Artykuł, opublikowany po raz pierwszy w 1979 r., jest jednym z najczęściej cytowanych tekstów filozoficznych z drugiej połowy XX wieku. Tekst Bernarda Williamsa zainicjował kilka ważnych debat, toczących się do dziś w etyce i filozofii działania. Zaproponowana przez niego interpretacja pojęcia racji działania jest, z jednej strony, niezwykle wpływowa, ale z drugiej bardzo niejednoznaczna i często krytykowana. Williams broni stanowiska, które z czasem zaczęto określać jako internalizm racji: pewne względy są racjami działania dla danego podmiotu tylko wtedy, gdy mają (...) ścisły związek z "subiektywnym układem motywacyjnym" tego podmiotu, czyli z jakimiś aspektami jego psychiki, charakteru, celów, pragnień, planów, relacji z innymi itd. Stwierdzenie, że ktoś ma rację, by coś zrobić (a jeśli uznajemy, że jest to racja przeważająca - to, że powinien to coś zrobić), znaczy więc wedle tego stanowiska tyle, że ten ktoś jest w stanie być motywowany, by to coś zrobić. W przeciwieństwie do tego stanowisko określane obecnie ako eksternalizm racji głosi, że pewne względy mogą być racjami działania dla danego podmiotu także wtedy, gdy odwołują się do niezależnych od jego układu motywacyjnego własności świata. Williams wychodzi od modelu działania nawiązującego do koncepcji Hume'owskiej, następnie przedstawia jego bardziej rozbudowaną wersję, omawia rolę namysłu, naturę potrzeb, a także przedstawia argument za internalizmem racji, określany jako argument z wyjaśniania działania. Głosi on, że nawet gdyby istniały zewnętrzne racje działania, niezwiązane z subiektywnym układem motywacyjnym danego podmiotu, to odwołanie się do nich nie byłoby w stanie wyjaśnić, dlaczego dany podmiot postąpił tak, a nie inaczej, gdyż "nic nie jest w stanie wyjaśnić (zamierzonych) działań podmiotu za wyjątkiem czegoś, co motywuje go działania". (shrink)

A response to comments by William Casebeer, Peter Railton, and Michael Ruse on "Naturalizing Ethics" (2007).

This book presents Robert S. Hartman’s formal theory of value and critically examines many other twentieth century value theorists in its light, including A.J. Ayer, Kurt Baier, Brand Blanshard, Paul Edwards, Albert Einstein, William K. Frankena, R.M. Hare, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, G.E. Moore, P.H. Nowell-Smith, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Charles Stevenson, Paul W. Taylor, Stephen E. Toulmin, and J.O. Urmson.

In this paper I argue against the view of G.E.L. Owen that the second version of the Third Man Argument is a sound objection to Plato's conception of Forms as paradigms and that Plato knew it. The argument can be formulated so as to be valid, but Plato need not be committed to one of its premises. Forms are self-predicative, but the ground of self-predication is not the same as that of ordinary predication.

Bernard Williams famously argued that eternal life is undesirable for a human because it would inevitably grow intolerably boring. I will argue against Williams and those who share his view. To make my case, I will provide an account of what staves off boredom in our current, earthly-mortal lives, and then I will draw on this account while advancing reasons for thinking that eternal life is desirable, given certain conditions. Though my response to Williams will partly (...) overlap with some prior responses to Williams, especially the one offered by J. M. Fischer, my response will also be distinctive in some important ways. For instance, it will be distinctive in that it will discuss the role that one’s part-whole-reality conception plays in fending off boredom, where by “one’s part-whole-reality conception” I mean “one’s conception of his or her place in the whole of reality.”. (shrink)

The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible "worlds" containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind (...) of literary text. This paper discusses the emergence of "aesthetic worlds" in the work of both poets and then examines how a common concern with Baroque form unites them in the phenomenological task of overcoming Cartesian dualism. (shrink)

Recent students of mysticism have sharply distinguished monistic from theistic mysticism. The former is more or less identified with the empty consciousness experience and the latter with the love mysticism of such figures as Bernard of Clairvaux. I argue that a sharp distinction between the two is unwarranted. Western medieval mystics, for example, combined the apophatic theology of Dionysius the Areopagite with the erotic imagery of the mystical marriage. Their experiences were clearly theistic but integrally incorporated ”monistic moments’. I (...) conclude by discussing Nelson Pike’s claim that these monistic moments were themselves phenomenologically theistic. (shrink)

