Bernard Williams

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<h1 class="firstHeading">Bernard Williams</h1><div id="bodyContent"><h3 id="siteSub">From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</h3><div id="contentSub"></div><div id="jump-to-nav">Jump to: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#column-one">navigation</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#searchInput">search</a></div><div class="dablink"><i>For other persons named Bernard Williams, see <a title="Bernard Williams (disambiguation)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams_%28disambiguation%29">Bernard Williams (disambiguation)</a>.</i></div><table class="infobox" cellpadding="2" style="FONT-SIZE: 85%; BORDER-LEFT-COLOR: #b0c4de; BORDER-BOTTOM-COLOR: #b0c4de; WIDTH: 26em; BORDER-TOP-COLOR: #b0c4de; BORDER-RIGHT-COLOR: #b0c4de;"><tbody><tr><th align="center" bgcolor="#b0c4de" colspan="2" style="FONT-SIZE: 125%; BORDER-BOTTOM: #b0c4de 1px solid;">Western Philosophy<br/><small><a title="20th-century philosophy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_philosophy"><font size="3">20th-century philosophy</font></a></small></th></tr><tr><td colspan="2" style="TEXT-ALIGN: center;"><div class="center"><div class="floatnone"><span><a class="image" title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BernardWilliams.jpg"><font size="3"><img height="208" alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a6/BernardWilliams.jpg/200px-BernardWilliams.jpg" width="200" longdesc="/wiki/Image:BernardWilliams.jpg"/></font></a></span></div></div><div style="LINE-HEIGHT: 1.25em;">Sir Bernard Williams</div></td></tr><tr><th style="TEXT-ALIGN: right;">Name:</th><td>Bernard Williams</td></tr><tr><th style="TEXT-ALIGN: right;">Birth:</th><td><a title="September 21" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_21">September 21</a>, <a title="1929" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929">1929</a></td></tr><tr><th style="TEXT-ALIGN: right;">Death:</th><td><a title="June 10" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_10">June 10</a>, <a title="2003" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003">2003</a></td></tr><tr><th style="TEXT-ALIGN: right;">School/tradition:</th><td><a title="Analytic philosophy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy">Analytic philosophy</a></td></tr><tr><th style="TEXT-ALIGN: right;">Main interests:</th><td><a title="Ethics" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics">Ethics</a></td></tr><tr><th style="TEXT-ALIGN: right;">Influences:</th><td><a title="Friedrich Nietzsche" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche">Friedrich Nietzsche</a>, <a title="R.M. Hare" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.M._Hare">R.M. Hare</a></td></tr><tr><th style="TEXT-ALIGN: right;">Influenced:</th><td><a title="Jennifer Hornsby" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Hornsby">Jennifer Hornsby</a>, <a title="Martha Nussbaum" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Nussbaum">Martha Nussbaum</a></td></tr></tbody></table><p><b>Bernard Arthur Owen Williams</b> (<a title="September 21" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_21">September 21</a>, <a title="1929" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929">1929</a> – <a title="June 10" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_10">June 10</a>, <a title="2003" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003">2003</a>) was a British philosopher, widely cited as the most important British moral philosopher of his time. <sup class="reference" id="_ref-Times1_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Times1">[1]</a></sup></p><p>He was Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at the <a title="University of Cambridge" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge">University of Cambridge</a> for over a decade, and Provost of <a title="King\'s College, Cambridge" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_College%2C_Cambridge">King\'s College, Cambridge</a> for almost as long, before becoming Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. <sup class="reference" id="_ref-Telegraph1_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Telegraph1">[2]</a></sup> Williams became known internationally for his attempt to return the study of moral philosophy to its foundations: to history and culture, politics and psychology, and, in particular, to the Greeks. Described as an "<a title="Analytic philosophy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy">analytic philosopher</a> with the soul of a <a title="Humanism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism">humanist</a>," <sup class="reference" id="_ref-NYbooks1_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-NYbooks1">[3]</a></sup> he saw himself as a <a title="Synthesis" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis">synthesist</a>, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed increasingly unable to communicate with one another. He rejected scientific and <a title="Evolution" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution">evolutionary</a>
<a title="Reductionism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism">reductionism</a>, once calling reductionists "the ones I really do dislike" because they are morally unimaginative, he said. <sup class="reference" id="_ref-SF_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-SF">[4]</a></sup> For Williams, complexity was <a title="Beauty" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty">beautiful</a>, meaningful, and irreducible.</p><p>He became known as a great supporter of women in <a title="Academia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia">academia</a>, <sup class="reference" id="_ref-Nussbaum_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Nussbaum">[5]</a></sup> seeing in women the possibility of that synthesis of <a title="Reason" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason">reason</a> and <a title="Emotion" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion">emotion</a> that he felt eluded analytic philosophy. The American philosopher <a title="Martha Nussbaum" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Nussbaum">Martha Nussbaum</a> said Williams was "as close to being a <a title="Feminism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism">feminist</a> as a powerful man of his generation could be." <sup class="reference" id="_ref-Nussbaum_1"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Nussbaum">[5]</a></sup></p><table class="toc" id="toc" summary="Contents"><tbody><tr><td><div id="toctitle"><h2>Contents</h2><span class="toctoggle">[<a class="internal" id="togglelink" href="javascript:toggleToc()">hide</a>]</span></div><ul><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#His_life"><span class="tocnumber">1</span>
<span class="toctext">His life</span></a>
</li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#His_work"><span class="tocnumber">2</span>
<span class="toctext">His work</span></a>
</li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#Critique_of_utilitarianism"><span class="tocnumber">3</span>
<span class="toctext">Critique of utilitarianism</span></a>
</li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#Critique_of_Kantianism"><span class="tocnumber">4</span>
<span class="toctext">Critique of Kantianism</span></a>
</li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#Reasons_for_action"><span class="tocnumber">5</span>
<span class="toctext">Reasons for action</span></a>
</li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#Posthumous_works"><span class="tocnumber">6</span>
<span class="toctext">

osthumous works</span></a>
</li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#Books_and_papers"><span class="tocnumber">7</span>
<span class="toctext">Books and papers</span></a>
</li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#Notes"><span class="tocnumber">8</span>
<span class="toctext">Notes</span></a>
