Among the many promises of the Enlightenment was the promise that morality, hitherto grounded, it was claimed, on nothing more worthy of respect than religious authority or the habits of the tribe, should henceforth be founded upon Reason. Among the major figures of the Enlightenment, Hume alone found the whole project suspect. The major moral philosophies of the period, most notably those of Kant and Bentham, are attempts to ground morality in rational reflection by representing moral injunctions as the outcome of a determinate process of ratiocination conducted by the moral agent himself. Moral Thought was born.
These ideas retain a powerful hold upon us. It is not just that the major architects of Enlightenment thought upon these questions remain the staple of university courses in Ethics. By and large we — liberal intellectuals, that is — are still prepared to buy into the Enlightenment dream of a community of free and reflective individuals who elaborate their collective moral outlook through some process of open, rational discussion.
It is thus not entirely decent to enquire whether a reflectively grounded morality is in fact an intelligible goal. This is Williams’ question in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. And although there is some suggestion that he takes himself to be answering it with an extremely qualified ‘yes’, the general impression left by the book strikes me as a good deal less positive.
The book presents itself, to be sure, as calling into question more the pretensions of philosophy than the rationality of morals. It sets itself up, that is to say, as an attack on the claim of academic philosophy to fulfill the promise of a rationally grounded morality. Williams aims for ‘a scepticism that is more about philosophy than it is about ethics’ (p.74). And even then, not every kind of philosophical talk about ethics is in his sights.
There could be a way of doing moral philosophy that started from the ways in which we experience ethical life . . . it would involve a phenomenology of the ethical life. This could be a good philosophy, but it would be unlikely to yield an ethical theory. (p.95)
Ethical Theory, then, is Williams’ real target, an ethical theory being ‘a theoretical account of what ethical thought and practice are, which account either implies a general test for the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles; or else implies that there cannot be such a test.’ (p.72) Almost the whole menagerie of such theories still thought worth discussing are paraded through the pages of this quite slim book, from Aristotle to Rawls’ contractarianism, to Professor R.M. Hare’s latest version of utilitarianism. Such breadth of scope means that for quite a lot of the time the argument is at best sketchy and at worst perfunctory. The closest we get to Williams’ usual style of clear, penetrating and sometimes devastating analysis is in the critique of Hare on pp.82-92, to my mind the best bit of the book, considered as an original piece of philosophy. On the other hand there are copious references to the large recent literature on these issues, which supplement Williams’ remarks and to some extent flesh out the skeleton of his argument.
Ethical theories fail, Williams argues, because they offer ways of testing for the correctness of ‘basic ethical beliefs.’ There can be no such test, because in this context the notion of correctness itself is suspect. One of Williams’ few upbeat claims in the book is that ‘the natural sciences, at least, are capable of objective truth’ (p.198), and in a chapter on ‘Relativism and Reflection’ he remonstrates with Richard Rorty, who happened at this moment to have appointed himself Chief Mocker in this particular temple. Williams needs scientific Realism because his claim is that it is by contrast with the objectivity of science that the claims of morality to possess an objective foundation look so pitiful. Williams grants that in the application of what he calls ‘thick’ moral concepts (treachery, promise, brutality, courage are examples offered on p.129) we may be ‘guided by the world’: i.e., that it can just be a matter of fact whether, for instance, somebody has made a promise or behaved treacherously. Moreover he rejects the usual method of debunking this suggestion: that of distinguishing two components of meaning, one ‘descriptive’, the other ‘prescriptive’, in each such judgment. In order to grasp the meaning of a concept like treachery or promise, Williams insists, an observer cannot just grasp its ‘factual content’: he/she must ‘grasp imaginatively its evaluative point’ (p.142).
This argument is sometimes taken as establishing at a stroke that moral judgments are as ‘objective’ as factual judgments of any other kind. Williams argues, however (Chapter 8), in what seems to me to be the pivotal move of the book, that this is a non-sequitur. One can understand the evaluative point of a moral concept, he argues, and even grant that statements couched in terms of it may be simply, factually, true, without oneself being in the least inclined to use that concept in one’s own moral thinking, and without granting that statements couched in terms of it have, even if true, the slightest moral weight (except for others who do use the concept in their moral thinking).
