[Pre-2021 highlights](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KfOMG2Qnoj6wKiwPp9g17u9ahbM1kQrhK9lExuqIHmU/edit#). See also [[=Thomas Nagel]], [[=Richard Rorty]]. Inbox: - Re-read SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard/ - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard/#Bib - WME: World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams, J.E.J.Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), with “Replies” by Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. - IBD: In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, Geoffrey Hawthorn (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. - History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection,” in Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 210–218. - Reasons, Values and the Theory of Persuasion,” in Ethics, Rationality and Economic Behavior, Francesco Farina, Frank Hahn and Stafano Vannucci (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 66–76. - Why Philosophy Needs History”, London Review of Books, October 17, 2002, 7–9. - Donald McDonald, “The uses of Philosophy”, The Center Magazine, November/December 1983, pp. 40–49, available online: http://web.archive.org/web/20050221085049/http://www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/web/res/bwilliams.usephil.html - Greco, Lorenzo, 2007, “Humean Reflections in the Ethics of Bernard Williams”, Utilitas: A Journal of Utilitarian Studies, 19 (3): 312–325. - Greenway, William, 2007, “Modern Metaphysics, Dangerous Truth, Post-Moral Ethics: The Revealing Vision of Bernard Williams”, Philosophy Today, 51 (2): 137–151. - McGinn, Colin, 2003, “Isn’t it the truth?”, New York Review of Books, April 10, 2003, available online. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/apr/10/isnt-it-the-truth/ - Moore, Adrian, 2003, “Williams on Ethics, Thick Knowledge, and Reflection”, Philosophy, 78: 337–354. - Sleat, Matt, 2007, “Making Sense of Our Political Lives — On the Political Thought of Bernard Williams”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 10 (3): 389–398. - Smyth, Nicholas, 2018, “Integration and authority: rescuing the ‘one thought too many’ problem”, The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1: 1–19. - Thomas, Alan (ed.), 2007, Bernard Williams: Contemporary Philosophers in Focus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Wolf, Susan, 1997, “Meaning and Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 97: 299–315. - Look for Williams writing on Rorty - Re-read all of Williams' intros to Nietzsche books - Callcut, Daniel, 2008, Reading Bernard Williams, London: Routledge. - Plato: The Invention of Philosophy’, a superb tribute to this magical, protean, essentially unacademic figure. - an essay on Sidgwick included in The Sense of the Past, and in ‘The Primacy of Dispositions’ and ‘The Structure of Hare’s Theory’ in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. - Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom’ is only seven pages long, but it applies Williams’s characteristic resistance to excessive justification to the problem of punishment. (It should be read together with the discussion of blame in ‘Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology’ in The Sense of the Past.) Williams argues that the concept of moral responsibility has a use in dealing with our response to offences, but that it should not be taken too seriously and should not be turned into something metaphysically profound. - Williams' book on Descartes - 1972 Morality; '73 Problems of the Self, Utilitarianism For and Against (with JJC Smart); '78 Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry; '81 Moral Luck; '85 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy; '93 Shame and Necessity; '95 Making Sense of Humanity; '98 Plato; 2002 Truth and Truthfulness. - Dancy, Jonathan, 2004, Ethics without Principles, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ## Postscript to ELP We must reject any model of personal practical thought according to which all my projects, purposes, and needs should be made, discursively and at once, considerations for me. I must deliberate from what I am. Truthfulness requires trust in that as well, and not the obsessional and doomed drive to eliminate it. ## The point of view of the universe: Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics My own view is that no ethical theory can render a coherent account of its own relation to practice: it will always run into some version of the fundamental difficulty that the practice of life, and hence also an adequate theory of that practice, will require the recognition of what I have called deep dispositions; but at the same time the abstract and impersonal view that is required if the theory is to be genuinely a theory cannot be satisfactorily understood in relation to the depth and necessity of those dispositions. Thus the theory will remain, in one way or another, in an incoherent relation to practice. ## Richard Rorty reviews Truth and Truthfulness by Bernard Williams https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n21/richard-rorty/to-the-sunlit-uplands Highlight [page 1]: From there it is a short step to Spinoza’s conclusion that ‘God’s decrees and commandments, and consequently God’s Providence are, in truth, nothing but Nature’s order.’ Highlight [page 1]: Nietzsche said that ‘we simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of attempting to cope better with the world round about us, you are likely to ҄find yourself described as a danger to the health of society: philosophers sympathetic to this line of thought now ҄find themselves called Postmodernists, and are viewed with the same hostility as Spinozists were three hundred years ago. If you agree with Dewey that the search for truth is just a particular species of the search for happiness, you will be accused of asserting something so counter-intuitive that only a lack of intellectual responsibility can account for your behaviour… Highlight [page 2]: Most non-philosophers would regard the choice between correspondence-to-reality and pragmatist ways of describing the search for truth as a scholastic quibble of the kind that only a professor of philosophy could be foolish enough to get excited about. Underline [page 2]: But reading books like Israel’s helps us remember that those who grow passionate on one or the other side of arcane and seemingly pointless disputes are struggling with the question of what self-image it would be best for human beings to have. So it is with the dispute about truth that has been going on among the philosophy professors ever since the days of Nietzsche and James. That dispute boils down to the question of whether, in our pursuit of truth, we must answer only to our fellow human beings, or also to something non-human, such as the Way Things Really Are In Themselves. Highlight [page 2]: Nietzsche thought the latter notion was a surrogate for God, and that we would be stronger, freer, better human beings if we could bring ourselves to dispense with all such surrogates: to stop wanting to have ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ on our side. Highlight [page 2]: Contemporary philosophers who invoke Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas in order to strengthen their criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth typically share Nietzsche’s hope. They believe that the institutions and practices their critics see as threatened will in fact be strengthened by adopting pragmatist philosophical views. Analogously, Christians who hid their copies of Spinoza’s writings under their beds, and who were inspired by them to dream of a secularised culture and a politically liberal society, believed that the true message of Christ would be better understood once the distinction between God and Nature had been collapsed. Highlight [page 2]: Bernard Williams’s term for those usually lumped together as Postmodernists – the targets of his polemic in Truth and Truthfulness – is ‘the deniers of truth’. Highlight [page 2]: For Williams himself accepts Nietzsche’s view that, as he puts it, ‘there is no standpoint from which our representations as a whole’ can be measured against the way the world is ‘in itself’. Highlight [page 2]: Most people who warn that Postmodernist relativisms are endangering all that we hold dear reject most of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Plato and Kant. Williams endorses most of them. Highlight [page 3]: He has derided what he calls ‘the rationalistic theory of rationality’: the claim that rationality consists in obedience to eternal, ahistorical standards. His most widely read book, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, mocked Kantian approaches to moral philosophy. Highlight [page 3]: He thinks that Nietzsche was entirely right to reject philosophies, such as Plato’s, in which ‘the concept of truth is itself in҇ated into providing some metaphysical teleology of human existence.’ Highlight [page 3]: Such remarks will convince many people that Williams has long since gone over to the dark side, and is hardly the right person to mount a defence of truth against the bad guys. Highlight [page 3]: Yet the most salient feature of Truth and Truthfulness is Williams’s passionate devotion to the political heritage of the Enlightenment. Highlight [page 3]: But he insists that we moderates ‘as much as the more radical deniers need to take seriously the idea that to the extent that we lose a sense of the value of truth, we shall certainly lose something, and may well lose everything.’ Highlight [page 3]: Williams argues that it is essential to the defence of liberalism to believe that the virtue he capitalises as ‘Sincerity’ has intrinsic rather than merely instrumental value. He defends this claim in the course of telling a ‘genealogical story’, one that attempts to ‘give a decent pedigree to truth and truthfulness’. We need such a story, he believes, since the notion of truth might be thought tainted by its associations with Platonism. Highlight [page 3]: So he undertakes to show that the value of truth can be ‘understood in a perspective quite diѻerent from the Platonic and Christian metaphysics’, and that the deniers have thrown out the baby of intrinsically valuable truth with the Platonist bathwater. He thinks that Nietzsche did not make this mistake, and cites the famous passage from The Gay Science in which Nietzsche seems directly to contradict what he says in the passage (from the same book) I quoted above: ‘it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests – that even we knowers of today, we godless anti- metaphysicians, still take our ҄re, too, from the ҇ame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, that Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.’ Highlight [page 3]: To get his genealogy under way, Williams oѻers a familiar and uncontroversial account of why social co-operation requires trust between members of the community: why you cannot have such co-operation without widespread respect for the virtues he calls Sincerity and Accuracy. Highlight [page 4]: No widespread truthfulness and reciprocal helpfulness, no social institutions. Highlight [page 4]: But it is not clear how this genealogical explanation of the fact that all human societies prize Sincerity and Accuracy supports Williams’s claim about intrinsic value. He makes it ‘a suѾcient condition for something (for instance, trustworthiness) to have an intrinsic value that, ҄rst, it is necessary (or nearly necessary) for basic human purposes and needs that human beings should treat it as an intrinsic good, and, second, that they can coherently treat it as an intrinsic good.’ Highlight [page 4]: It seems unlikely that Williams can make either the notion of ‘intrinsic value’ or that of ‘real reason’ respectable without ҄rst of all taking a lot of Platonic-looking baggage on board. When he tries to exploit the intrinsic-instrumental distinction, he can no longer hope for Nietzsche’s approval. For Nietzsche treated that distinction as one more example of the bad Platonic-Aristotelian practice of distinguishing the really real from the merely human, the in-itself from the for-us. Those dualisms are still deeply ingrained in common sense, which is why pragmatism is so counterintuitive… Highlight [page 4]: He also wants to retain the conviction, common among analytic philosophers who distrust pragmatism, that the quest for truth is not the same thing as the quest for justi҄cation. This amounts to the claim that inquiry has two distinct aims: on the one hand, acquiring beliefs that can be justi҄ed to the relevant audience (your fellow citizens, for example, or your fellow experts), and, on the other hand, acquiring true beliefs. From a pragmatist point of view, this looks like regression to the Platonist idea that we have responsibilities not only to our fellow humans, but to something non- human. But for Williams it is a way of reinforcing the point that truth has intrinsic value, that it is something to be pursued for its own sake. Highlight [page 4]: Pragmatists try to coalesce the quest for truth and the quest for justi҄cation by trotting out what Williams labels ‘the indistinguishability argument’. They claim that the activity of reaching agreement with others about what to believe looks exactly like the activity of trying to acquire true beliefs, and that there is no point in postulating two distinct aims for a single enterprise. Williams says that the basic objection to this argument is that ‘a justi҄ed belief is one that is arrived at by a method, or supported by considerations, that favour it, not simply by making it more appealing or whatever, but in the speci҄c sense of giving reason to think that it is true.’ Brainwashing o҈en brings agreement, as do exchanges between scientists in meetings of the Roy… Highlight [page 5]: Society, but only the latter counts as acquiring truth. So, Williams says, ‘the pragmatist owes us an answer’ to the question of how we tell methods for acquiring truth from other methods of producing consensus. As he rightly suggests, the only answer the pragmatist can give to this question is that the procedures we use for justifying beliefs to one another are among the things that we try to justify to one another. We used to think that Scripture was a good way of settling astronomical questions, and ponti҄cal pronouncements a good way of resolving moral dilemmas, but we argued ourselves out of both convictions. But suppose we now ask: were the arguments we oѻered for changing our approach to these matters good arguments, or were they just a form of brainwashing? At this point, pragmatists think, our spade is turned. For we have, as Williams himself says in the passage I quoted above, no way to compare our representations as a whole with the way things are in themselves. Highlight [page 5]: Williams, however, seems to think that we philosophy professors have special knowledge and techniques that enable us, despite this inability, to show that the procedures we now think to be truth-acquiring actually are so. ‘The real problems about methods of inquiry, and which of them are truth acquiring . . . belong to the theory of knowledge and metaphysics.’ These disciplines, he assures us, provide answers to ‘the question, for a given class of propositions, of how the ways of ҄nding out whether they are true are related to what it is for them to be true’… Highlight [page 5]: Williams would seem to be claiming that these metaphysicians and epistemologists stand on neutral ground when deciding between various ways of reaching agreement. They can stand outside history, look with an impartial eye at the Reformation, the Scienti҄c Revolution and the Enlightenment, and then, by applying their own special, speci҄cally philosophical, truth-acquiring methods, underwrite our belief that Europe’s chances of acquiring truth were increased by those events. They can do all this, presumably, without falling back into what Williams scorns as ‘the rationalistic theory of rationality’. Highlight [page 5]: We think the sort of metaphysics and epistemology currently practised by analytic philosophers is just as fantastical and futile as Plato’s Theory of Forms and Locke’s notion of simple ideas. Highlight [page 5]: – that they are not just hard-working public relations agents for contemporary institutions and practices, but independent experts whose endorsement of our present ways of justifying beliefs is based on a superior knowledge of what it is for various propositions to be true. Williams would have had a hard time convincing Nietzsche, Dewey or the later Wittgenstein that they had any such knowledge. Highlight [page 5]: Williams says that he will not, in this book, take up any metaphysical or epistemological issues, but will stick to the question: ‘granted that there are methods of inquiry that are, for diѻerent kinds of properties, truth-acquiring, what are the qualities of the people who can be expected to use such methods reliably? Highlight [page 6]: In them, Williams puts aside the debate with the deniers, and instead oѻe a historical account of the development of the common sense, and the intellectual and moral virtues, of the educated classes of the modern West. Highlight [page 6]: He describes himself as turning from ‘a peculiar philosophical mode of ҄ctional genealogy’ (the part of the book that tells us how social co-operation grew up hand in hand with trustworthiness) to ‘real genealogy – to cultural contingencies and to history’. Highlight [page 6]: The historical portion shows Williams at his best – not arguing with other philosophers, but rather, in the manner of Isaiah Berlin, helping us understand the changes in the human self-image that have produced our present institutions, intuitions and problems… Highlight [page 6]: They begin with an absorbing, and very plausible, account of the diѻerence between Herodotus and Thucydides. Williams argues that ‘Thucydides imposed a new conception of the past, by insisting that people should extend to the remoter past a practice they already had in relation to the immediate past, of treating what was said about it as, seriously, true or false,’ thereby making a crucial contribution to the Western insistence that we distinguish sharply between truth and fantasy – between what actually happened and what we should like to have happened. Highlight [page 6]: Williams seems to me right in saying that a lot of what is distinctive, and best, about the modern West depends on remorselessly enforcing the distinction between truth- seeking and wish-ful҄lment – though I don’t think he has succeeded in showing that the pragmatists blur this distinction. Highlight [page 6]: That Eurocentric claim of superiority cannot, pragmatists believe, be defended by non-circular arguments before a tribunal of ahistorical reason, but is none the worse for that. Highlight [page 6]: Here Williams distinguishes two notions – Rousseau’s and Diderot’s – of ‘what it is to be a truthful person’. Rousseau thought that you could be authentic simply by laying yourself bare, but Diderot explained why it was not that easy. Williams thinks that Diderot did us a great service in helping to break down Plato’s simplistic reason-will- emotion distinction, and in showing us why we should be suspicious of the belief- desire model of human agency currently in fashion among philosophers. He shows why Diderot’s proto-Freudian account of the agent as ‘awash with many images, many excitements, merging fears and fantasies that dissolve into one another’ leaves us with the need to construct a self to be true to, rather than, as Rousseau thought, the need to make an already existent self transparent to itself. Highlight [page 7]: Habermas plays Rousseau to Foucault’s Diderot. He thinks that ‘undistorted communication’ can bring us to recognise the truth, and he sticks pretty closely to the old Platonic triad of faculties. Foucault, like Diderot, Nietzsche and Freud, has little use for the idea that reason can, by triumphing over emotion and will, clear away distortions and make our souls transparent to truth. He does not think, as Habermas does, that we can eliminate what Marxists used to call ‘false consciousness’ – the kind of consciousness produced by the machinations of power. For Foucault, truth will never be disentangled from power. The most we can do is to try to exert power ourselves, by reprogramming the social institutions that he called ‘mechanisms of truth’. Highlight [page 7]: He concedes to Foucault that ‘the “force of reason” can hardly be separated altogether from the power of persuasion, and, as the ancient Greeks well knew, the power of persuasion, however benignly or rationally exercised, is still a species of power.’ Williams’s appreciation of this Nietzschean point makes him wary of the Habermasian idea of ‘the force of the better argument’, and leads him to conclude the chapter by saying ‘It is not foolish to believe that any social and political order which eѻectively uses power, and which sustains a culture that means something to the people who live in it, must involve opacity, mysti҄cation and large- scale deception.’ Highlight [page 7]: Not foolish, he continues, but not necessarily true. Highlight [page 7]: He agrees with White that we have to be ‘especially careful of the idea’ that truthful history can ‘tell us what the past is “really” or “in itself”’, but goes on to explain why, even if it cannot do that, it can still do us a lot of good – why Thucydides did not live in vain. ‘Liberalism may have destroyed in some part its distinctive supporting stories about itself,’ including stories of the sort Habermas tells about reason’s ability to disclose universal validity. Nevertheless, it is important for us liberals to realise that ‘there is no conscious road back, that the Enlightenment is intellectually irreversible.’ Highlight [page 7]: As in the ҄rst part of the book, Williams has to work hard here to concede just enough to the opposition, but not too much. He needs carefully to distinguish between justi҄ed Nietzschean and Foucauldian suspicions about the supporting stories, and unjusti҄ed contempt for the Enlightenment’s political hopes. In making this distinction, he takes on the same complicated and delicate assignment previously attempted by Dewey, Weber and many others. He wants to show us how to combine Nietzschean intellectual honesty and maturity with political liberalism – to keep on striving for liberty, equality and fraternity in a totally disenchanted, completely de- Platonised intellectual world. Highlight [page 7]: The prospect of such a world would have appalled Kant, whose defence of the French Revolution was closely linked to his ‘rationalistic theory of rationality’. Kant is the philosopher to whom such contemporary liberals as Rawls and Habermas ask us to Highlight [page 8]: remain faithful. Williams, by contrast, turns his back on Kant. So did Dewey. The similarity between Dewey’s and Williams’s conceptions of the desirable self-image for heirs of the Enlightenment is, in fact, very great, so I am all the more puzzled by his hostility to pragmatism in the ҄rst half of his book… Highlight [page 8]: Whether it is or not, anyone who wants to understand the relations between the relatively arcane issues concerning truth debated by philosophy professors, and the larger question of what self-image we human beings should have, would do well to read William… ## SF Gate interview https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Q-A-Bernard-Williams-Carrying-the-torch-for-2767949.php Q: Do you think philosophers get better at what they do as they age? Or are they more like the proverbial mathematical genius who peaks early then settles down to trench work? A: There are two paradigms in the history of philosophy. One is Hume, who wrote his greatest work in his 20s and sort of got fed up with philosophy until relatively late in life. The other is Kant, who did his greatest work after 50. Some are like mathematicians who have some single great formal insight in their youth. But in the area of moral philosophy, thinkers do get better with experience, if they allow themselves to have any experience. There was a minor philosopher in the 19th century who was described as the janitor of the Hegelian system, and there are many today who similarly become janitors of their own systems. But if you're willing to go on listening, I think experience does help. Nietzsche was terribly good at aphorisms and was very consciously influenced by the French writers La Rochfoucauld and Chamfort. I think there's a terrible danger in that style of thought, though, which is that they sound tremendously smug and self-satisfied. What aphorism can do is bring something true to your attention by exaggeration, like a caricature. Q: At several points you write about how the virtues of truth, as you call them, find reinforcement, or fail to, through a society's forms of life. This sounds like a subject for another book. A: Yes, much more could be written about the way virtues can be reinforced by institutions and perhaps could even be replaced by institutions, which is important now. **Consider all those systems analysts who thought that a corporation was such a self-regulating structure that it didn't need to be managed by honest people.** Had news of Enron and the others come to the fore when I was writing the book, I might have made a point of this. **Impersonality is the name of the game in modern systems, but recent events have shown that you can't rely on it right up to the top**. Q: Is there anyone you think of as a philosophical nemesis? A: I'm not sure I can answer that. My arguments with Richard Rorty [professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford] is not any form of personal animus, I just don't think he took the right path. I'm more sympathetic to his concerns than many of my colleagues are. But I think he's really wrong about what it means to change the subject in philosophy and get rid of truth. I think his influence has been unfortunate. The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who in the name of science think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism. Q: Do you know what your next project will be? A: I have had for some time the idea that I might write something about political philosophy. I've come to the conclusion that the modes of analytic political philosophy are not that fruitful. I think the subject can be approached by historical means, but I'm not the one to do it. Most analytical political philosophy has been applied moral philosophy, but I think political philosophy has to start from the notion of the political. I would like to write a little book about it in closer relation to recent political experience. ## Guardian profile https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/nov/30/academicexperts.highereducation The chief denier, though, and the book's primary target, is his former colleague Richard Rorty, the American philosopher, who argues that truth is not only dispensable, but that its pursuit by scientists and historians is a hopeless surrogate for humanity's earlier worship of God. Rorty agrees with Nietzsche that now God is dead, intellectuals replace him with metaphysical fictions like truth. "We would be stronger, freer, better human beings," Rorty wrote recently, "if we could bring ourselves to dispense with all such surrogates." We should stop seeking the truth, he argued; we would do better to focus on reaching pragmatic agreement. For Williams, truth and truthfulness are indispensable to us and he tries to show in his book that in any human society truth will be valued, and his twin virtues of truth - sincerity and accuracy - prized. Shortly after graduating in 1951, Williams was called up and sent to Canada to train as an RAF pilot. He spent a year flying Spitfires, and was reportedly very skilled at it. In 1962 he wrote an influential paper, The Idea of Equality, in which the lifelong Labour Party member argued for an egalitarian wealth distribution on the grounds that other policies were irrational. He also pioneered the now-fashionable philosophical study of personal identity, bringing a young man's fresh perspective to traditional problems. His first book, Morality , was published in 1971, and was an incendiary critique of British philosophy's obsession with meta-ethical questions (What is the nature of moral judgment? Can there be moral knowledge?) at the expense of first-order ethical questions concerning abortion, famine and feminism. "I rejected the way in which morality was discussed - as though it was an abstract thing. It was so boring and pointless! The book also showed me as I wrote it that I hated util itarianism [the English moral philosophy that regards the right action as the one that has the best consequences for human well-being]. I used to have very pious utilitarian views. But I came to see that consequentialist reasoning could just lead you on and on in the wrong direction." Towards the end of Morality Williams approvingly quotes DH Lawrence: "Find your deepest impulse, and follow that." He adds this gloss: "The combination - discovery, trust, and risk - are central to this sort of outlook, as of course they are to the state of being in love." Only a few years after this book was published Williams discovered he was in love with someone other than his wife. "If there's one theme in all my work it's about authenticity and self-expression," he says. "It's the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren't. [Lawrence] is an author I always found difficult but he sure made an impression on me with that remark. It went with my interest as a schoolboy in the aesthetic versus the moral, and the artist as antinomian figure." Williams concedes: "Sometimes I can be extremely tough. I like to think that this is usually when I'm confronted with self-satisfaction. In philosophy the thing that irritates me is smugness, particularly scientistic smugness. What makes me really angry these days are certain kinds of reductive scientism that knock all the philosophical difficulties out." He then proceeds to say some very disparaging things about the evolutionary biologist Steven Pinker. "I heard him talk recently. He's a very smooth performer, very clever, but utterly glib. He just rides roughshod over the real philosophical problems." It was also a productive period intellectually, giving him the space to read more broadly, renewing his interest in ancient philosophy and literature, deepening his appreciation of continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Diderot, Rousseau and Kierkegaard. The result was a philosopher with a deeper historical and literary sensibility than most of his British colleagues. This freer spirit was first manifest in a book called Moral Luck , whose title essay argued that one's being blameable for an action, for example abandoning one's family and going off to Tahiti to paint, could depend on luck - such as turning out to be a great artist like Gauguin. This thesis, upsetting to the two prevailing isms of British moral philosophy, utilitarianism and Kantianism [which claims that the right moral action is always rational and freely chosen], did not appeal to all reviewers. Ted Honderich, one of Williams's colleagues at London and later Grote Professor at University College London, wrote that luck was not part of morality, and in a review charged Williams with being "too clever by only an eighth". As in his most sustained attack on conventional moral philosophy theories, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Williams was revolting once more against over-tidy isms. "I was rejecting the notion of morality as rational control. The idea that life couldn't be luck-proof led me to think about tragedy and the ways in which the ancient world had better ways of thinking about this: how we're to understand luck and necessity, how these relate to the moral." The result was a series of lectures during the 1980s that resulted in the 1993 book Shame and Necessity . "This work on ancient texts was born of my conviction that we still had a lot to learn ethically from the Greeks. Few people were thinking in that direction." Williams left Britain in 1988 to go to California to become professor at Berkeley, making the headlines for being part of the anti-Thatcherite brain drain. In his little study beneath Hawksmoor's twin towers, where he has one of the most beautiful urban views in Britain over the college cloisters and the Radcliffe Camera beyond, **Williams muses on his career. "The whole thing has been about spelling out the notion of inner necessity. That someone who has to do something, has to live in a certain way or discovers something is really him, what he belongs to, what is his destiny - I'm drawn to all that.** I do regard myself as very lucky because I was able to spend my life in a subject which I enormously enjoyed." These days, though, the workload is lighter. "I have no duties whatever. It suits me. I've had a bout of ill health since 1999. It's cancer. It's one of those diseases that doesn't go away. You can do a certain amount to mitigate its hold, as it were." ## VBW discussion Negative responsibility: responsibility for what we fail to prevent from happening. "When it comes to moral evaluation, killing and letting die are roughly the same." Hmm... Joshua Greene dual process model. > --249-250 “The reason why the squeamishness appeal can be very unsettling, and one can be unnerved by the suggestion of self-indulgence in going against utilitarian considerations, is not that we are utilitarians who are uncertain what utilitarian value to attach to our moral feelings, **but that we are partially at least not utilitarians, and cannot regard our moral feelings as objects of utilitarian value**. **Because our moral relation to the world is partly given by such feelings, and by a sense of what we can or cannot “live with,” to come to regard those feelings from a purely utilitarian point of view, that is to say, as happenings outside one’s moral self is to lose a sense of one’s moral identity**: to lose, in the most literal way, one’s integrity. At this point utilitarianism alienates one from one’s moral feelings; we shall see a little later how, more basically, it alienates one from one’s actions as well.” **Consequentialism is sort of taking notion of impartiality and running away with it so far that you lose the persons.