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What did Bernard Williams mean by ‘one thought too many’?

Thamarai Raman Fellow
· 4 replies
Moral theoriesAnalyticContinentalJewishCare ethicsBernard WilliamsR. M. Hare#care-ethics#impartiality#one-thought-too-many#partiality
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A book on care ethics I borrowed keeps quoting Bernard Williams's phrase "one thought too many", and I think I understand it but I want to be sure.

As I understand the case: a man can save only one of two drowning people, and one of them is his wife. A moral philosopher might say he is permitted to save his wife, because some impartial principle allows people to favour their spouses. Williams says that if the man thinks "that's my wife, and in situations like this it is permissible to save one's wife", he has had one thought too many. It should be enough that it's his wife.

My questions:

  1. Is Williams saying that impartial moral theories get the wrong answer, or the right answer for the wrong reason?
  2. Was he a care ethicist? The book seems to treat him as one.
  3. Is there a good reply from the impartial side? It seems obvious to me that I don't consult a principle before picking up my own child, but maybe that's just how it feels.
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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Femke Bosman

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Your summary is right. The phrase comes from Williams's essay "Persons, Character and Morality" (1976), later collected in Moral Luck.

    1. The second. Most impartial theories can permit saving the wife. Williams's complaint is about the structure of the reasoning: the theory makes the man's love answerable to an impartial principle, as if his reason to save her must be licensed from outside the relationship. For Williams that misdescribes what it is to love someone, and it threatens the "ground projects" that give a life its meaning.

    2. No. His target was impartial morality, Kantian and utilitarian alike, and he was suspicious of theory in ethics generally. Care ethicists borrowed his objection and sharpened it with a child instead of a wife: the relationship itself is where the obligation comes from, not a special case to be fitted into a general framework.

    3. Yes, see the replies below. The usual impartialist answer is that a theory can tell you not to think in its terms most of the time.

    Helpful · 2

Other answers

  1. Ethan Mercer

    Fellow

    The impartialist reply, since I'm usually the one making it: Peter Railton's "sophisticated consequentialist" doesn't consult the theory in the moment. The theory says that a world with people who love their families directly and unreflectively goes better, so it recommends that you not have the extra thought. Hare had a similar two-level picture. Whether that's a reply or a concession is the real fight, because now the theory is endorsing dispositions that ignore it.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    A different angle. For Levinas, the ethical demand comes first from the face of the other person, and he means any other: the stranger, the widow, the orphan. So in a sense he agrees with Williams that ethics doesn't begin with a principle, but disagrees about where it begins. Williams starts with my wife; Levinas starts with the one who is not mine. Care ethicists sometimes use both, and I'm not sure they can.

  3. Thamarai Raman

    Fellow

    Femke's answer to 1 is what I needed. Ethan, my honest reaction to Railton is that if the theory's best advice is "don't think like this theory", I'd like to know what the theory is for. Miriam's point is the one I'll be thinking about, because my children are mine but the children at their school are not, and I seem to owe them something too.

    Helpful · 1