</li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#References"><span class="tocnumber">9</span>
<span class="toctext">References</span></a>
</li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#Further_reading"><span class="tocnumber">10</span>
<span class="toctext">Further reading</span></a>
</li></ul></td></tr></tbody></table><p><script type="text/javascript"></script><a id="His_life" name="His_life"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: His life" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=1">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">His life</span></h2><p>Williams was born in <a title="Westcliff-on-Sea" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westcliff-on-Sea">Westcliff-on-Sea</a>, <a title="Essex" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex">Essex</a>, the only son of a civil servant. He was educated at <a title="Chigwell School" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chigwell_School">Chigwell School</a> and read Greats (Classics) at <a title="Balliol College, Oxford" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balliol_College%2C_Oxford">Balliol College, Oxford</a>. Despite allegedly turning up 30 minutes late for his finals in order to spend that time learning all the material he needed for his exams, he still graduated, in 1951, with the rare distinction of a congratulatory first-class honours degree, the highest award at this level in the British university system. He then spent his year-long national service in the <a title="Royal Air Force" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Air_Force">Royal Air Force</a> (RAF), flying <a title="Supermarine Spitfire" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine_Spitfire">Spitfires</a> in <a title="Canada" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada">Canada</a>.</p><p>He met his future wife, <a title="Shirley Williams" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Williams">Shirley Brittain-Catlin</a>, the daughter of political scientist and philosopher <a title="George Catlin (political scientist)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Catlin_%28political_scientist%29">George Catlin</a> and novelist <a title="Vera Brittain" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Brittain">Vera Brittain</a>, while he was on leave in <a title="New York" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York">New York</a>, where she was studying at <a title="Columbia University" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University">Columbia University</a>. At the age of 22, after winning a Prize Fellowship at <a title="All Souls College, Oxford" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls_College%2C_Oxford">All Souls College, Oxford</a>, Williams returned to England with Shirley to take up the post – though not before she\'d had an affair with four-minute-miler <a title="Roger Bannister" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bannister">Roger Bannister</a><sup class="reference" id="_ref-Jeffries_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Jeffries">[6]</a></sup> – and they were married in 1955. <a title="Shirley Williams" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Williams">Shirley Williams</a>, as she became known, was elected as a <a title="Labour Party (UK)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_%28UK%29">Labour</a>
<a title="Member of Parliament" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_of_Parliament">Member of Parliament</a>, then crossed the floor as one of the "<a title="Gang of Four (disambiguation)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four_%28disambiguation%29">Gang of Four</a>" to become a founding member of the <a title="Social Democratic Party (UK)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_%28UK%29">SDP</a>, a centrist breakaway party. She was later ennobled, becoming Baroness Williams of Crosby, and remains a prominent member of the <a title="Liberal Democrats (UK)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democrats_%28UK%29">Liberal Democrats</a>.</p><p>Williams left Oxford to accommodate his wife\'s rising political ambitions, finding a post first at <a title="University College London" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_College_London">University College London</a> and then at <a title="University of London" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_London">Bedford College</a>, while his wife worked as a journalist for the <i><a title="Financial Times" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Times">Financial Times</a></i>. For 17 years, the couple lived in a large house in <a title="Kensington" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington">Kensington</a> with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife. During this time, described by Williams as one of the happiest of his life,<sup class="reference" id="_ref-Jeffries_1"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Jeffries">[6]</a></sup> the marriage produced a daughter, Rebecca, but the development of his wife\'s political career kept the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal values – Williams was a confirmed <a title="Atheism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism">atheist</a>, his wife a devout <a title="Roman Catholic Church" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Church">Catholic</a> – placed a strain on their relationship, which reached breaking point when Williams had an affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian <a title="Quentin Skinner" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Skinner">Quentin Skinner</a>. The Williams\' marriage was dissolved in 1974, and Williams and Skinner were able to wed, a marriage that produced two sons.</p><div class="thumb tright"><div class="thumbinner" style="WIDTH: 302px;"><a class="internal" title="Williams spent nearly 20 years at Cambridge, eight of them as Provost of King\'s College. " href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:KingsCollegeChapel.jpg"><img class="thumbimage" height="212" alt="Williams spent nearly 20 years at Cambridge, eight of them as Provost of King\'s College. " src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/KingsCollegeChapel.jpg/300px-KingsCollegeChapel.jpg" width="300" longdesc="/wiki/Image:KingsCollegeChapel.jpg"/></a>
<div class="thumbcaption"><div class="magnify" style="FLOAT: right;"><a class="internal" title="Enlarge" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:KingsCollegeChapel.jpg"><img height="11" alt="" src="http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/common/images/magnify-clip.png" width="15"/></a></div>Williams spent nearly 20 years at Cambridge, eight of them as Provost of <a title="King\'s College, Cambridge" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_College%2C_Cambridge">King\'s College</a>.</div></div></div><p>Williams became Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1967, then served as <a title="

rovost (education)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provost_%28education%29">

