Bernard Williams secondary literature summaries


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Date: version 8, 5th June 2026, Lear and Crashcourse added (v.1 2nd June, A A Long summarized in 2022.)


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.


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
 
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 bicondition 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.


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]
 
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.


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=DpDSPVv8lUE
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