Bernard Williams secondary literature summaries


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Draft version: version 19 28th August (Taylor added), Version 18 11 August (Stubbs added), v17, 9 August (Jenkins added), 8 August (Geuss added), 26 June (Ward added and Cooper), v14 Hacking added, v12, Koopman added, version 11, 8th June 2026, Leiter and myself added, v.1 2nd June, A A Long summarized in 2022.
Note to self: remember to put Nozick!


Andrew Ward. Discusses Williams' distribution principles in renowned paper "The Idea of Equality." Williams argues that the availability of medical goods should only be based on medical need: that is the only relevant factor, not wealth. Ward points out that British public health service, the NHS, is funded to a greater extent by the rich than the poor - they pay more taxes - and argues that this violates Williams' principle: they are effectively paying more for medical goods. Williams, Ward thinks, would have to say that superior education ought to be distributed purely on the grounds of intellectual ability: the child of higher ability ought to get the superior education, whatever the wealth of their family. But he thinks the rich would pay more for this too, under a left-liberal system in which all schools are state-funded and which taxes the rich more. Regarding distribution in general, Ward writes, "Williams is only concerned to argue that people's situations should be equalized unless some relevant social reason can be given for treating them differently. He is not concerned to argue that people's situations should be equalized when some relevant social reason can be given." [Ward does not spell the difference out for the clueless. "I just can't"? What follows is my guess.] For Williams, equalization is the default approach, as treat you as innocent is for Western law, and one needs a special reason not to:  if there is no such reason, then equalize, even if no reason in favour of equalizing is actually given. [This material relates to John Rawls's approach, of equal distribution unless the worst-off position is better.]
References. Ward, Andrew. 1973. The Idea of Equality Reconsidered. Philosophy 48 (183): 85-90.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: the Belknap Press.

Gabrielle Taylor. She considers what integrity is, a central concept and value for Williams, and writes quite like him. "Sometimes this is understood simply in terms of certain types of behaviour which conform to the socially accepted code of morality: he keeps his promises, he does not cheat at cards or in business; he does not tell lies. Sometimes it is thought that what matters is not so much adherence to an accepted code, but rather that the person of integrity should do what he himself thinks right, regardless of whether this coincides with the more conventional view. He will be true to the standards he has come to accept, stick to the principles he has evolved...  We may dislike his principles, but we admire him at least for having the courage of his convictions." Taylor favours a different view according to which the person of integrity keeps their innermost self intact and has a self which is whole and integrated. The reader expects Taylor to go through each characterization, dismissing the previous two, but she turns to the description that a person of integrity is true to their commitments. What is "is true" adding here, because to have commitments at all surely involves being true to them to some extent? Taylor says she will not directly address the question, but consider ways of failing to be true: hypocritically pretending, being shallowly sincere (very short term commitments, e.g. guided by momentary enthusiasm), the weak-willed, and the self-deceived about what his commitments are (Edward Casaubon being the example, presented as engaging in distorted scholarly behaviour). Taylor then  moves on to her claim that the person of integrity keeps their self intact. Here Taylor refers to a fictional example from Williams: "George is a chemist who can find no job other than one which involves him in research relating to chemical and biological warfare. He is  poor and has family responsibilities. He is also strongly opposed to biological warfare." This opposition is surely part of a whole set of commitments. Taylor writes, "should he accept the job, he will either be unable to express what he believes consistently in all areas of his life, or he will maintain consistency by shaping his views to fit the implications of being engaged in research into biological warfare." She thinks self-deception would probably be involved. Taylor moves on to considering integrity as a virtue. It is unlike other virtues. Unlike to say he is brave, for example, to say he has integrity lacks informativeness. "This lack of informativeness reflects the fact that from the conditions to be fulfilled by the person who keeps himself intact nothing whatever can be deduced about any  particular kind of behaviour on the part of that person." [Is this an allusion to Frege? a=a is uninformative!] Taylor rejects the disassociation of integrity and immorality: the wicked may have integrity, by her account. (Later she says her account rules out common kinds of wickedness and maintains its association with honesty. Um, er...) She discusses the Jim and the Indians case of Williams, as well. 19 Indians from a rebellion village will be released if Jim shoots one. Jim is opposed to killing here and, furthermore, does not think of himself as someone who would kill in cold blood. "Williams points out that there are differences between this case and that of George discussed earlier, but he seems to regard both  as equally relevant to the question of possession and loss of integrity. This seems to me mistaken." Whatever he does is going to undermine his commitment to the sanctity of life, whereas George must not take the job to preserve his commitment to opposing biological warfare. [?? Discussion difficult to follow.]  Says that the person of integrity will not see various situations in a detached light: " even if from some abstract point of view one state of affairs is better than another, it does not follow that he should regard it as his business to bring it about."
Reference. Gabrielle Taylor. 1981. Integrity. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes 55: 143-159. Available at:
https://till.agh.edu.pl/home/wz_katedry/ill/Integrity_-_Taylor__Gaita.pdf

Brad Hooker. Reconstructs Williams' argument. Then Hooker quotes William' "conveying" that for an individual to have a reason in favour of doing PHI is for it to be the case that if that individual deliberated rationally they would be motivated to PHI, given their inner motivation set of beliefs or desires. There is no such thing as an external reason, for Williams: a reason for doing something regardless of their inner motivation set at present. Williams argues by rhetorical question, says Hooker: " What is it that one comes to believe when he comes to believe that there is a reason for him to PHI, if it is not the proposition, or something that entails the proposition, that if he deliberated rationally, he would be motivated  to act appropriately?" Hooker argues that this won't do against the external reasons theorist. If "deliberated rationally" means Williams' own conception of deliberating rationally, which requires reference to one's inner motivation set, then the external reasons theorist will simply answer with something else to the question. If it is neutral between Williams and the external reasons theorist, then the rhetorical question cannot serve as an argument. [Can't Williams respond that the external reason' theorist has simply not supplied a plausible rival account, merely implied "Something else"?]
Reference. Brad Hooker. 1987. Williams' argument against external reasons. Analysis 47(1): 42-44.

A.C. Stubbs. In his book Descartes: the project of pure inquiry, Bernard Williams rejects the familiar charge that Descartes reasons in a circular way in the 3rd meditation. This is Stubbs' presentation of the circle: "Descartes attempts to prove the existence of a God incapable of deceit in order to guarantee the truth of clearly and distinctly perceived propositions and thus vindicate his method of acquiring knowledge. However, since propositions of the type in need of divine guarantee figure as premises in Descartes' proof artes' proof(s), his reasoning is circular, in that it presupposes what it sets out to prove-viz. that whatever is clearly and distinctly perceived is true." Williams rejects what he calls the memory solution, following Harry Frankfurth in doing so. Stubbs writes: "According to this answer, the truth of what is clearly and distinctly  perceived is never called into question by Descartes, who doubts only the reliability of his memory that he did, on some past occasion. Williams cites ample and convincing textual evidence that, for Descartes, metaphysical doubt does extend (via the 'evil genius hypothesis') to the truth of what is clearly and distinctly perceived, and is only laid to rest by the proofs that a non-deceiving God exists." On Williams's interpretation, Descartes holds that some clearly and distinctly perceived propositions are irresistable. Stubbs extracts this clarification of the quality: "A proposition's being irresistible, then, comes down to this, that even though it may not be true, this is a possibility one can only entertain while not attending closely to it." [The promise of a solution to the circularity problem appears to be this: the propositions relied on in establishing that God is no deceiver, in order to establish the truth of clearly and distinctly perceived propositions, are irrestitable ones: one cannot actually doubt them while arguing, so Descartes does not already need to establish their truth by means of God's undeceitfulness.] Stubbs thinks that this solution cannot work because being irrestitable is defined as a psychological notion: the subject is incapable of doubting the propoposition when attending closely to it. One cannot infer from psychological irresistability objective truth. [What if that is simply a peculiar feature of the subject's psychology that they cannot doubt the proposition rather than reflecting what is truly the case?] Some guarantee that the propositions used [the premises used] to establish God's undeceitfulness is true is still needed, and Descartes cannot appeal to God on pain of circularity.
Reference. A.C. Stubbs. 1980. Bernard Williams and the Cartesian Circle. Analysis 40(2): 103-108.