** You lose sight of what it means to be an agent. The appeal is that in its place it gives you a decision rule that is very easy to calculate. But it sacrifices the very thing it's trying to protect. George working in a job he is alienated from for his entire life. Biological weapons. Consequences are all good, except for him. #todo hmm > 253 “It is absurd to demand of such a man when the sums come in from the utility network which the projects of others have in part determined, that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his own convictions. It is to make him into a channel between the input of everyone’s projects, including his own, and an output of optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which his actions and his decisions have to be seen as the actions and decisions which flow from the projects and attitudes with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity.” E.g. really prejudiced people suffering because of presence of some minority. ## Amia Srinivasan on Williams https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/amia-srinivasan/ Williams is very interested in the question of perspective and of points of view. He’s very interested in the aspiration to a perfectly neutral scientific description of the world, and very interested in the question of what that leaves out. At the same time, he _very_ much wants to [resist a view put forward by Richard Rorty](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n22/bernard-williams/getting-it-right), which begins from a **recognition of the contingency of worldviews to a kind of nihilistic or skeptical conclusion about the ability to achieve common understanding**. I’m very interested in that specific dialectic because **Williams isn’t some knee-jerk realist who just wants to dismiss Rorty and say, “Look, common-sense reasoning just gets us on to the true picture of the world.”** He thinks that a purely scientific picture of the world leaves out essential parts of the nature of the world. There, **you have to take up a certain kind of normatively loaded perspective to be able to describe the world correctly**. He’s, again, in this kind of **ambivalent position with respect to these questions about objectivity and value and perspective**. I’m very much interested in that locus of problems. ## Thomas Nagel: The View from the Here and Now: A Tribute to Bernard Williams (LRB) ... held together by Williams' **acute sense of historical contingency and his resistance to the aspiration of so much philosophy to be timeless**. This project, of pulling philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, down from the stratosphere and resisting its most universal theoretical ambitions, is what has set Williams against the general grain and given rise to the strong responses to his work. He was the foremost representative in our day of the view that **philosophical reflection of the highest rational order need not lead to transcendence of the more contingent features of human life**. He believed that instead of trying to view ourselves with maximal detachment, from the point of view of the universe, **we can obtain a more illuminating form of reflective distance from our concepts and values through historical self-consciousness, which is an immersion in contingency**. Williams loved Plato both for his powerful expression of the transcendent impulse that must be resisted and for his understanding, so vividly expressed in the dialogues, of points of view opposed to his own. > Plato was recognisably, I think, one of those creative thinkers and artists – it is not true of all, including some of the greatest – who are an immensely rich source of thoughts and images, too many, perhaps, for them all to have their place and use . . . We should not think of him as constantly keeping his accounts, anxious of how his system will look in the history of philosophy. a wonderful discussion of Descartes’s Meditations as a work of fiction, whose first-person narrator, describing his process of thought over a succession of days, cannot be identified with Descartes, the author, who of course knows the outcome in advance. Williams comments: >This might have been a work in which the thinker’s fictional ignorance of how his reflections would turn out was convincingly sustained. To some extent it is so, and to that extent, **one of the gifts offered to the reader by this extraordinary work is a freedom to write it differently, to set out with the thinker and end up in a different place. The rewriting of Descartes’s story in that way has constituted a good deal of modern philosophy**. Later: > It may be that we have the aspiration that no social or economic relation should lie outside considerations of justice. To the extent that we have that aspiration, we try either (with the Left) to replace necessity and luck with justice, or (with the Right) to show that the results of necessity and luck can be just. Neither project is such a success as to enable us to say that in these matters we have decisively gone beyond the ethical condition of the ancients. An old saw has it that all politics is local. Williams believed that political theory, too, should be in a sense local, rather than universal, because it must be addressed to individuals in a particular place and time, and must offer them a justification for the exercise of political power that has persuasive force in the light of standards that are accessible to them. Williams believed that the distinction between illegitimate and legitimate states depends on whether their exercise of power over their subjects is sheer coercion or not. But **whether a society can meet this ‘Basic Legitimation Demand’ depends on whether its justification for the exercise of power will be morally persuasive in that historical situation.** The requirement cannot be for justification sub specie aeternitatis. **What is legitimate at one time may not be so at another.** No political theory, liberal or other, can determine by itself its own application. The conditions in which the theory or any given interpretation of it makes sense to intelligent people are determined by an opaque aggregation of many actions and forces.’ For example: even if liberal institutions and equal rights for women are necessary conditions of legitimacy for us now, this has not always been true. Justifications have to come to an end within the point of view of those to whom justification must be offered. There is no point, Williams says, in imagining oneself as ‘Kant at the court of King Arthur’, judging its institutions from a universal standpoint. This is the ‘relativism of distance’ that Williams put forward in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985). It is one of his most controversial claims, and goes together with the thesis that reasons for action in general must start from something in the agent’s subjective motivational set – that they must, in Williams’s terms, be ‘internal’ rather than ‘external’ reasons. The search for truth about reasons for action, personal ethics and political morality cannot aspire to the kind of objective validity that is a reasonable aim for science and mathematics. Williams claims that ethics is irreducibly perspectival, and that the perspective is local – not a universal human perspective. he doesn’t think that either Kant or anyone else has offered a persuasive argument for that conclusion, starting from inside some motivational structure shared by all rational beings. Those who disagree may appeal to the force of moral arguments themselves as revealing that motivational structure. But Williams would reply that, even if we find the moral reasons for impartiality compelling, that does not show that they appeal to reason as such, as opposed to something more local about us. This is one of the most fundamental disagreements in ethics. [...] Precisely because he is convinced that it is not a judgment from an absolute point of view, Williams sees no conflict between, for example, our confidence in the requirement of equal rights for all citizens and the refusal to judge that hierarchical societies in the past were unjust. Confidence need not be undermined by historical self-awareness. And he shrewdly adds: > That does not mean, as Richard Rorty likes to suggest, that we must slide into a position of irony, holding to liberalism as practical liberals, but backing away from it as reflective critics. **That posture is itself still under the shadow of universalism: it suggests that you cannot really believe in liberalism unless you hold it true in a sense which means that it applies to everyone**. He argues that what is fundamental in the ethical life are dispositions to act and feel in certain ways – dispositions to honesty and fidelity, for instance – and that these can exist only if truthfulness and keeping your word are valued in themselves, not merely as useful instruments for promoting the general welfare, impersonally considered, or for any other higher-order reason. [...] [In The Human Prejudice] Williams’s main point is that being partial to humanity does not require a belief in the absolute importance of human beings. There is no cosmic point of view, and therefore no test of cosmic significance that we can either pass or fail. Those who criticise the privileged position of human beings in our ethical thought are confused: > They suppose that we are in effect saying, when we exercise these distinctions between human beings and other creatures, that human beings are more important, period, than those other creatures. That objection is simply a mistake . . . These actions and attitudes need express no more than the fact that human beings are more important to us, a fact which is hardly surprising. [...] > When the hope is to improve humanity to the point at which every aspect of its hold on the world can be justified before a higher court, the result is likely to be either selfdeception, if you think you have succeeded, or self-hatred and self-contempt when you recognise that you will always fail. The self-hatred, in this case, is a hatred of humanity. Personally I think that there are many things to loathe about human beings, but their sense of their ethical identity as a species is not one of them. [...] In his book on Descartes, Williams offered an illuminating interpretation of the aim of scientific objectivity as what he called the ‘absolute conception of reality’. Here he asks: > Why should the idea that science and only science describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective, mean that there is no independent philosophical enterprise? That would follow only on the assumption that if there is an independent philosophical enterprise, its aim is to describe the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective. And why should we accept that? The marks of philosophy are reflection and heightened self-awareness, not maximal transcendence of the