"Cogito: In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy you criticize the attempts of Aristotle to found morality on human nature, and of Kant to found it on the nature of reason itself. But if all the big theories have indeed failed, and if there is no prospect of a successor, what is left of moral philosophy?
Williams: I think an awful lot is left of it. People are always asking, ‘What would you put in its place?’ If they mean, ‘What item(s) of the same sort would I put in its place?’, the answer is none. There is a great deal of difference between, on the one hand, theoretical structures that enable us to think about the relation of ethics to the world and, on the other hand, moral or ethical theories that are supposed to tell us how to decide what to do. The removal of the latter, which is the main focus of my book, seems to me to remove very little at the moral level. Take, for example, the ethics of Aristotle. Not everyone who is a good agent, on Aristotle’s view, needs to be armed with Aristotelian theory. In fact, one of the things he says in his book is that you won’t be able to understand it unless you are already a good agent. I simply do not believe that what keeps most people going through their ethical lives is something in the form of a theory; and I don’t think that what is needed to sustain moral life is philosophers’ producing more theories. I do accept that there are images and conceptions which help people to organize their experience, and may thus be useful at the political level. I have in mind images of what societies are—whether they are organic, or based on a contract, or whatever. Such images may help us to think about our relation to the State, what the powers of the State should be, and so on. Some sort of conceptual apparatus for thinking about these issues is especially important in modern society, where such things as open discussion and transparency are both particularly important and particularly vulnerable. And of course these political conceptions will have consequences and implications for ethics. On my view, it is a mistake to start with the theories of ethics and then ask what we are to do if they are all discredited. Rather, we should say, ‘Look, we find ourselves living under certain kinds of pressures to make the world sensible to ourselves. How much and what kind of theory do we need?’ Then we’ll see how ‘theoretical’ the structures will need to be to serve their purpose.
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We also have to accept, in my view, that human affairs are largely shaped by luck, contingency, and even absurdity. People sometimes do find themselves in situations that seem to them to be absurdly, even surreally horrible. There is therefore a tension here. Ethical thought is bound to address itself to the usual—that’s almost a matter of necessity. But we live in a world in which the usual is constantly subverted by contingency, absurdity, and horror. How can we reconcile those two things? It may help to distinguish here, not between the fantastic and the real, but between extraordinary and ordinary cases. Having made this distinction, I think there are two things we can say about the use of extraordinary examples. The first is that the extraordinary should be represented in realistic terms. If we draw our extraordinary examples from science fiction, or from wildly counterfactual stories, the effect can be very misleading. It insulates you from their horror, for one thing. Also, it confuses the difference between the fantastic and the extraordinary because, by being contrary to the laws of nature, such examples make us think that the extraordinary belongs to another world. And it’s very important that it doesn’t. So we should take realistic examples of the extraordinary. Some of the torture and threat cases are relevant here, e.g. those that turn on the sorts of threat that actual terrorists do use. Take, for example, being in a room with twenty innocent people, where the terrorists take one out of the room every hour and shoot them. Questions about what you should do in cases like that are, I think, perfectly proper in moral philosophy. The second consideration which is very important here is whether the extraordinary case is one from which anything can be learned. One of the troubles about the method of principle and counter-example in moral philosophy is that it always assumes that the case is one from which you can learn something of a general kind, that is, that you can modify your principle. Now some cases are of this kind: what you may learn is that a certain kind of extraordinary case is continually coming up, so you’d better be prepared for it. But consider, on the other hand, the sort of extraordinary case that comes up in tragic drama. Such cases may teach us something about moral psychology, but nothing about general questions of moral principle. Some moral philosophers seem to think that the whole of the moral world can be tamed by principle, and if your current principles aren’t serving too well, you should get yourself some more complicated ones. But not every form of extreme situation should be reacted to in that way.
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I suppose I was also dimly aware of something that Nietzsche reminds us of, which is that the material conditions for the production of things of value, including morality itself, often rest on the violation of morality. I’ve always been impressed by the thought that if you took morality absolutely as seriously as it demands, almost nothing that we value would exist. It seems to me that this conflict requires us to rethink entirely the balance between rules and constraints, on the one hand, and various sorts of creativity on the other.
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Cogito: In 1979 the Williams Report was published, the report of a committee you chaired on pornography. In view of your rather modest conception of the competence of moral philosophy, what role do you think philosophers can and should play in the formation of public policy on such matters?
Williams: I don’t have modest views about the competence of moral philosophy. Or rather, I have modest views about one thing in particular: its supposed authority as based on theory. It seems to me that a lot of the pretensions of moral philosophy to contribute to public policy are based on a false view of its authority as based on theory. The idea seems to be that someone will turn up on a Royal Commission, or a hospital board, and claim to have an authoritative voice because they have taken a degree in moral philosophy, or have a PhD in applied ethics, or whatever, I really do think that, taken at face value, this is just nonsense. You can get an academic qualification without having any practical judgement whatever; and how can we expect that someone who hasn’t got any judgement in other matters will be competent to make good decisions in, say, medical ethics? However, I don’t underestimate the powers of moral philosophy— particularly if it’s historically informed—to serve a number of valuable roles in relation to public policy. For one thing, it’s helpful in sorting out one argument from another. I am strongly opposed to the claim that analytic expertise is a monopoly of philosophers—that, I think, is an insult to other people who think clearly about anything—but there is a certain level of abstraction that philosophers, in virtue of their analytic training, may help with.