Richard Kraut. Bernard Williams argues against a kind of condescension in relation to the Greeks, regarding ourselves as having simply morally progressed from where they were. Williams argues that we are closer to them than some influential scholars think, such as Snell, and in some cases their ideas were in better condition than ours. Williams does acknowledge the otherness of the Greeks, however, notably their acceptance of slavery and he considers the excellent question of "how far our rejection of that institution . . . depends on modern conceptions that were not available in the ancient world" (Williams quote). Kraut raises the concern that Williams' response to the ancient Greeks "presupposes an anti-Kantian, antiutilitarian, secular outlook; and his sensibility lays great emphasis on ideas he has brought to the center of attention in academic philosophy - moral luck, moral dilemmas, agent regret." You won't find the argument for these commitments or these directions of focus in the book, and if you don't accept them - e.g. you are not convinced by Williams' earlier work - then how to relate to the book? Kraut engages interestingly with Williams on slavery. Williams thinks, "the  Greeks had available to them 'considerations' which would have enabled them to see its injustice, but that since they were convinced that it was necessary to their way of life, the question of its injustice never became an issue." (Kraut's words.) Kraut points out that the contemporary case typically depends on an appeal to human rights, a modern notion. Williams does not address the issues to do with the divergence between this case and Greek thinking. Kraut denies Williams' view that the Greeks regarded slaves as unlucky: "After all, when you are regularly beating someone, it helps if you can regard him not as someone just like you, only less fortunate, but as an inferior being-an unlucky bastard. The slaves were by and large barbaroi, and the Greeks tended to look on themselves as superior to these foreigners. So, when Aristotle tried to justify slavery by arguing that some people are naturally inferior, his thinking in this respect captured a prevalent attitude. This conflicts with Williams's portrait of Aristotle as being exceptional in his attitude towards slavery." Kraut questions Williams' view that slavery was regarded as necessary: why not merely useful? Kraut also has a different attitude to Aristotle's defence of slavery. "That slavery was not an issue for the ordinary Greek reflects the tendency we all have to avoid inconvenient moral issues; and however bad Aristotle's argument, at least he did not duck the issue. Williams has the opposite opinion: 'If there is something worse than accepting slavery, it consists in defending it.' "
Reference. Richard Kraut. 1994. Review of Shame and Necessity by Bernard Williams. Ethics 105(1): 178-181.

David E Cooper. A book review of Truth and Truthfulness. Bernard Williams finds a tension within contemporary culture. "On the one hand, we find something bordering on an obsession with truth, a sometimes hysterical enthusiasm for 'transparency', 'outing', confession and unmasking. Especially within the Arts and Social Sciences sectors of academia, on the other hand, we encounter-in the shape of postmodernists, pragmatists, constructivists and their many cousins-figures whom Williams dubs 'deniers of truth'." Williams is interested in the value of truthfulness and identifies two related virtues: sincerity and accuracy. Williams observes that being sincere requires not just speaking truly but also avoiding misleading speech, such as your saying, "Someone opened your mail," when you did. Williams is inspired by Nietzsche to engage in genealogy, but Cooper registers 2 differences. "First, Williams's aim is to vindicate these virtues, whereas Nietzsche's ambition, typically, was to confound our confidence in 'Judaeo-Christian virtues' by exposing their pudenda origo. Second, Nietzsche took himself to be doing history: by contrast, Williams's story of emergence, in its early stages at least, is an 'as if one in the tradition of the 'state of nature' fictions familiar from political  theory'." Later Cooper says Nietzsche favours art over science, which he thinks cannot reflect reality. Williams says it is not difficult to realize how early people in a state of nature [no government or legal system as yet] would have an interest in pooling information, leading them to promote sincerity and accuracy. But Williams notes that these virtues are incorporated differently into different later ethical outlooks: "Among the Greeks, the man who fails in Sincerity shames or dishonours himself, among us moderns-Kant's children-the moral crime of such a man is implicitly to deny the autonomy of others, to treat them as means only." About the concept of truth rather than the virtue of being truthful, Williams thinks we all subscribe to P is true if and only if P. Cooper criticizes there is a gap in Williams' account, regarding how subscribers to this platitude may differ over how they conceive being true. He refers to Indian philosophies in which various claims are relegated to the status of mundane truths. This devaluing, Cooper says, can lead to a devaluing of the virtue of being accurate. [Amongst people who mundanely desire to live and flourish by ordinary standards, there will be some demand for accuracy, because of the costs otherwise.] Cooper ends by saying that no youth could have written this book. It required long scholarship and matured intelligence. [Interesting claim. True though? The state of nature story is devisable by a youth. By the way, are some almost born grey?]
Reference. Cooper, David. 2003. Review of Truth and Truthfulness: An essay in genealogy by Bernard Williams. Philosophy  78 (305): 411-414.


Jonathan Lear, Psychoanalysis and Moral Psychology. Bernard Williams would talk philosophy anytime, with anyone. [How true? This is a University of Chicago debate, it seems.] Williams was a critic of all attempts to provide a foundation for ethics, including through psychoanalysis, in his Ethics and the limits of philosophy. But he never abandoned the hope of nuanced justifications. Williams was interested in understanding human beings "including the exercise of their moral, ethical and social capacities" as part of nature. [No appeal to the supernatural, e.g. divine command or design.]  A dilemma: on the one hand, various attempts to do so with supposedly value-free science fail because of lack of resources: neuropsychology, behaviourism, sociobiology; on the other hand, a more robust human psychology will import the values we are trying to justify. Williams argues that Plato and Aristotle were "impaled on the second horn." Plato's depiction of the higher and lower capacities of the soul requires already assuming the truth of a certain ethics, when the aim was to use this depiction to justify the rationality of each person's aiming at the ethical life. Williams was much influenced by Nietzsche. [Really? Another Chicago debate.] First, Nietzsche criticizes attempts to ground morality on some metaphysical substance: God, the Form of the Good, etc. As a result, secondly, he attempts a naturalistic account of morality. Thirdly, he emphasizes a gap between our official accounts of morality (appearance) and what is actually the case (reality). This suggests unconscious motivations, but Nietzsche provides no account of what is going on. Lear argues that Williams proceeds along the same path, requiring psychoanalysis for his project but actually not turning to it. When explaining Williams on shame, Lear says, "The basic experience connected with shame is of being seen in some kind of bad condition by an observer whose judgment matters." But if we are concerned about an imagined gaze too, as Williams accepts, don't we have to understand this internalized other unconsciously, e.g. a parental figure observing us? [Or homeless person, says Lear interestingly.] Williams argues that an account involving an internalized other must not already assume the emotion being explained, e.g. shame is the result of a homunculus that experiences shame. He is interested in shame as arising out of more primitive emotions, but then he needs a more detailed account of those, which would presumably come from psychoanalysis. It is like with Nietzsche. Lear writes, "Moreover, there is no reason to assume, as Williams seems to, that any acceptable bootstrapping account must show how internal psychological states are built up exclusively on the basis of 'outer' experiences. This is a holdover from British empiricism". Not sure what he means, but he seems to imply that Williams assumes the unavailability of appealing to the innate. Williams is keen to downgrade guilt. [This is all connected to whether ancient Greece is a guilt or shame culture.] We can resist this by a more complex account guilt, says Lear.
Reference. Lear, Jonathan. 2004. Psychoanalysis and the Idea of Moral Psychology: Memorial to Bernard Williams' Philosophy. Inquiry 47: 515-522. [I checked whether this article was on the journal website, by the way, for one cannot underestimate the ****ing.] Available at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170809102651id_/http://home.uchicago.edu/~jlear/docs/Psychoanalysis%20and%20the%20Idea%20of%20a%20Moral%20Psychology.pdf
 
Ian Hacking. Review of Truth and Truthfulness. Williams identifies a tension. We are skeptical about much that we are told. The histories of a previous era feature too many lies or distortions to cohere with ideologies. We are uncomfortable and yearn for truthfulness. But when we don't find it, we doubt there is any truth to be had: "a tension, for the first discomfort demands that there is truth out there, yet that very doubt has led to the wish that the concept of truth itself be dismantled - and that seems to undo the original complaint." [I have not got to the undoing for many cases.] Williams takes up the position that "truth-deniers are no worse at telling the truth and discerning error than those who present themselves as common-sensical." Williams' project is a genealogy of truthfulness, influenced by Nietzsche, and he has an excellent discussion of Nietzsche, says Hacking, in which he counters the idea that Nietzsche was a denier of there being truths. (Foucault did much to make the term "genealogy" popular, says Hacking, and he briefly describes Foucault's historical inquiries, declaring the Frenchman a genius beforehand: "Historians have amply demonstrated that he did not always get the facts straight or in quite the right order, but despite that, he brilliantly illuminated how the past structured our present ways of thinking.") We are told "Nietzsche had a vast nineteenth century philological and historical apparatus behind him that makes almost every scholar living today look like an ignoramus. But his genealogies - and other tales that function in a similar way - are an extraordinary blend of myth, just-so-story, transcendental argument, and historical or philological fact." And we are told that Williams respects this but does not seek to imitate. Williams offers a state of nature story. Williams rejects the idea that language would collapse if everyone lied, which Hacking regards as popular and idiotic. [Davidson? I am attracted to the idea. Quine is referred to later in the review.] Williams argues that sharing information better enables a group to avoid ill-fortune and profit from good luck. Hacking is skeptical, because in his experience truth is stranger than fiction. Williams says that historicism - that history as a discipline came into being at some point after humans exist; Williams, like Hume, identifies Thucydides as the first [Western?] historian - does not imply relativism: truths are relative to something or other. Williams' emphasizes sincerity and accuracy, but later also authenticity. Hacking says Williams owes a debt to Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity. In line with Trilling, Williams traces the value of authenticity back to the French Enlightenment, specifically Rousseau, especially Confessions. For Williams, authenticity is a dangerous enterprise, for the pursuer is tempted towards dishonesty. Hacking quotes Williams arguing that even if a language lacks the word "truth" it does not follow that speakers lack the concept of truth. Hacking suspects Williams regards the literature on different theories of truth to be sterile and scholastic. [He seems to have a conception of Williams as a humanist essayist who happens to work in academic philosophy, strayed in and stayed even, rather than someone who started out very academic and loosened up to reach wider audiences in the humanities. Leiter finds Williams closer to Judith Jarvis Thompson, suggesting the latter picture.]  Hacking considers the intrinsic and instrumental values of being truthful and trustworthy, favouring the intrinsic. [Impressive old man review combining detail, scholarship, broader picture, and opinion for wider readership.]
Reference. Hacking, Ian. 2004. Review of Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy by Bernard Williams. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34(1): 137-148.

