Bernard Williams - Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Williamss discussions are much to be valued: his explicitness and argumentative ingenuity focus the issues more sharply, and at greater depth, than any comparable work I know... One of the most interesting contributions of recent years, not only to ethics but to philosophy.

John McDowell, Mind

This is a superior book, glittering with intelligence and style.

Thomas Nagel, Journal of Philosophy

Bernard Williams has a greater force of thought, deployed over a wider horizon, than anyone else I have ever listened to.

John Dunn, The Times Higher Education Supplement

Who has not askedif only when depressedHow should I live, and how can I fi nd out? To read this book is to be taken through one of the most sophisticated discussions available of such questions by an engaging, sceptical often wryly witty and extraordinary subtle professional.

Ronald de Sousa, New York Times Book Review

Remarkably lively and enjoyable... It is a very rich book, containing excellent descriptions of a variety of moral theories, and innumerable and often witty observations on topics encountered on the way.

Philippa Foot, Times Literary Supplement

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For Jacob

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is a call to change how we do ethics. Philosophers, Bernard Williams argues, should stop propping up what he calls the morality systema punitive structure of obligation, blame and guiltsupported by the construction of ever more complex moral theories, theories of obligation, of just punishment and so on. Instead we should focus on the question: What would it be legitimately to live with confidence in our ethical lives? In the generation since its publication there has been a lively, sometimes brilliant, debatetaking issue with Williams characterization of objectivity in ethics, his defense of ethical relativism, his attempt to divide ethical concepts into thick and thin, his own need for such moral categories as right, obligation and justice. In short, Williams has been pushed on almost every major thesis. But there is near universal agreement that Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy sets the terms of the conversation. One cannot enter the contemporary world of ethical thinking without taking a stand on the issues Williams raises. The book has also had an unsettling effect on the academic study of ethics, challenging professors and students to reflect on the kind of activity they are engaged in; and to question what significance it has. I think one can honestly think of this book as a classic: if one wants to understand the movement of ethical thought in the twentieth century, one must read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.

In the early 1980s in Cambridge, I had the lifetime opportunity to teach a series of seminars on ethics jointly with Bernard Williams. These were the seminars in which he tried out the ideas that would later emerge in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy and it was my job to challenge him when I could. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had pushed him more forcefully over his defense of the relativism of distance . This was Williams attempt to articulate a version of relativism that did not succumb to obvious objections and which, Williams thought, was true for ethics. A real confrontation between two divergent outlooks, he stipulates, occurs at a given time if there is a group of people for whom each of the outlooks is a real option. A real option for a group is an outlook they already inhabit or one they could go over to in their actual historical circumstances, while maintaining their hold on reality, avoiding self-deception, and so on. A relativistic outlook, Williams says, consists in the view that it is only with real confrontations that the language of appraisalgood, bad, right, wrong, and so oncan be applied to them. For Williams, we cannot legitimately render moral appraisal of that samurai, precisely because his way of life is not a real option for us. I have come to think this cannot be correct.

One problem is that real confrontations cannot be defined in terms of real options. One cannot, for example, understand the brutality with which dominant American culture (as well as European immigrants) overran and destroyed the ways of life of native peoplesunless one grasps that, for the dominant culture, there was no way the alternative outlook could be a real option for them. The brutality of the confrontation is explained in part because, for each side, the alternative outlook could only be notional. One of the cruel ironies of the situation was that for Sitting Bull, it would have been more of a real option to take on the life of a medieval samurai than to take on the life of General George Custer; yet for Custer, to ask him to take on the outlook of Sitting Bull would have been as unrealistic as his taking on the the life of the medieval samurai. It is not that these various forms of distance render moral evaluation beside the point; they are part of causal explanation of the atrocity.