In response to rapid technological changes in our society, there are calls by governments and industry for increased training of the workforce. But training alone is not sufficient to ensure success, even if talent, discipline and good fortune are all amply provided. When “training” goals require creativity, or decision making, or moral judgment, then adequate preparation must also include “education” in John Dewey’s sense—that is, imparting abilities to solve new problems and grasp novel meanings. Concluding this small monograph is a (...) proposed research agenda, which includes exploring the crucial role of “intuition” and related processes in abilities to generate hypotheses and solve problems. In its elaboration on the nature and limits of training, compared to education, the discussion includes a Thought Experiment, based on Bernard Suits’ exploration of rules and success in playing games. (shrink)

This mini-monograph supplements the author’s “Beyond Competence,” which is also posted on this site. The latter asks how training is accomplished. But training success is ultimately judged by one’s success at the trained-for tasks. This leads to asking: “What makes people succeed at their tasks?” If this could be known, then preparation could be more effective. Such influences as training, talent, chance, and discipline are considered. Yet, for goals requiring creativity, decision making, or moral judgment, we find that training alone (...) cannot ensure success. In its elaboration on the issues for success, the discussion expands on the Thought Experiment, begun in “Beyond Competence,” based on Bernard Suits’ analyses of playing games. (shrink)

Husserl’s early picture of explanation in the sciences has never been completely provided. This lack represents an oversight, which we here redress. In contrast to currently accepted interpretations, we demonstrate that Husserl does not adhere to the much maligned deductive-nomological (DN) model of scientific explanation. Instead, via a close reading of early Husserlian texts, we reveal that he presents a unificationist account of scientific explanation. By doing so, we disclose that Husserl’s philosophy of scientific explanation is no mere anachronism. It (...) is, instead, tenable and relevant. We discuss how Husserl and other contemporary thinkers draw theoretical inspiration from the same source—namely, Bernard Bolzano. Husserl’s theory of scientific explanation shares a common language and discusses the same themes as, for example, Phillip Kitcher and Kit Fine. To advance our novel reading, we discuss Husserl’s investigations of grounding, inter-lawful explanation, intra-mathematical explanation, and scientific unification. (shrink)

This article contrasts the sense in which those whom Bernard Williams called ‘political realists’ and John Rawls are committed to the idea that political philosophy has to be distinctively political. Distinguishing the realist critique of political moralism from debates over ideal and non-ideal theory, it is argued that Rawls is more realist than many realists realise, and that realists can learn more about how to make a distinctively political vision of how our life together should be organised from (...) his theorising, although it also points to a worrying tendency among Rawlsians to reach for inappropriately moralised arguments. G. A. Cohen's advocacy of socialism and the second season of HBO's The Wire are used as examples to illustrate these points. (shrink)

The guise of the good is the thesis that an agent can only want, or intentionally do or pursue something, if and because this seems good to the agent in some respect or other. Bernard Williams criticizes the guise of the good in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. In this paper I reconstruct and assess his hitherto unnoticed critical remarks. Williams's opposition is based on the idea that it takes an “extra step” to go from desiring (...) or pursuing something to thinking of it as good. To show this, he employs an argument from elimination (with two strands: an argument from personal ends and an argument from immediate ends), and a separate argument which I call the one‐desire argument. I review and reject two types of answers to Williams's objections: answers that explore different varieties of what it can mean to “think of as good,” and answers that focus on different varieties of goodness under the guise of which one can desire something. I then consider whether a different, but nearby thesis, namely the guise of normative reasons, can accommodate Williams's objections, concluding that this alternative also fails. I end by looking at how this debate might move forward. (shrink)

Bernard Williams thought that philosophy should address real human concerns felt beyond academic philosophy. But what wider concerns are addressed by Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, a book he introduces as being ‘principally about how things are in moral philosophy’? In this article, we argue that Williams responded to the concerns of his day indirectly, refraining from explicitly claiming wider cultural relevance, but hinting at it in the pair of epigraphs that opens the main text. This (...) was Williams’s solution to what he perceived as the stylistic problem of how to pursue philosophy as cultural critique. Taking the epigraphs as interpretative keys to the wider resonances of the book, we show how they reveal Williams’s philosophical concerns – with the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life in a disillusioned world – to be recognisably rooted in the cultural concerns of post-war Britain. In the light of its epigraphs, the book emerges as the critique of a philosophical tradition’s inadequacies to the special difficulties of its cultural moment. (shrink)