rovost</a> of <a title="King\'s College, Cambridge" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_College%2C_Cambridge">King\'s College, Cambridge</a> from 1979 until 1987, when he moved to the <a title="University of California, Berkeley" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California%2C_Berkeley">University of California, Berkeley</a> to take up the post of Deutsch Professor of Philosophy from 1987 to 2000. He told a British newspaper, he could barely afford to buy a house in central London on his salary as an <a title="Academia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia">academic</a>. His public outburst at the low salaries in British universities made his departure appear part of the <a title="Brain drain" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_drain">brain drain</a>, as the British media called it, which was his intention. He told <i>The Guardian</i> in November 2002 that he regretted his departure became so public: "I was persuaded that there was a real problem about academic conditions and that if my departure was publicised this would bring these matters to public attention. It did a bit, but it made me seem narky, and when I came back again in three years it looked rather absurd. I came back for personal reasons – it\'s harder to live out there with a family than I supposed."<sup class="reference" id="_ref-Jeffries_2"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Jeffries">[6]</a></sup></p><p>Having taught at Berkeley since 1987, in 1990 he began working simultaneously at Berkeley and again at Oxford where he held <a title="White\'s Chair of Moral Philosophy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White%27s_Chair_of_Moral_Philosophy">White\'s Professor of Moral Philosophy</a> He returned to Oxford to live in retirement in 2000 until his death in Rome while on holiday in 2003.</p><p>In addition to academic life, Williams chaired and served on a number of Royal Commissions and government committees. In the 1970s, he chaired the Committee on <a title="Obscenity" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity">Obscenity</a> and Film <a title="Censorship" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship">Censorship</a>, which reported in 1979 that: "Given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that one can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any hint at all that <a title="Pornography" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography">pornography</a> was present in the background." The Committee\'s report was influenced by the liberal thinking of <a title="John Stuart Mill" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill">John Stuart Mill</a>, a philosopher greatly admired by Williams, who used Mill\'s principle of <a title="Liberty" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty">liberty</a> to develop what Williams called the "harm condition," whereby "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone."<sup class="reference" id="_ref-Jeffries_3"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Jeffries">[6]</a></sup> Williams concluded that pornography could not be shown to be harmful and that "the role of pornography in influencing society is not very important ... to think anything else is to get the problem of pornography out of proportion with the many other problems that face our society today". The committee reported that, so long as children were protected from seeing it, adults should be free to read and watch pornography as they saw fit. <a title="Margaret Thatcher" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher">Margaret Thatcher</a>\'s first administration put an end to the <a title="Liberalism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism">liberal</a> agenda on sex, and nearly put an end to Williams\' political career too; he was not asked to chair another public committee for almost 15 years.</p><p>Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining <a title="Recreational drug use" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_drug_use">drug abuse</a> in 1971; <a title="Gambling" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling">gambling</a> in 1976–78; the role of <a title="Public school" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school">British private schools</a> in 1965–70; and social justice in 1993–94. "I did all the major vices," he said.<sup class="reference" id="_ref-times_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-times">[7]</a></sup></p><p>Williams was famously sharp in discussion. Oxford philosopher <a title="Gilbert Ryle" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle">Gilbert Ryle</a> once said of him that "[h]e understands what you\'re going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you\'ve got to the end of your sentence."<sup class="reference" id="_ref-Jeffries_4"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Jeffries">[6]</a></sup></p><p>He was <a title="Knighthood" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knighthood">knighted</a> in 1999 and became a fellow of the <a title="British Academy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Academy">British Academy</a> and an honorary member of the <a title="American Academy of Arts and Sciences" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Academy_of_Arts_and_Sciences">American Academy of Arts and Sciences</a>. He sat on the board of the <a title="English National Opera" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_National_Opera">English National Opera</a> and wrote the entry for "opera" in the <i><a title="Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians">Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians</a></i>.</p><p>Williams died on <a title="June 10" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_10">June 10</a>, <a title="2003" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003">2003</a>, while on holiday in <a title="Rome" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome">Rome</a>. He had been suffering from <a title="Multiple myeloma" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_myeloma">multiple myeloma</a>, a form of <a title="Cancer" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer">cancer</a>. He is survived by his wife, Patricia, their two sons, Jacob and Jonathan, and Rebecca, his daughter from his first marriage.</p><p><a id="His_work" name="His_work"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: His work" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=2">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">His work</span></h2><p>Williams\' books and papers include studies of <a title="René Descartes" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes">René Descartes</a> and <a title="Ancient Greece" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece">Ancient Greek</a> philosophy, as well as more detailed attacks on <a title="Utilitarianism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism">utilitarianism</a> and <a title="Kantianism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantianism">Kantianism</a>.</p><div class="thumb tright"><div class="thumbinner" style="WIDTH: 199px;"><a class="internal" title="Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900. Williams said he wished he could quote him on every page." href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nietzsche1.jpg"><img class="thumbimage" height="244" alt="Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900. Williams said he wished he could quote him on every page." src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c7/Nietzsche1.jpg" width="197" longdesc="/wiki/Image:Nietzsche1.jpg"/></a>
<div class="thumbcaption">Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900. Williams said he wished he could quote him on every page.</div></div></div><p>Williams was a systems destroyer, attacking all "isms" with equal vigour. He turned his back on the <a title="Meta-ethics" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-ethics">meta-ethics</a> studied by most moral philosophers trained in the Western analytic tradition – "What is the Good?" and "What does the word \'ought\' mean?" – and concentrated instead on <a title="Normative ethics" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics">practical ethics</a>. Williams tried to address the question of how to live a good life, focusing on the complexity, the "<a title="Moral luck" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_luck">moral luck</a>," as he called it, of everyday life.</p><p>In <i>Morality: An Introduction to Ethics</i> (1972), he wrote that "whereas most moral philosophy at most times has been empty and boring . . . contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing issues at all". The study of <a title="Morality" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality">morality</a>, he argued, should be vital and compelling. He wanted to find a moral philosophy that was accountable to psychology, history, politics, and culture. In his rejection of morality as what he called "a peculiar institution", by which he meant a discrete and separable domain of human thought, Williams resembled the <a title="19th century" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_century">19th-century</a>
