Williams Bernard (b.1929), English philosopher who has made major contributions to many fields but is primarily known as a moral philosopher. His approach to ethics, set out in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), is characterized by a wide-ranging skepticism, directed mainly at the capacity of academic moral philosophy to further the aim of reflectively living an ethical life.
One line of skeptical argument attacks the very idea of practical reason. Attributions of practical reasons to a particular agent must, in Williams’s view, be attributions of states that can potentially explain the agent’s action. Therefore such reasons must be either within the agent’s existing set of motivations or within the revised set of motivations that the agent would acquire upon sound reasoning. Williams argues from these minimal assumptions that this view of reasons as internal reasons undermines the idea of reason itself being a source of authority over practice.
Williams’s connected skepticism about the claims of moral realism is based both on his general stance toward realism and on his view of the nature of modern societies. In opposition to internal realism, Williams has consistently argued that reflection on our conception of the world allows one to develop a conception of the world maximally independent of our peculiar ways of conceptualizing reality – an absolute conception of the world. Such absoluteness is, he argues, an inappropriate aspiration for ethical thought. Our ethical thinking is better viewed as one way of structuring a form of ethical life than as the ethical truth about how life is best lived. The pervasive reflectiveness and radical pluralism of modern societies makes them inhospitable contexts for viewing ethical concepts as making knowledge available to groups of concept users. Modernity has produced at the level of theory a distortion of our ethical practice, namely a conception of the morality system. This view is reductionist, is focused centrally on obligations, and rests on various fictions about responsibility and blame that Williams challenges in such works as Shame and Necessity (1993). Much academic moral philosophy, in his view, is shaped by the covert influence of the morality system, and such distinctively modern outlooks as Kantianism and utilitarianism monopolize the terms of contemporary debate with insufficient attention to their origin in a distorted view of the ethical. Williams’s views are not skeptical through and through; he retains a commitment to the values of truth, truthfulness in a life, and individualism. His most recent work, which thematizes the long-implicit influence of Nietzsche on his ethical philosophy, explicitly offers a vindicatory ‘genealogical’ narrative for these ideals. See also EXTERNALISM , MORALITY, MORAL REALISM , NIETZSCHE , PRACTICAL REASO. A.T.