human perspective. Reflection can deepen understanding without leaving that perspective. For that reason Williams values historical self-consciousness and deplores its neglect, or outright avoidance, by most analytic philosophers: > The reflective understanding of our ideas and motivations, which I take to be by general agreement a philosophical aim, is going to involve historical understanding . . . Philosophy has to learn the lesson that conceptual description (or, more specifically, analysis) is not self-sufficient; and that such projects as deriving our concepts a priori from universal conditions of human life, though they indeed have a place (a greater place in some areas of philosophy than others), are likely to leave unexplained many features that provoke philosophical enquiry. # Philosophy Bites - Adrian Moore on Bernard Williams [http://traffic.libsyn.com/philosophybites/Adrian_Moore_on_Bernard_Williams_on_Ethics.mp3? dest-id = 14010](http://traffic.libsyn.com/philosophybites/Adrian_Moore_on_Bernard_Williams_on_Ethics.mp3? dest-id = 14010) Ethics concerns the broader question of how to live. Morality concerns the question of what obligations we have from an objective point of view? utilitarianism and kantian deontology are two examples of morality systems. Morality systems tend to claim that moral obligations trump all other obligations and considerations, such as aesthetic ideals, personal relationships, commitments to one another, to place, commitments of self-interest. they also Tend to feature a notion of a purely voluntary action. Both of these according to Williams are philosopher's myths. Critics of Bernard Williams tend to share in common an assumption that we can reasonably expect moral philosophy to provide us a systematic theoretical account of right and wrong, and how to act. for example the kind of things that utilitarianism provides. # Utilitarianism: For and Against ## Selected highlights This is not at all to say that the alternative to consequentialism is that one has to accept that there are some actions which one should always do, or again, some which one should never do, whatever the consequences: this is a much stronger position than any involved, as I have defined the issues, in the denial of consequentialism. All that is involved on the present account in the denial of consequentialism is that with respect to some type of action there are some situations in which that would be the right thing to do even though the state of affairs produced by one's doing that would be worse than some other state of affairs accessible to one. One might think that they're just were some types of action which [ should or should not be done whatever the consequences];  though it seems to me obscure how one could have much faith in a list of such actions unless one suppose that it had supernatural warrant. the idea that there was nothing which was right whatever the consequences, and the different idea that everything depends on consequences [...]  it is very important that the two ideas are different. ## All highlights The essay opens with a quote from Nietzsche: If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how. Man does not strive after happiness;  only the Englishman does that. The first question for philosophy is not "do you agree with utilitarianism's answer?" but "do you really accept utilitarianism's way of looking at the question?" Consequentialism is the doctrine that the moral value of any action always lies in its consequences, and that it is by reference to their consequences that actions, and indeed such things as institutions, laws and practices, are to be Justified if they can be Justified at all/ forms of utilitarianism which help themselves too liberally to the resources of indirectness lose their utilitarian rationale and end up as vanishingly forms of utilitarianism at all. utilitarianism cannot hope to make sense at any serious level of integrity. it cannot do that for the very basic reason that can make only the most superficial sense of human desire and action at all and has only very poor sense of what was supposed to be its own speciality, happiness. although men set themselves ends and work towards them, it is very often not really the supposed end, but the effort towards it on which they set value -- that they travel, not really in order to arrive [...] but rather they choose somewhere to arrive, in order to travel. I take it to be the central idea of consequentialism that the only kind of thing that has intrinsic value is states of affairs, and anything else that has value has it because it conduces to some intrinsically valuable state of affairs. the point of saying that consequentialism ascribes intrinsic value to states of affairs is rather to contrast states of affairs with other candidates for having such value in particular, perhaps, actions. A distinctive mark of consequentialism may be this, that it regards the value of actions as always consequential (or, as we may more generally say, derivative) and not intrinsic. the value of actions with them lie in their causal properties, of producing valuable states of affairs;  or if they did not derive their value in the simple way they would derive it in some more round about way as for instance by being expressive of some motive or in accordance with some rule whose operation in society cand used to desirable states of affairs. The act is right because the state of affairs which consists in its being done is better than any other state of affairs accessible to the agents;   whereas for the non-consequentialist it is sometimes at least the other way around and the state of affairs which is better than the alternatives is so because it consists of the right act being done. the emphasis on the necessary comparability of situations is a peculiar feature of consequentialism in general, and of utilitarianism in particular. This is not at all to say that the alternative to consequentialism is that one has to accept that there are some actions which one should always do, or again, some which one should never do, whatever the consequences: this is a much stronger position than any involved, as I have defined the issues, in the denial of consequentialism. All that is involved on the present account in the denial of consequentialism is that with respect to some type of action there are some situations in which that would be the right thing to do even though the state of affairs produced by one's doing that would be worse than some other state of affairs accessible to one. One might think that they're just were some types of action which [ should or should not be done whatever the consequences];  though it seems to me obscure how one could have much faith in a list of such actions unless one suppose that it had supernatural warrant. One might have the idea that the unthinkable was itself a moral category [...]  it could be a feature of a man's moral outlook that he regarded certain courses of action as unthinkable, in the sense that he would not entertain the idea of doing them:  and The Witness to that might, in many cases, be that they simply would not come into his head.  entertaining certain alternatives, regarding them indeed as alternatives, is itself something that he regards as  dishonorable or morally absurd. [...]  their occurrence as situations presenting him with a choice would represent not a special problem in his moral world, but something that lay beyond its limits. [...]  there are certain situations so monstrous that the idea that the process of moral rationality could yield  an answer in them is insane:   they are situations which so transcend in a normative the human business of moral deliberation that from a moral point of view it  cannot matter anymore what happens. the demand to think the Unthinkable is not an unquestionable demand of rationality, set against the Cowardly or inert refusal to follow out  one's moral thoughts. rationality as a demand not merely on him,  but on the situations in, and about, which he has to think;  unless the environment reveals minimum sanity,  it is Insanity to carry the decorum of sanity into it. consequentialist rationality however and in particular utilitarian rationality, has no such limitations: making the best of a bad job is one of its maxims and it will have something to say even on the difference between massacring 7 million, and massacring 7000001. the idea that there was nothing which was right whatever the consequences, and the different idea that everything depends on consequences [...]  it is very important that the two ideas are different. it is because consequentialism attaches value ultimately to states of affairs, and it's concern is with what state of affairs the world contains, that it essentially involves the notion of negative responsibility:  that if I am never responsible for anything, then I must be just as responsible for things that I allow or failed to prevent, as I am things that I myself, in the more everyday restricted sense, bring about. the strong  doctrine of negative responsibility flows directly from consequentialisms assignment of  ultimate value to states of affairs. That the doctrine of negative responsibility represents in this way the extreme of impartiality and abstracts from the identity of the agents, leaving just a locus of causal intervention in the world -  that fact is not merely a surface paradox.  it helps to explain why consequentialism can seem to sound to express a more serious attitude than non consequentialist views, why part of its appeal is to a certain kind of high mindedness. a future of utilitarianism is that it cuts out of kind of consideration which some others makes a difference to what they feel about such cases:  consideration involving the idea, as we might first and very simply put it, that each of us especially responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do.  do this is an idea closely connected with the value of integrity. perhaps as utilitarian sometimes suggest we should just forget about integrity, in favour of such things as a concern for the general good.  however if I am right we cannot really do that, since the reason why utilitarianism cannot understand integrity is that it cannot  coherently describe the relations between a man's projects and his actions. The assertion that he is being self-indulgent be squeamish, will not answer that question, or even help to answer it, since it essentially tells him to regard his feelings just as unpleasant experiences of his, and he cannot, by doing that, answer the question they pose when they are precisely not so regarded but are regarded as indications of what he thinks is right and wrong.  if he does come round fully to the utilitarian point of view then of course he will regard those feelings  as just as unpleasant experiences of his. [...] The  squeamishness appeal is not an argument which adds in a hitherto neglected consideration.  rather it is an invitation to consider the situation, and one's own feelings, from a utilitarian point of view. the reason why the squeamishness appeal can be very unsettling, and 1 can be unnerved by the suggestion of Self Indulgence in going against utilitarian considerations, is not that we are utilitarians who are uncertain what utilitarian value to attach to a moral feelings, but that we are partially at least not utilitarians and cannot regard our moral feelings  merely as objects of utilitarian value.  