A.A. Long, Williams on Greek literature and philosophy. This chapter covers writings before the book Shame and Necessity, but mainly focusing on this book. Williams approves of the Greek outlook, but Long notes that his approved-of Greeks are actually few: Homer, the three Attic tragedians, and Thucydides. The second chapter is praised as brilliant in what it resolves, while chapters 3 and 4 are described as the most successful in the book. Williams attacks scholars who regard us as having progressed significantly from the deeply flawed Homeric worldview, for exaggerating the differences. [Williams' opponent, Bruno Snell, says that in Homer there is no concept of a human freely and responsibly doing an action, rather actions are caused by the Gods.] Williams argues that Homer manages without (1) the distinctions between soul and body; (2) the idea of a will as mediating between decision and doing something; (3) the notion that the mental functions with regard to action derive their significance from ethics; and that these absences are a good thing, rather than making Homer ethically primitive. Long argues against the third absence. Also, he regards Williams as overly negative about Plato. After the book, Williams wrote Plato: The Invention of Philosophy which Long presents as providing a counterbalance to some extent.
Reference: Long, A.A. 2007. Williams on Greek literature and philosophy. In Alan Thomas (editor), Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

John Skorupski. Internal and external reasons. [Note: a bit of quoting without quotation marks.] The only clear notion of a reason is the internal notion: person A has a reason to PHI if and only if A has some motive which will be served or furthered by his PHI-ing. There is no such thing as an external reason, a reason to perform an action whatever one's motives are. For the biconditional to be plausible, one must exclude motives based on false beliefs about the facts. Williams imagines someone who wants a gin and tonic and believes the stuff in this bottle to be gin, whereas in fact it is petrol. He probably believes he has reason to drink the stuff, but actually he does not. [This example is beginning to trouble me.] Skorupski wants to focus on one formulation from Williams' paper but registers another as well. The focus (or I): there is reason for person A to PHI if and only if PHI-ing would serve a motive in A's motivational set S. The alternative (or II): "The internalist view of reasons for action is that . . . A has a reason to PHI only if he could reach the conclusion to PHI by a sound deliberative route from the motivations he already has. The externalist view is that this is not a necessary condition." [Note: Greek letter replaced with "PHI".] Obscurity arises largely from this alternative. But it can be clarified with reference to (I). "What is a sound deliberative route? It is too broad to say that a deliberative route is sound so long as every step in it is a priori truth-preserving. For in that case, if the principles of morality or prudence are a priori truths they can enter into a sound deliberative route, whether or not they are in A's S,in other words, whether or not A accepts and is motivated by them." "It will follow from (I) that any agent, anyone who has motives at all, has reason to get the information and do the reasoning that will serve the motives in their S, whatever these may be." Does it matter whether A - that person - could reach the conclusion by a sound deliberative route, or are we asking only whether there is a sound deliberative route? "Suppose, for example, that A's goal is to sink an enemy battleship, and that a sound deliberative route starting from information he already has shows that this goal would be served by sending the fleet to a particular area of the ocean. However the route in question involves cracking an enemy code that would take A's best computers a long time to unravel and is certainly well beyond A." Skorupski reads Williams as implying that A has a reason to send the fleet to that ocean area. [Some distinctions follow; skipped past.] What should we say about the following possibility: if A were to deliberate about how to realize some goal that is in his S, that very process of deliberation would remove the goal from his S? [Interesting question, but skipping past brief pursuit.] Does Williams differ from Hume? Williams calls the following sub-Humean, because he thinks Hume is more complex: There is reason for A to PHI if A has some desire the satisfaction of which will be served by PHI-ing. Skorupski agrees Hume is more complex but not very clear here, making comparison difficult. Then says, "Observe, for example, that Williams is interested in the concept of a reason understood normatively, in the context of justification, and that he accepts that such a normative concept is perfectly legitimate, whereas quite a lot of what Hume says seems to imply a wholly sceptical view about the existence of normative reasons, rather than an internalist theory of them." " Plausibly, his view taken as a whole has two levels: considering the matter in strictly epistemological terms, Hume thinks, we're never justified in saying anything is a reason (epistemic or practical) for anything; however, he also thinks that insofar as we in fact,in everyday discussion, talk about reasons for a person to act we should do so in a way that conforms to [the sub-Humean account]." Skorupski thinks a Humean requires a desire to explain action as for a reason: to explain why a person apologized, say. Williams, however, can say that a belief alone explains this and Skorupski presents him as committed to this. [This is a large issue in British philosophy, pursued also by John McDowell and much engaging Peter Goldie, a student and friend of Williams.] Skorupski does not clearly explain how Williams can evade Humeanism about reasons, but in terms of consistency, Williams target is external reasons and at a distance one can coherently target that without saying the internal must involve desire. UNFINISHED SUMMARY.
Reference. John Skorupski. 2007. Internal Reasons and the Scope of Blame. In Alan Thomas (editor), Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Colin Koopman. Koopman says that both Nietzsche and Bernard Williams use genealogies to engage in normative evaluation. Nietzsche hopes to deny the value of moral norms by genealogy and Williams hopes to vindicate the value of being truthful. Koopman's Williams says that there is little we can say to define the concept of truth, supporting a minimalism about truth and regarding the concept as universal once one has grasped this minimalism. But Williams thinks there is much to say about the value of being truthful and hopes to supply vindicatory history: a history that vindicates our practice of being truthful. Williams' risks a genetic fallacy, in which some proposition is supposed to be accepted or rejected on the basis of its origins, and Richard Rorty has found it unclear how the historical and philosophical parts of Williams relate to each other. Koopman himself is not convinced by Williams effort. Koopman contrasts Williams and Nietzsche (largely left aside, with regards to details) with Foucault. Foucault's genealogies do not aim to establish conclusions of good or bad in relation to practices, rather to problematize them. A practice may not simply be wrong, but in need of further defence or revision.
Reference. Colin Koopman. 2009. Two uses of genealogy: Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams. (This is chapter 5 of a book, but I don't yet know which book!) Available at: https://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/pub/2009anth-fouc-legacy_foucault_williams-final.pdf

Raymond Geuss. Williams thinks "that the traditional notion of 'ethics,' namely as an autonomous, knowledge-based, reflective, discursive doctrine which could give completely general and rationally persuasive answers to the question, 'How should one live?' was unsalvageable." "What should replace philosophical ethics, in Williams's view, was politics." It won't be a universal political theory, rather realistic politics, based on political practice. "Williams used to say that the USA was the most eighteenth-century country in the world; it was, he thought, politically, socially, and culturally caught in a kind of time-warp, an apparently eternal present which was actually represented by some point in time in the 1790s." [The initial description sounds like me!] "Of course, one can criticize individual performances of the government or even subordinate institutions, but only as a form of internal criticism, that is, only relative to the absolute assumption that the performance or the institution is a momentary falling short of the ideals that it itself proclaims and fundamentally instantiates. I recall Williams' making this claim in a series of lectures at Princeton in the 1980s." [Text seems to say "that us itself"; my correction.] "Even to the end of his life, Williams showed flashes of what are now called 'Old Labour' attitudes-"profits" for him were always inherently suspect and the fact that a particular legal, administrative, or economic reform would result in large profits for a corporation or a private individual was prima facie a good reason to oppose it." "At the beginning of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams writes that his position differs from that of most others in that he is more skeptical about the powers of philosophy and about ethical thought as a whole than most of his contemporaries are. At the end, however, after holing below the waterline views that depend on too robust a theory of human nature or of rationality, Williams finds himself left with three sparks of optimism: optimism about truth, optimism about truthfulness, and optimism about “the meaning of individual life." "Williams took an extremely dim view of the powers of reason to persuade. He once told me he had only once in his life seen a case of a person convinced to give up a deeply held belief by the force of rational argumentation. This was when he was the chairman of the Royal Commission on Pornography, one of whose members was a former military man who was completely uninterested in any restrictions on sexual relations be￾tween humans or the depiction of such relations, but was deeply anxious about bestiality. Men and women could do what they wanted with each other, as far as he was concerned, but what about pictures of men with sheep or cows; surely that could not be allowed. He was finally convinced in a lengthy, emotion-filled session that various arguments that he himself had presented implied that there should be no legal regulation of representations of bestiality, either." "So the forms of traditional ethics Williams is furthest away from are Kantianism, Divine Command versions of Christianity, and utilitarianism; and the form that is closest to him would be some form of Aristotle, or of that modern extended version of Aristotle that Hegel developed." (Article also relates Williams to Adorno and discusses Wagner. I change my mind on issues important to me or change my practices on the basis of evidence or reasoning.]
Reference. Geuss, Raymond. 2012. Did Williams do ethics?   Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics , Vol. 19, No. 3: 141-162