When Bernard Williams died in June 2003, the obituary in The Times said that “he will be remembered as the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time”. It goes on to make clear that Williams was far from the dry, awkward, detached academic philosopher of caricature. -/- Born in Essex in 1929, Williams had an extraordinary and, in some respects, glamorous life. He not only enjoyed a stellar academic career – holding a (...) series of distinguished posts at Oxford, UCL, Cambridge and Berkeley – but was also a public figure in British political and cultural life. He played, for example, a leading role in several high profile government committees and reports, and served for almost two decades on the board of the English National Opera. He had, moreover, an easy confidence and charm, a lucidity of expression, and a sharp and, at times, acerbic wit (which could alarm both friends and foes alike). -/- Although these achievements and qualities are impressive, what he will be remembered for chiefly is his significant contribution to philosophy, which spanned a wide spectrum of topics. It is in the field of ethics, in particular, that his contributions are of the most lasting importance. And yet there is a real sense in which he remains a rather enigmatic figure – and the interpretation of his work continues to be a matter of considerable debate.... (shrink)

"Ethical thought has no chance of being everything it seems." Bernard Williams offered this cryptic remark in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, and in this chapter I argue that understanding it is the key to understanding Williams' skepticism about moral theory and about systematization in ethics. The difficulty for moral philosophy, Williams believed, is that ethics looks one way to embodied, active agents, but looks entirely different when considered from the standpoint of theory. This, in (...) turn, means that following a moral theory is a sure route to practical alienation. I argue that once we see it for what it is, we can see that Williams own skepticism undermines his later attempts to vindicate Truthfulness. Moreover, given the pervasiveness of reflective practical alienation in ordinary life, it leaves us with a difficult question: what would a non-alienated ethical existence even look like for us? (shrink)

In questo saggio traccio un profilo del pensiero di Bernard Williams, concentrandomi su temi relativi alla filosofia morale e, più nello specifico, ricostruendo la sua disamina dell’idea di oggettività in questa disciplina. Dopo aver esaminato le sue critiche all’idea di teoria etica normativa, offro un inquadramento metaetico della sua posizione e concludo mostrando le sue affinità con la riflessione etica degli antichi Greci e, in particolar modo, di Aristotele.

I explore what BernardWilliams means by regarding one’s action ‘purely externally, as one might regard anyone else’s action’, and how it links to regret and agent-regret. I suggest some ways that we might understand the external view: as a failure to recognize what one has done, in terms of Williams’s distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic luck, and as akin to Thomas Nagel’s distinction between an internal and external view. I argue that none of these captures what Williams was (...) getting at because they do not allow one to take a view on one’s action. I offer two alternative accounts. One turns around what we identify with, the other concerns what we care about. Both accounts capture how I might regret, rather than agent-regret, my own action. I demonstrate that these accounts can explain the relationship between an insurance payout and the external view, and they can explain the agent-relativity of agent-regret. (shrink)

In Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams sought to defend the value of truth by giving a vindicatory genealogy revealing its instrumental value. But what separates Williams’s instrumental vindication from the indirect utilitarianism of which he was a critic? And how can genealogy vindicate anything, let alone something which, as Williams says of the concept of truth, does not have a history? In this paper, I propose to resolve these puzzles by reading Williams as a type (...) of pragmatist and his genealogy as a pragmatic genealogy. On this basis, I show just in what sense Williams’s genealogy can by itself yield reasons to cultivate a sense of the value of truth. Using various criticisms of Williams’s genealogical method as a foil, I then develop an understanding of pragmatic genealogy which reveals it to be uniquely suited to dealing with practices exhibiting what I call self-effacing functionality—practices that are functional only insofar as and because we do not engage in them for their functionality. I conclude with an assessment of the wider significance of Williams’s genealogy for his own oeuvre and for further genealogical inquiry. (shrink)

This paper develops Bernard Williams’s suggestion that for philosophy to ignore its history is for it to assume that its history is vindicatory. The paper aims to offer a fruitful line of inquiry into the question whether philosophy has a vindicatory history by providing a map of possible answers to it. It first distinguishes three types of history: the history of discovery, the history of progress, and the history of change. It then suggests that much of philosophy lacks (...) a vindicatory history, for reasons that reflect philosophy’s character as a humanistic discipline. On this basis, the paper reconstructs Williams’s conception of what it means for philosophy to engage with its own history. The paper concludes that it is a mistake to think that a vindicatory history is what we would really like to have, and that in fact, the resulting picture gives philosophy several reasons to engage with its own history. (shrink)

This research discusses Bernard Williams' critique of utilitarianism. I will address Williams' well-known “Integrity Objection” and clarify where his main issue with utilitarianism lies. Through this, I will demonstrate that the separation of the two viewpoints – the “inside viewpoint” and the “impartial viewpoint” - is the issue, as the utilitarian impartial viewpoint does not capture the value of ethical deliberations based on our inside viewpoint in which we presuppose our personal projects. Furthermore, I will argue that (...) this interpretation enables us to place the objection in the context of the critique of impartiality which is one of the central themes of Williams’ ethics. (shrink)

