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Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (September 21, 1929 – June 10, 2003) was an English moral philosopher, noted by The Times as the "most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time."

Williams spent over 50 years seeking answers to one question: What does it mean to live well? This was a question few analytic philosophers had explored, preferring instead to focus on the issue of moral obligation. For Williams, moral obligation, insofar as the phrase had any meaning, had to be compatible with the pursuit of self-interest and the good life.

As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge for over a decade, and the Provost of King's College, Cambridge for almost as long, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to return the study of moral philosophy to its foundations: to history and culture, politics and psychology, and, in particular, to the Greeks. Described as an "analytic philosopher with the soul of a humanist," he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed increasingly unable to communicate effectively with one another. He rejected scientific and evolutionary reductionism, once calling reductionists "the ones I really do dislike" because they are morally unimaginative, he said. For Williams, complexity was beautiful, meaningful, and irreducible.

He became known as a great supporter of women in academia, seeing in women the possibility of that synthesis of reason and emotion that he felt eluded analytic philosophy. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum said Williams was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be."

His life

Williams was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, the only son of a civil servant. He was educated at Chigwell School and read Greats (Classics) at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating in 1951 with the rare distinction of a congratulatory first-class honours degree, the highest award at this level in the British university system, he spent his year-long national service in the Royal Air Force (RAF), flying Spitfires in Canada.

He met his future wife, Shirley Brittain-Catlin, the daughter of political scientist and philosopher George Catlin and novelist Vera Brittain, while he was on leave in New York, where she was studying at Columbia University. At the age of 22, after winning a Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, Williams returned to England with Shirley to take up the post — though not before she'd had an affair with four-minute-miler Roger Bannister — and they were married in 1955. Shirley Williams, as she became known, was elected as a Labour Member of Parliament, then crossed the floor as one of the "Gang of Four" to become a founding member of the SDP, a centrist breakaway party. She was later ennobled, becoming Baroness Williams of Crosby, and remains a prominent member of the Liberal Democrats.

Williams left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political ambitions, finding a post first at University College London and then at Bedford College, while his wife worked as a journalist for the Financial Times. For 17 years, the couple lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife. During this time, described by Williams as one of the happiest of his life, the marriage produced a daughter, Rebecca, but the development of his wife's political career kept the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal values — Williams was a confirmed atheist, his wife a devout Catholic — placed a strain on their relationship, which reached breaking point when Williams had an affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian Quentin Skinner. The Williams' marriage was dissolved in 1974, and Williams and Skinner were able to wed, a marriage that produced two sons.

Williams became Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1967, then served as Provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1979 until 1987, when he moved to the University of California, Berkeley to take up the post of Sather Professor of Classics, because, he told a British newspaper, he could barely afford to buy a house in central London on his salary as an academic. His public outburst at the low salaries in British universities made his departure appear part of the brain drain, as the British media called it, which was his intention. He told The Guardian in November 2002:

I now regret my departure was so public. I was persuaded that there was a real problem about academic conditions and that if my departure was publicised this would bring these matters to public attention. It did a bit, but it made me seem narky, and when I came back again in three years it looked rather absurd. I came back for personal reasons — it's harder to live out there with a family than I supposed.

He returned to England in 1990 to become White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, a post he held until 1996, when he was appointed Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at Berkeley, where he remained until his death.

In addition to academic life, Williams chaired and served on a number of Royal Commissions and government committees. In the 1970s, he chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, which reported in 1979 that:

Given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that one can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any hint at all that pornography was present in the background.

The Committee's report was influenced by the liberal thinking of John Stuart Mill, a philosopher greatly admired by Williams, who used Mill's principle of liberty to develop what Williams called the "harm condition," whereby "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone." Williams concluded that, according to the harm condition, pornography could not be shown to be harmful and that "the role of pornography in influencing society is not very important ... to think anything else is to get the problem of pornography out of proportion with the many other problems that face our society today". The committee reported that, so long as children were protected from seeing it, adults should be free to read and watch pornography as they saw fit. However, Margaret Thatcher's first administration put an end to the liberal agenda on sex, and nearly put an end to Williams' political career too; he was not asked to chair another public committee for almost 15 years.

Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining drug abuse in 1971; gambling in 1976–78; the role of British private schools in 1965–70; and social justice in 1993–94.

"I did all the major vices," he said.

Williams was famously sharp in discussion. Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle once said of him that "e understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your sentence."