Mark P Jenkins. Starts with Williams' description of himself as a pessimist and seeks to compare Williams' pessimism with Nietzsche on pessimism. Quote from Williams: "“Taylor and MacIntyre are Catholic, and I am not; Taylor and I are liberals, and MacIntyre  is not; MacIntyre and I are pessimists, and Taylor is not (not really)." Jenkins: "The paper, 'The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,' takes moral  philosophy to task for going on as if the manifest horrors of the world were of  little or no relevance to its task. The basic culprit here, on Williams’s view, is  moral philosophy’s penchant for focusing its attention on the moment of rational  decision while ignoring the profound influence of “uncontrollable necessity and chance." Dense fiction (e.g. Charles Dickens' Bleak House) "provides a depth of characterization and social background  which gives substance to the moral situation and brings it nearer to everyday experience." (Wiliams quote.) But in trying to capture the significance of chance in risks becoming comedy or farce. Stark fiction, e.g. Sophochles' The Women of Trachis, avoids this. Regarding Sophocles and Thucydides: "Each of them represents human beings  as dealing sensibly, foolishly, sometimes catastrophically, sometimes nobly, with a world that is only partially intelligible to human agency and in itself is not well adjusted to ethical aspirations." Now Nietzsche. He asks whether pessimism is necessarily a sign of decline and weak instincts? Is it not sometimes a sign of strength? He finds this in Greek tragedy, in its "craving  for the ugly... the image of everything underlying existence that is frightful, evil, a riddle, destructive, fatal." (Nietzsche quote.) "he took Schopenhauer and Wagner to embody the same 'tragic insight' that infused the ancient Greek’s pessimism of strength. But over  time Nietzsche came to realize that he had been duped by his one-time heroes..." (Jenkins quote) Nietzsche also identifies Dionysian pessimism. [Don't yet understand this.] A reason for seeing Williams as favouring Nietzschean pessimism is "Williams's contrast between stark and dense fiction seems to map pretty cleanly onto Nietzsche’s contrasts between tragic pessimism and Socratic optimism..."  "...insofar as at least part of Williams's sustained critique of ethical theory has been driven by a desire to point up the extent to which, say, utilitarianism or Kantianism can render tragedy impossible, then much of Williams's work should be seen as sympathetic to, if not actually promoting, pessimism." "A second reason one might see Williams as a pessimist in the sense (or senses) Nietzsche extols is that Williams himself prominently and approvingly alludes to Nietzsche’s pessimism of strength at a critical juncture in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. But here it gets tricky. The problem is that this  very same allusion might also be seen as evidence that Williams encourages something more along the lines of Socratic optimism..." In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, having attacked ethical theories and the aspiration to objectivity, does he have anything to put in their place? Confidence: a kind of optimism, it seems. Conclusion adds information about Martha Nussbaum: "Martha Nussbaum draws rather different lessons from Williams’s discussion of Sophocles’ stark fiction in “The Women of Trachis,” emphatically rejecting what she sees as  Williams's passivity in the face of tragic necessity and chance. As she puts it: 'Williams does not exactly counsel resignation, but it is hard to know what other moral attitude his perspective suggests.' " Can Williams' recommendation of confidence be reconciled with a Nietzschean pessimism of strength: on this, Jenkins says, Williams is like how he describes Nietzsche, extremely compelling and infuriatingly vague.
Reference. Mark P. Jenkins. 2012. Williams, Nietzsche, and Pessimism. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 43(2): 316-325.

Lucas Bennett. Williams' The Self and The Future. How many people have lived in Melrose Apartments 113 since 2015? 1. But I am different now, in body and mind, so why say I am the same person? Bennett opens by saying that the psychological theory of personal identity (labelled PTPI) says that some psychological relations are necessary to count as one person and that John Locke's body-swapping thought experiment is usually used to support the theory. A prince and a cobbler swap souls, with the prince now having the cobbler's body and the cobbler's having the prince's body. We no longer have the intuition that this bodily entity is the prince: the relevant psychological relation is absent. Williams argues that this thought experiment does not actually support PTPI. "Suppose that a mad scientist tells me that I will be tortured tomorrow. Given that I, like the majority of people, desire to avoid pain, I will be fearfully anticipating the next day when this cruel process will be carried out upon me. However, the mad scientist adds another condition: That, before the torture is carried out, he will administer a powerful amnesiac, which will cause me to forget ever being told that I would be tortured. This surely will not yield me any comfort, for I can easily imagine being unexpectedly tortured because I had forgotten the prediction of the torture, and this is still a situation that I deeply fear. The mad scientist further adds that, not only will I not remember the prediction of the torture when the torture is administered, but I will also receive an entire and different set of memories and psychological traits from another person. According to Williams, this second condition still will not alleviate any fears." The fears seem to be grounded on the intuition that I remain and so this essentially similar thought experiment undermines the Lockean view. Bennett denies that this thought experiment succeeds in doing so, because aside from its different conclusion, it already assumes something which the advocate of PTPI will not accept. "For a thought experiment to be counted as successful counterevidence against a theory x, the thought experiment must not rely upon crucial assumptions which are rejected by x." Bennett thinks Williams thought experiment assumes that the psychological changes brought about by the mad sciences are to a persisting me, which the advocate of PTPI will reject. (Supposedly) assuming this, Williams then takes the fear we have as an intuition against PTPI. [You want to say the Williams mad science thought experiment, as described, is "too speculative" or "messy" but then why is the Lockean one good?]
Reference. Bennett, Lucas. 2014. Bernard Williams on Personal Identity Thought Experiments in "The Self and the Future." Implausible Worlds. Available at:
https://implausibleworlds.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/williams-on-personal-identity-thought-experiments-in-the-self-and-the-future1/
[Presents what rigid designator is as well. Does this help? "Of course!" A Monica Good perhaps? "What's that?" See my: "Another B essay or perhaps not: "No ideas and the ability to express them": is this journalists?"At: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWABE]
 
Miranda Fricker, Philosopher of ethical freedom. THESIS: Fricker says in Williams, "Everything seems to depend on everything else without any single element being conspicuously primary." [Implication of this, if correct: one cannot extract a system which unfolds from some foundational commitments.] ANTITHESIS: Fricker says actually Williams's philosophy is rooted in a single proposition: that we are ethically free.  DISTINCTIONS: Fricker distinguishes between ethical freedom and dialogical freedom. "Whereas "ethical freedom" here names a metaphysical fact about our basic ethical condition such that our ethical reasons are under-determined, "dialogical freedom" indicates a practice through which we might complete their determination-a certain kind of dialogue." And "the kind of freedom I am suggesting Williams was essentially always championing, whether in critical or positive mode, was not our metaphysical freedom from causal determinism, but rather our ethical freedom from determination by a fraudulently all-encompassing idea of rationality." REMAINING STRUCTURE: "So how does this most basic conviction that we are ethically free express itself in Williams' work? I will answer by reference to three signature Williams theses: internal reasons; the relativism of distance; and the open borders of philosophy and history."  [Finish this later] SIDEPOINT: "one of the places where his thought displays a localized but genuine affinity with that of Wittgenstein…Williams effectively regarded the alleged problem of freewill as a pseudo-problem; that is, a mere appearance of a problem, and one that is created by the very process of philosophizing." SIDEPOINT: Various philosophers change their minds, but Williams seems hardly to have changed his. [Harvard, ask some early 20 somethings what their immediate reactions are to "Persons are just atoms", "There is a mathematical formula for achieving justice", "Computers will produce high art," and find who Williams is representing, regardless of his private views?] SIDEPOINT: Says "No one could in any case seriously cast Williams as a philosopher of principally critical bearing after the publication of Shame and Necessity." [Other static folk?!]
Reference: Fricker, Miranda. 2020. Bernard Williams as a Philosopher of Ethical Freedom. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (8):919-933. Available at:
https://www.mirandafricker.com/uploads/1/3/6/2/136236203/bernard_williams_as_a_philosopher_of_ethical_freedom.pdf
See also this question: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZO6l3Nxcl0/
And this version: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZO8FB6SFDs/


