Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Bernard Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134147946
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

By the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy.

Presenting a sustained critique of moral theory from Kant onwards, Williams reorients ethical theory towards 'truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life'. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy and identifies new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge.

This edition also includes a new commentary on the text by A.W.Moore and a foreword by Jonathan Lear.

CHAPTER 1

Socrates’ Question

IT is not a trivial question, Socrates said: what we are talking about is how one should live. Or so Plato reports him, in one of the first books written about this subject.¹ Plato thought that philosophy could answer the question. Like Socrates, he hoped that one could direct one’s life, if necessary redirect it, through an understanding that was distinctively philosophical—that is to say, general and abstract, rationally reflective, and concerned with what can be known through different kinds of inquiry.

The aims of moral philosophy, and any hopes it may have of being worth serious attention, are bound up with the fate of Socrates’ question, even if it is not true that philosophy, itself, can reasonably hope to answer it. With regard to that hope, there are two things to be mentioned here at the outset. One is par ticularly to be remembered by the writer—how large a claim he is making if he says that a particular kind of abstract, argumentative writing should be worth serious attention when these large questions are at issue. There are other books that bear on the question—almost all books, come to that, which are any good and which are concerned with human life at all. That is a point for the philosophical writer even if he does not think his relation to Socrates’ question lies in trying to answer it.

The other initial point is one for the reader. It would be a serious thing if philosophy could answer the question. How could it be that a subject, something studied in universities (but not only there), something for which there is a large technical literature, could deliver what one might recognize as an answer to the basic questions of life? It is hard to see how this could be so, unless, as Socrates believed, the answer were one that the reader would recognize as one he might have given himself. But how could this be? And how would this be related to the existence of the subject? For Socrates, there was no such subject; he just talked with his friends in a plain way, and the writers he referred to (at least with any respect) were the poets. But within one generation Plato had linked the study of moral philosophy to difficult mathematical disciplines, and after two generations there were treatises on the subject—in particular, Aristotle’s Ethics, still one of the most illuminating.²

Some philosophers would like to be able to go back now to Socrates’ position and to start again, reflectively questioning common sense and our moral or ethical concerns, without the weight of texts and a tradition of philosophical study. There is something to be said for this, and in this book I shall try to follow it to the extent of pursuing an inquiry and hoping to involve the reader in it. At another level, however, it is baseless to suppose that one can or should tr y to get away from the practices of the subject. What makes an inquiry a philosophical one is reflective generality and a style of argument that claims to be rationally persuasive. It would be silly to forget that many acute and reflective people have already labored at formulating and discussing these questions. Moral philosophy has the problems it has because of its history and its present practices. Moreover, it is important that there is a tradition of activity, some of it technical, in other parts of philosophy, such as logic, the theory of meaning, and the philosophy of mind. While few of them outside mathematical logic provide “results,” there is certainly a lot to be known about the state of the subject, and some of it bears significantly on moral philosophy.

There is another reason for not forgetting that we exist now and not in Socrates’ condition. For him and for Plato it was a special feature of philosophy that it was reflective and stood back from ordinary practice and argument to define and criticize the attitudes involved in them. But modern life is so pervasively reflective, and a high degree of self-consciousness is so basic to its institutions, that these qualities cannot be what mainly distinguishes philosophy from other activities—from law, for instance, which is increasingly conscious of itself as a social creation; or medicine, forced to understand itself as at once care, business, and applied science; to say nothing of fiction, which even in its more popular forms needs to be conscious of its fictionality. Philosophy in the modern world cannot make any special claim to reflectiveness, though it may be able to make a special use of it.

This book will try to give some idea of the most important developments in moral philosophy, but it will proceed by way of an inquiry into its problems, in those directions that seem to me most interesting. I hope that the accounts of other people’s work will be accurate, but they will assuredly be selective. It is not merely that my account of the subject will be different from one given by someone else (that must presumably be so if the book is worth reading at all), nor is it a question of how representative it will be, but rather that I shall not be concerned all the time to say how representative it is. There is one respect, at least, in which this book is not representative of ways in which the subject is for the most part now conducted, at least in the English-speaking world. It is more skeptical than much of that philosophy about what the powers of philosophy are, and it is also more skeptical about morality.

What the aims of moral philosophy should be depends on its own results. Because its inquiries are indeed reflective and general, and concerned with what can be known, they must try to give an account of what would have to go into answering Socrates’ question: what part might be played by knowledge of the sciences; how far purely rational inquiry can take us; how far the answer to the question might be expected to be different if it is asked in one society rather than another; how much, at the end of all that, must be left to personal decision. Philosophical reflection thus has to consider what is involved in answering this, or any other less general, practical question, and to ask what powers of the mind and what forms of knowledge might be called upon by it. One thing that has to be considered in this process is the place of philosophy itself.

