Life and Thought
Bernard Williams (1929–2003) was a British philosopher and one of the most prominent moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Through his critique of utilitarian and Kantian moral theories and concepts such as "moral luck" and personal integrity, he defended an ethics closer to the real lives, history and psychology of human beings. *Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy* (1985) is among his principal works.
Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was born on 21 September 1929 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, England. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and went on to teach at Oxford and in London. From 1967 to 1979 he was Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, and he then served as Provost of King's College until 1987. Later he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and again at Oxford, as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy. He also chaired a committee that reported in the late 1970s on obscenity and film censorship, known as the Williams Report. He was knighted in 1999 and died in Rome on 10 June 2003.
His major works include *Morality* (1972), *Utilitarianism: For and Against* (1973, with J. J. C. Smart), *Problems of the Self* (1973), *Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry* (1978), *Moral Luck* (1981), *Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy* (1985), *Shame and Necessity* (1993), *Making Sense of Humanity* (1995) and *Truth and Truthfulness* (2002). The collections *In the Beginning Was the Deed* (2005) and *The Sense of the Past* (2006) appeared after his death.
Williams opposed what he called the "morality system": an ethics that tries to reduce all human values to general, impartial duties and principles, whether utilitarian or Kantian. In his view, such an approach neglects a person's integrity, that is, their commitment to the projects and attachments that give their life its shape. In his essay "Moral Luck" he argued that moral judgement of people inevitably depends on factors beyond their control. He also tied reasons for action to the agent's own "subjective motivational set" (internal reasons) and stressed the role of "thick" ethical concepts such as courage and cruelty.
To rethink ethics he turned to the Greeks, and in *Shame and Necessity* he showed that Greek ethics, with its notions of shame, fate and responsibility, is richer than some modern conceptions. In *Truth and Truthfulness* he grounded the value of truth in the two virtues of accuracy and sincerity, defending it through a genealogical method inspired by Nietzsche. The historicity of values and humility before the complexity of moral life are enduring themes of his work.