Brian Leiter. Debt to Nietzsche. Bernard Williams and Philippa Foot were the only prominent figures within mainstream analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century to pay serious attention to Nietzsche. Derek Parfit is discounted for the somewhat obscure reason "Nietzsche was Parfit's enemy to be defanged, defamed, and deposed." Leiter says that for understanding the relationship between Bernard Williams and Nietzsche, you need to be aware of two trends in continental philosophy. Starting arguably with Herder, in the 18th century, there was a historicist turn. Historicism consists of 2 theses: weak historicist thesis that the meaning of a term typically varies with historical context. The strong thesis is that concepts have no correct referent. For example, the concept of good may pick out nobility in antiquity and humility now, with no correct reference. [Not sure how to make sense of Leiter here, to avoid trivially true theses.] The second trend is trying to say what is really going on, eschewing intuition and commonsense, as historically contingent objects of diagnosis. (Says unlike Marx, Nietzsche is only concerned with liberating higher human beings from illusions of morality.) The second trend is opposed to a conservative conception of philosophy, presented by Judith Jarvis Thomson of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which she associated with Wittgenstein and Moore): explain what makes our ordinary pre-philosophical beliefs true. Leiter focuses on 2 influential Williams books, one of which seems to partake in the second trend too, but doesn't really, the other of which breaks with the first trend. [My signposting of Leiter.] *Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy*: Williams is a critic of Ethical Theory, in a specific sense, as are Annette Baier and Charles Taylor. Ethical Theory in this sense has 2 features: reduce all moral value to a single source (e.g. utility or justice) and offer a mechanical procedure for delivering answers to specific ethnical questions. Williams thinks there can be practical reflection still whereas Nietzsche thought practical reflection is an epiphenomenal illusion. [It sounds as if Williams attacks ethics in a narrow sense, Ethical Theory, opposition to which allows for practical ethics still, whereas Nietzsche attacks it in a wide sense. Anyway, this is not Leiter's main focus with this book of Williams.] The Morality Critics of Anglophone philosophy sound like Nietzsche rhetorically and also opponents of Ethical Theory in a narrow sense, but the focus of this line of criticism is not theoretical ambitions but the weight assigned to moral demands in practical reasoning. The critics include Susan Wolf and Michael Stocker and Williams is one as well (he is in both camps, it seems, or mind-split joke): saying a focus on moral obligation rules out other considerations. Williams wishes to claim affinity with Nietzsche but his notion of moral obligation is not the tepid one pervasive in our culture, rather than a philosopher's notion derived from W.D. Ross. Leiter says it is a philosopher's fantasy to think ordinary people have this sense of obligation as something they must fulfil regardless of desire. (Kant and Shelly Kagan said to think of obligation like this too.) [So Williams is not partaking in the second trend identified above, because his focus in obligation in philosophy literature actually.] Williams and Wolf flag a conflict between morality (in their narrow sense) and the good life, to use Thomas Nagel's framing, the good bourgeois life of varied pleasures, whereas Nietzsche is concerned with morality as commonly understood impeding the realization of higher excellence. Nietzsche worries our moral culture in general, not our best professional-moral-theory, is bringing into existence the "reign of the last man": complete mediocrity and banality. He is like Baudelaire, Freud, Adorno and Marcuse in "his modernist discontent with bourgeois Christianity." Leiter says, unlike Williams, his attack can be assessed empirically: what an overly moral culture does to geniuses. In *Shame and Necessity* Williams defends an anti-historicist thesis. [So he is not partaking in the first trend identified above.]. His claim is that folk psychology in the Homeric world is much the same as ours, in relying on notions of responsibility and shame, contrary to Bruno Snell. [If I recall correctly, Snell says that the Homeric Greeks think all human action is causally determined by Gods.] Williams claims affinity with Nietzsche but he is actually affirming something Nietzsche often denies, Nietzsche the historicist emphasizing large differences between ourselves and the Greeks. [Nevertheless, Leiter thinks Nietzsche would have to accept some points of Williams.] Leiter informs us that Nietzsche was influenced by University of Basel colleague Jacob Burckhardt, who thought that the extraordinary achievements of Ancient Greece were due to a culture of competitiveness at Diosnysian festivals and the like: this culture produced Sophocles and Aeschylus, who partook in competitions. [Interesting, but this does not obviously bear on the debate over whether Williams is wrong to appeal to Nietzsche, because Williams is anti-historicist about the philosophical concepts that concern him and Nietzsche historicist. The values were different in the earlier competitive culture, we are told: power, wealth, exacting revenge over Christianity's chastity, humility, forgiveness. Yes, but did they have the concept of being responsible for one's action?] Useful summary of Williams on intention and will: they lack the word for intention, but Homeric Greeks still deliberate as if they have agential control. Williams is cast as a compatibilist whereas Nietzsche rejects moral responsibility as an illusion. Leiter concludes that there is a superficial debt Williams owes to Nietzsche, but Williams veers little from Judith Jarvis Thomson's conservative conception of philosophy. [It is unclear to me there is any debt going by Leiter, unless the acceptance that the Greeks were different to an extent is the debt, but Williams would probably say that anyway - a tiny disturbance of Williams from orthodox Strawsonianism? See the last summary below.]
Reference. Leiter, Brian. 2022. Bernard Williams's Debt to Nietzsche. Real or Illusory? In Andras Szigeti and Matthew Talbert, Morality and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at:
https://leiterreports.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Bernard-Williams-Debt-to-Nietzsche-published.pdf


Terence Rajivan Edward (that's me). The warrior example, equality of opportunity, and John Rawls. Bernard Williams presents a fictional example in which a hierarchical society has a prestigious warrior class, but only people from certain wealthy families can apply to join. After reforms, anyone can apply. But people from beyond these families are so undernourished that they cannot carry out the duties of being a member and any applications would be met with rejection. Protestors say that the reforms do not achieve genuine equality of opportunity. It is tempting to bring this example into dialogue with John Rawls by appealing to his distinction between formal and fair equality of opportunity: saying there is formal equality of opportunity after the reforms but not fair equality of opportunity. Mark Navin and Shlomi Segall say this. But there are problems with endorsing this distinction. Formal equality of opportunity can be more finely distinguished into 2 kinds: anyone can apply for a given job (no official restrictions) - formal formal equality of opportunity, let's call it (I called this something else in the draft paper); and anyone capable of doing the job can apply (there are no official restrictions based on class, race, etc. concerning who among the capable can make an application, but that doesn't mean the incapable can apply too) - capability formal equality of opportunity. Fair equality of opportunity goes beyond formal: equally capable applicants stand an equal chance of getting the job. PROBLEM 1. Rawls's description of formal equality of opportunity as "careers open to talents" suggests the second kind: if you have the talent, you can apply! But then the warrior class could say, "There was formal equality of opportunity even before the reforms, because all capable could apply." The characterization of the reforms as achieving this seems wrong. [Should say this more loudly in the paper? "For some people, yes - Professor Julian Dodd maybe - but not for certain others. It's off putting!"] PROBLEM 2. There would be a failure of fair equality of opportunity if applicants A and B are equally capable of doing the job, but A stands a greater chance. However, after the reforms there is still no case of this situation being met: A being wealthy and B being poor, both being capable of doing the job, but A's standing a greater chance. So there seems no reason to describe this as a failure of fair equality of opportunity, AS defined by Rawls. PROBLEM 3. The principle to achieve fair equality of opportunity has a lower priority in Rawls's system of recommended principles, after implementing the basic liberties (freedom of speech, movement, right to run for public office, right to a fair trial, etc.): never sacrifice the higher priority for achieving the lower priority. But it seems very strange to apply Rawls to Williams' warrior example like this: "Now that you have achieved the basic liberties and also formal equality of opportunity, it is time for further reforms to achieve fair equality of opportunity. Ensure the poor are more nourished so that they can compete." Isn't undernourishment as much a problem as not having freedom of speech, of movement, lacking a right to a fair trial, etc, rather than a problem to be tackled after implementing the basics? (I guess lots of people have noticed problem 3, but who knows really? Problems not in order of importance here!)
Reference. Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2023. Bernard Williams's warrior example and Rawls's fair equality of opportunity. Available at (you might need to sign in now):
https://www.academia.edu/102298034/Bernard_Williams_warrior_example_and_Rawlss_fair_equality_of_opportunity
 