Moral luck is an important issue in meta- ethics. Its conflict to principle of control make challenges to moral moral assessment, moral judgment and moral responsibility. Bernard Williams is the first philosopher who uses the expression "moral luck" and tries to show that the contradiction between “moral” and “luck” is not so serious. Against Kantian’s idea and also our intuitions Williams doesn’t believe that morality is immune of luck and that unlike other values, is accessible to all (...) people. If moral value is accessible to all, according to his idea, it should be not only immune of luck but also supreme. Giving some examples, Williams by concepts like justification, regret and retrospective, shows that morality hasn’t these characteristics. Dividing moral luck into four types: resultant, circumstantial, constitutive and causal, Thomas Nagel puts Williams' moral luck under the first type and criticizes it. This study seeks to explain Bernard Williams’ viewpoint on moral luck. At first it clears types of moral luck, principle of control and its contradiction with moral luck, then after explaining Williams’ account of moral luck criticizes it. Nagel’s criticisms and others show that although they accept the existence of moral luck and also their account is compatible to williams’ but they deny williams’ success in defending of this phenomenon. Finally, despite of all critiques, it seems that Williams’ failure in defense of moral luck didn’t decrease the importance of this matter, but made some stronger ideas were appeared by Thomas Nagel in this regard. (shrink)

Bernard Williams’ books demand an unusual amount of work from readers. This is particularly true of his 1985 magnum opus, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (ELP)—a work so charged with ideas that there seems to be nothing more to say, and yet at the same time so pared-down and tersely argued that there seems to be nothing left to take away. Reflecting on the book five years after its publication, Williams writes that it is centrally concerned (...) with a Nietzschean question: the question of philosophy’s authority, in particular when it comes to telling us how to live (1990, p. XIX). Some ethical theories seem implicitly committed to the idea that philosophy has everything to tell us about how to live. This Williams rejects. But the question then is how much philosophy has to tell us, and as critical as Williams may be of philosophy’s ambitions in this regard, his answer in ELP is certainly not nothing. The book even suggests some things that philosophy might say. But what Williams emphatically insists on, both in the book and in his later reflection on it, is that the question needs to be taken more seriously than it has been. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine Bernard Williams' critique of the Morality System and defend it from a repeated objection by showing my reading of Williams. According to this reading, the Morality System is an alienated ethics: it has certain idiosyncrasies which ordinary ethics lacks.

Tradicionalmente, se ha argumentado que el concepto de eudaimonía en Aristóteles se encuentra anclado en el contexto de una comprensión teleológica del universo, por cuanto dicha noción parece radicar en una definición funcionalista de la naturaleza humana. Teniendo esto en mente, Bernard Williams ha desarrollado una crítica en contra de la propuesta ética de Aristóteles, acusándola de una cierta ambición científica en el campo del razonamiento práctico que resulta insostenible actualmente. Este ensayo busca discutir si, en efecto, estos (...) señalamientos tienen un sustento plausible o si, por el contrario, se basan en una interpretación debatible de los fundamentos de la ética aristotélica. Con este propósito, se analiza la justificación del razonamiento ético de Aristóteles a la luz de los argumentos de Williams y de algunos de sus contradictores. (shrink)

This essay explores Bernard Williams’ notion of agent-regret, comparing it with guilt, remorse, and other forms of regret. I first highlight some features of the intentional structure of guilt (also in relation to shame) and remorse, and then proceed to the analysis of regret. I discuss several examples of regret, including Williams’ discussion of the truck driver who accidentally runs over a child. In agreement with Williams, I argue that agent-regret has a moral significance not captured (...) by either guilt or remorse. If we generally feel guilty or remorseful for intentional actions or omissions, regret shows that we are emotionally attached even to the involuntary aspects of what we do. Agent-regret suggests that our concept of responsibility is broader than we think, and its phenomenology (as well as its potential action tendencies) may be indicative of an agent’s morality. (shrink)