<a title="Germany" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany">German</a> philosopher <a title="Friedrich Nietzsche" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche">Friedrich Nietzsche</a>. After beginning by thinking of him as a crude reductionist, in his later career, Williams came to greatly admire Nietzsche — he once even remarked that he wished he could quote Nietzsche on every page he wrote.</p><p>Although Williams\' disdain for reductionism sometimes made him appear a <a title="Moral relativism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism">moral relativist</a>, he believed, like the <a title="Ancient Greece" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece">Ancient Greeks</a>, that the so-called "thick" moral concepts, like courage and cruelty, were real and universal.</p><p>Williams\' last finished book, <i>Truth And Truthfulness: An Essay In Genealogy</i> (2002), attempts to defend a non-foundationalist attachment to the values of truth, which Williams identifies as accuracy and sincerity, by giving a vindicatory naturalistic genealogy of them. The debt to Nietzsche is again clear, most obviously in the adoption of a genealogical method as a tool of explanation and critique. Although, as <i>The Guardian</i> noted in its obituary of Williams, describing the book as an examination of those who "sneer at any purported truth as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power, class bias and ideology,"<sup class="reference" id="_ref-0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-0">[8]</a></sup> part of Williams\' intention was to attack those who he felt denied the value of truth, the book\'s blurb cautions that to understand it simply in that sense would be to miss part of its purpose: it "presents a... challenge" to both "the fashionable belief that truth has no value" and "the traditional faith that [truth\'s] value guarantees itself"<sup class="reference" id="_ref-PUP_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-PUP">[9]</a></sup>.</p><p><a id="Critique_of_utilitarianism" name="Critique_of_utilitarianism"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: Critique of utilitarianism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=3">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">Critique of utilitarianism</span></h2><p>Williams was particularly critical of <a title="Utilitarianism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism">utilitarianism</a>, a <a title="Consequentialism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism">consequentialist</a> theory, the simplest version of which argues that moral acts are good only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number.</p><p>One of Williams\' famous arguments against utilitarianism centres on Jim, a scientist doing research in a <a title="South America" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_America">South American</a> country led by a brutal dictator. Jim finds himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 rebels, captured and tied up. The captain who has defeated them says that, if Jim will kill one of the rebels, the others will be released in honour of Jim\'s status as a guest. But if he does not, they will all be killed.<sup class="reference" id="_ref-Williams1973_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Williams1973">[10]</a></sup>
<i>Simple act utilitarianism</i> says that Jim should kill one of the captives in order to save the others, and indeed, for most consequentialist theories, there is no moral dilemma in a case like this: All that matters is the outcome.</p><p>Against this, Williams argued that there is a crucial moral distinction between a person being killed by me, and being killed by someone else because of what I do. The utilitarian loses that vital distinction, he argued, thereby stripping us of our agency and so our humanity, turning us into empty vessels by means of which consequences occur, rather than preserving our status as moral actors and decision-makers with <a title="Integrity" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity">integrity</a>. Moral decisions must preserve our integrity and our <a title="Psychological identity" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_identity">psychological identity</a>, he argued.</p><p>An advocate of utilitarianism would reply that the theory cannot be dismissed as easily as that. The <a title="Nobel prize" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_prize">Nobel</a> philosopher of economics <a title="Amartya Sen" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen">Amartya Sen</a>, for example, argued that moral agency, issues of integrity, and personal points of view can be worked into a consequentialist account; that is, they can be counted as consequences too.<sup class="reference" id="_ref-Sen_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Sen">[11]</a></sup> For example, to solve parking problems in London, Williams wrote, a utilitarian would have to favour threatening to shoot anyone who parked in a prohibited space. If only a few people were shot for this, illegal parking would soon stop; the shootings would be justified, according to simple act utilitarianism, because of the happiness the absence of parking problems would bring to millions of Londoners. Any theory that has this as a consequence, Williams argued, should be rejected out of hand, no matter how <a title="Ethical intuitionism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_intuitionism">intuitively</a> plausible it feels to agree that we do judge actions solely in terms of their consequences. We do not, argued Williams, and we must not.</p><p>However Sen and others have argued rule utilitarianism would ask what rule could be extrapolated from the parking example. The rule \'shoot those who commit parking violations\' is unlikely to, in the long run and considering all its consequences, maximise good outcomes. For Williams, however, this type of argument simply proved his point. We do not, as a matter of fact, need to calculate whether threatening to shoot people over parking offences would maximise good outcomes. We already know that threatening to shoot people over parking offences is wrong, and any system that requires us to make that calculation is a system we should reject because by forgetting we know that, it misunderstands and misrepresents moral reasoning.</p><p><a id="Critique_of_Kantianism" name="Critique_of_Kantianism"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: Critique of Kantianism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=4">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">Critique of Kantianism</span></h2><div class="thumb tright"><div class="thumbinner" style="WIDTH: 202px;"><a class="internal" title="Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804. Williams rejected Kant\'s moral philosophy, arguing that moral principles should not require me to act as though I am someone else." href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kant2.jpg"><img class="thumbimage" height="222" alt="Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804. Williams rejected Kant\'s moral philosophy, arguing that moral principles should not require me to act as though I am someone else." src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/50/Kant2.jpg/200px-Kant2.jpg" width="200" longdesc="/wiki/Image:Kant2.jpg"/></a>