The barrier that Williams seeks to erect earlier in the book between scepticism about moral theory as concocted by philosophers, and scepticism about ethics itself, seems at this point to have collapsed. Someone who doubted the Enlightenment prospectus for an objective ethics grounded in philosophical reflection merely because he doubted whether philosophy was up to the task, might still think it possible to retreat to the firm ground (to him/her) of a theologically or intuitively based casuistry. Such a retreat is not possible to someone who thinks, as Williams does, that rational reflection undermines not only its own prospectus for an objectively grounded morality, but every other as well. According to Williams the only conditions under which men and women can rest entirely secure in the possession of ‘thick’ moral concepts are those of a ‘hypertraditional society’, in which the alarming consequences of the essentially bottomless character of moral disagreement remain unrealized only because there just is, as it happens, no moral disagreement. Any disagreement, however, will serve to start the process of reflection that leads, allegedly, to Williams’ brand of subjectivism.
One danger of this, it seems to me, is that it contributes to a rather prevalent climate of nostalgia for the ‘hypertraditional society.’ Of course Williams could reasonably claim that his argument, if sound, demonstrates precisely the absurdity of any such nostalgia. There can be no going back. ‘There is no route back from reflectiveness’ (p.163). Against that must be set, though, the dubious power of the attractive (to some) but extremely qualified and tentative moral stance that Williams propounds in the last few chapters of the book to resist the corrosive power of his own subjectivism.
In these closing chapters Williams argues for a qualified return to something like the Aristotelian conception of ethics as rooted in a fairly loose and unsystematic reflection on the relationship between practice and wellbeing. He advocates a corresponding abandonment of the idea that anything important about morality can be discussed in terms of a notion of strict obligation which abstracts entirely from circumstance and feeling and depends upon a quite unrealistic voluntarism. He argues that we need to cease thinking of moral judgment as open to a demand for conviction, and to opt instead for a more modest notion of moral confidence, construed as an essentially social phenomenon which may, even so, persist in individuals when it is lacking in society.
He suggests that, while ethical thought ‘will never entirely appear as what it is, and can never fully manifest the fact that it rests in human dispositions’ (pp.199-200), still it is possible to hope that ‘ethical thought should stand up to reflection, and that its institutions and practices should be capable of becoming transparent.’ (p.199). Such a ‘transparent’ ethics may be able to rely to some extent on ‘thick’ ethical concepts. In any event an ethics founded upon confidence rather than conviction, which partially recognises its own subjectivity and avoids Kantian rigorism, will perhaps leave more room for the
meaningful life, one that does not reject society, and indeed shares its perceptions with other people to a considerable depth, but is enough unlike others, in its opacities and disorder as well as its reasoned intentions, to make it somebody’s. (pp201-202)
Vague as this is, it would be difficult not to understand the attractions, to a certain sort of liberal mind, of the image it conjures up of a happy truce somehow to be arranged between the forces of social conformism, wild personal idiosyncrasy and genuinely rational independence of mind. But to what extent are Williams’ would-be amiable conclusions undercut by the very scepticism that is supposed to sustain them? If ethical thought can ‘never fully manifest the fact that it rests in human dispositions,’ presumably because that fact only has to be clearly recognized for ethical thought and its ‘thick ethical concepts’ to lose the power to command credence, then it seems to follow that the closer we get to Williams’ ideal of a process of ethical thought that would be ‘transparent’ to reflection, the closer we get to the collapse of moral confidence. Williams’ ethics, to say the least, skates on decidedly thin ice.
That in turn may make one wonder whether a subjectivism as far-reaching as Williams’ can really be extracted from the bare fact of ethical disagreement. What is fatal to objectivism in that fact, according to Williams, is that it opens up the possibility of grasping the evaluative point of a ‘thick ethical concept’ current in another culture (Sicilian family honor, say) without feeling the least inclination to grant that concept moral weight in one’s own life. Seeing that, so Williams’ story goes, we see that our own dearest moral notions have as little title to represent a commonly accessible (and thus ‘objective’) moral reality. And so we reach, as Williams puts it on p.148, ‘the notably un-Socratic conclusion that, in ethics, reflection can destroy knowledge‘ (his italics).