Bernard Williams is widely recognized as belonging among the greatest and most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth-century – and arguably the greatest British moral philosopher of the late twentieth-century. His various contributions over a period of nearly half a century changed the course of the subject and challenged many of its deepest assumptions and prejudices. There are, nevertheless, a number of respects in which the interpretation of his work is neither easy nor straightforward. One reason for this (...) is that both his views and his methods evolved and shifted in significant ways, especially around the time that he wrote and published Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (i.e. the early 1980s). One way of gauging and assessing these changes in Williams’ views and outlook is to consider his relationship and attitude to other philosophers during this period. Of particular interest is his changing attitude to the moral philosophy of David Hume. This relationship is of considerable importance, not only because it serves as a useful tool for the interpretation of Williams’ views but also because it provides us with some critical insight into the respective strengths and weaknesses of both Hume’s and Williams’ contributions. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter argues that several aspects of Bernard Williams’s style, methodology, and metaphilosophy can be read as evolving dialectically out of Wittgenstein’s own. After considering Wittgenstein as a stylistic influence on Williams, especially as regards ideals of clarity, precision, and depth, Williams’s methodological debt to Wittgenstein is examined, in particular his anthropological interest in thick concepts and their point. The chapter then turns to Williams’s explicit association, in the 1990s, with a certain form of Wittgensteinianism, (...) which he called ‘Left Wittgensteinianism’. It is shown how this is not a sudden conversion, but the direct product of Williams’s longstanding critical engagement with Wittgenstein’s methodology and metaphilosophy: Williams arrives at this position by envisaging a Wittgensteinianism that thinks in concrete sociohistorical terms, embraces genuine explanation, and relinquishes its insistence on the purity of philosophy. When properly understood, moreover, this critique turns out to be continuous with Williams’s advocacy of a conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline. Finally, it is shown that Williams inherits from Wittgenstein a certain understanding of how philosophy can help us to live, in particular the therapeutic ambition to liberate us from distortions in our self-understanding by assembling reminders. (shrink)

Bernard Williams articulated his later political philosophy notably in response to Ronald Dworkin, who, striving for coherence or integrity among our political concepts, sought to immunize the concepts of liberty and equality against conflict. Williams, doubtful that we either could or should eliminate the conflict, resisted the pursuit of conceptual integrity. Here, I reconstruct this Dworkin–Williams debate with an eye to drawing out ideas of ongoing philosophical and political importance. The debate not only exemplifies Williams's (...) political realism and its connection to his critique of the morality system. It also illustrates the virtues and hazards of contemporary efforts to ameliorate or engineer our concepts; it indicates what political philosophy might look to in appraising political concepts; it adverts to the different needs these concepts have to meet if they are to sustain a politics of pluralism, deal with polarization, and secure the consent of those who end up on the losing side of political decisions; and it presents us with two starkly contrasting conceptions of politics itself, of the place of political values within it, and of our prospects of reducing the uncomfortably conflictual character of those values through philosophy. (shrink)

Einer der traditionell gegen den Utilitarismus erhobenen Vorwürfe besagt, Utilitarismus sei mit der Konzeption unveräußerlicher Individualrechte unvereinbar, er könne die Menschenrechte entweder nicht begründen oder schlösse deren Gebotensein schlicht aus. Der Berechtigung dieser Behauptung wird zuerst bei den klassischen Utilitaristen Jeremy Bentham und John Stuart Mill nachgegangen. Der Einwand von Bernhard Williams gegen den Utilitarismus, er würdige den Wert von Integrität der Persönlichkeit nicht, wird anhand seines von ihm selbst gebotenen Beispiels erwogen. Unter den nicht-klassischen Utilitarismen wird die Theorie (...) von Rainer W. Trapp auf ihre Vereinbarkeit mit unveräußerlichen Rechten geprüft. Das Resümee ist uneindeutig: Nicht alle Utilitarismen schließen die Rechtsinhalte unveräußerlicher Individualrechte aus. Nicht alle der uns heute bekannten und als unveräußerlich postulierten Individualrechte lassen sich inhaltlich utilitaristisch begründen. Im Paralipomenon wird das Verhältnis der utilitaristischen Methode zu moralischen Intuitionen überdacht und ein weiterer Einwand Bernard Williams gegen den Utilitarismus geprüft: Ist der Utilitarismus konformistisch? Ein Plädoyer für einen freiheitlichen Utilitarismus in der Tradition Mills bildet den Abschluss. -/- 1. Klassischer Utilitarismus und unveräußerliche Individualrechte / 1.1. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832): Utilitarismus im Sicherheitsinteresse der Gemeinschaft / 1.2. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873): Utilitarismus der Freiheit als Lebenskunst der Individuen / 2. Zu Bernard Williams` Utilitarismus-Kritik: Integrität oder „Hier steh` ich und ich kann nicht anders!“ / 2.1. Das Jim-Pedro-Beispiel / 2.2. Negative Verantwortlichkeit: „Verhindere das größere Übel!“ / 3. Nicht-klassischer Utilitarismus und unveräusserliche Individualrechte / 3.1. Rainer W. Trapp: Gerechtigkeitsutilitarismus / 3.2. Utilitaristen und deontologische Rigoristen / 4. Resümee: Utilitarismus und unveräusserliche Individualrechte - 5. Paralipomenon: Plädoyer für Utilitarismus als Lebenskunst / 5.1. Ist der Utilitarismus konformistisch? / 5.2. Utilitarismus im Sinne John Stuart Mills als freiheitliche Lebenskunst, als „Art of Life“. (shrink)

