Williams never fully abandoned the Enlightenment

Tragedy and Justice Bernard Williams remembered Martha C. Nussbaum bostonreview.net

In 1985, Williams published Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, which had occupied him for years. In this major book Williams assails all systematic theorizing in ethics, defining an ethical theory as “a theoretical account of what ethical thought and practice are, which account either implies a general test for the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles or else implies that there cannot be such a test.”1 Focusing on the aspirations of Kantianism and utilitarianism, he argues that the project of providing rational and systematic foundations for the ethical life is not only doomed to failure but also damaging, conducing to a narrow and simplistic understanding of the ethical life. Williams suggests that the whole enterprise of systematic theorizing in ethics is an attempt to deny the complexity of human life and the irrational aspects of human nature—including the fact that people find value, as he said in Morality, “in such things as submission, trust, uncertainty, risk, even despair and suffering.”

He urged philosophers to return to the Greeks’ inclusive and general starting point, the question “How should one live?”, which invites consideration of all the salient aspects of human life. Instead of constructing systematic moral theories, ethical philosophers should be confronting life’s tough questions, presumably in a piecemeal way, with close attention to literature and to psychology. Williams believed that the central questions in ethics are practical—“What am I to do?”—not theoretical, and that success would require engagement with hard practical questions.

Some people who have attacked ethical theory have done so out of a confidence in conventional morality and people’s daily intuitions, but Williams later said that he had no such confidence; he was always dismissive of what he saw as a complacent moral conventionalism. In a reply to critics of the book he speaks of the “emptiness and cruel superficiality of everyday thought” and denounces as “wonderfully perverse” a “certain vulgar Wittgensteinianism” that seeks to return us to those everyday intuitions.2 But then it remains unclear why a theory like Kant’s, which seeks to remind us of what is least corrupt in our daily understandings, would be bound to be so damaging, except in the sense that Williams plainly disagrees with some specific parts of its content. Nor was it clear where Williams’s critique left a theory such as Aristotle’s, with whose content he could be presumed to be more in agreement.3

Another puzzling question concerns the relationship between the ethical and the political. Williams later maintained that his attack on ethical theorizing left intact the aspiration to construct political theories, which might be valuable guides. But where does this leave those among the great Western political theorists such as Aristotle, Cicero, Rousseau, Kant, and John Rawls, who put a moral theory at the core of their political theories? Williams singles out Rawls as an example of the criticized class of moral theories; and yet his later statement suggests that after all he might admit the usefulness of Rawls’s theory, given its political nature. In any case the source of the distinction between an acceptable aspiration to a theory of political justice and an unacceptable aspiration to a theory of individual morality is left obscure. Williams’s general failure to engage systematically with Rawls’s ideas about social and political justice leaves such important issues unresolved.

More generally Williams seems to alternate between an extreme contemptuousness toward most everyone—neither the theorists nor everyday intuitions offer good guidance; both are superficial and distorting—and an extreme confidence. Somehow, without theories to guide us, we will manage to confront the complexities of life. But the great theorists in ethics, Aristotle and Kant among them, typically begin from an assessment of human beings that is, I think, both more generous and more realistic. Most people have an ethical understanding that is in many respects sound, but they are also hasty, self-serving, prone to self-deceptive rationalization. An ethical theory, then, might help to fix in a clear way the best deliverances of reflective self-examination, so that in times of haste or temptation we might have a paradigm to consider, which would, if the theory was a good one, represent the best part of ourselves. Kant’s idea that we must always treat humanity as an end and never as a mere means might in this way help us criticize many inclinations we have, in both personal and political life.

On this view ethical theory would not be an evasion of life—a device for “switching off the monitors to earth,” as Williams once described Robert Nozick’s ethical theorizing—but a considered response to its complexities and to our own weaknesses. To my mind Williams never adequately confronted this plausible account of the good in ethical theory.4 Perhaps this silence is to be explained by the very great importance he attached to each person’s grappling directly with the problems of life rather than taking off-the-shelf guidance. It may be that no corporate account of our good could satisfy because only a deeply personal search could count for much. This element of Existentialism in Williams’s thought explains, I believe, his equal hostility to theory and to convention. As a historian of philosophy I believe we should resist this stark contrast between the personal and the theoretical: sometimes, I believe, we get the best and most personal understanding of our lives by grappling with the great theories of the past.

Despite this major assault on Enlightenment rationalism, Williams never fully abandoned the Enlightenment. The rationalism evident in his early first-rate book on Descartes never fully left him, and it resurfaced dramatically in his last book, Truth and Truthfulness, in which he brilliantly defended the values of truth and objectivity against postmodernist and Foucauldian critique, arguing that any viable human society needs to make these notions central, to rely on them, and to honor the related virtues of accuracy and sincerity. In this book he also offers a general account of how to criticize corrupt social systems, in this way responding to some of the critics of his antitheoretical stance.