Bernard Williams BIOGRAPHY

Bernard Williams

BIOGRAPHY

Bernard Williams received the M.A. degree from Oxford University, but has received honorary degrees from the University of Dublin, the University of Aberdeen, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Chicago. Initially moved to study the Latin and Greek languages and literature, Williams’ interests quickly turned to politics and philosophy. Some of his early influences at Oxford were Gilbert Ryle, and David Pears; but Williams' thought is also drawn from the works of Wittgenstein and Hume. Recently, Williams work has drawn increasingly from Nietzsche.

Williams has also served on several government committees in England, including the Royal Commission on Gambling, Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, the Labour Party's Commission on Social Justice, and participated in the Independent Inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act (1997-2000).

From 1967 through 1986 Williams was a member of the Board of Sadler's Wells Opera (later the English National Opera). He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1971 and Foreign Honorable Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1983. He has been awarded honorary; he was knighted in 1999.

CAN LUCK MAKE A MORAL DIFFERENCE?

Williams is highly skeptical of the Kantian view of morality and what he sees as prevalent ideas about it: morality is a supreme value that is immune to luck. The influence of luck is felt at almost everywhere. A spin of the roulette wheel can make one person terribly wealthy, while the costs of a traffic accident are almost impossible to calculate. Some seem to have all the luck, some can never catch a break. Luck can give one person a leg up; but it can also hold people under its boot. Even characteristics like speed, strength or health are often described as results of a “genetic lottery.” Cancer is often a consequence of being unlucky enough to grow up near a Superfund cite. Regardless, we often think of luck as affecting our happiness, successes, and health in a multiplicity of ways.

WILLIAMS ON RATIONALITY AND MORALITY

Williams begins by noting that it is impossible to foresee the success of a discussion before it was made for instance. It would be impossible to tell if Gauguin would succeed at becoming a great painter. Even if Gauguin had reason to think he would succeed, he could not be sure what would come of that talent, nor whether the decision to leave his family would help or hinder the development of that talent. In the end, no success would justify Gauguin’s choice according to Williams. Similarly, the only thing that could show Gauguin to be rationally unjustified is failure. To the extent that success depends on luck, rational justification therefore depends on luck.

What, if anything, does this have to do with morality? Williams hopes to inflict fatal damage on the notion of the moral by setting up a collision between rational and moral justification. Rational justification, Williams has suggested, is, at least partly, a matter of luck. Moral justification, as we have noted, is not supposed to be a matter of luck at all. This clearly leaves room for clashes between the two sorts of justification, cases in which an action is morally unjustified, but rationally justified (or vice versa).
Williams' point is not that morality is the only source of value, but that it is the supreme source of value. On this picture, the mere fact that morality and rationality collide does not necessarily pose a problem. The possibility that rationality and morality may be distinct sources of value is no more troubling than the fact that morality and pleasure are distinct sources of value. There can be more than one source of value so long as moral value trumps these other sorts of value.
The example of Gauguin is meant to suggest that morality is not the supreme source of value after all. We are supposedly stuck between two unpalatable options. If we are in a situation in which moral value and another value (i.e., rationality) clash and the other value can be the winner. This sort of move will eliminate the threat that rationality poses to morality's supremacy, but this occurs at the expense of one of our deep commitments about morality, namely, its invulnerability to luck. Either way, the notion of morality fails to escape intact. This, anyway, is what Williams would have us believe.

CRITIQUE OF WILLIAMS

Despite all the attention that Williams' articles have generated, his argument is actually remarkably unimpressive. It is not clear, for instance, that moral value has to be the supreme sort of value. Why can't it just be an important sort of value (and, according to what value are the various sorts of value to be ranked anyway)? Moreover, what is there to stop us from saying that our gratitude (if we have any) that Gauguin did what he did is just misguided and so that this is not a case in which it is better that the rational thing rather than the moral thing happened? It may be that our gratitude is no indicator of whether or not it is better that Gauguin did as he did.