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Second, some expertise in moral philosophy may help you to get some hold on aspirations and ideals that are rather ill-defined, and to focus them onto a particular case. They may help you to see that a certain dispute is a species of a more general kind of argument, or resembles an argument that is going on in another area. If you are lucky and approach the matter in the right way, you may be able to unite ethical ideas from apparently very different domains. So I don’t think that moral philosophy is all that limited in relation to public policy; I think its limitation is only in respect of a false model of its authority as based upon theory. A further point about the pornography case is that you have to remember that the report was a public policy document of a very special kind, namely, a legislative proposal within a given state. As such, it is a public document, and one that must couch itself in terms of the discourse of that politics and that legislature. For instance, suppose that my colleagues on that commission and I had felt that the constitution of the USA was much better in this respect than that of England, because it founds pornography legislation on the First Amendment, on a right of free speech of a very unqualified kind. It would have been no good our saying, ‘Everyone has an absolute right to free speech, as expressed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution’, because that is not part of the political tradition in which we were operating. You have to start from the law, and the understanding of the law, that are already in place. This produces a particular kind of political discourse. It’s not necessarily conservative, but it has to be continuous, i.e. it must address itself to the ideas that are expressed in existing institutions and practices. Moral philosophy may help here because it may help you to see what is essential and what is not. But of course it isn’t sufficient, because you still have to have the political judgement to determine what is practicable.
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Cogito: Campaigners for a ban on pornography have traditionally cast their argument in causal terms—porn is sometimes defined as material that will ‘deprave and corrupt’. Now according to conventional views about causality, causal claims involve us in counterfactual conditionals, i.e. claims about what would have happened if… But claims about what would have been the case raise notorious problems for philosophers interested in their truthconditions. Do you think such propositions have definite truth-conditions? And if so, could we hope to know them? Or is this an area in which ideological bias will always prevail on either side?
Williams: I don’t think that the metaphysical issues about the truth of counterfactuals are relevant here, because there are clearly acceptable counterfactuals about public matters. For example, we may all agree that if certain events hadn’t happened at Chernobyl, there would not have been an explosion; or that if a lot of people hadn’t started smoking, the incidence of lung cancer would be much lower. So I’m not worried about that. There is, however, another feature of counterfactuals which is clearly relevant to public policy debates. In philosophers’ jargon, counterfactuals are not monotonic—that is, you can’t get from ‘if p then q’ to ‘if p and r, then q’. This is of course the whole basis of David Lewis’ theory of counterfactuals, which relies on the similarity of possible worlds.
Cogito: Your most recent book is entitled Shame and Necessity. Can you give our readers, in a few words, some idea of its contents?
Williams: It’s a study, in good part a historical study, of ethical ideas found in the earliest ancient Greek literature, particularly Homer and the tragedians. I’m concerned mainly with literature that was written before Socrates and Plato, although there is some discussion of Aristotle. Its negative aim is to combat a certain view of our relation to those ethical ideas, a view that I label ‘progressivism’. On this view, the ancient Greeks had certain primitive, elementary, pre-modern (even pre-moral) ethical ideas on such matters as moral responsibility, guilt, and so on. That progressivist view is associated with celebrating what all of us will regard as improvements: the abolition of chattel slavery, an improved respect for the equality of women, and so on. My thesis in brief is, firstly, that the ethical ideas of ancient Greece have been misunderstood; secondly, that we have much more in common with the ancient Greeks than we believe. A lot of the ideas that actually ‘keep us going’ are fundamentally the same, I argue, as those of that world; and in so far as ours are different in some respects, they may even be worse. We have fooled ourselves into believing that we have a more purified notion of moral responsibility than we have. This belief is thus a form of illusion. To the extent that our situation represents progress or an improvement over theirs, understanding that progress requires the ancient ideas rather than our modern ones. Put another way, the degree of self-understanding of post-Enlightenment ethics is rather poor. I don’t want to take the archaising, reactionary view and say, ‘The Enlightenment has been a terrible disaster— back to the Greeks!’ If you were to go all the way back to the ancient Greeks, you’d get a very black picture indeed. Of course there has been some progress: our ethical situation is not theirs, because the modern world isn’t the ancient world. But there is more in common, ethically, than people think, and we actually mislead ourselves when we suppose otherwise.
"Bernard Williams" in, Andrew Pyle, Key Philosophers Conversation, Loc. 2759-76, 2910-24.
