W is for Williams
Among the many questions that fascinate me, the one I keep coming back to is ‘how should one live?’ According to Plato, this was Socrates’ question. I can’t think of a more compelling query, all the more so as it is a philosophical question, not an empirical or scientific one. That is not to say the question like ‘how did the world come to be?’ isn’t a great topic for an enquiry too, one which has occupied researchers and thinkers over many hundreds of years. But I find Socrates’ question far more alluring, as it is always there, insistently nagging away at me, and yet I know it’s one to which there can be no definitive answer. By that I mean it is a question that has to be re-examined, rethought, and reconsidered on a continuing basis. Further, the question isn’t ‘how should I live?’: that is a question about personal morals and choices, for which I might be able to come up with an answer, but what is an answer for me is not an answer to Socrates’ ethical question, which is both broader and deeper.
A late arrival to the world of philosophical questions, the importance of Socrates’ question didn’t hit me until my 40’s. I’d seen it before, first when I read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy in the final years of my secondary education. I loved that book, swept up by the story it told, yet quite certainly misunderstanding much, if not most, of what it explained. Confronting Socrates’ question later on in life, I started to think. My ideas were influenced by the view we need some way to chart the direction lives might take, an ethical compass. In that regard, I jumped on Jim O’Toole’s book, The Executive Compass, with his model of four ideas, four ‘poles’ as he put it, existing in some kind of irresolvable tension. [i] To choose what to do was to consider how to balance liberty against community, efficiency against equality.
That model festered away for a long time, and I came back to it during a long holiday overseas, during which I started typing my ideas while staying in a cottage in the French Jura. Once started, I couldn’t stop, and eventually completed ‘How Shall I Live’, a contribution to thinking that was so valuable that … that the only way I could get it published was to do it myself! [ii] It wasn’t totally dreadful, and the work involved made me read and think about many issues I had missed or skimmed over before. Indeed, I still think the idea of seeing key issues caught between opposed extremes is a good one. Although writing it took time, I’m well aware the book had all the hallmarks of my usual approach: rushed, skating over the surface of issues, and lacking diligent editing. It wasn’t completely hopeless, but neither was it very good!
For me, Socrates’ question points to the one key issue to which we can constantly return, as it helps focus us on examining the complexities and confusions of the contemporary world and how to address them. It is a question that many great minds have explored, and in recent times none better, to my way of thinking, than Bernard Williams. I have many reasons to admire Bernard Williams. He was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, following Edmund Leach. Like Leach, he was knighted, in his case in 1999. His abilities were evident from the beginning. Straight after graduation, he won a prize fellowship to All Soul’s Oxford, to which he returned on retirement, at the end of a long and distinguished career in 1996. In between he held chairs at the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Oxford. Throughout, he was an outstanding commentator and an academic philosopher.
Described as “analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist”,[iii] he was sceptical regarding attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. I first read his views in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, a contribution to Masterguides, a series of titles in which a leading thinker introduced readers to a key topic, (others included Ronald Dworkin on law and Jerry (Jerome) Bruner on developmental psychology). [iv] His book started with Socrates’ question, and when I reread it recently I realised I had failed to grasp the subtleties of Williams’ approach. Short, accessible, it is a masterguide, not in a technical, professional sense, but as a way to confront being a thinking person in the world. I should have saved time, and not written anything myself, but rather encouraged people to buy his book!
Early on in his career, Williams adopted what is usually described as the analytic tradition, avoiding normative or prescriptive ethics, and instead interested in what might be called meta-ethics, examining the nature and meaning of moral terms, statements, and judgments. He was clearly averse to moral systems, and focussed on trying to improve understanding the complexities of situations by fleshing out the issues and their inter-relationships, rather than seeking answers. It is an approach I find especially relevant to my approach to thinking.
His critique of two moral frameworks illustrate this well. The first of these is utilitarianism. Rather than trying to summarise his approach, much of which is best understood by reading what he wrote, I can briefly illustrate his concerns with just two of the points he raises. The first is that while the utilitarian focus is on ‘the greater good’ or the benefit to the majority, the approach fails to define what this majority might be. Too big a constituency, the approach becomes meaningless, as with the greater good of the US, or, as is being argued right now in relation to the coronavirus, the good of ‘the economy’. Second, is this the only criteria for choice? A hot topic right now: does the economy’s ‘health’ take precedence over saving lives?
The other is Kantian ethics, based on the view that the only intrinsically good thing is good intent, and an action can only be good if the principle behind it follows the moral law. The key here, of course is ‘the moral law’, and Kant’s formulation of the ‘categorical imperative’, that the moral law acts on all people, regardless of their interests or desires. This is familiar ground. In this approach, the requirement to never lie quickly runs into other equally binding principles (the usual example is not admitting to the Gestapo you are sheltering some Jewish people when questioned). As Williams makes clear, Kant’s demands are impossible to sustain. The other element of Kant’s views, that people should never to treat others as merely a means to an end but always as ends in themselves, seems so clear and simple, but is equally challenging.
Bernard Williams did not produce an ethical theory or system; as an analytical philosopher he was largely a critic, seeing ethical theories as offering tidy and systematic ideas that failed to describe human lives and motives. In his first book, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, the style that was to mark him out was already evident. He wrote that whereas “most moral philosophy at most times has been empty and boring … [c]ontemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.” [v] I have to love anyone who writes like that. More to the point, he was anxious to emphasise judgement, that we cannot be forced by the world to accept one set of values rather than another. [vi]
Sometimes I see him like a surgeon, deftly using a scalpel to cut through confusions and mistakes. On religious ethics, for example, he is incisive. “If God exists, then arguments about him are arguments about the cosmos and are of cosmic importance, but if he does not, they are not about anything”. [vii] Got that clear?