Queloz and Krishnan, Williams' Debt to Wittgenstein. (Note: some material quoted from article without quotation marks. A touch of my structuring.) PRELIMINARY MATERIAL. "In his personal manner, he was famously unWittgensteinian: sociable where Wittgenstein was solitary, egalitarian where Wittgenstein sought hierarchies, transparent where Wittgenstein was esoteric, active in politics where Wittgenstein was conspicuously apolitical. Williams also harboured less hostility to academic philosophy and its conventions…  He had, moreover, a great respect for historical scholarship and published extensively in the history of philosophy—a striking contrast with Wittgenstein's proud description of himself as 'a one-time professor of philosophy who has never read a word of Aristotle!' (Drury 2017: 65)" THE OPPOSITION: Stephen Mulhall says that Williams had unwavering hostility to Wittgenstein. Authors are against Mulhall's view. [Whatever hostility to Wittgenstein Williams expressed is mild compared to elsewhere?] OBJECTION 1 [minor]: Williams' own remark is that like everybody else, he was excited when Philosophical Investigations appeared. OBJECTION 2: Williams… inherited something of Wittgenstein's resistance to scientism— not, however, 'Wittgenstein's hatred of the cockiness of natural science', which Williams found hard 'to distinguish from a hatred of natural science' (1973c: 91), but rather his resistance to stylistic ideals modelled on natural science. The scientism Williams resisted was what he called the 'scientism of style' (Williams 2006j: 204) OBJECTION 3 (main objection, or maybe elaboration of 2): Above all, however, the pursuit of 'emotionally and morally denser pictures of a form of life' drove both Wittgenstein and Williams away from physical or biological explanations towards anthropological or ethnographic descriptions: like an ethnographer, one 'understands from the inside a conceptual system in which ethical concepts are integrally related to modes of explanation and description' while being 'conscious that there are alternatives to any such system' (1986: 204). DETAILS 1: This preference for anthropological or ethnographic descriptions is manifest in Williams's emphasis on the explanatory and justificatory value of what he influentially labelled 'thick' ethical concepts. Previous philosophers focused on good, right, wrong, bad; Williams focuses on courageous, insensitive, etc. The focus on these is said to be influenced by Wittgenstein. DETAILS 2: Williams follows Wittgenstein in two important respects: in concentrating on thick concepts, and in asking what is the point of our conceptual practices. SYNTHESIS: Williams also adopts what he recognizes is 'basically a Wittgensteinian idea' (1985: 263n7): namely, the idea that we would be unable to see how people 'go on' from one application of a thick ethical concept to the next 'if we did not share the evaluative perspective in which this kind of concept has its point' (1985: 157). POLITICS: In the 1990s, Williams became more open about the Wittgensteinian roots of his own thinking. He explicitly associated himself with a certain form of Wittgensteinianism, which, in an echo of the traditional distinction between Right and Left Hegelians, he called 'Left Wittgensteinianism'. [Surely there is a heavy strand of Wittgenstein's "These things are finer spun than crude hands have inkling of" in Williams' work! See the Dworkin-Williams debate.]
Reference: Queloz, Matthieu and Krishnan, Nikhil. 2025. Williams's Debt to Wittgenstein. In Marcel van Ackeren and Matthieu Queloz, Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: https://philpapers.org/archive/QUEWDT.pdf
See also (from me): This Instagram video: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZFeryJMyBZ/


Queloz, The Dworkin-Williams debate. In the fall of 1998, a year after the death of Isaiah Berlin, the New York Institute for the Humanities convened a two-day conference in Manhattan to examine his intellectual legacy. Williams and Dworkin debated. Many people value equality and liberty but it seems that there must be conflict: either liberty or equality prevails. Dworkin opposes this assumption. He asks, which conception of liberty we have most reason to accept. "And perhaps the most attractive conception of liberty will turn out not to conflict with the most attractive conception of equality after all." Dworkin's project is an interpretation that yields consistency. Dworkin's proposal is that, in politics, "liberty should not be understood as freedom from interference in doing what one wants, but in terms of rights distributed according to a political principle of equality – in other words, liberty should be rightful freedom." There can thus be losses of freedom which are not losses of liberty. Williams raises this worry. What is it that we care about that leads us to use the concept of liberty? One can produce a neat interpretation of liberty and equality in which there is no conflict, but if the concepts or conceptions presented are disconnected from concepts arising from what we care about, then it will not help. We will presumably return to those concepts and applying those concepts will lead us to assert once more that there is often conflict of values. [Queloz's Williams does not actually say this and perhaps Williams thinks if we revise as Dworkin proposes, we will be left with wordless discontent!] Quotes Williams: "Our use of the concept of liberty is animated by a different and utterly basic concern, namely the universal human concern to be unobstructed in doing what one wants—in particular, unobstructed by humanly imposed coercion." This is the primitive concept of liberty. Williams formulates a political concept, which is more refined - not detailed here. Williams thinks of the political realm as one in which there is winning and losing, and raises a major concern about Dworkin. With Dworkin's conception, the loser has no space for complaint or rationally feeling loss. Queloz gives this example. Both Williams and Dworkin, let us assume, are in favour of abolishing private schools. And let's suppose they are abolished. Applying Dworkin's political philosophy, there is no reason for the loser in this debate to complain that liberty has been reduced in favour of equality. Williams, by not seeking to interpret so as to remove conflict and potentially disconnect from experience, leaves the loser with space to complain or express regret at the direction policy has taken. Queloz links Williams' position to Chantel Mouffe's recommendation to not turn adversaries into enemies. [Against democracy, it is difficult not to react thus: this is what happens when a commoner with a bit of brains - Dworkin - rises too high. He produces a flashy political theory - reconciles liberty and equality - but the effect in practice is likely to produce extreme resentment.]
Reference: Queloz, Matthieu. 2024. The Dworkin-Williams Debate: Liberty, Conceptual Integrity, and Tragic Conflict in Politics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1):3-29. Available at: https://philpapers.org/archive/QUETDD.pdf


Dave Weber on Bernard Williams' Morality. Says it is not some historically famous book or anything. It is used as a textbook in some ethics classes, but it is kind-of a weird, not a normal textbook. Have you heard? Alex Jones says that if worst comes to worse, he will eat his neighbours. He thinks when push-comes-shove we will be who we really are and do what we have to do, to save ourselves. This reminds Weber of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, which he has never read but heard about. Some children are stuck on an island and they turn into barbarians. [Well, not all do.] But he was watching the Internet about an actual case of deprivation and this did not happen: it involved Australian children shipwrecked on a desert island. Things were much better. [Details not given though; it is quite easy to be better!] But in philosophy we often aim at a deeper critique. In this case you have Goldings' proposal and the critique referring to an actual case, but there is the common ground: that you find out what people are really like by putting them in a situation of deprivation. In the first chapter of Williams' Morality, he says that if he wants to find out what people are really like, he would not look at people who had spent 2 weeks in a lifeboat. You need to look at what they are actually like in normal circumstances for human beings. Another thing from the first chapter: if you were faced with someone who did not accept morality, did not buy into the morality game, what would it take to get them to do so. You cannot really argue for how things ought to be from how things are, we learn from Hume. What Williams does is take this person who wants to be argued from how things are into the morality game, he takes this person and asks, "What kind of person would that be?" We are all in the morality game and what would we have to take away to be such a person? It is a kind-of surprising answer. Weber recommends the book.
Reference. Department of Philosophy Portland State University. 2020. Dave Weber on Bernard Williams' Morality. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5JpWdwMT5U
(Is this date correct?)


C. M. Lorkowski, Williams "Against Utilitarianism". Reverse order of Williams' article. (3) Utilitarianism loses integrity. Any moral precept that you have - e..g. don't plagiarize, don't murder - could potentially be overridden for reasons of utility. [I would not explain the integrity objection like this, taking an inadequate approach to moral rules to be a different objection and not especially associating it with Williams. Integrity objection is about how I must give up on the projects that enable me to experience life as meaningful, if this leads to greater utility. See video title!]  He asks us to imagine being told to plagiarize, against his moral values, or an elementary school will be blown up. "Of course I will cheat then." Lorkowski objects that this only applies to act utilitarianism, not rule utilitarianism. And even with this, one never overrides the principle of utility, never overrides that moral precept: maximizes happiness. For Lorkowski, this is a weak objection that merely challenges us to think, "What sort of thing is an ethical principle?" (2) Extreme impartiality. "There is no relevant difference between yourself and others." Illustration: I come home from work and the apartment building is on fire. I have time to clean out one apartment. (I believe he says "Clean out.") I can choose mine, in which my one child is, or a neighbour's, with three children. Utilitarianism requires the latter choice, the 3 strangers, ignoring my attachment to my own child. Everyone's happiness counts the same and we cannot make relevant distinctions based on who is important to us: that is what extreme impartiality is. Why is this commitment a problem? Williams' only objection is that it is highly counterintuitive: I should care a lot more about my children than that of a stranger. [I am not sure I would QUITE present it like this, rather it is unreasonable for a moral philosophy to demand I prioritize rescuing a stranger's children over my child.] Notice there is talk about remote effects. What's a remote effect? Illustrates using example: if I knowingly let my child die, that will leave psychological damage, a giant frowning face for the rest of my life. That matters to the utilitarian, but not enough to change the obligation to save the stranger's 3 children. The general position is: remote effects matter but not enough to change what utilitarianism recommends. Roughly speaking, if you have 2 kidneys and 2 lungs, you are not a utilitarian. (1) What is negative responsibility? You are equally responsible for what you choose to do and what you choose not to do. [Don't present it as equally responsible for what you do and what you don't do, because then you are responsible for not saving Abraham Lincoln, which is not something you have the power of choice over.] The easiest way to think of this in terms of killing and letting die. The utilitarian has to say they are the same in value, because only consequences matter for it. But that is highly counterintuitive, says Williams. To use a timely example (interesting eye/ head movement - I am worried about the date on this and the last video now!), if I choose to come to class and spread the coronavirus, am I as responsible for deaths as if I intended to do so? Seems a utilitarian must say, "Yes." Peter Singer will reply that the charges of counterintuitiveness are merely a problem with our intuitions.
Reference. C.M. Lorkowski. 2020. Williams- "Against Utilitarianism." Available on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbt4dhf0DOg
(Is this date correct?)


