A mosquito biting a mountain? On the legacy of Bernard Williams (and coding homework done)


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Abstract. Bernard Williams, the cleverest graduate of Oxford University apparently, devoted much of his career to opposing utilitarianism. Even if we grant that he has a point, or two, are they comparable to a few undangerous mosquito bites upon the legs of a giant, or even a mosquito foolishing biting a mountain? There are different routes to this conclusion. One route is from hastily contemplating how one would deal with an actual debatable issue of deciding government policy. I focus on whether cousin marriage should be banned. There are too many relevant values to engage in choosing by common sense balancing, for me. I need a formula. (The coding homework was presented yesterday but I forgot to say this in the title, when writing on The History Boys, which may be a disadvantage to me above all others in the end.)
Draft version: version 4 (30th July, note added; 29th July 2026, poem changed, etc.; 18th January 2026; version 1 31st December 2025)


Poets stay aloof
This painting is caption proof


There is an old saying, I believe, that man is defined by what he does - his line of work - while woman is defined by what she is. But what did Bernard Williams do? Is he not defined by what he is? "An extraordinarily intelligent person. "The cleverest graduate of Oxford." "With his sparkling wit, everything that others wanted to be he was that." But he was a philosopher, right, and what did he actually do in philosophy? "He was a complex man. You cannot reduce him to a slogan." "I knew him. It is a pity he never wrote a novel." "He would have made an exceptional scientist." "If only our university had Williams as its chancellor." "Reading Williams was more like reading poetry than a dry discourse." "Evisceratingly dry wit though." Okay, but if there is one thing which seems to define Williams' career as philosopher - which is what he officially was - it is opposition to utilitarianism. What do we make of this opposition?


Williams favours a commonsensical balancing of values: there is no formula by which you can do it; you use your intuition to detect which values are relevant and your intuition to select a policy, the one which offers the best balance of values. (Upon learning that I taught political philosophy and what it was about, a former plumber of mine told me: political philosophy is common sense!) Classical utilitarianism, in contrast, offers a formula: "The greatest happiness for the greatest number" or, put more clearly, "Do what produces the greatest amount of happiness." My worry about Williams' main objection and all his side-objections is simple: if you put me in government, I would soon enough go utilitarian, I believe.


Consider: "Should first cousin marriage be banned in the United Kingdom?" It is practised in rural parts of Pakistan, I gather, and the practise has spread by migratory networks to here (Daily NEWS 2025). What are the relevant values to take into account? So many! Freedom: adult individuals are free to marry who they want (or whom - grammar). Health: there are health risks for any offspring with all this genetic material shared and offspring don't consent to health disorders. Tradition: the average individual is a part of a community which has a tradition and they are the outcome of that tradition and it is a complicated thing to simply throw away a piece of tradition: it is not like an able-bodied person intentionally raising an arm. Assimilation: the United Kingdom is not Pakistan and first cousin marriage is not traditionally accepted in the United Kingdom (except for…), so is it better to force these people to adapt now than the offspring of first cousin marriage learning from the school playground never to do this? Ancient wisdom: if the rule is first cousin marriage, what is the crime going to be - "I stuck to the rule of course, but my friend Momo is a bit of a rebel and  now there is a plague." Psychoanalysis: what does it have to say about overly close family relations? New technology: what is the point of having genetic screening technology if we don't use it and we can test first cousins who marry for risks? ("Hello I am the ghost of Sir P.F. Strawson. This paragraph is going to look ugly to our readership." Perhaps!) Yes, imagine that you are a scientist and your technology can help with realizing liberal multiculturalism. You are not the common garden skeptic -about liberalism  "People are racist, this can't work" - rather you are the toast of Bloomsbury! And other scientists aspire to be that! I cannot do this balancing of values: it is too many. I am going to find a simple formula and my decision will be based on that. 


