Bernard Williams

Early Life and Education

Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was born on September 21, 1929, in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, England. He attended Chigwell School before winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Greats (classics and philosophy). After completing his degree, he served in the Royal Air Force in Canada during his national service, then returned to Oxford for graduate work.

Williams held positions at University College London, Bedford College, and King's College Cambridge (where he was Provost from 1979 to 1987), before moving to UC Berkeley in 1988 and later returning to Oxford as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy.

Critique of Utilitarianism

Williams's most influential contribution was his sustained critique of utilitarianism and, more broadly, of the aspiration of moral philosophy to produce a systematic theory that can adjudicate all ethical questions through a single principle. In "A Critique of Utilitarianism" (1973, published with J.J.C. Smart's defense of utilitarianism in Utilitarianism: For and Against), Williams argued that utilitarianism's demand to maximize aggregate welfare undermines personal integrity — the agent's identification with her own projects, commitments, and ground projects that give her life meaning.

The thought experiments of Jim and the Indians (a utilitarian would require Jim to kill one person to save twenty) and George the chemist (a utilitarian would require George to take a job in chemical weapons research) illustrated how utilitarianism treats the agent as a mere conduit for producing the best consequences, severing the essential connection between actions and the agent's character and commitments.

Moral Luck and Ethics

"Moral Luck" (1976) challenged the Kantian assumption that moral assessment should be immune to factors beyond the agent's control. Williams argued that our ethical assessments are in fact pervasively influenced by luck — whether a drunk driver kills someone, whether a gamble on abandoning one's family for art succeeds (the case of Gauguin) — and that attempts to purify morality of luck distort ethical experience.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) is Williams's most systematic work. It argued that the dominant moral theories (utilitarianism and Kantianism) share a flawed aspiration: to systematize ethics through a single overriding principle. Williams advocated instead for attention to the "thick" ethical concepts (courage, cruelty, gratitude) that are simultaneously descriptive and evaluative, and for a conception of ethical life that acknowledges its messiness, plurality, and resistance to theoretical codification.

Later Work: Truth, Genealogy, and the Greeks

Shame and Necessity (1993) challenged the view that the Greeks had a more "primitive" ethical psychology than moderns, arguing that Greek concepts of shame, responsibility, and agency are in many ways more psychologically sophisticated than modern guilt-based morality.

Truth and Truthfulness (2002), his final book, offered a genealogical defense of the values of truth and truthfulness. Against those who (following Nietzsche and poststructuralism) questioned the value of truth, Williams argued that truthfulness — understood as the dispositions of accuracy and sincerity — is essential to any form of human social life and cannot be dismissed without self-contradiction.

Williams died on June 10, 2003, in Rome, Italy. He was widely regarded as the most intellectually brilliant British philosopher of his generation.