Andras Szigeti (editor) - Morality and Agency: Themes from Bernard Williams

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936410

ISBN 9780197626566

eISBN 9780197626580

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197626566.001.0001

Andrs Szigeti and Matthew Talbert

Brian Leiter

Marcel van Ackeren

Stephen Bero and Aness Kim Webster

Stephen Darwall

Agata ukomska

Gideon Rosen

Paul Russell

Matthieu Queloz

Ulrike Heuer

Daniel Telech

Miranda Fricker

Geraldine Ng

The chapters collected here were presented at a workshop entitled Agency, Fate, and Luck: Themes from Bernard Williams, which was organized by the Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project and held in Lund, Sweden, on June 1315, 2019. The Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project is funded by the Swedish Research Council. We gratefully acknowledge the Swedish Research Councils support, without which the workshop in Lund would not have been possible. The director and principal investigator of the Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project is Paul Russell. He not only master-minded the workshop in the first place, but his encouragement and assistance in bringing this volume to completion were also essential. We would also like to thank all those who participated in the workshop. We were particularly pleased that Patricia Williams was able to be in attendance. We would like to express our gratitude to Annah Smedberg-Eivers and the Lund University Department of Philosophy for making the necessary arrangements and for hosting the workshop. Finally, we would like to thank Alexander Velichkov for providing us with editorial assistance and for compiling this books index. With the exception of Miranda Frickers contribution, these chapters are published here for the first time. We would like to thank Cambridge University Press and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for permission to reprint Frickers chapter.

Stephen Bero

School of Law

University of Surrey

Guildford, UK

Stephen Darwall

Department of Philosophy

Yale University

New Haven, CT, USA

Miranda Fricker

Department of Philosophy

The Graduate Center CUNY

New York City, NY, USA

Ulrike Heuer

Department of Philosophy

University College London

London, UK

Brian Leiter

Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values

University of Chicago

Chicago, IL, USA

Agata ukomska

Department of Philosophy

University of Warsaw

Warsaw, Poland

Geraldine Ng

Philosophy Lab CIC

London, UK

Matthieu Queloz

Faculty of Philosophy

University of Oxford

Oxford, UK

Gideon Rosen

Department of Philosophy

Princeton University

Princeton, NJ, USA

Paul Russell

Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project (LGRP)

Lund University

Lund, Sweden

Department of Philosophy

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Andrs Szigeti

Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project (LGRP)

Lund University

Lund, Sweden

Department of Philosophy

Institute for Culture and Society (IKOS)

Linkping University

Linkping, Sweden

Matthew Talbert

Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project (LGRP)

Lund University

Lund, Sweden

Department of Philosophy

West Virginia University

Morgantown, WV, USA

Daniel Telech

Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences

The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute

Jerusalem, Israel

Marcel van Ackeren

Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy

Wrzburg University

Wrzburg, Germany

Department of Philosophy

Oxford University

Oxford, UK

Aness Kim Webster

Department of Philosophy

Durham University

Durham, UK

Andrs Szigeti and Matthew Talbert

is that we do not understand Williamss work well enough and that more philosophy is required to understand it better. No doubt, Williams was and remains a highly influential and respected figure, not just as a philosopher but alsomost unusually for analytical philosopherswell beyond the world of academe. During his dazzling academic career, he held prestigious positions at universities in Britain and the United States, and he was also sought after as a public intellectual and a policy advisor. And yet he is not infrequently regarded as a bit of a maverick, a Socratic figure who asks the right questions but does not supply the answers and, truth be told, more often than not has not even seriously attempted to do so. This volume joins the hopefully growing number of attempts to decisively counter this characterization.

Granted, there are a few things everybody with even a minimal interest in analytical philosophy will (more or less grudgingly) acknowledge about Williams: that he was a brilliant and original moral philosopher who eschewed the dry conceptual analyses favored by some of his contemporaries in preference for a more historically oriented approach, that he was deeply critical of attempts to resolve difficult moral problems by invoking abstract and technical distinctions, and that he did not think it was desirable or possible to present ones views as a philosophical system. In light of this skeptical and anti-theoretical attitude, even many fans of Williamss work tend to emphasize its negative aspects. In particular, he is widely recognized for his sustained and many-faceted critique of the morality systemthat is, the system of modern moral practices which Williams himself referred to as the peculiar institution and which he associated with a set of distinctive philosophical, mostly Kantian but also Utilitarian, ideas.

We agree with those commentators (, etc.) who argue that this depiction is woefully one-sided and simplistic even in its praise, let alone its criticisms. Not just because it underplays the coherence of Williamss key ideas but also because it ignores Williamss intention to make a positive contribution to several areas in ethics and metaethics, including debates on the problem of free will and moral responsibility, the nature of moral emotions and reactive attitudes, the scope of rational motivations in morality, the possibility of moral knowledge, and much more. This anthology has been put together in the spirit of the latter assessment of Williamss work. Specifically, our aim has been to select chapters that focus on the substantive and original ideas and methods Williams developed as part of his distinctive outlook in ethics. Needless to say, in analytical philosophy the elaboration of new ideas and methods nearly always proceeds by way of criticizing extant alternatives. This is perhaps especially so in Williamss work, given the above-mentioned historical and skeptical orientation of his entire approach. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the chapters collected here also reflect extensively on the critical and negative side of Williamss philosophy. That said, the primary interest of the authors contributing to this volume has been to focus on Williamss conceptual and methodological innovations. Our hope, in short, is that these chapters will add some new strokes to the emerging picture of Williamss philosophy as a fully fledged alternative approach in ethics.