<div class="thumbcaption"><div class="magnify" style="FLOAT: right;"><a class="internal" title="Enlarge" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kant2.jpg"><img height="11" alt="" src="http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/common/images/magnify-clip.png" width="15"/></a></div><a title="Immanuel Kant" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant">Immanuel Kant</a>, 1724–1804. Williams rejected Kant\'s moral philosophy, arguing that moral principles should not require me to act as though I am someone else.</div></div></div><p>One of the main rivals of utilitarianism is the moral philosophy of the 18th-century German philosopher <a title="Immanuel Kant" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant">Immanuel Kant</a>. Williams\' work throughout the 1970s and 1980s<sup class="reference" id="_ref-1"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-1">[12]</a></sup> outlined the basis of his attacks on the twin pillars of utilitarianism and Kantianism. <a title="Martha Nussbaum" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Nussbaum">Martha Nussbaum</a> wrote that his work "denounced the trivial and evasive way in which moral philosophy was being practised in England under the aegis of those two dominant theories."<sup class="reference" id="_ref-Nussbaum_2"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-Nussbaum">[5]</a></sup></p><p>Kant\'s <i><a title="Critique of Practical Reason" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Practical_Reason">Critique of Practical Reason</a></i> and <i><a title="Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundwork_for_the_Metaphysic_of_Morals">Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals</a></i> expounded a moral system based on what he called the <a title="Categorical Imperative" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_Imperative">Categorical Imperative</a>, the best known version of which is: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become, by an act of <a title="Will (philosophy)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_%28philosophy%29">will</a>, a universal law of nature".</p><p>This is a binding law, Kant argued, on any <a title="Rationality" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality">rational</a> being with <a title="Free will" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will">free will</a>. You must imagine, when you act, that the rule underpinning your action will apply to everyone in similar circumstances, including yourself in future. If you cannot accept the consequences of this <a title="Thought experiment" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment">thought experiment</a>, or if it leads to a contradiction, you must not carry out the act. For example, if you want to kill your wife\'s lover, you must imagine a law that says all wronged husbands have the right to kill their wives\' lovers; and that will include you, should you become the lover of someone else\'s wife. In other words, you must <a title="Universalizability" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalizability">universalize</a> your experience.</p><p>Williams argued against the Categorical Imperative in his paper "Persons, character and morality."<sup class="reference" id="_ref-ML_0"><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_note-ML">[13]</a></sup> Morality should not require us to act selflessly, as though we are not who we are, as though we are not in the circumstances we presently find ourselves. We should not have to take an impartial view, or a <a title="Christianity" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity">Christian</a> view, of the world, he argued. Our values, commitments, and desires do make a difference to how we see the world and how we act; and so they should, he said, otherwise we lose our individuality, and thereby our humanity.</p><p><a id="Reasons_for_action" name="Reasons_for_action"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: Reasons for action" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=5">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">Reasons for action</span></h2><p>Williams\' insistence that morality is about people and their real lives, and that acting out of <a title="Self-interest" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-interest">self-interest</a> and even <a title="Selfishness" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfishness">selfishness</a> are not contrary to moral action, is illustrated in his "internal reasons for action" argument, part of what philosophers call the "internal/external reasons" debate.</p><p>Philosophers have tried to argue that moral agents can have "external reasons" for performing a moral act; that is, they are able to act for reasons external to their inner mental states. Williams argued that this is meaningless. For something to be a "reason to act," it must be magnetic; that is, it must move us to action. How can something entirely external to us – for example, the <a title="Proposition" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition">proposition</a> that X is good – be magnetic? By what process can something external to us move us to act?</p><p>Williams argued that it cannot. <a title="Cognition" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition">Cognition</a> is not magnetic. Knowing and feeling are quite separate, and a person must <i>feel</i> before they are moved to act. Reasons for action are always <i>internal</i>, he argued. If I feel moved to do X (for example, to do something good), it is because I <i>want</i> to. I may want to do the right thing for a number of reasons. For example, I may have been brought up to believe that X is good and may wish to act in accordance with my upbringing; or I may want to look good in someone else\'s eyes; or perhaps I fear the disapproval of my community. The reasons can be complex, but they are always internal and they always boil down to <a title="Desire" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire">desire</a>.</p><p>With this argument, Williams left moral philosophy with the notion that a person\'s moral reasons must be rooted in his desires to act morally, desires that might, at any given moment, in any given person, be absent. In a <a title="Secular humanism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism">secular humanist</a> tradition, with no appeal to <a title="God" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God">God</a> or any external moral authority, Williams\' theory strikes at the foundation of conventional morality; namely, that people sometimes do good even when they don\'t want to.</p><p><a id="Posthumous_works" name="Posthumous_works"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: Posthumous works" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=6">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">Posthumous works</span></h2><p>Since Williams\' death, three collections of essays, articles, and transcripts of lectures have been published. <i>In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument</i> (2005), on political philosophy; <i>The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy</i> (2006), a series of essays on the boundaries between philosophy and history; and <i>Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline</i> (2006), on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.