These large problems aside, there is an even more basic problem with Williams' argument. It rests on a claim about rational justification that can quite easily be made to look doubtful. At the heart of Williams' argument is the claim that a rational justification for a particular decision can only be given after the fact. This is what allows luck to enter into rational justification. If we do not accept this claim, Williams has given us no reason to think that either rational or moral justification is a matter of luck and so we cease to have a reason to imagine a conflict between rationality and morality (on these grounds anyway). If so, Williams has given us no reason to think that either rational or moral justification is a matter of luck. What's more, there is good reason to doubt the claim that rational justification must sometimes be retrospective. The usual intuition about justification is that if we want to know whether Gauguin's decision to leave his family and become a painter was a rational one, what we need to consider is the information Gauguin had available to him when he made that decision. What did he have reason to believe would be the fate of his family? What indication did he have that he had the potential to become a great painter? Did he have good reason to think his family would hinder his quest after greatness? Did he have reason to believe a move to the South Seas would help him achieve his goal? And so on. Our standard picture of justification tells us that, regardless of how things turned out, the answer to the question about Gauguin's justification is to be found in the answers to the above questions. Luck is thought to have nothing to do with his justification. Indeed, if Gauguin is found to have been somehow relying on luck -- if, for example, he had never painted anything, but just somehow felt he had greatness in him -- this would weigh substantially against the rationality of his decision. The same could be said of the moral status of his decision: what counts is the information he had at the time, not how things turned out.
Williams does have an argument against this picture of justification, albeit an ineffective one. He appeals to the notion of agent regret. Agent regret is a species of regret a person can feel only towards his or her own actions. It involves a 'taking on' of the responsibility for some action and the desire to make amends for it. Williams' example is of a lorry driver who "through no fault of his" runs over a small child. (Williams, 1993a, 43) He rightly says that the driver will feel a sort of regret at the death of this child that no one else will feel. The driver, after all, caused the child's death. Furthermore, we expect agent regret to be felt even in cases in which we do not think the agent was at fault. If we are satisfied that the driver could have done nothing else to prevent the child's death, we will try to console him by telling him this. But, as Williams observes, we would think much less of the driver if he showed no regret at all, saying only 'It's a terrible thing that has happened, but I did everything I could to avoid it.' Williams suggests that a conception of rationality that does not involve retrospective justification has no room for agent regret and so is "an insane concept of rationality." (Williams, 1993a, 44) His worry is that if rationality is all a matter of what is the case when we make our decisions and leaves no room for the luck that finds its way into consequences, then the lorry driver ought not to experience agent regret, but instead should simply remind himself that he did all he could. This, however, just does not follow.
The problem is that, in any plausible case of this sort, it will not be rational for the driver to believe that he could not have driven more safely. Driving just isn't like that. Indeed, what it is rational for the driver to do is to suspect there was something else he could have done which might have saved the life of the child. If he had just been a little more alert or driving a little closer to the centre of the road. If he had been driving a little more slowly. If he had seen the child playing near the street. If his brakes had been checked more recently and so on. It will be rational for him to wonder whether he could have done more to avoid this tragedy and so also rational for him feel a special sort of regret at the death of the child. (See Rosebury, 1995, 514-515 for this point.) Agent regret exists because we can almost never be sure we did 'everything we could'. Thus it provides us with no reason to believe there is a retrospective component to rational justification (and so no reason to conclude that luck plays the role in justification Williams suggests).
None of this is to deny that the way things turn out may figure in the justifications people give for their past actions. It is just that, despite this, the way things turn out has nothing to do with whether or not those past actions really were justified. Sometimes the way things turn out may be all we have to go on, but this tells us nothing about the actual justification or lack thereof of our actions, not unless we confuse the state of an action being justified with the activity of justifying that action after the fact.
Why then have Williams' claims about moral luck been taken so seriously? Because despite the shakiness of the argument he in fact gave, he pointed the way towards a much more interesting and troubling argument about moral luck. This argument, glimpses of which can be found in Williams' paper, is explicitly made in Thomas Nagel's response to Williams.

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