Bernard Williams argues that human mortality is a good thing because living forever would necessarily be intolerably boring. His argument is often attacked for unfoundedly proposing asymmetrical requirements on the desirability of living for mortal and immortal lives. My first aim in this paper is to advance a new interpretation of Williams' argument that avoids these objections, drawing in part on some of his other writings to contextualize it. My second aim is to show how even the (...) best version of his argument only supports a somewhat weaker thesis: it may be possible for some people with certain special psychological features to enjoy an immortal life, but no one has good reason to bet on being such a person. (shrink)

Amplifying Bernard Williams’ critique of the Nietzschean project of a revaluation of values, this paper mounts a critique of the idea that whether values will help us to live can serve as a criterion for choosing which values to live by. I explore why it might not serve as a criterion and highlight a number of further difficulties faced by the Nietzschean project. I then come to Nietzsche's defence, arguing that if we distinguish valuations from values, there is (...) at least one form of the project which overcomes those difficulties. Finally, however, I show that even on this reading, the project must either fall prey to ‘Saint-Just's illusion’ or fall back into the problems it was supposed to escape. This highlights important difficulties faced by the Nietzschean project and its descendants while also explaining why Williams, who was so Nietzschean in other respects, remained wary of the revaluation of values as a project. (shrink)

According to Westermarck’s widely accepted explanation of the incest taboo, cultural prohibitions on sibling sex are rooted in an evolved biological disposition to feel sexual aversion toward our childhood coresidents. Bernard Williams posed the “representation problem” for Westermarck’s theory: the content of the hypothesized instinct is different from the content of the incest taboo —thus the former cannot be causally responsible for the latter. Arthur Wolf posed the related “moralization problem”: the instinct concerns personal behavior whereas the (...) prohibition concerns everyone. This paper reviews possible ways of defending Westermarck’s theory from the representation and moralization problems, and concludes that the theory is untenable. A recent study purports to support Westermarck’s account by showing that unrelated children raised in the same peer groups on kibbutzim feel sexual aversion toward each other and morally oppose third-party intra-peer-group sex, but this study has been misinterpreted. I argue that the representation and moralization problems are general problems that could potentially undermine many popular evolutionary explanations of social/moral norms. The cultural evolution of morality is not tightly constrained by our biological endowment in the way some philosophers and evolutionary psychologists believe. (shrink)

In 2002, Bernard Williams delivered a lecture that revisited the arguments of his article 'Ought and moral obligation', published in his Moral Luck. The lecture attributed to the earlier article the thesis that there are no ‘personal’ or (as I put it) ‘owned’ oughts. It also rejected this thesis. This paper explains the idea of an owned ought, and supports Williams’s lecture in asserting that there are owned oughts. It also examines the question of how accurately (...) class='Hi'>Williams’s later lecture interprets his earlier article. (shrink)

Bernard Williams’ discussion of immortality in “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” has spawned an entire philosophical literature. This literature tends to focus on one of Williams’ central claims: if we were to relinquish our mortality, we would necessarily become alienated from our existence and environment—“bored,” in his terms. Many theorists have defended this claim; many others have challenged it. Even if this claim is false, though, it still isn’t obvious that we should choose (...) to relinquish our mortality, given the option. And this is puzzling. Death is generally regarded as an evil, meriting anxiety, dread, and avoidance. What is it about our mortality that makes us hesitant to relinquish it? In this paper, I aim to explain this hesitancy and to argue in its favor: we should be hesitant to relinquish our mortality. Further, I take my discussion to suggest that most of us probably shouldn’t take this option if we were given it. To make these points, I draw on Williams’ discussion of immortality, developing and extending his thought in order to better understand how mortality shapes the way we relate to our lives, particularly the commitments and values that make them meaningful. Our mortality, it seems, plays a crucial role in our lives standing for something. Relinquishing it thus means risking the loss of this value. (shrink)

