Bernard Williams

For half a century, the English philosopher Bernard Williams (b. 1929–d. 2003) was a distinctive and individual voice in Anglophone philosophy. He made major original contributions to the history of philosophy, epistemology, the philosophy of personal identity, and ethics. His central concern was the tension between human significance and historical contingency. Everything we have and are is essentially conditioned by its past, and this apparently threatens the experienced meaningfulness and importance of our lives. But Williams questions the traditions of transcendence and atemporality, often Christian or Christian-inspired, that he thinks create the ethical threat in the first place. In ethics we can, he claims, find no absolute standpoint outside history to give us a founding certainty to live by, partly because there is no such standpoint, and partly because we could not live by it even if there was; Williams sees the unavailability of the transcendent standpoint in ethics not as a disadvantage to our living fully human lives, but as a precondition of it. Hence Williams’s rejection of the “absolute conception of the world” as a starting point for humane (rather than scientific) understanding, and his rejection of any fully ahistorical conception of what truth can be for us. Hence, too, his rejection of “external reasons.” Also of the whole project of moral theory, whose paradigms are the Kantian enterprise of pure reason, and the utilitarian endeavor to regiment human practical reasoning into a scientific form. Williams rejects the Kantian view that there can be moral verdicts on any action that are entirely purified of “moral luck.” He argues that utilitarianism is superficial in supposing that the proper business of moral deliberation is over as soon as we settle which action is right. Even then, questions remain about how this conclusion has been reached, and whether the causal routing of the proposed solution violates the integrity of the agent through whom it is supposed to run. Questions also remain about whether, if at all, utilitarian solutions to difficult cases can give proper recognition to the kinds of ineliminable regret that often seem appropriate. What we are left with, once we are freed from the external ideological impositions characteristic of systematic moral theory, is ourselves and our own necessities. Our deepest ethical resource is simply ourselves, and our deepest ethical question is how to become, and how to be, ourselves, in the brief time that we have to become or be anything. Hence the distinction between the ethical and morality and the morality system. Williams’s concern for the complexity of the human life led him to develop influential conceptions of personal identity, theories of ethical knowledge, and the virtue of truth. His lifelong discussion of historical contingencies of the human condition include not only substantial contributions on the methodology of doing history of philosophy, but also philosophy of history and science. The most characteristic aspect of Williams is how he related these many subfields to his core ambition, the humanistic reflection on ethics. For helpful comments and suggestions we are grateful to Adrian Moore, Julia Markovits, and Paul Hurley.