Because our moral relation to the world is partly given by such feelings, and by a sense of what we can or cannot "live with", to come to regard those feelings from a purely utilitarian point of view that is to say, as happening outside one's moral self, is to lose a sense of one's moral identity, to lose in the most literal way ones integrity. At this point utilitarianism alienates one from one's moral feelings. What projects does a utilitarian agent have? [...]  Unless  there were  first order projects, the general utilitarian project would have nothing to work on, and would be vacuous. What do the more basic or lower order products comprise? Many will be the obvious kinds of desires for things for oneself, 1 family, 1 friends, including the basic necessities of life, and in more relaxed circumstances, objects of taste. Or they may be pursued and interests of an intellectual, cultural or creative character [...] some people's Commitments to these kinds of interests just is at once more  thoroughgoing and serious than their pursuit of various objects of taste, while it is more individual and permeated with character than the desire for the necessities of life. Utilitarianism has a tendency to slide in this direction and to leave a vast hole in the range of human desires, between  egoistic inclinations and necessities at one end, and impersonally benevolent happiness-management at the other. [...] utilitarianism would do well then to acknowledge the evident fact that among the things that make people happy is not only making other people happy, but being taken up or involved in any of a vast range of projects, or [...] commitments.  one can be committed to such things as a person,  a cause, an institution, a career, one's own genius, or the pursuit of danger. One has to believe in, or at least want, or quite a minimally, be content with, other things, for there to be anywhere that happiness can come from. utilitarianism then should be willing to agree that it's general aim of maximizing happiness does not imply that what everyone is doing is just pursuing happiness. on the contrary people have to be pursuing other things. What those other things may be, utilitarianism, sticking to its professed empirical stance, should be prepared just to find out. Happy is a partly evaluative term, in the sense that we call happiness those kinds of satisfaction which as things are we approve of.  But by what standard is this surplus element of  approval supposed, from a utilitarian point of view, to be allocated? His own decisions as utilitarian agents are a function of all the satisfaction  he  can affect from where he is:  and this means that the products of others, to an indeterminately great extent, determine his decisions how can a man, as a utilitarian agent, come to regard as one satisfaction among others, and a dispensable one, a project or attitude around which he has built his life, just because someone else's projects have so structured the causal scene that that is how the utilitarian sum comes out? The point here is not [...]  that if the project or attitude is that central to his life, then to abandone it will be very disagreeable to him and a great loss of utility will be involved. [...]The point is that he is identified with his actions as flowing from projects and attitudes which in some cases he takes seriously at the deepest level, as what his life is about ( or in some cases this section of his life -  seriousness is not necessarily the same as persistence). We are not primarily janitors of any system of values, even  our own:  very often, we just act, as a possibly confused result of the situation in which we are engaged. The Spirit of utilitarianism [...]  demand for a rational, decidable empirically based, and unmysterious set of values. Utilitarianism [...]  rests its judgements on a Strictly secular and non mysterious basis, and derives ( or at least hopes to derive)  it's substantial input from what people as a matter of fact want, taking its citizenry as it finds them. Utilitarianism appeals to a frame of mind in which technical difficulty,  even insufferable technical difficulties, is preferable to moral unclarity,  no doubt because it is less alarming. it is not the ideal Observer we have to reckon with, but the unideal agent WELFARE ECONOMICS  collective choice and social welfare by sen Sen: In using individual welfare functions for collective choice, there are at least three separate but interdependent problems: a  measurability of individual welfare, b  interpersonal   comparability of individual welfare, c  the form of a function which will specify a social preference relation given individual welfare functions and the compatibility assumptions. Classical utilitarianism makes very strong assumptions with regards to A&B demand and cardinality in reply to a and straightforward interpersonal comparisons in reply to be.  if then offers a simple solution to see in the form of maximizing either cross I could get to the utility or else average utility in the simple sense of the aggregate utility divided by the number of individuals. more generally the kind of lexicographic ordering which Rawls and others have employed - by which some criteria for preference can be brought into play only after others have been satisfied - is more realistic and sophisticated than utilitarianism's gross insistence on summing everything that's there must be something which constitutes compensation for a finite loss is just a Dogma, one which is more familiar in the traditional version to the effect that every man has his price. groups can hold views about what the state should be like and similar matters of principle or deep concern which they cannot currently regarded as material for a trade off with other advantages as we found in the individual case, so in political decision, utilitarianism is forced to regard commitments externally as a fanatical deviation from the kind of preference which can be cooperatively traded off against conflicting preferences. That might seem in any case a gratuitous evaluation, and an  impermissible limitation on the supposed atopic neutrality of utilitarianism view of preferences.  but it might be yet worse.  brightlife turn out as I have already mentioned in discussing the individual case that the happiness of Many Men buy criteria of happiness which utilitarianism would itself to recognise and identification with these Commitments these self transcending social objectives which do not allow of trade offs. Illusion which utilitarianism trades on, which renders utilitarianism irresponsible -  the illusion that preferences are already given that the role of the social decision process is just to follow them.  there is no such thing as just following.  to engage in those processes which utilitarianism regards as just following is [...] itself doing something:  is it cheating to endorse those preferences, or some set of them, which lie on the surface as determined by such things as what people at a given moment regard as possible A well-known argument of utilitarianism against criticisms of this kind is that we can agree that everything is  imperfect [...]  but that's all the same half a loaf is better than no bread and it is better to do what we can with what we can can rather than relapse into unquantifiable intuition and unsystematic decision. This argument contains an illusion.  for to exercise utilitarian methods on things which at least seem to respond to that is not merely to provide a benefit in some areas which one cannot provide in all.  it is at least very often to provide those things with Prestige, to give them an unjustifiably large role in the decision, and to dismiss to a greater distance those things which do not respond to the same methods. [...] weight will be put on those considerations which respected intellectual techniques can seem or at least promise to handle.  # Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Essay Collection) ## Introduction Philosophy contributes to the project of making sense of being human, and that is not a contribution that is next served by abstracting from the local perspectives or idiosyncrasies of human beings. ## Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline Reading process: 1. First read and highlight (~1 hour) 2. Transfer highlights in this G Doc and reflect (15-60 mins) 3. Write some thoughts (15-60 mins) ### Reflections - PH summary of key points, from memory - Philosophy should not think of itself as aiming at absolute timeless truths, finding out the way things are in themselves. Rather it is about understanding our present condition. History plays an important role here. - There are different levels of objectivity, depending on what "we" you take as your grounding perspective. People in my culture, all humans, all minds. - Don't assume that more objective = better. - Science tries to be as objective as possible, aiming to "give a representation of [the world] which is to the largest possible extent independent of local perspectives or idiosyncrasies of enquirers [...] as I put it, 'as it is anyway'." as possible. Don't assume that philosophy should do the same. - Don’t assume that “if there were an absolute conception of the world, a representation of it which was maximally independent of perspective, that would be better than more perspectival or locally conditioned representations of the world.” - - ### All highlights what I take philosophy to be, part of a more general attempt to make the best sense of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves. -- A question that intrigues me and to which I do not know the answer is the relation between a scientistic view of philosophy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the well-known and highly typical style of many texts in analytic philosophy which seeks precision by total mind control, through issuing continuous and rigid interpretative directions. In a way that will be familiar to any reader of analytic philosophy, and is only too familiar to all of us who perpetrate it, this style tries to remove in advance every conceivable misunderstanding or misinterpretation or objection, including those that would occur only to the malicious or the clinically literal-minded. This activity itself is often rather mournfully equated with the boasted clarity and rigour of analytic philosophy. -- I have entertained the idea that science might describe the world ‘as it is in itself’, that is to say, give a representation of it which is to the largest possible extent independent of the local perspectives or idiosyncrasies of enquirers, a representation of the world, as I put it, ‘as it is anyway’. 