He was knighted in 1999 and became a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He sat on the board of the English National Opera and wrote the entry for "opera" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Williams died on June 10, 2003, while on holiday in Rome. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. He is survived by his wife, Patricia, their two sons, Jacob and Jonathan, and Rebecca, his daughter from his first marriage.

His moral philosophy

Williams' books and papers include studies of René Descartes and Ancient Greek philosophy, as well as more detailed attacks on utilitarianism and Kantianism.

Williams was a systems destroyer, attacking all "isms" with equal vigour. He turned his back on the meta-ethics studied by most moral philosophers trained in the Western analytic tradition — "What is the Good?" and "What does the word 'ought' mean?" — and concentrated instead on practical ethics. Williams tried to address the question of how to live a good life, with the emphasis on how to live it, not how to write an essay about it. He focused on the complexity, the "moral luck", of everyday life, and was highly critical of many of the moral philosophy textbooks with their dry examples frequently encountered by philosophy undergraduates.

In Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), he wrote that "whereas most moral philosophy at most times has been empty and boring . . . contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing issues at all". The study of morality, he argued, should be vital and compelling. He wanted to find a moral philosophy that was accountable to psychology and to history, to politics and to culture. In his rejection of morality as what he called "a peculiar institution", by which he meant a discrete and separable domain of human thought, Williams resembled the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Williams greatly admired Nietzsche, often saying he wished he could quote Nietzsche on every page he wrote.

Although Williams' disdain for reductionism sometimes made him appear a moral relativist, he was far from that. He believed, like the Ancient Greeks, that the so-called "thick" moral concepts, like courage and cruelty, were real. What is brave and what is cruel is not relative, he argued. We do know these things when we see them.

His last book, Truth And Truthfulness (2002), examines how philosophers Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and other followers of what he considered political correctness "sneer at any purported truth as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power, class bias and ideology," wrote The Guardian in Williams' obituary. Unusually for a philosophy book, The Guardian said, Truth and Truthfulness makes the reader laugh, then want to cry.

Critique of utilitarianism

Williams was particularly critical of utilitarianism, a consequentialist theory, the simplest version of which argues that moral acts are good only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, regardless of any issues of personhood or moral agency.

One of Williams' famous arguments against utilitarianism centres on Jim, a scientist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator. One day, Jim finds himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 rebels, captured and tied up. The captain who has defeated them says that if Jim will kill one of the rebels, the others will be released, in honour of Jim's status as a guest. But if he does not, they will all be killed (Utiliarianism: For and Against, 1973). Simple act utilitarianism says that Jim should kill one of the captives in order to save the others. For most consequentialist theories, there is no moral dilemma in a case like this. All that matters is the outcome.

Against this, Williams argued that there is a crucial moral distinction between a person being killed by me, and being killed by someone else because of what I do. The utilitarian loses that vital distinction, he argued, thereby stripping us of our humanity and of everything that makes human life worthwhile, turning us into empty vessels by means of which consequences occur, rather than preserving our status as moral actors and decision-makers with integrity. Moral decisions must preserve our integrity and our psychological identity, he argued.

An advocate of utilitarianism would reply that the theory cannot be dismissed as easily as that. The Nobel philosopher of economics Amartya Sen, for example, argued that moral agency, issues of integrity, and personal points of view can be worked into a consequentialist account; that is, they can be counted as consequences too (see Sen and Williams, 1982). For example, to solve parking problems in London, Williams wrote, a utilitarian would have to favour threatening to shoot anyone who parked in a prohibited space. If only a few people were shot for this, illegal parking would soon stop, and the shootings would be justified, according to simple act utilitarianism, because of the happiness the absence of parking problems would bring to millions of Londoners. Any theory that has this as a consequence, Williams argued, should be rejected out of hand, no matter how intuitively plausible it feels to agree that we do judge actions in terms of their consequences. We do not, argued Williams, and we must not.

However, as Sen and others have argued, rule utilitarianism would ask what rule could be extrapolated from the parking example. If the rule is "Anyone might be shot over a simple parking offence," the utilitarian would argue that the implementation of that rule would bring great unhappiness to Londoners, and that, on those grounds, threatening to shoot people would be wrong. For Williams, however, this type of argument simply proved his point. We do not, as a matter of fact, need to calculate whether or why threatening to shoot people over parking offences is wrong, and any system that shows us how to make that calculation is a system we should reject.