Curiouser. Internal and external reasons. A "dialogue," taking an example from Bernard Williams' paper. A person drinks some petrol and tonic believing it is gin and tonic. Does he have reason to? "Sure if he believed it is gin and tonic." Well, that is a reason in that it explains why he drank it. But it is obvious that he should not have drunk it. "So normative reason?" A reason dictating whether someone should or should not do something. Any theory of reasons for action has to account for both normative and explanatory reasons for action. "So does Williams then mean that you have - well, the person in question has - a reason for action independent from themselves to not drink what is in the glass?" No, no, he doesn't imply that: any reason for action must be related to the agent's internal motivational set. He calls these internal reasons for action. The members of the set include desires, such as desires to drink gin. What you're talking about is external reasons for action, which Williams does not believe in. "Wait, wait, wait. Back up a second. The guy we are talking about - call him Bob - does have a motivation to drink what is in the glass, right? Sure he is wrong about what is actually inside the glass, but that does not seem to matter in constituting his motivation to drink what is inside the glass." So you're right in that true and false beliefs do not alter the form of explanation, but as we have just discussed, internal reasons are concerned with more than just explanation, they are concerned with the agent's rationality, with what they have reason to do. So for Williams, no element X in an agent's motivational set can ever provide an agent with a reason for action if X is based on a false belief or the agent's belief that X is relevant in their action is false. So in the first scenario Bob mistakenly takes what is in the glass to be gin. So his conviction to drink what is in the glass is based on a false belief. So Williams argues that he has no reason, no normative reason, to drink what is in the glass. In the second scenario, given that his motivation is to drink gin, drinking what is in the glass in no way furthers his project of drinking gin, even if he thinks it does. So both of these cases provide no normative reason to drink what is in the glass, according to Williams… [Reducing transcription!] "So which motivations give rise to internal reasons statements?" For Williams, there is no clear cut way, but Williams does say that internal reasons statements are discoverable through a deliberation process. [Some elaboration here skipped.] "So external reasons imply that our motivation does not have to be related to existing motivations. So what, you just… the new motivation just comes out of thin air? Kind-of weird, isn't it?" Well, he would agree with you there, but do you think, regardless of desire, it is wrong to kill someone for fun? "Yeah." (!) Then you believe in Kant's categorical imperatives. Categorical imperatives are a kind of external reasons statement, though the converse is not true. [Is the imperative different from the statement of it?] "What is Williams' argument against external reasons?" There are a few interpretations. One is that he believes the conditions for their existence to be impossible: it is impossible for a new motivation to arise independently of your prior motivations. This is said to be question-begging. Says there is another interpretation in a Finlay paper, she thinks - not yet read.
Reference. Curiouser. 2021. Bernard Williams - Internal and External Reasons. Available on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVLlFHPGMrU&t=2s
[The cupboard in the background scenery resembles this video of mine, from 2025, but I did not see her video until today: June 3 2026: https://www.instagram.com/p/DFfQU1MvFzg/
Coincidence? Time traveller? Her name is Arianna Leah Fischer and her YouTube channel has 1 video.]


Viktor Gijsbers. The Makropulus Case. The case is a play and opera about a woman who has an elixir of life. She lives until 300 and something. But she is unhappy and bored with life. Everything that happens to her has happened before. Is death bad? Nagel says yes, though the person is not there, because life was good and it has been taken away. Williams' analysis is somewhat different, though his conclusion is the same. Neither says death is always bad though. For Williams, death is usually bad for a person, because they desire things and death prevents the satisfaction of these desires. Gijsbers presents this issue: desires are often conditional, such as "If I have an itch, then I want to scratch" (if I don't, then I don't want to) so what does death take away, since the conditional is not met? But we do have desires which are not conditional in this way, which are categorical, in Kant's language. Gives the example of I just want to walk in the Sun. Death prevents this. And I just want to see my kids grow up. But given categorical desires, must we prefer immortality? If they remain recognizably the same person - there is stability of character - then at a certain point they will have exhausted the experiences, relationships, and projects that were relevant to that kind of person. At that point immortality would become boredom, tedium. To challenge this, for Williams, two conditions must be met: (i) it has to be the same person ("same person": Gijsbers says "you") who lives on - there is no massive change of character, of personality; (ii) the projects that make life worth living for the person have to be something they can recognize as of value now. Reincarnation with no memory would be immortality, but not boring, but it is not really you. Another possibility is that I step into the pleasure machine and it injects me, producing pleasurable effects: there is no boredom then, but Gijsbers says that from my current perspective this does not look like a good life. What will immortality be like? Williams does not refer to this, but there is a funny passage from Mark Twain's book Letters from the Earth, where Lucifer - not so bad in this story - visits Earth and finds people want to go to heaven and informs them that in heaven, they play harps and sing songs to God, but the people on Earth don't enjoy doing that, yet they want to go to Heaven. Gijsbers presents this question: in what sense is it me who is engaged in this eternal contemplation, me with my character, my life history, my projects, my loves? Williams responds to Spinoza's claim that the intellectual life of contemplation is the best life there is, by saying that my own personality still does not seem to be there with this. Most people are not interested in this kind of life and even if someone is, what is the difference between two people who are, with their different histories. You seem to have to strip away the me to get to the value, the lack of boredom. What Williams concludes at the end of his article - it is more something suggestive, than a tightly argued, knockdown argument - is that we have not been given a model of immortality in which the conditions have been met: it is my immortality and valuable to the person I am now, contemplating immortality. The good thing, says Williams, is not to die before the boredom sets in and not after the boredom sets in. Basically you have to die at the exact moment before being bored from living. Death tends to be too early or too late, but you could be lucky: you could die at the right moment. That is actually the advice that Nietzsche gives us in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Very different from Nagel: Nagel basically suggests that death is bad. Williams says that death starts out being bad, but at a certain point it will become good, so try to die at the right moment.
Reference. Viktor Gijsbers. 2025. Bernard Williams - The Makropulos Case: reflections on the tedium of immortality. Available on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V01DaeKUtJI&t=1s