There might seem to be a circle in this: philosophy, in asking how Socrates’ question might be answered, determines its own place in answering it. It is not a circle but a progression. Philosophy starts from questions that, on any view of it, it can and should ask, about the chances we have of finding out how best to live; in the course of that, it comes to see how much it itself may help, with discursive methods of analysis and argument, critical discontent, and an imaginative comparison of possibilities, which are what it most characteristically tries to add to our ordinary resources of historical and personal knowledge.

Socrates’ question is the best place for moral philosophy to start. It is better than “what is our duty?” or “how may we be good?” or even “how can we be happy?” Each of these questions takes too much for granted, although not ever yone will agree about what that is. In the case of the last question, some people, such as those who want to start with the first question, will think that it starts in the wrong place, by ignoring the distinctive issues of morality; others may simply find it rather optimistic. Socrates’ question is neutral on those issues, and on many others. It would be wrong, however, to think that it takes nothing for granted. The first thing we should do is to ask what is involved in Socrates’ question, and how much we are presupposing if we assume that it can be usefully asked at all.

“How should one live?”—the generality of one already stakes a claim. The Greek language does not even give us one: the formula is impersonal. The implication is that something relevant or useful can be said to anyone, in general, and this implies that something general can be said, something that embraces or shapes the individual ambitions each person may bring to the question “how should I live?” (A larger implication can easily be found in this generality: that the question naturally leads us out of the concerns of the ego altogether. We shall come back to this later.) This is one way in which Socrates’ question goes beyond the everyday “what shall I do?” Another is that it is not immediate; it is not about what I should do now, or next. It is about a manner of life. The Greeks themselves were much impressed by the idea that such a question must, consequently, be about a whole life and that a good way of living had to issue in what, at its end, would be seen to have been a good life. Impressed by the power of fortune to wreck what looked like the best-shaped life, some of them, Socrates one of the first, sought a rational design of life which would reduce the power of fortune and would be to the greatest possible extent luck-free.³ This has been, in different forms, an aim of later thought as well. The idea that one must think, at this ver y general level, about a whole life may seem less compelling to some of us than it did to Socrates. But his question still does press a demand for reflection on one’s life as a whole, from every aspect and all the way down, even if we do not place as much weight as the Greeks did on how it may end.

The impersonal Greek phrase translated as one should is not only silent about the person whose life is in question. It is also entirely noncommittal, and very fruitfully so, about the kinds of consideration to be applied to the question. “How should I live?” does not mean “what life morally ought I to live?”, this is why Socrates’ question is a starting point different from those other questions I mentioned, about duty or about a life in which one would be good. It may be the same as a question about the good life, a life worth living, but that notion in itself does not bring in any distinctively moral claims. It may turn out, as Socrates believed and most of us still hope, that a good life is also the life of a good person (must be is what Socrates believed; can be is what most of us hope). But, if so, that will come out later. Should is simply should and, in itself, is no different in this very general question from what it is in any casual question, “what should I do now?”

Some philosophers have supposed that we cannot start from this general or indeterminate kind of practical question, because questions such as “what should I do?”, “what is the best way for me to live?”, and so on, are ambiguous and sustain both a moral and a nonmoral sense. On this view, the first thing one would have to do with the question is to decide which of these two different kinds of thing it meant, and until then one could not even start to answer it. That is a mistake. The analysis of meanings does not require “moral” and “nonmoral” as categories of meaning. Of course, if someone says of another “he is a good man,” we can ask whether the speaker means that he is morally good, as contrasted, for instance, with meaning that he is a good man to take on a military sortie—but the fact that one can give these various interpretations no more yields a moral sense of “good” or of “good man” than it does a military sense (or a football sense, etc.).

One can of course ask, on a given occasion, “what should I do from an ethical point of view?” or “what should I do from a self-interested point of view?” These ask for the results of subdelibera-tions, and invite one to review a particular type of consideration among those that bear on the question and to think what the considerations of that type, taken by themselves, support. In the same way, I can ask what I should do taking only economic or political or family considerations into account. At the end of all that, there is the question “what should I do, all things considered? ” There is only one kind of question to be asked about what to do, of which Socrates’ is a very general example, and moral considerations are one kind of consideration that bear on answering it.⁴