Critique of Kantianism

One of the main rivals of utilitarianism is the moral philosophy of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Williams' work throughout the 1970s and 1980s — Morality: An Introduction to Ethics in 1972; Problems of the Self in 1973; Utilitarianism: For and Against with J.J.C. Smart, also in 1973; Moral Luck in 1981; and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy in 1985 — outlined the basis of his attacks on the twin pillars of utilitarianism and Kantianism. Martha Nussbaum wrote:

As a group these works denounced the trivial and evasive way in which moral philosophy was being practised in England under the aegis of those two dominant theories."

Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals expounded a moral system based on what he called the Categorical Imperative, the best known version of which is: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become, by an act of will, a universal law of nature".

This is a binding law, Kant argued, on any rational being with free will. You must imagine, when you act, that the rule underpinning your action will apply to everyone in similar circumstances, including yourself in future. If you cannot accept the consequences of this thought experiment, or if it leads to a contradiction, you must not carry out the act. For example, if you want to kill your wife's lover, you must imagine a law that says all wronged husbands have the right to kill their wives' lovers; and that will include you, should you become the lover of a married woman. In other words, you must universalize your experience.

Williams argued against the Categorical Imperative in his paper "Persons, character and morality" (Moral Luck, 1981). Morality should not require us to act selflessly, as though we are not who we are, as though we are not in the circumstances we presently find ourselves. We should not have to take an impartial view, or a Christian view, of the world, he argued. Our values, commitments, and desires do make a difference to how we see the world and to how we act; and so they should, he said, otherwise we lose our individuality, and thereby our humanity.

Reasons for action

Williams' insistence that morality is about people and their real lives, and that acting out of self-interest and even selfishness are not contrary to moral action, is illustrated in what is called his "internal reasons for action" argument, part of what philosophers call the "internal/external reasons" debate.

Before Williams, some philosophers tried to argue that moral agents had "external reasons" — by which they meant objective reasons, or reasons external to the moral agent — for performing a moral act. If action X was good, and was part of the Good, that alone was a reason to do X: a reason to act. Williams argued that this is meaningless nonsense. For something to be a "reason to act," it must be magnetic; that is, it must move us to action. But how can something entirely external to us — for example, the proposition that X is good — be magnetic? By what process can something external to us move us to act?

Williams argued that it cannot. Cognition is not magnetic. Knowing and feeling are quite separate, and a person must feel before they are moved to act. Reasons for action are always internal, he argued. If I feel moved to do X (for example, to do something good), it is because I want to. I may want to do the right thing for a number of reasons. For example, I may have been brought up to believe that X is good and may wish to act in accordance with my upbringing (something we might call conscience); or I may want to look good in someone else's eyes; or perhaps I fear the disapproval of my community. The reasons can be complex, but they are always internal and they always boil down to desire.

With this argument, Williams left moral philosophy with the notion that a person's moral reasons must be rooted in his desires to act morally, desires that might, at any given moment, in any given person, be absent.

Williams' philosophical legacy

In a secular humanist tradition, with no appeal to God or any external moral authority, Williams' theory strikes at the very foundation of conventional morality: that one would sometimes do good even if one did not want to because, in order to be rational, one had to. However, one question raised by the British moral philosopher, Philippa Foot, counters this approach by asking: is desiring to be good really a bad thing? Is it not more reasonable to argue that the person who wants to be good is a better person than the one who does not? To recognize that we act in accordance with our desires need not, Foot argued, rob us of morality. Although when left with self-interest as the basis for morality in a secular philosophy, good people will desire to do good for their own reasons, that selfish desire need not detract from the goodness of the subsequent act.

By illuminating what he saw as the positive role of self-interest in moral action, a role largely neglected in Western philosophy, Bernard Williams went on to become one of the leading English-language philosophers of his time, bringing moral philosophy firmly back into the arena of difficult lives being lived under difficult circumstances.