</p><p><a id="Books_and_papers" name="Books_and_papers"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: Books and papers" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=7">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">Books and papers</span></h2><ul><li><i><a title="Morality: An Introduction to Ethics" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality:_An_Introduction_to_Ethics">Morality: An Introduction to Ethics</a></i>. Cambridge University Press, 1972. </li><li><i>Problems of the Self</i>. Cambridge University Press, 1973. </li><li><i>Utilitarianism: For and Against</i> with J.J.C. Smart. Cambridge University Press, 1973. </li><li><i>Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry</i>. Harvester Press, 1978. </li><li><i>Moral Luck</i>. Cambridge University Press, 1981. </li><li><i>Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy</i>. Harvard University Press, 1985. </li><li><i>Shame and Necessity</i>. University of California Press, 1993. </li><li><i>Making Sense of Humanity</i>. Cambridge University Press, 1995. </li><li><i>Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy</i>. Princeton University Press, 2002. </li><li><i>In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument</i>. Princeton University Press, 2005. </li><li><i>The Sense Of The Past: Essays In The Philosophy Of History</i>, 2006. </li><li><i>Philosophy As A Humanistic Discipline</i>. Edited by A. W. Moore, 2006. </li><li>"Philosophy As a Humanistic Discipline," <i>Philosophy</i> 75, Oct. 2000, pp. 477–496. </li><li>"Understanding Homer: Literature, History and Ideal Anthropology," in <i>Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives</i>. Neil Roughley, ed. de Gruyter, 2000. </li><li>"Tolerating the Intolerable," in <i>The Politics of Toleration</i>. ed. Susan Mendus, Edinburgh University Press, 1999. </li><li>"Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom," <i>Cambridge Law Journal</i> 56, 1997. </li><li>"Stoic Philosophy and the Emotions: Reply to Richard Sorabji," in <i>Aristotle and After</i>, R. Sorabji (ed.), <i>Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies</i> Supplement 68, 1997. </li><li>"Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look," in <i>The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy</i>. N. F. Bunnin (ed.), Blackwell, 1996. </li><li>"History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection," in <i>The Sources of Normativity</i>. Onora O\'Neill (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1996. </li><li>"The Politics of Trust," in <i>The Geography of Identity</i>, ed. Patricia Yeager, University of Michigan Press, 1996. </li><li>"The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics," in <i>The Greeks and Us</i>, R. B. Louden and P. Schollmeier (eds.), Chicago University Press, 1996. </li><li>"Truth, Politics and Self-Deception," <i>Social Research</i> 63.3 (Fall 1996). </li><li>"Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?" in <i>Toleration: An Exclusive Virtue</i>, ed. David Heyd, Princeton University Press, 1996. </li><li>"Reasons, Values and the Theory of Persuasion," in <i>Ethics, Rationality and Economic Behavior</i>, ed. Francesco Farina, Frank Hahn and Stafano Vannucci, Oxford University Press, 1996. </li><li>"Truth in Ethics," <i>Ratio</i> 8.3, 1995, pp. 227–42. </li><li>"Acting as the Virtuous Person Acts," in <i>Aristotle and Moral Realism</i>, ed. Robert Heinaman, Westview Press, 1995. </li><li>"Ethics," in <i>Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject</i>, ed. A. C. Grayling, Oxford University Press, 1995. </li><li>"Identity and Identities," in <i>Identity: Essays Based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford</i>, ed. Henry Harris, Oxford University Press, 1995. </li><li>"Cratylus\' Theory of Names and Its Refutation," in <i>Language</i>, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge University Press, 1994. </li><li>"Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy," in <i>Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes\'s Metaphysics</i>, ed. John Cottingham, Oxford University Press, 1994. </li><li>"The Actus Reus of Dr. Caligari," <i>Pennsylvania Law Review</i> 142, May 1994. </li><li>"Pagan Justice and Christian Love," <i>Apeiron</i> 26.3–4, 1993, pp. 195–207. </li></ul><p><a id="Notes" name="Notes"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: Notes" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=8">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">Notes</span></h2><ol class="references"><li id="_note-Times1"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Times1_0">^</a></b> Obituary, "Professor Sir Bernard Williams," <i>The Times</i>, June 14, 2003. </li><li id="_note-Telegraph1"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Telegraph1_0">^</a></b> Obituary, no byline, <a class="external text" title="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/14/db1401.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/06/14/ixportal.html" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/14/db1401.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/06/14/ixportal.html" rel="nofollow">Professor Sir Bernard Williams</a>
<i>The Daily Telegraph</i>, June 14, 2003 </li><li id="_note-NYbooks1"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-NYbooks1_0">^</a></b> McGinn, Colin, <a class="external text" title="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=16188" href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=16188" rel="nofollow">"Isn\'t It the Truth?"</a>
<i>The New York Review of Books</i>, April 10, 2003. </li><li id="_note-SF"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-SF_0">^</a></b> Baker, Kenneth, <a class="external text" title="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/09/22/RV77987.DTL" href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/09/22/RV77987.DTL" rel="nofollow">Bernard Williams: "Carrying the torch for truth"</a>, an interview with Bernard Williams, <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>, September 22, 2002. </li><li id="_note-Nussbaum">^ <a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Nussbaum_0"><sup><i><b>a</b></i></sup></a>
<a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Nussbaum_1"><sup><i><b>b</b></i></sup></a>
<a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Nussbaum_2"><sup><i><b>c</b></i></sup></a> Nussbaum, Martha, <a class="external text" title="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/nussbaum.html" href="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/nussbaum.html" rel="nofollow">"Tragedy and Justice"</a>, <i>Boston Review</i>, October/November 2003 </li><li id="_note-Jeffries">^ <a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Jeffries_0"><sup><i><b>a</b></i></sup></a>
<a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Jeffries_1"><sup><i><b>b</b></i></sup></a>
<a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Jeffries_2"><sup><i><b>c</b></i></sup></a>
<a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Jeffries_3"><sup><i><b>d</b></i></sup></a>
<a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Jeffries_4"><sup><i><b>e</b></i></sup></a> Jeffries, Stuart, <a class="external text" title="http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,850062,00.html" href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,850062,00.html" rel="nofollow">The Quest for Truth</a>
<i>The Guardian</i>, November 30, 2002. </li><li id="_note-times"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-times_0">^</a></b> Obituary, no byline, <a class="external text" title="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-712787,00.html" href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-712787,00.html" rel="nofollow">Professor Sir Bernard Williams</a>
<i>The Times</i>, June 14, 2003. </li><li id="_note-0"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-0">^</a></b> O\'Grady, Jane, <a class="external text" title="http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,976477,00.html" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,976477,00.html" rel="nofollow">Professor Sir Bernard Williams</a>
<i>The Guardian</i>, June 13, 2003. </li><li id="_note-PUP"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-PUP_0">^</a></b> Princeton University Press, <a class="external autonumber" title="http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7328.html" href="http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7328.html" rel="nofollow">[1]</a>
</li><li id="_note-Williams1973"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Williams1973_0">^</a></b> Williams, Bernard. <i>Utilitarianism: For and Against</i>, 1973. </li><li id="_note-Sen"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-Sen_0">^</a></b> Sen, Amartya, and Bernard Williams (eds),<i>Utilitarianism and Beyond</i>. Cambridge University Press, 1982. </li><li id="_note-1"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-1">^</a></b>