Bernard Williams identifies Hume as “in some ways an archetypal reconciler” who, nevertheless, displays “a striking resistance to some of the central tenets of what [Williams calls] ‘morality’”. This assessment, it is argued, is generally correct. There are, however, some significant points of difference in their views concerning moral responsibility. This includes Williams’s view that a naturalistic project of the kind that Hume pursues is of limited value when it comes to making sense of “morality’s” illusions (...) about responsibility and blame. It is, Williams maintains, only when we consider moral responsibility in genealogical terms, which gives attention to the importance of culture and history, that we can find a way of exposing the various prejudices and illusions of “the morality system”. Nevertheless, despite these differences, what Hume and Williams share is a fundamental commitment to provide a more “truthful” and “realistic” understanding of moral responsibility and our human ethical predicament. (shrink)

The rejection of a “characterless” moral self is central to some of Bernard Williams’ most important contributions to philosophy. By the time of _Truth and Truthfulness_, he works instead with a model of the self constituted and stabilized out of more primitive materials through deliberation and in concert with others that takes inspiration from Diderot. Although this view of the self raises some difficult questions, it serves as a useful starting point for thinking about the process of developing (...) an authentic moral point of view in the context of contemporary living. In what follows, I begin to fill out and extend this picture of the self and its related notion of authenticity by exploring some of the “technologies of the self” at play in Rachel Cusk’s recent work (primarily, the Outline trilogy, _Coventry_, _Second Place_, and “The Stuntman”) that ask us to rethink the possibility and importance of stability; seek a way of constituting oneself and one’s values outside the confining structures of traditional narrative (focusing instead on a framework that might be provided by the visual arts); and give a different role to the sort of internalized other Williams sees as being at work in the mechanisms of shame. (shrink)

مداخلة مترجمة عن الفرنسية للفيلسوف الفرنسي جيل دولوز.

Just as humans can draw conclusions responsibly or irresponsibly, so too can computers. Machine learning systems that have been trained on data sets that include irresponsible judgments are likely to yield irresponsible predictions as outputs. In this paper I focus on a particular kind of inference a computer system might make: identification of the intentions with which a person acted on the basis of photographic evidence. Such inferences are liable to be morally objectionable, because of a way in which they (...) are presumptuous. After elaborating this moral concern, I explore the possibility that carefully procuring the training data for image recognition systems could ensure that the systems avoid the problem. The lesson of this paper extends beyond just the particular case of image recognition systems and the challenge of responsibly identifying a person’s intentions. Reflection on this particular case demonstrates the importance (as well as the difficulty) of evaluating machine learning systems and their training data from the standpoint of moral considerations that are not encompassed by ordinary assessments of predictive accuracy. (shrink)

One of the most controversial issues to emerge in recent studies of Fichte concerns the status of his normative ethics, i.e., his theory of what makes actions morally good or bad. Scholars are divided over Fichte’s view regarding the ‘final end’ of moral striving, since it appears this end can be either a specific goal permitting maximizing calculations (the consequentialist reading defended by Kosch 2015), or an indeterminate goal permitting only duty-based decisions (the deontological reading defended by Wood 2016). While (...) I think each interpretive position contains an element of truth, my aim in this paper is to defend a third alternative, according to which Fichte’s normative ethics presents us with a unique form of social perfectionism. (shrink)

Hume introduced important innovations concerning the theory of ideas. The two most important are the distinction between impressions and ideas, and the use he made of the principles of association in explaining mental phenomena. Hume divided the perceptions of the mind into two classes. The members of one class, impressions, he held to have a greater degree of force and vivacity than the members of the other class, ideas. He also supposed that ideas are causally dependent copies of impressions. And, (...) unlike Locke and others, Hume makes positive use of the principle of association, both of the association of ideas, and, in a more limited way, of the association of impressions. Such associations are central to his explanations of causal reasoning, belief, the indirect passions (pride and humility, love and hatred), and sympathy. These views about impressions and ideas and the principles of association form the core of Hume’s science of human nature. Relying on them, he attempts a rigorously empirical investigation of human nature. The resulting system is a remarkable but complex achievement. (shrink)

Practical reasoning is a domain of concerns that deal with our most intimate views on what should be done, every day, in facing the world. Unlike theoretical reasoning which forms only beliefs, practical reasoning forms intensions and sets ground for actions. It deals mostly with the notion of reason, broadly understood as a term that acquires both rationality and motivation for our actions. Bernard Williams in “Internal and external reasons” introduced a strong and influential distinction, the distinction between (...) internal and external reasons. Williams explicitly argues in favour of internalism, excluding the existence of external reasons and placing the burden of proof on the externalists. In this paper I will reconsider his views drawing on John Skorupski’s insights on Williams in “Internal Reasons and the Scope of Blame” and Skorupski’s cognitive internalism. I will criticise both of their internalistic accounts and argue for an Aristotelian framing of their main arguments which I believe is a fairer deal in their contribution to the practical reasoning issues. (shrink)