It is certainly true that it is often possible for me, as an observer of human affairs, to disengage myself from the entire social and institutional framework within which a certain moral concept operates, and so to free myself from the power of that concept to direct my actions: to turn it into a mere sociological fact, external to my own life and concerns. But it is much easier to do this with some moral concepts than with others, and impossible to do it with all moral concepts at once. Take, for instance, treachery, one of Williams’ own examples of ‘thick ethical concepts.’ To grasp the ‘evaluative point’ of the notion of betrayal I need, surely, to grasp among other things why there is an essential, conceptual connection between betrayal and certain sorts of emotional response to it, such as bitterness on the part of the betrayed, and also why certain sorts of relationship, such as friendship or an innocent, uncalculating commitment to membership of a political or religious group, cannot survive betrayal. It is not clear how I could fully comprehend these things if I had never been a friend or an innocent. But if I have, then friendship and innocence will be for me, among other phenomena, such as trust, that we are inclined to think of as ‘psychological’, but whose very descriptions are saturated with the ethical, matters that enter into the very constitution of my identity as an individual human being. But in that case two conclusions follow. On the one hand, the relationships of conceptual compatibility and incompatibility holding between such things as friendship, brotherhood, trust, betrayal and bitterness, since they are definitive of the nature of things of which I have direct, living experience, will appear to me as an array of real relationships between real things. And on the other hand, factual questions about betrayal will possess potentially action-determining moral weight for me because such things as friendship, innocence and trust, given that they are in part constitutive of my identity as a person, possess primordial moral weight for me.
If this is my situation, then whether I am a member of a ‘hypertraditional’ society, or of our own shambling and unpersuaded one, the bare thought that ethics ‘rests on human dispositions’ will possess no power to unseat my conviction that friendship, trust and innocence are, wherever they exist, real features of human life, and that treachery, when it occurs, matters morally. Of course in the thin air of the philosophy seminar one could try to secure Williams’ position by imagining an ideal observer who disengages himself entirely from trust, friendship, straightforward political commitment and every other human relational entanglement that could hinder him from perceiving the concept treachery in the manner Williams suggests, as a curious and intrinsically morally weightless social construct having no roots in anything seriously describable as reality. But now one faces a further question: in doing this, has such an ideal observer elevated himself to a higher epistemic level, on which he is able to perceive how things really stand; or has he merely rendered certain realities of human life invisible to him, in the manner of a contentious physical theorist who smashes a radio set in order not to be forced to recognize the existence of tracts of the electromagnetic spectrum uncongenial to his preferred physical theory?
Somewhere or other, any life that we can envisage as human must strike root in some system of relationships between persons, and where it strikes root the specific kinds of interpersonal entanglement in which it roots itself will render visible, to him/her, moral realities and concomitant values whose demands no individuality so rooted can avoid regarding — whatever he or she may actually do in response to then — as possessing, prima-facie, moral weight. Any one of those demands, no doubt, is in principle capable of being nullified — returned to the oblivion of invisibility — by some sufficiently radical act of withdrawal and self-deracination. But such acts can release me from the sway of moral demand per se only by committing me to the radical solitude entailed by total disengagement from the human world.
There is, in short, a gap, part logical, part existential, between Williams’ perfectly correct observation that moral values ‘rest in human dispositions’ and the devastating and all-embracing scepticism that he imagines to flow from it. The passage from (an essentially mythical) ‘hypertraditional society’ to his own brand of global disillusionment about morality is thus, for my money, less straightforward, less negotiable, and less inevitable than Williams would like to make out.
Note: This review of Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London: Fontana/Collins (1985), originally appeared, in a slightly different version, in the Universities Quarterly, 40:4 (1986), pp. 427-432.