Here and earlier I have mentioned “moral” considerations, using that word in a general way, which corresponds to what is, irremovably, one name for the subject: moral philosophy. But there is another name for the subject, “ethics,” and corresponding to that is the notion of an ethical consideration. By origin, the difference between the two terms is that between Latin and Greek, each relating to a word meaning disposition or custom. One difference is that the Latin term from which “moral” comes emphasizes rather more the sense of social expectation, while the Greek favors that of individual character. But the word “morality” has by now taken on a more distinctive content, and I am going to suggest that morality should be understood as a particular development of the ethical, one that has a special significance in modern Western culture. It peculiarly emphasizes certain ethical notions rather than others, developing in particular a special notion of obligation, and it has some peculiar presuppositions. In view of these features it is also, I believe, something we should treat with a special skepticism. From now on, therefore, I shall for the most part use “ethical” as the broad term to stand for what this subject is certainly about, and “moral” and “morality” for the narrower system, the peculiarities of which will concern us later on.

I shall not try to define what exactly counts as an ethical consideration, but I shall say something about what goes into the notion of the ethical. It does no harm that the notion is vague. It is in fact morality, the special system, that demands a sharp boundary for itself (in demanding “moral” and “nonmoral” senses for words, for instance). This is a function of its special presuppositions. Without them, we can admit that there is a range of considerations that falls under the notion of the ethical, and we can also see why the range is not clearly delimited.

One thing that falls within its range is the notion of an obligation. A rather varied set of considerations is ordinarily counted as obligations, and I shall take up later (in Chapter 10) the question of why this should be so. One familiar kind is the obligation that one can put oneself under, in particular by making a promise. There is also the idea of a duty. The most familiar use of that word nowadays may be in narrow institutional connections, as when there is a list or roster of duties. Going beyond that, duties have characteristically been connected with a role, position, or relationship, such as those that follow from one’s “station,” as Bradley called it in the title of a famous essay.⁵ In a case such as the duties of a job, the job may have been acquired voluntarily, but in general duties, and most obligations other than those of promises, are not acquired voluntarily.

In the thought of Kant and of others influenced by him, all genuinely moral considerations rest, ultimately and at a deep level, in the agent’s will. I cannot simply be required by my position in a social structure—by the fact that I am a particular person’s child, for instance—to act in a certain way, if that required is to be of the moral kind, and does not simply reflect a psychological compulsion or social and legal sanctions. To act morally is to act autonomously, not as the result of social pressure. This mirrors some of the characteristic concerns of the subsystem morality. As against that, it has been in every society a recognizable ethical thought, and remains so in ours, that one can be under a requirement of this kind simply because of who one is and of one’s social situation. It may be a kind of consideration that some people in Western societies now would not want to accept, but it has been accepted by almost everyone in the past, and there is no necessity in the demand that every requirement of this kind must, under rational scrutiny, be either abandoned or converted into a voluntar y commitment. Such a demand is, like other distinctive features of morality, closely related to processes of modernization: it represents an understanding in ethical terms of the process that in the world of legal relations Maine called the change from status to contract. It corresponds also to a changing conception of the self that enters into ethical relations.⁶

Obligation and duty look backwards, or at least sideways. The acts they require, supposing that one is deliberating about what to do, lie in the future, but the reasons for those acts lie in the fact that I have already promised, the job I have undertaken, the position I am already in. Another kind of ethical consideration looks forward, to the outcomes of the acts open to me. “It will be for the best” may be taken as the general form of this kind of consideration. In one way of taking this, specially important in philosophical theory, the best is measured by the degree to which people get what they want, are made happy, or some similar consideration. This is the area of welfarism or utilitarianism (I shall discuss such theories in Chapters 5 and 6). But that is only one version. G.E. Moore also thought that the forward-looking type of consideration was fundamental, but he allowed things other than satisfaction—such as friendship and the awareness of beauty—to count among the good consequences. It was because of this that his theory was so attractive to the Bloomsbur y group: it managed to reject at once the stuffiness of duty and the vulgarity of utilitarianism.

There is another kind of ethical consideration, which presents an action as being of some ethically relevant kind. There is a wide range of ethical characteristics of actions under which they may be chosen or, again, refused. A particular action may be refused because it would be theft or murder, for instance, or deceitful or dishonorable, or, less dramatically, because it would let someone down. These descriptions—and there are many of them—operate at different levels; thus an action can be dishonorable because it is deceitful.

Closely conn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 Socrates' Question
• 2 The Archimedean Point
• 3 Foundations: Well–Being
• 4 Foundations: Practical Reason
• 5 Styles of Ethical Theory
• 6 Theory and Prejudice
• 7 The Linguistic Turn
• 8 Knowledge, Science, Convergence
• 9 Relativism and Reflection
• 10 Morality, the Peculiar Institution
• Postscript
• Commentary on the Text
• Notes
• Index