<i>Morality: An Introduction to Ethics</i> in 1972; <i>Problems of the Self</i> in 1973; <i>Utilitarianism: For and Against</i> with J.J.C. Smart, also in 1973; <i>Moral Luck</i> in 1981; and <i>Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy</i> in 1985 </li><li id="_note-ML"><b><a title="" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams#_ref-ML_0">^</a></b> Williams, Bernard, <i>Moral Luck</i>. Cambridge University Press, 1981. </li></ol><p><a id="References" name="References"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: References" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=9">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">References</span></h2><ul><li>Baker, Kenneth, <a class="external text" title="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/09/22/RV77987.DTL" href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/09/22/RV77987.DTL" rel="nofollow">Bernard Williams: Carrying the torch for truth</a> An interview with Bernard Williams, <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>, September 22, 2002. </li><li>Foot, Philippa, "Reasons for Action and Desires," in <i>Practical Reasoning,</i> ed. Joseph Raz, Oxford University Press, 1978. </li><li>Jeffries, Stuart, <a class="external text" title="http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,850062,00.html" href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,850062,00.html" rel="nofollow">The Quest for Truth</a>
<i>The Guardian</i>, November 30, 2002. </li><li>McGinn, Colin, <a class="external text" title="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=16188" href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=16188" rel="nofollow">Isn\'t It the Truth?</a>
<i>The New York Review of Books</i>, April 10, 2003. </li><li>Nussbaum, Martha, <a class="external text" title="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/nussbaum.html" href="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/nussbaum.html" rel="nofollow">Tragedy and Justice</a>
<i>Boston Review</i>, October/November 2003. </li><li>Obituary, no byline, <a class="external text" title="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/14/db1401.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/06/14/ixportal.html" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/14/db1401.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/06/14/ixportal.html" rel="nofollow">Professor Sir Bernard Williams</a>
<i>The Daily Telegraph</i>, June 14, 2003. </li><li>Obituary, no byline, <a class="external text" title="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-712787,00.html" href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-712787,00.html" rel="nofollow">Professor Sir Bernard Williams</a>
<i>The Times</i>, June 14, 2003. </li><li>Obituary, no byline, <a class="external text" title="http://economist.com/people/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1875125" href="http://economist.com/people/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1875125" rel="nofollow">Bernard Williams</a>
<i>The Economist</i>, June 26, 2003. </li><li>O\'Grady, Jane, <a class="external text" title="http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,976477,00.html" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,976477,00.html" rel="nofollow">Professor Sir Bernard Williams</a>
<i>The Guardian</i>, June 13, 2003. </li><li>Pearson, Richard, <a class="external text" title="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A7634-2003Jun17&notFound=true" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A7634-2003Jun17&notFound=true" rel="nofollow">Philosopher Bernard Williams Dies: Weighed Questions of Moral Identify</a>
<i>The Washington Post</i>, June 18, 2003. </li><li>Sen, Amartya, <i>Ethics and Economics</i> (Blackwell, 1989). </li><li>Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard (eds),<i>Utilitarianism and Beyond</i>, Cambridge University Press, 1982. </li><li>Williams, Bernard, <i>Moral Luck</i>. Cambridge University Press, 1981. </li><li>Williams, Bernard, <i>Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy</i>. Harvard University Press, 1985. </li></ul><p><a id="Further_reading" name="Further_reading"></a></p><h2><span class="editsection">[<a title="Edit section: Further reading" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Williams&action=edit&section=10">edit</a>]</span>
<span class="mw-headline">Further reading</span></h2><ul><li><a class="external text" title="http://educationtalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?50@@.3ba77186/0" href="http://educationtalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?50@@.3ba77186/0" rel="nofollow">A live chat with Bernard Williams</a>, <i>GuardianUnlimited</i>, November 2002. </li><li>Chappell, Timothy, <a class="external text" title="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard/" href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard/" rel="nofollow">Bernard Williams</a>, <a title="Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Encyclopedia_of_Philosophy">Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</a>, February 2006. </li><li>McGinn, Colin, <a class="external text" title="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=16188" href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=16188" rel="nofollow">Isn\'t it the truth?</a>
<i>New York Review of Books</i>, April 10, 2003. (requires subscription) </li><li>Sides, Carl Brock, <a class="external text" title="http://home.midsouth.rr.com/philarete/philosophy/williams.html" href="http://home.midsouth.rr.com/philarete/philosophy/williams.html" rel="nofollow">Williams on Personal Identity</a>
<i>Brock\'s Philosophy Page</i>, 1997, retrieved December 07, 2004. </li><li>Williams, Bernard, <a class="external text" title="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n20/will03_.html" href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n20/will03_.html" rel="nofollow">Why Philosophy Needs History</a>
<i>London Review of Books</i>, October 17, 2002. (requires subscription) </li><li>Williams, Bernard, <a class="external text" title="http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=39" href="http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=39" rel="nofollow">Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline</a> The Royal Institute of Philosophy, undated, retrieved January 20, 2007.<br/></li></ul><p><br/></p><center><table id="toc" style="MARGIN: 0px 2em;"><tbody><tr><td align="center" style="BACKGROUND: #ccccff;">This article is part of <b>The <a title="Contemporary Philosophers" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Philosophers">Contemporary Philosophers</a></b> series</td></tr><tr><td align="left" style="FONT-SIZE: 85%; BACKGROUND: #ccccff;"><a title="Analytic philosophy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy">Analytic</a> philosophers:</td></tr><tr><td align="center" style="FONT-SIZE: 90%;"><a title="Isaiah Berlin" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin">Isaiah Berlin</a> | <a title="Simon Blackburn" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Blackburn">Simon Blackburn</a> | <a title="Ned Block" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Block">Ned Block</a> | <a title="David Chalmers" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers">David Chalmers</a> | <a title="Patricia Churchland" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Churchland">Patricia Churchland</a> | <a title="Paul Churchland" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Churchland">Paul Churchland</a> | <a title="Donald Davidson (philosopher)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_%28philosopher%29">Donald Davidson</a> | <a title="Daniel Dennett" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett">Daniel Dennett</a> | <a title="Jerry Fodor" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Fodor">Jerry Fodor</a> | <a title="Ernest Gellner" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gellner">Ernest Gellner</a> | <a title="John N. Gray" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Gray">John Gray</a> | <a title="Susan Haack" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Haack">Susan Haack</a> | <a title="Saul Kripke" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke">Saul