He was not always so surgically dismissive. In a discussion on the ‘theological appearance of the Church of England’ he makes a delicate and deft point as to why Anglicans just might be able to offer a better view than some others. He quickly identifies the problems faced by Roman Catholics, whose religious system require they believe many things about a universal god, such as creation, resurrections and similar issues, views that are patently unsustainable based on what we know today. An unreasonable faith, I think he might have said, and a faith that leads its followers into the more foolish areas of casuistry (although it can be a methodology for debating incompatible principles and practice that has contemporary relevance, far away from its use by medieval theologians). He is equally unimpressed by any kind of non-conformist conscience, since this leaves its adherents without any firm and agreed basis on which to choose what to do. Left in the middle, he suggests the Anglicans could, and should, give up any attempt to argue against what is scientifically refutable, but rather continue to seek for principles to help in a complicated world. [viii] I wonder if in some ways he saw Anglicanism as close to humanism?
Always willing to step into controversial issues, one of his essays addressed views on abortion. He separates the debate into two camps, those who see abortion as a definitional issue, and those who argue abortion can be the justified killing of a foetus. The definitional issue is familiar, and I suspect it can never be resolved. Is a foetus at six weeks a human being, or at 20 weeks, or only when a baby is living unsupported and out of the womb? For some, abortion as early as conception is wrong, as they define this as killing a human being; others, like Peter Singer, argue even viability at birth may not be enough. The other approach is to claim there is a right to abortion, perhaps on utilitarian grounds, from harm to the mother through to harming a teenager unable to bring up a child. Arguing for such a right leaves the same dilemma: up to what point can that right be exercised? Without declaring his own view, Williams points out potential mothers often feel differently about a spontaneous abortion as opposed to a stillbirth. [ix] I confess I like his approach. He doesn’t believe philosophers offer answers, but they can uncover the complexities of an issue at stake: practice has to do with how we address those complexities. As Judith Shklar would say, it reflects our character dispositions, a term he also uses.
Williams was clearly concerned about problems he saw with moral philosophy, and the search for some standard that justifies actions. He happily dissects the simplifications and fuzziness of those advocating utilitarianism, seeing it as dangerously resting on an “unquestioned belief in impartial benevolence, and also a miracle of moral and theoretical overconfidence”. [x] He has more enthusiasm for those who look to explore the complexities of the issues at stake, rather than providing answers. In this regard, he offers a fascinating commentary on John Rawls and the evolution of Rawls’ thinking about justice as equality, and his redistribution principle to ameliorate differences. When Political Liberalism was published, he suggested Rawls was moving from a near-universal moral theory (with which Williams had concerns) to a political theory, and especially its emphasis on “a thoroughgoing redistribution of advantage”. True to his aversion for grand theories, he wonders if Rawls is willing to accept alternative moral theories within his political principles. He concludes “It is characteristic of Rawls’ achievement that these are questions [he raises] that in one form or another we shall have to confront anyway”. [xi]
At the end of a collection of his essays, Bernard Williams’ article On Hating and Despising Philosophy is a delightful testimony to his wit and insight. At the beginning, he wonders why some people despise philosophers, at one point noting, “Nor do I suppose that philosophers are often seen as politicians are in Australia, where that profession (I was once told) is regarded as much like that of night-soil workers”! More seriously he asks us to consider the view that philosophy is ‘useless’ as it doesn’t tell us what to do. For Williams, philosophy is a reflective endeavour, not about getting things right, but about “the less obvious roots and consequences of our concerns”, a task that involves truthfulness, even when it reveals uncomfortable or disturbing insights. “If there could be what serious philosophers dream of, a philosophy at once thoroughly truthful and honestly helpful, it would still be hard, un-accommodating and unobvious. For those reasons, it would doubtless be disliked by those who dislike philosophy as it was. But it might, more encouragingly, succeed in recruiting some new enemies as well, who would do it the credit of hating it for what it said and not just for what it was.” [xii] Concerned that philosophy had been taken over by moral frameworks like utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, philosophies he carefully dismissed, he hoped it could be less in thrall to such systems in the future.
Truthfulness and reflection. At the end of his Masterguide, Williams summarised his position:
“I hope I have made it clear that the ideal of transparency and the desire that our ethical practice should be able to stand up to reflection do not demand total explicitness, or a reflection that aims to lay everything bare at once. Those demands are based on a misunderstanding of rationality, both personal and political. We must reject any model of personal practical thought according to which all my projects, purposes, and needs should be made, discursively and at once, considerations for me. I must deliberate from what I am. Truthfulness requires trust in that as well, and not the obsessional and doomed drive to eliminate it. How truthfulness to an existing self or society is to be combined with reflection, self-understanding, and criticism is a quest that philosophy, itself, cannot answer. It is the kind of question that has to be answered through reflective living.” [xiii]
Philosophical enquiry as reflective honest questioning is a tool for everyone, whether seeking to understand despondency or joy, love or despair, or how one should live. As a practice it is unlike empirical enquiry. It is not about facts but rather it is a way to help us think about our place in the world and our common humanity. It is a practice sorely needed right now
[i] OUP, 1993
[ii] Travelling North, 2013. The best parts are the photographs on the front and back! Wrong title, of course.
[iii] Colin McGinn, Isn’t It the Truth, The New York Review of Books, 10 April 2003.
[iv] Fontana, 1985
[v] Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Cambridge University Press, page xvii
[vi] Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, page 142.
[vii] Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Fontana, 1985
[viii] Bernard Williams, Essays and Reviews 1959-2002, Princeton University Press, 2014, pp 17-24
[ix] Ibid, pp 146-152
[x] Ibid, page 318
[xi] Ibid, pp 326-332
[xii] Ibid, pages 363 and 370
[xiii] Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, page 200
