Williams levelled at utilitarianism: it sees no moral difference between what the agent does and what other people do. Yet what I do with my own hand and what I merely fail to prevent are not, for me, the same thing.

Moral luck#

Williams's second great contribution is the notion of moral luck.

The traditional understanding of morality assumes that moral assessment must be confined to what lies within the agent's control. Kant put it most plainly: the good will is good independently of what comes of it.

Williams showed that in practice this is not so. We find the person whose decision turned out well to have been justified, and the person whose decision turned out badly to be culpable — though what separates them is very often luck.

An example: a painter who leaves his family in order to paint. If he becomes a great painter, his choice acquires a kind of justification; if he does not, he has merely walked out on them. And at the moment of deciding he cannot know whether his talent will prove sufficient.

The conclusion Williams draws makes no attempt to rescue morality. He asks us to accept that moral life is exposed to luck, and that this is not a defect but a fact.

Together with an essay written independently by Thomas Nagel in the same years, the notion opened a debate in the field that has not closed since.

"Philosophy is a humanistic discipline"#

Another theme comes forward in Williams's late work: the question of what kind of knowledge philosophy is.

The implicit model of twentieth-century analytic philosophy was science: a discipline that advances, solves its problems and accumulates its results. Williams objected. Philosophy, he held, belongs to the same family as history and the humanities rather than to the sciences. The reason is this: our philosophical concepts have been formed historically, and understanding them requires understanding how they came to be formed.

In science the past is a stage that has been superseded; nobody reads Aristotle in order to understand present-day physics. In philosophy, Plato is still an interlocutor.

The essay in which he set out this view — Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline — became, as we have reported before, the subject of a special issue of the journal Philosophy, now in its hundredth year.

Genealogy put to constructive use#

In Truth and Truthfulness (2002) Williams makes an unexpected move. He takes over Nietzsche's genealogical method but runs it in the opposite direction.

Genealogy is usually debunking: it unsettles a value by showing that it comes from a base origin. Williams argues that genealogy can be vindicatory as well. A story about how the virtue of truthfulness arose can also show why we need it.

This counts as one of the most original developments of the genealogical method since Nietzsche.

Where he worked, what he left#

Williams studied at King's College, Cambridge, and taught at Cambridge, Berkeley and Oxford. He chaired the public committee established in Britain on obscenity and censorship — an example still cited when the philosopher's relation to public office is discussed.

Morality: An Introduction to Ethics and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy have appeared in Turkish.

Why he should be read now#

Williams's objection has acquired an unexpected currency in the argument about the ethics of artificial intelligence.

If a system is to make moral decisions, it must be given either a set of rules or a utility function. Williams's whole critique was aimed at precisely those two options: neither can take account of the relation an agent has to his own life.

The question that follows is one rarely asked in engineering documents. If moral decision cannot be reduced to the application of a rule or to a calculation of utility, may we go on calling the reduced version a moral decision at all?