It is often assumed that Fichte's aim in Part I of the System of Ethics is to provide a deduction of the moral law, the very thing that Kant – after years of unsuccessful attempts – deemed impossible. On this familiar reading, what Kant eventually viewed as an underivable 'fact' (Factum), the authority of the moral law, is what Fichte traces to its highest ground in what he calls the principle of the 'I'. However, scholars have largely overlooked a passage (...) in the System of Ethics where Fichte explicitly invokes Kant's doctrine of the fact of reason with approval, claiming that consciousness of the moral law grounds our belief in freedom (GA I/5:65). On the reading I defend, Fichte's invocation of the Factum is consistent with the structure of Part I when we distinguish (a) the feeling of moral compulsion from (b) the moral law itself. (shrink)

A self-fulfilling prophecy is, roughly, a prediction that brings about its own truth. Although true predictions are hard to fault, self-fulfilling prophecies are often regarded with suspicion. In this article, we vindicate this suspicion by explaining what self-fulfilling prophecies are and what is problematic about them, paying special attention to how their problems are exacerbated through automated prediction. Our descriptive account of self-fulfilling prophecies articulates the four elements that define them. Based on this account, we begin our critique by showing (...) that typical self-fulfilling prophecies arise due to mistakes about the relationship between a prediction and its object. Such mistakes—along with other mistakes in predicting or in the larger practical endeavor—are easily overlooked when the predictions turn out true. Thus we note that self-fulfilling prophecies prompt no error signals; truth shrouds their mistakes from humans and machines alike. Consequently, self-fulfilling prophecies create several obstacles to accountability for the outcomes they produce. We conclude our critique by showing how failures of accountability, and the associated failures to make corrections, explain the connection between self-fulfilling prophecies and feedback loops. By analyzing the complex relationships between accuracy and other evaluatively significant features of predictions, this article sheds light both on the special case of self-fulfilling prophecies and on the ethics of prediction more generally. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to explain and analyze the debate between W. K. Clifford ("The Ethics of Belief", 1877) and William James ("The Will to Believe", 1896). Given that the main assumption shared by Clifford and James in this debate is doxastic voluntarism –i.e., the claim that we can, at least in some occasions, willingly decide what to believe–, I will explain the arguments offered by Bernard Williams in his “Deciding to Believe” (1973) against doxastic (...) voluntarism. Finally, I will explain what happens with the debate between Clifford and James once we accept Bernard Williams’s arguments and refuse to accept doxastic voluntarism. (shrink)

This paper examines the distinction between self-love and self-conceit in Kant's moral psychology. It motivates an alternative account of the origin of self-conceit by drawing a parallel to what Kant calls transcendental illusion.

Free Will & The Tragic Predicament : Making Sense of Williams -/- The discussion in this paper aims to make better sense of free will and moral responsibility by way of making sense of Bernard Williams’ significant and substantial contribution to this subject. Williams’ fundamental objective is to vindicate moral responsibility by way of freeing it from the distortions and misrepresentations imposed on it by “the morality system”. What Williams rejects, in particular, are the efforts (...) of “morality” to further “deepen” or “refine” the notion of the voluntary, with a view to securing “ultimate justice”. It is these aims and aspirations, he argues, that take us to the precipice of scepticism. In Shame and Necessity (1993) Williams advances a vindicatory genealogy that unmasks the “illusions” and “fantasies” of our current ethical ideas as they relate to agency and responsibility. What we are then left with is the task of “recasting our ethical conceptions” . It is here that Williams is especially insistent on the importance and value of historical consciousness and reflection. The role of our reflections about the Greeks and tragedy is precisely to show that in order to move forward, into the future, we need to first look back at where we have come from. The value of these “untimely” observations is that they provide us with alternatives and options that we might otherwise lack. What we discover, when we consider the Greeks, is their commitment to a “pessimism of strength” that rests on rejecting scepticism. It is this two-sided perspective on our ethical predicament that delivers a more truthful account of our human situation, one that will help us discard those illusions and fantasies of "morality" that we are “better off” without. An account of this kind refuses to accept an optimism that insists that any form of responsible ethical life must be one that is immune to the influence of luck and fate. This is the fundamental lesson that we can learn from the ancient Greeks and that Williams seeks to “recover” for us. (shrink)

I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.