6 -- conjunction of two things: first, that philosophy is as good as it gets, and is in no way inferior to science, and, second, that if there were an absolute conception of the world, a representation of it which was maximally independent of perspective, that would be better than more perspectival or locally conditioned representations of the world. Even if it were possible to give an account of the world that was minimally perspectival, it would not be particularly serviceable to us for many of our purposes, such as making sense of our intellectual or other activities, or indeed getting on with most of those activities. For those purposes—in particular, in seeking to understand ourselves—we need concepts and explanations which are rooted in our more local practices, our culture, and our history, and these cannot be replaced by concepts which we might share with very different investigators of the world. The slippery word ‘we’ here means not the inclusive ‘we’ which brings together as a purely abstract gathering any beings with whom human beings might conceivably communicate about the nature of the world. It means a contrastive ‘we’, that is to say, humans as contrasted with other possible beings; and, in the case of many human practices, it may of course mean groupings smaller than humanity as a whole. -- assumes that offering an absolute conception is the real thing, what really matters in the direction of intellectual authority. But there is simply no reason to accept that—once again, we are left with the issue of how to make the best sense of ourselves and our activities, and that issue includes the question, indeed it focuses on the question, of how the humanities can help us in doing so. -- There is of course a real question of what it is for a history to be a history of discovery. One condition of its being so lies in a familiar idea, which I would put like this: the later theory, or (more generally) outlook, makes sense of itself, and of the earlier outlook, and of the transition from the earlier to the later, in such terms that both parties (the holders of the earlier outlook, and the holders of the later) have reason to recognize the transition as an improvement. I shall call an explanation which satisfies this condition vindicatory. -- If we consider how these forms of argument came to prevail, we can indeed see them as having won, but not necessarily as having won an argument. For liberal ideas to have won an argument, the representatives of the ancien re´gime would have had to have shared with the nascent liberals a conception of something that the argument was about, and not just in the obvious sense that it was about the way to live or the way to order society. They would have had to agree that there was some aim, of reason or freedom or whatever, which liberal ideas served better or of which they were a better expression, and there is not much reason, with a change as radical as this, to think that they did agree about this, at least until late in the process. The relevant ideas of freedom, reason, and so on were themselves involved in the change. In the case of scientific change, it may occur through there being a crisis. If there is a crisis, it is agreed by all parties to be a crisis of explanation, and while they may indeed disagree over what will count as an explanation, to a considerable extent there has come to be agreement, at least within the limits of science since the eighteenth century, and this makes an important contribution to the history being vindicatory. But in the geographically extended and long-lasting and various processes by which the old political and ethical order has changed into modernity, while it was propelled by many crises, they were not in the first instance crises of explanation. They were crises of confidence or of legitimacy, and the story of how one conception rather than another came to provide the basis of a new legitimacy is not on the face of it vindicatory. -- the answer to the question whether there is a history of our conceptions that is vindicatory (if only modestly so) makes a difference to what we are doing in saying, if we do say, that the earlier conceptions were wrong. -- philosophers cannot altogether ignore history if they are going to understand our ethical concepts at all. One reason for this is that in many cases the content of our concepts is a contingent historical phenomenon. Philosophy has to learn the lesson that conceptual description (or, more specifically, analysis) is not self-sufficient; and that such projects as deriving our concepts a priori from universal conditions of human life, though they indeed have a place (a greater place in some areas of philosophy than others), are likely to leave unexplained many features that provoke philosophical enquiry. -- Richard Rorty, and he has suggested that the answer to it lies in irony: 13 that qua political actors we are involved in the outlook, but qua reflective people (for instance, as philosophers) we stand back and in a detached and rather quizzical spirit see ourselves as happening to have that attachment. The fact that ‘qua’ should come so naturally into formulating this outlook shows, as almost always in philosophy, that someone is trying to separate the inseparable: in this case, the ethically inseparable, and probably the psychologically inseparable as well, -- Bernard Williams on the "problem" of historicism: The supposed problem comes from the idea that a vindicatory history of our outlook is what we would really like to have, and the discovery that liberalism, in particular (but the same is true of any outlook), has the kind of contingent history that it does have is a disappointment, which leaves us with at best a second best. But, once again, why should we think that? Precisely because we are not unencumbered intelligences selecting in principle among all possible outlooks, we can accept that this outlook is ours just because of the history that has made it ours; or, more precisely, has both made us, and made the outlook as something that is ours. We are no less contingently formed than the outlook is, and the formation is significantly the same. We and our outlook are not simply in the same place at the same time. If we really understand this, deeply understand it, we can be free of what is indeed another scientistic illusion, that it is our job as rational agents to search for, or at least move as best we can towards, a system of political and ethical ideas which would be the best from an absolute point of view, a point of view that was free of contingent historical perspective. If we can get rid of that illusion, we shall see that there is no inherent conflict among three activities: first, the first-order activity of acting and arguing within the framework of our ideas; second, the philosophical activity of reflecting on those ideas at a more general level and trying to make better sense of them; and third, the historical activity of understanding where they came from. The activities are in various ways continuous with one another. This helps to define both intelligence in political action (because of the connection of the first with the second and the third), and also realism in political philosophy (because of the connection of the second with the first and the third). If there is a difficulty in combining the third of these activities with the first two, it is the difficulty of thinking about two things at once, not a problem in consistently taking both of them seriously. -- We believe, for instance, that in some sense every citizen, indeed every human being—some people, more extravagantly, would say every sentient being—deserves equal consideration. Perhaps this is less a propositional belief than the schema of various arguments. But in either case it can seem, at least in its most central and unspecific form, unhintergehbar: there is nothing more basic in terms of which to justify it. We know that most people in the past have not shared it; we know that there are others in the world who do not share it now. But for us, it is simply there. This does not mean that we have the thought: ‘for us, it is simply there.’ It means that we have the thought: ‘it is simply there.’ (That is what it is for it to be, for us, simply there.) -- With regard to these elements of our outlook, at least, a philosopher may say: the contingent history has no effect in the space of reasons (to use a fashionable phrase), so why bother about it? 14 Let us just get on with our business of making best sense of our outlook from inside it. There are several answers to this, some implicit in what I have already said. One is that philosophers reflecting on these beliefs or modes of argument may turn back to those old devices of cognitive reassurance such as ‘intuition’. But if the epistemic claims implicit in such terms are to be taken seriously, then there are implications for history—they imply a different history. -- Wittgenstein influentally and correctly insisted that there was an end to justifications, that at various points we run into the fact that ‘this is the way we go on’. But, if I may say again something that I have said rather often before, 15 it makes a great difference who ‘we’ are supposed to be, and it may mean different groups in different philosophical connections. It may mean maximally, as I mentioned earlier, any creature that you and I could conceive of understanding. Or it may mean any human beings, and here universal conditions of human life, including very general psychological capacities, may be relevant. Or it may mean just those with whom you and I share much more, such as outlooks typical of modernity. -- we can identify with the process that led to our outlook because we can identify with its outcome. But we cannot in our thought go beyond our outlook into the future and remain identified with the result: that is to say, we cannot overcome our outlook. If a possible future that figures in those shadowy speculations does not embody some interpretation of these central elements of our outlook, then it may make empirical sense to us—we can see how someone could get there—but it makes no ethical sense to us, except as a scene of retrogression, or desolation, or loss. -- Many liberals in their own way follow the same pattern; they go on, in this respect as with respect to the past, as though liberalism were timeless. 