A simple evaluation of Williams then is: formula or nothing - what he recommends is too difficult in practice. The utilitarian formula stands tall; his criticisms are mere mosquito bites and not the dangerous type. A more complex position is "There are people who can do the intuitive balancing when in actual politics but they are people with much more experience in politics, who probably have a family background in politics - as a Michael Oakeshott somewhere said. Williams is irrelevant at my level." That is probably my position. At the end of the day, I am close to the simpleton Rawlsian or luck egalitarian basically - who ignores Williams, cuts him off the reading list, dismisses him with one line in conversation, or even lies about his being less comprehensible than Rawls (see Edward 2022) - when faced with actual politics: I am more stylish about it perhaps. (Soon I am a fat man and a Williams book is in the home and I perhaps read him for satisfaction at the end of the day and offer him to my wife if she feels like dancing?)


    For the sake of philosophical experts, here is what I think of Williams' integrity objection in practice, or a variation on it, as crude utilitarian. The objection: "A man gains meaning in life from pursuing certain projects over an extended period, or many do, but utilitarianism tells him to give up on those projects as soon as it is established that people would be happier with him doing something else." (Williams' objection more strictly is: is there not a value of integrity in sticking to your project and isn't this something which utilitarianism cannot accommodate?) Now the only way to implement utilitarianism in practice is to rely on simplifying assumptions about what people are like and what sort of projects they want to engage in. (There are no individuals who get happier much more easily than others, we assume, contrary to Nozick 1974: page number, ask AI.) Imagine I run a large university. I work with some simplifying assumptions about what employees in general gain meaning from. They need enough time to do other things apart from research. Citations feel good, but it is also better if their work is something they care about and can work on for an extended period. For some people it has to be that. "The simplifying assumptions we use produce the most happiness, as far as we know. They may not perfectly realize Integrity, but the system in place is really not bad, generations have found it reasonable, we tweak it to make it ever so slightly better, and there are so many worse lives one can lead than the one we are offering. Let the arts or social science essayist become a lawyer and sure there is a load of money, but here you are working with young promising people, your book with your name is out there, you saw a Nobel prize winning physicist on the way to work, that novel you are reading is your organization's very own Jeanette Winterson, and Finnis is here for the research seminar - he was telling the UK parliament to shut down and get Brexit done the other day. What are you missing really?" In short, there seems to be this integrity objection, or something very like it, but one can set up an organization with simplifying assumptions about what projects people find worthwhile and it works quite well. (You wonder: what about Nussbaum? Is she a mosquito? She plays on the wing!)


Appendix
10 INPUT "Price of item (0.01 pounds = 1 pence)"; P
20 IF P < 0.01 THEN GOTO 10
30 LET N = 0.01
40 LET X = 0
50 IF N > P THEN GOTO 100
60 LET N = N + 0.02
70 LET X = X + 1
80 GOTO 50
100 PRINT "You only have 2 pence pieces."
110 PRINT "This many 2 pence pieces are sufficient for the item: "; X


References
Daily NEWS. 2025. Watch Lucy Powell HUMILIATED by the Reform UK leader in front of thousands right in Parliament! Available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2Q3fRr57qA
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2026. Not in the literature: an ideal political theory tutorial. Available at: https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWNIT.pdf
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilevich. (translated by D.J. Hogarth) 1842. Dead Souls. Available at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1081/pg1081.txt
Nussbaum, Martha. 3000 (1995 originally). Poetic justice: the literary imagination and public life. Published by Buttress Books.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Available at: https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/anarchy-state-utopia.pdf
Smart, J.J.C. and Williams, Bernard. 1973. Utilitarianism: for and against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at:
https://www.utilitarianism.com/utilitarianism-for-and-against.pdf


Note
The opening paragraph conversational material is influenced by a poem I read in The London Mercury, from the 1920s or 30s, probably 30s. I threw away my copy of the magazine and I cannot remember the poem's title or exact words, but it was an experimental/modernist poem composed exclusively of things said at a literary party.