Did Williams Do Ethics?

Abstract

Did Williams Do Ethics? RAYMOND GEUSS Bernard Williams came to bury ethics, not to criticize or revise it. He did not, of course, mean by that that there was nothing in traditional forms of ethical thinking (or nothing in traditional moral injunctions) that was of any substance or of any use or significance for human life. He did, however, think 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, then, should replace ethics? Well, first of all, perhaps nothing will or should replace it. Instead of a single hegemonic discipline, which gave us answers or the framework for finding answers to the question how one should one live, there will just be a variety of different things. Perhaps human life is characterized by a welter of different goods that form no cognizable unity; perhaps the very idea of a single, or a single dominant, notion of “normativity” just is a mistake. After all, the very term “normativity” is a recent invention— it has no entry in the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and its currency as a technical term in philosophy can scarcely date back to a period earlier than the 1980s. The fact/value or “is”/“ought” distinction is older than that, and the adjective “normative” has sporadic earlier uses, but the idea that there was a single “thing” or phenomenon that could be designated by the single term “normativity” may be thought to represent not a mere verbal quirk, but a not-insignificant step in giving the discussion of substantive issues a particular turn or slant or structure. arion 19.3 winter 2012 Perhaps then, instead of any kind of single overarching “normativity,” all there is are simply different—and possibly changing—human practices with different goals, associated conceptions of excellence, and resultant goods; and human life consists of an art or skill in negotiating a way through, which is partly constituted by these practices, partly a matter of making use of them for other ends. What replaces ethics then is not another intellectual discipline, but forms of action , which may be skillfully or less skillfully performed. The art or skill involved, however, might not—without significant loss—be reducible to anything like the object of a cognitive discipline. Nietzsche in some of his moods seems to take a tack like this, adding that the art or skill in question would have an extremely strong component of a type we would be likely to call “aesthetic,” and that the human emotions of admiration and disgust would play a constitutive role in it. The basic idea that ethics as a purportedly free-standing philosophical enterprise was a mistake is not in itself novel or unusual. I once heard the president of a large and very wellregarded university, whom I will call “Zmith,” ask the academic members of one of his advisory boards why his university needed departments of philosophy and political science at all. After all, he remarked, the university had a flourishing Law School and a distinguished Department of Economics, and surely they could satisfy any reasonable human cognitive need. Zmith’s remark was, to be sure, part of a micro-politics of bullying, of trying to intimidate the assembled academics and show them who was boss,1 but it would have had no chance of being effective if there had not been at least the shadow of a suspicion that Zmith might actually believe what he was saying and that some other influential people might come to believe it, too. Compare this case with that in which Zmith asked why a philosophy department was needed because his University already had a flourishing archaeology program and a Music School. Actually, the idea that ethics as a sub-discipline of philosophy might simply be replaced by something else, by some part of ecodid williams do ethics? 142 nomics or law (or some combination of both), is not in itself completely daft. It would, of course, require some changes in the existing disciplines of law and economics. It would require law to stop...