Jeffrey Kaplan. Attack on moral relativism. We need a distinction between realism and anti-realism. Anti-realism about something is the view that this thing is not real: there aren't any of this thing. So anti-realism about morality is the claim that there is no such thing as morality. There are no moral properties: nothing is good or bad in the moral sense, or right or wrong. Relativism is different: it says that something is real, but it is relative to context. Take relativism about etiquette. Some things really are rude - e.g. chewing with your mouth full - but it is relative to the society you are talking about. Williams focuses on vulgar relativism. It has 3 components, by his definition and is complicated and difficult to extract from the text, despite the name. Kaplan will work with a simplified representation of the view being discussed. [A vulgar vulgar relativism?] It is composed of 2 claims, the first of which Kaplan calls relativism confusingly. (1) Relativism. What is morally right or wrong can only be coherently understood as relative to the moral code of a society. This is not the mere claim that there is disagreement between societies about what is right or wrong, something everyone agrees with, e.g. on foot-binding. Relativism says that every moral code is correct: it is right for that society.  (2) Toleration. It is wrong for people in one society to condemn or interfere with another society. There is something natural about combining these two. 80-90% of Kaplan's students accept vulgar relativism. 80% accept toleration. Williams claims (1) and (2) cannot be combined, because (2) is a nonrelative principle. [Is this not a long-before-Williams charge of self-contradictoriness?] The vulgar relativist might try to avoid Williams' objection by saying that toleration is itself a relative principle. [Does Williams himself consider this defence?] But that is not as good as what we wanted: what was good about toleration is that every group has to go back to its corner and not interfere. But if only one group does, that group will be the victim of the other groups' invasive behaviour. The relativist could try to avoid this by saying there are actually a number of societies whose moral codes are such that they have to accept toleration: for every single one. [Does Williams himself consider this defence?] That will get you the result that the moral relativist wanted in the first place: by a convergence of relativist principles. But Kaplan objects that this is obviously false: not every society includes a toleration principle in its moral code. This is wildly implausible, says Kaplan. [Perhaps they will do after enough collisions. Early solar system, then the planets in their orbits!]  Williams says, "The central confusion of relativism is to try to conjure up from the fact that different societies have different attitudes and values an a priori nonrelative principle to determine the attitude of one society to another; this is impossible." Explains what a priori is by referring to triangles and what we know about them: that the interior angles of a triangle sum up to 180 degrees. [Reminds me of a problem in my pol-theory teaching class: the student afterwards says it was all about triangles.] This is a fact, but it is not one we learn by measuring them. No, because we don't measure triangles: what is on the board is not strictly a triangle. We know these a priori, by stipulating definitions and thinking really hard and clearly about a triangle, without sense perception. A bit of knowledge is a priori if it can be known without experience. Nonrelative means true across societies. Williams further says, "If we are going to say that there are ultimate moral disagreements between societies, we must include, in the matters they can disagree about, their attitudes to other moral outlooks." Kaplan says: let's say relativism is true and add just one intolerant society. They say it is right to interfere. Add relativism to that and they are right about that. So (1) and (2) cannot be consistently combined.
Reference. Jeffrey Kaplan. 2020. Bernard Williams' Attack on Moral Relativism. Available on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uBbmuvW-Kc


Vlad Vlexer. Williams' identification with Nietzsche. Brian Magee told Vlad Vlexer that by the 80s or 90s, Bernard Williams had really come to identify with Nietzsche. 70% just an observation and 30% criticism. The concern was that Williams swam around too much in philosophical concerns and did not come up with enough propositional claims. His remarkable talent was not fully realized. More recently, there have been claims in the philosophical community that Williams relationship to Nietzsche was somehow bogus. It was like Donald Trump supporters' relationship to Trump: asked what exactly do you like about Trump, no clear answer is forthcoming. He was drawn to an image of Nietzsche, but this representation of affinity was undermined when you looked under the bonnet and registered divergences. (Clip of Brian Leiter on Williams' debt to Nietzsche is superficial, but not illusory… An objector, Miranda Fricker, raises the concern that Williams' opposition to external reasons is Nietzchean.) Leiter says, best reconstruction of Williams and Nietzsche reveals little overlap. That's silly! If you conclude that Leiter (!) is more Nietzschean than Williams, then something has to have gone wrong. It is clear Williams was not drawn to Nietzsche because of, e.g., 17 shared propositions. Also it was not attraction to Nietzsche the man, a desire to have many dinners with him, say. If you met Beethoven, you would find him a crazy unpredictable guy, who suddenly jolts you with a gruff yell - Vlexer makes the sound. Avishai Margalit says that what we admire in great philosophers is that we share their concerns, whenever we think of their views. ("Views" - said very quietly.) For Williams and Nietzsche, you cannot separate views (propositions) and concerns sharply: views come wrapped on the page in a stylistic rhetoric which is an expression of an underlying psychological reality. They agree that the moral cannot be separated from the non-moral and deny the moral has priority. We accept a scientific worldview but not scientific reduction. (Vlexer is not specifying enough in last 2 sentences whether this is Williams, Nietzsche, both or himself: I am going with both.) The modern world involves a severe (spectacular?) conflict between truthfulness and other values. Then strangely moves to some words enchantingly said. Humour. How you balance heaviness and lightness. (Kundera allusion.) Above all: authenticity! Going on in a way that is distinctively you! We find this reiterated [is that the word used?] in abundance in Nietzsche and a main concern for Williams. Putting it altogether: less focus on propositional common ground Nietzsche's philosophical concerns and the way they sit with Nietzsche are an ego ideal for Williams. Vlexer says he has been ill, but his relationship to Williams is perhaps the same as Williams relationship to Nietzsche. [Neat! My own relation to Williams and Nietzsche is not economically rational to specify: too demanding on resources and little evidence of demand?]
Reference. Vlad Vlexer Philosophy. 2025. Bernard Williams' identification with Nietzsche. Available on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4B9vbKsoDE


Moral Luck: Crash Course Philosophy #9. Begins with an example: 2 neighbours, A and B, get equally drunk at a party and drive home, in identical cars, on the same paths, one before the other. A gets home safely. B hits a child who strays onto the road. It probably seems to you B is more blameworthy, because he killed a child. But had a child crossed A's path, A would have not been able to avoid killing the child. It looks as if A just got morally lucky. Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel have used examples like this to raise some thorny issues to do with moral responsibility. What does it mean to be morally responsible? In philosophy, moral responsibility refers to acts or states of affairs for which you can be praised or blamed. But how do you figure out if you really deserve praise or blame for something that happens? There is a principle "ought implies can": it is only the case that you ought to do something, if you are able to. Basically everyone in philosophy agrees with this. [This is not true.] There is a distinction between causal responsibility - you are one link in a chain of events - and moral responsibility: you deserve positive or negative judgment for what happened. Much talk then of "coconuts" including narrator (a white bespectacled man, with youthful voice, computer generated or not?) throws a coconut at a pyramid and it hits you accidentally. "I can't help it if you ran in front of my coconut!" ["Coconut" is slang for Asian with brown skin and white person's character/soul.] Thomas Nagel thinks the key to figuring this out is looking deeper into our actions - ones both in and out of our control. ["Deeper" seems to mean classify types of luck involved.] Constitutive luck has to do with our dispositions, our personality: some of us are more prone to anger. Nagel says some of us have to work really hard to not be greedy, cranky, or anti-social. Then there is circumstantial luck: this relates to the situation you find yourself in. What if the 9/11 firefighter had been a member of the German military in 1933. There is also luck regarding consequent circumstances: the way your actions actually turn out. But if they are out of our control, does praise and blame make sense? By ought-implies-can, the two drunk drivers should be blamed equally, says Nagel. But perhaps we should still praise and blame people, despite luck being involved, because it is important for society at large. We should praise someone who successfully rescues a child, to better encourage that behaviour; the unlucky failures won't do that. [The video does not quite say this or present this view; notably doesn't refer to the unlucky failures. And is an indirect message: "If you want to find out about Williams, read up! But I'm American and was good enough to refer to him early on!"? Or perhaps it is: "If you want to find out more about Williams, watch our other videos!"?! By the way, The Google AI summary of Thomas Nagel on moral luck is a challenge here.]
Reference. CrashCourse. 2017? Moral Luck: Crash Course Philosophy #39. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpDSPVv8lUE
 
Other videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-NFdJvDMFU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz1Kli6BAS8


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFrZn4ghniI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-aSfarBaZE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVLlFHPGMrU

Terence Rajivan Edward (that's me). I have cut and paste from a brief humorous contribution of mine, imitating Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, as it is sounds in English anyway... There has been a boom in secondary literature on P.F. Strawson's 1963 essay Freedom and Resentment since the 2010s. In this decade alone, it has received over 2000 citations, according to Google scholar. Anyway, how did Strawson's equally stellar contemporaries respond to his essay. Let me begin by anticipating a planned response from anthropologists. Strawson makes a distinction between reactive attitudes and objective attitudes when faced with a person's behaviour. Reactive attitudes treat that person as a responsible individual, for example when you resent someone for cancelling an invitation to their party at the last minute. Objective attitudes treat someone's behaviour as simply caused: "They cannot not do that. That is the way they are." People suffering from certain mental illnesses are engaged with by means of objective attitudes, whereas reactive attitudes are central to normal human relationships, thinks Strawson. The naive babe! What the anthropologist plans to do is describe a society in which there is no such distinction: what Strawson believes is universal is actually a distinction within a local folk worldview. But like a character from a popular music song, Bernard Williams sort-of gets there first. In his book Shame and Necessity, based on his Sather Classical Lecturers, he rejects an account of society when Homer lived according to which members regarded all human actions as caused by the Gods. (Bruno Snell.) I suspect Williams anticipated the anthropological plan and decided to introduce and then counter its historical counterpart. He does not say that he is doing this though! Suspicions, gentlemen, suspicions is all we have, and in a field that more or less prohibits speculating upon motivations.
References. Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Notes concerning Bernard Williams' response to Strawson's reactive and objective attitudes distinction. Available at Philpapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWNCB
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). 1993. Notes from Underground. London: Vintage.
[Originally 1864. See here for Constance Garnett - ! - translation: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/600/pg600-images.html)
The Bangles. 2013? (original video 1987?). Walk The Bangles - Walk Like an Egyptian (Official Video). Available at:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv6tuzHUuuk