Kripke</a> | <a title="Thomas Samuel Kuhn" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn">Thomas Samuel Kuhn</a> | <a title="Bryan Magee" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Magee">Bryan Magee</a> | <a title="Ruth Barcan Marcus" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Barcan_Marcus">Ruth Barcan Marcus</a> | <a title="Colin McGinn" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_McGinn">Colin McGinn</a> | <a title="Thomas Nagel" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel">Thomas Nagel</a> | <a title="Robert Nozick" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nozick">Robert Nozick</a> | <a title="Martha Nussbaum" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Nussbaum">Martha Nussbaum</a> | <a title="Alvin Plantinga" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga">Alvin Plantinga</a> | <a title="Karl Popper" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper">Karl Popper</a> | <a title="Hilary Putnam" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam">Hilary Putnam</a> | <a title="W. V. Quine" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._V._Quine">W. V. Quine</a> | <a title="John Rawls" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls">John Rawls</a> | <a title="Richard Rorty" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty">Richard Rorty</a> | <a title="Roger Scruton" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton">Roger Scruton</a> | <a title="Peter Singer" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer">Peter Singer</a> | <a title="John Searle" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle">John Searle</a> | <a title="Charles Taylor (philosopher)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_%28philosopher%29">Charles Taylor</a> | Bernard Williams</td></tr><tr><td align="left" style="FONT-SIZE: 85%; BACKGROUND: #ccccff;"><a title="Continental philosophy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy">Continental</a> philosophers:</td></tr><tr><td align="center" style="FONT-SIZE: 90%;"><a title="Louis Althusser" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser">Louis Althusser</a> | <a title="Giorgio Agamben" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben">Giorgio Agamben</a> | <a title="Roland Barthes" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes">Roland Barthes</a> | <a title="Jean Baudrillard" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard">Jean Baudrillard</a> | <a title="Maurice Blanchot" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Blanchot">Maurice Blanchot</a> | <a title="Pierre Bourdieu" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu">Pierre Bourdieu</a> | <a title="Hélène Cixous" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Cixous">Hélène Cixous</a> | <a title="Guy Debord" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Debord">Guy Debord</a> | <a title="Gilles Deleuze" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze">Gilles Deleuze</a> | <a title="Jacques Derrida" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida">Jacques Derrida</a> | <a title="Michel Foucault" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault">Michel Foucault</a> | <a title="Hans-Georg Gadamer" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Georg_Gadamer">Hans-Georg Gadamer</a> | <a title="Jürgen Habermas" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas">Jürgen Habermas</a> | <a title="Werner Hamacher" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Hamacher">Werner Hamacher</a> | <a title="Julia Kristeva" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva">Julia Kristeva</a> | <a title="Henri Lefebvre" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Lefebvre">Henri Lefebvre</a> | <a title="Claude Lévi-Strauss" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss">Claude Lévi-Strauss</a> | <a title="Emmanuel Levinas" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas">Emmanuel Levinas</a> | <a title="Jean-François Lyotard" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard">Jean-François Lyotard</a> | <a title="Paul de Man" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_de_Man">Paul de Man</a> | <a title="Jean-Luc Nancy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Nancy">Jean-Luc Nancy</a> | <a title="Antonio Negri" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Negri">Antonio Negri</a> | <a title="Paul Ricoeur" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ricoeur">Paul Ricoeur</a> | <a title="Michel Serres" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Serres">Michel Serres</a> | <a title="Paul Virilio" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio">Paul Virilio</a> | <a title="Slavoj Zizek" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_Zizek">Slavoj Žižek</a></td></tr></tbody></table></center><div class="tright" style="BORDER-RIGHT: #aaa 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #aaa 1px solid; FONT-SIZE: 85%; BACKGROUND: #f9f9f9; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.5em; BORDER-LEFT: #aaa 1px solid; BORDER-BOTTOM: #aaa 1px solid;"><table style="BACKGROUND: none transparent scroll repeat 0% 0%;"><tbody><tr><td><div style="OVERFLOW: hidden; WIDTH: 32px; POSITION: relative; HEIGHT: 28px;"><div style="Z-INDEX: 2; LEFT: 0px; POSITION: absolute; TOP: 0px;"><a class="image" title="Portal

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inkFA-star.png"/></div></div><table class="persondata" id="persondata"><tbody><tr><th colspan="2"><a title="Wikipedia:Persondata" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Persondata">Persondata</a></th></tr><tr><td class="persondata-label">NAME</td><td>Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen</td></tr><tr><td class="persondata-label">ALTERNATIVE NAMES</td><td>Williams, Bernard</td></tr><tr><td class="persondata-label">SHORT DESCRIPTION</td><td>English philosopher</td></tr><tr><td class="persondata-label">DATE OF BIRTH</td><td><a title="September 21" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_21">September 21</a>, <a title="1929" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929">1929</a></td></tr><tr><td class="persondata-label">PLACE OF BIRTH</td><td><a title="Westcliff-on-Sea" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westcliff-on-Sea">Westcliff-on-Sea</a>, <a title="Essex" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex">Essex</a></td></tr><tr><td class="persondata-label">DATE OF DEATH</td><td><a title="June 10" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_10">June 10</a>, <a title="2003" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003">2003</a></td></tr><tr><td class="persondata-label">PLACE OF DEATH</td><td><a title="Rome" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome">Rome</a></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span id="interwiki-nl-fa"></span></p><div class="printfooter">Retrieved from "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams</a>"</div><div id="catlinks"><p class="catlinks"><a title="Special:Categories" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Categories">Categories</a>: <span dir="ltr"><a title="Category:1929 births" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1929_births">1929 births</a></span> | <span dir="ltr"><a title="Category:2003 deaths" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2003_deaths">2003 deaths</a></span> | <span dir="ltr"><a title="Category:20th century philosophers" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:20th_century_philosophers">20th century philosophers</a></span> | <span dir="ltr"><a title="Category:Fellows of King\'s College, Cambridge" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fellows_of_King%27s_College%2C_Cambridge">Fellows of King\'s College, Cambridge</a></span> | <span dir="ltr"><a title="Category:Academics of University College London" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Academics_of_University_College_London">Academics of University College London</a></span> | <span dir="ltr"><a title="Category:British philosophers" href=