Thinker · TH-0077
Bernard Williams
Bernard Williams was an English moral philosopher who held chairs at London, Cambridge and Berkeley and later returned to Oxford. He was a searching…
Also known as Bernard Arthur Owen Williams
1929 – 2003 · Oxford, London, Cambridge, Berkeley
Traditions: Analytic
Bernard Williams was an English moral philosopher who held chairs at London, Cambridge and Berkeley and later returned to Oxford. He was a searching critic of utilitarianism and Kantian moral theory, arguing that they misdescribe agents' integrity, their ground projects and the role of luck in moral life. In 'The Makropulos Case' he argued that an endless life would eventually become intolerably tedious, so immortality would not be desirable even though death is usually an evil.
Key ideas
- Utilitarianism threatens personal integrity by treating one's projects as just inputs to an overall sum.
- Moral luck shows that our moral standing depends on factors beyond our control.
- Categorical desires give us reason to go on living, but an endless life would exhaust them.
- Ethics needs thick concepts and reflection, not a single theoretical foundation.
Major works
- Utilitarianism: For and Against (with J. J. C. Smart, 1973)
- "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" (in Problems of the Self, 1973)
- Moral Luck (1981)
- Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985)
In the conversation
- Question What did Bernard Williams mean by ‘one thought too many’?
- Debate Relativism about truth refutes itself, but relativism about morality does not, at least not so easily
- Discussion Genealogy and the genetic fallacy: can the history of a value ever count against it?
- Debate Williams was right: an endless life would eventually become unbearable
- Debate Williams’s integrity objection, not the arithmetic, is the deepest problem for utilitarianism