The Deflation of Moral PhilosophyEthics and the Limits of Philosophy. Bernard Williams

Abstract

For years, Bernard Williams has been raising extremely disturbing questions both about the moral theories that have dominated contemporary moral philosophy and about some general features of moral thought that have commonly been thought to be basic. These questions have disturbed not simply because they have persuaded many to give up previously cherished beliefs but because they have done so in a way that offers no comfortable alternative-in a way, indeed, that raises doubts about the possibility of finding an alternative that will provide a picture of morality as simple, as harmonious, and as apparently rationally powerful as the pictures these questions have forced people to give up. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams confronts these doubts; more precisely, he confirms these doubts. For, rather than offer an alternative of the sort for which many have been hoping, he gives an account of the nature of ethical thought according to which no such alternative is to be expected. Why should one think the ethical life should be simple and harmonious? Why should one think that the power of ethical considerations should be rational power? In light of the history of moral philosophy and the information and experience available to us as participants in modern life, Williams suggests that, if anything, we have reason to expect quite the contrary. In this context, Williams's earlier critiques of utilitarianism and Kantianism are deepened and extended into a critique of the very enterprise of searching for the right ethical theory, and his objections to individual presuppositions about the nature of morality-presuppositions about ethical consistency, for example, and about morality's immunity to luck-can be understood as part of a much more sweeping rejection of a type of ethical outlook Williams associates specifically with the term morality. Due in part to the scope and to the level of abstraction of the issues with which Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is concerned, this book is harder to read and understand than many of Williams's earlier writings.