Books and papers by Bernard Williams

• Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1972)
• Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973)
• Utilitarianism: For and Against with J.J.C. Smart (Cambridge University Press, 1973)
• Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (Harvester Press, 1978)
• Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
• Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1985)
• Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1993)
• Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
• Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002)
  
• In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Edited by Geoffrey Hawthorne. (Princeton University Press, 2005)
• "Philosophy As a Humanistic Discipline," Philosophy 75 (294), Oct. 00, 477–496.
• "Understanding Homer: Literature, History and Ideal Anthropology," in Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Neil Roughley, de Gruyter, 2000.
• "Tolerating the Intolerable," in The Politics of Toleration, ed. Susan Mendus, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
• "Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom," 56 Cambridge Law Journal, 1997.
• "Stoic Philosophy and the Emotions: Reply to Richard Sorabji," in Aristotle and After, ed. R. Sorabji, Bulletin Inst. Class Stud. London, Supplement 68, 1997.
• "Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look," in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, ed. N. F. Bunnin, Blackwell, 1996.
• "History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection," in The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O'Neill, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• "The Politics of Trust," in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yeager, University of Michigan Press, 1996.
• "The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics," in The Greeks and Us, ed. R. B. Louden and P. Schollmeier, Chicago University Press, 1996.
• "Truth, Politics and Self-Deception," Social Research 63.3 (Fall 1996).
• "Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?" in Toleration: An Exclusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd, Princeton University Press, 1996.
• "Reasons, Values and the Theory of Persuasion," in Ethics, Rationality and Economic Behavior, ed. Francesco Farina, Frank Hahn and Stafano Vannucci, Oxford University Press, 1996.
• "Truth in Ethics," Ratio 8(3), 1995, 227–42.
• "Acting as the Virtuous Person Acts," in Aristotle and Moral Realism, ed. Robert Heinaman, Westview Press, 1995.
• "Ethics," in Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject, ed. A. C. Grayling, Oxford University Press, 1995.
• "Identity and Identities," in Identity: Essays Based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford, ed. Harris, Henry, Oxford University Press, 1995.
• "Cratylus' Theory of Names and Its Refutation," in Language, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• "Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy," in Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes's Metaphysics, ed. John Cottingham, Oxford University Press, 1994.
• "The Actus Reus of Dr. Caligari," 142 Pennsylvania Law Review, May 1994.
• "Pagan Justice and Christian Love," Apeiron 26 (3–4), 1993, 195–207.

Notes

1. Obituary, "Professor Sir Bernard Williams," The Times, June 14, 2003
2. McGinn, Colin, "Isn't It the Truth?" The New York Review of Books, April 10, 2003.
3. Baker, Kenneth, Bernard Williams: "Carrying the torch for truth", an interview with Bernard Williams, San Francisco Chronicle, September 22, 2002.
4. Nussbaum, Martha, "Tragedy and Justice", Boston Review, October/November 2003

References

• Baker, Kenneth, Bernard Williams: Carrying the torch for truth An interview with Bernard Williams, San Francisco Chronicle, September 22, 2002
• Foot, Philippa, "Reasons for Action and Desires," in Practical Reasoning, ed. Joseph Raz (Oxford University Press, 1978).
• Jeffries, Stuart, The Quest for Truth The Guardian, November 30, 2002
• McGinn, Colin, Isn't It the Truth? The New York Review of Books, April 10, 2003. It is the introduction to a review of the book Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy by Bernard Williams.
• Nussbaum, Martha, Tragedy and Justice Boston Review, October/November 2003
• Obituary, no byline, Professor Sir Bernard Williams The Daily Telegraph, June 14, 2003
• Obituary, no byline, Professor Sir Bernard Williams The Times, June 14, 2003
• Obituary, no byline, Bernard Williams The Economist, June 26, 2003
• O'Grady, Jane, Professor Sir Bernard Williams The Guardian, June 13, 2003
• Pearson, Richard, Philosopher Bernard Williams Dies: Weighed Questions of Moral Identify The Washington Post, June 18, 2003
• Sen, Amartya, Ethics and Economics (Blackwell, 1989).
• Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard (eds),Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
• Williams, Bernard, Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
• Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1985).

Further reading

• Chappell, Timothy, Bernard Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 2006
• Sides, Carl Brock, Williams on Personal Identity Brock's Philosophy Page, 1997, retrieved December 07 2004
• Williams, Bernard, Why Philosophy Needs History London Review of Books, October 17, 2002 (requires subscription)
• A live chat with Bernard Williams, GuardianUnlimited, November 2002
• McGinn, Colin, Isn't it the truth? New York Review of Books, April 10, 2003 (requires subscription)
• Williams, Bernard, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline The Royal Institute of Philosophy, undated, retrieved December 7, 2004
  

• 1929 births
• 2003 deaths
• 20th century philosophers
• Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
• British philosophers
• English philosophers
• Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford
• Former students of Balliol College, Oxford
• Natives of Essex
• Philosophers