16 It is not a reproach to these liberals that they cannot see beyond the outer limits of what they find acceptable: no-one can do that. But it is more of a reproach that they are not interested enough in why this is so, in why their most basic convictions should seem to be, as I put it, simply there. -- I have argued that philosophy should get rid of scientistic illusions, that it should not try to behave like an extension of the natural sciences (except in the special cases where that is what it is), that it should think of itself as part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and of our activities, and that in order to answer many of its questions it needs to attend to other parts of that enterprise, in particular to history. # Nagel review of Williams [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n09/thomas-nagel/the-view-from-here-and-now](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n09/thomas-nagel/the-view-from-here-and-now) Essays are held together by "Williams acute sense of historical contingency and his resistance to the aspiration of so much philosophy to be timeless. This project, of pulling philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, down from the stratosphere and resisting its most universal theoretical ambitions, is what has set Williams against the general grain and given rise to the strong responses to his work. He was the foremost representative in our day of the view that philosophical reflection of the highest rational order need not lead to transcendence of the more contingent features of human life. He believed that instead of trying to view ourselves with maximal detachment, from the point of view of the universe, we can obtain a more illuminating form of reflective distance from our concepts and values through historical self-consciousness, which is an immersion in contingency. The standard Greek attitude to slavery was not that it was a just institution; nor, again, that it was an unjust institution. . . Their view rather was that the institution was necessary, and that for those subjected to it it was bad luck. In that sense, it lay outside the considerations of justice. [...] It may be that we have the aspiration that no social or economic relation should lie outside considerations of justice. To the extent that we have that aspiration, we try either (with the Left) to replace necessity and luck with justice, or (with the Right) to show that the results of necessity and luck can be just. Neither project is such a success as to enable us to say that in these matters we have decisively gone beyond the ethical condition of the ancients. humanism is just a form of group loyalty. Williams doesn’t suggest that this warrants our brutality towards other species or complete indifference to their suffering, but he thinks our partiality to those who share our form of life does not need justification. H # YouTube - The Human Prejudice What is the thing that bothers me here? It's something like preserving space for partial attachments, the particular place person moment. Refusing to let the significance of those things get lost by the intimidating scale of the objective - the 7 billion people, the 13.8 billion years, the 2 trillion galaxies, the many branching universes. it's almost like a reverse form of scope insensitivity - once you start taking the 10005 you karma you struggle to accord any weight to the things nearby - it becomes simply a rounding error. How to reconcile these things? Long termism encourages a rather callous attitude towards human scale suffering. A mid-sized war? Just a regrettable blip from the long termist perspective. This suggests that something is going wrong here. The high discount rate sing may actually makes sense. Is the reason that we have a high moral discount rate because we just don't really care about the values of future people after a certain point because after a certain point they become sufficiently different from us that their values are just incomprehensible. Woah, right there is a big difference between a morality system type worldview and a Bernard Williams or Nietzschean worldview. Proximity in time really does matter if we want to have a meaningful conversation about approval and disapproval, about what matters. -- Justification only makes sense within a context of similarity comma of common ground, by which we can appeal to each other's shared values, shared ways of thinking, shared ethics. does this just apply to moral justification, or does it also apply to epistemic and pragmatic justification as well. ## Review: A relic of a world not yet thoroughly disenchanted “In some remote corner of the universe that is poured out in countless flickering solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the most arrogant and the most untruthful moment in ‘world history’ — yet indeed only a moment. After nature had taken a few breaths, the star froze over and the clever animals had to die.” [ON TRUTH AND LYING IN AN EXTRA-MORAL SENSE](https://archive.org/stream/NietzscheOnTruthAndLying/nietzsche%20on%20truth%20and%20lying_djvu.txt) (1873), Edited and Translated with a Critical Introduction by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent, New York and Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1989 In "The Human Prejudice", Bernard Williams rails against the idea of an objective moral viewpoint -  a perspective that is not grounded in human values, and from which we can dispassionately evaluate and improve upon humanity as a species. This idea is sometimes called objectivity, but Nagel famously named it the view from nowhere. What is the view from nowhere? The cosmic point of view is supposed to be a perspective, independent of humanity, which emits judgements about what ultimately matters. [Nozick quote] What are the attractions? An external standard to measure humanity A shared purpose for humanity An external standard for resolving disputes, and achieving value convergence What are the worries It does look an awful lot like an artefact of a religious outlook, "a relic of a world not yet thoroughly disenchanted". Some may deny that's an objection, but proponents of the idea typically do try to present it in secular terms. Williams rightly flagged that the idea that certain properties are being "cheered on by the universe" does seem hard to cash out in secular terms. A possible secular response may be Kantian in spirit: think of the view from nowhere as in some sense the view from all possible minds. Perhaps if all minds with the ability to reflect on these matters actually do so, there are structural / logical reasons which mean they all end up at a similar place on matters of common value. But this does seem like quite a stretch - is the space of possible minds really so homogenous? Even within the relatively narrow range of human minds, we see cases that seem like counterexamples. The temptation might be to narrow things down to the space of possible minds that are somehow like ours, but to do that is to give up the spirit of the view from nowhere, in favour of the view from places like this. most of the benefits of adopting A View From Nowhere can be derived from an idea that I find much easier to swallow. that is  what Susan wolf calls the impartial insight Impartialist Insight: the claim that all persons are equally deserving of well-being and respect. "Morality requires the recognition of the Impartialist Insight and the integration of it into one's life. [...] integratating the II into one's life need not mean letting it absolutely take over [...] idea that morality requires one to act only in ways that one thinks any reasonable person would accept is one formal and more moderate interpretation of impartialism. Notion that one most hold oneself to whatever standards one expects of others is another." I like that  ideal, and I would be willing 2 use violence to defend it, if peaceful means were insufficient.  this despite and awareness that reasonable person definition is quite vague  and that there is space for reasonable disagreement about what counts as a reasonable person.  at some point it is no longer a matter of justifying yourself to others karma but simply defending yourself. Max Stirner: the tiger who attacks me is in the right, and so am I when I strike him down. I defend against him not my right, but myself. The figure who can take up the view from nowhere is said to be "omniscient, disinterested, dispassionate, but otherwise normal." If we hold up this figure as an ideal, then we will naturally regret the distance between us and it, and try to close the gap. But since there is such a great distance between us and the ideal, wishing for this amounts to wishing for self-erasure. It is not just regretting our imperfections, but regretting what we are. As a matter of psychology, it is a partial commitments are attachments to specific people Places and ideas that  motivate our existence. Take those away and, to a human psychology, life becomes empty and full of despair. From LRB review: "Platonic contempt for the human and the contingent in the face of the universal and impersonal." Philosophy as a humanistic discipline - according to Nagel the fullest statement of William's conception of philosophy, it's purpose and it's relations to science, history and human life. very many people with a philosophical temperament are characterized buy a desire 2 justify and defend everything about their identity, all of their particular commitments and idiosyncrasies. A deep horror of the arbitrary, the chaotic, the meaningless, the brutal solid given hard reality. We are like this and not like that and there is no justification necessary. The question is simply inappropriate. ## Highlights There is no test of cosmic significance. If there's no such thing as the cosmic point of view, if the idea of absolute importance in the scheme of things is an illusion, a relic of a world not yet thoroughly disenchanted, then there is no other point of view except ours, from which our activities can have, or lack, significance. Nietzsche: once upon a time there was a star in a certain corner of the universe, and be as r that star was a planet, and some animals on the planet invented knowledge and then they died and the star went out and it was as if nothing had ever happened. Singer should be pro infanticide for any infants, even healthy ones, in some circumstances. Why does Singer think that personhood / whatever else - is of value. Idea that certain properties we possess are being cheered on by the universe. View from nowhere: this figure is "omniscient, disinterested, dispassionate, but otherwise normal." [Who is BW quoting there?] The figure comes in different versions. On one he's not disinterested, but benevolent. Simplest version is concerned to reduce suffering: this is what matters from the cosmic point of view. Presumably Singer wants to spell it out in less enchanted terms. They deploy the model against "the human prejudice" we express our benevolent sentiments in an irrationally restricted way. The ideal observer is supposed to be a rational corrective. Even if we thought that the ideal observers outlook was a reliable guide to what would be a better state of affairs, how is that connected with what we, each of us, should be trying to do? Wild animal suffering: isn't this bonkers? Doesn't it misrepresent our relations to nature. Those who see our selective sympathies as a biased and prejudiced filtering of the suffering in the world, who think in terms of our shadowing insofar as we can, the consciousness of the ideal observer, I wonder if they ever really consider what it'd be like to take this on. What would it be like too take on (perceive) every bit of suffering that is currently ongoing? We can act intelligibly from these concerns only if we see them as aspects of human life. Its not an accident that we can't think in terms of the total suffering in the world, is a condition is our existence, and indeed our sanity. It's à total illusion to think that our enterprise can be credentialed our licensed by some external source, a source that's not already involved in the peculiarities of human enterprise. This view thinks that all that matters in the universe is how much suffering it contains. Human beings don't have to deal with any creature that can in terms of argument or principle answer back, but it might be otherwise. Max Stirner: the tiger who attacks me is in the right, and so am I when I strike him down. I defend against him not my right, but myself. The ideal of an ethical concept that appeals to species membership is entirely familiar and seems quite reasonable. Aliens… what side are you on? Often hopes for self improvement lie very close to the risk of self hatred While I think there are many things to loathe about human beings, their sense of their ethical identity as a species isn't one of them. “he model has things entirely inside out. We indeed have reasons to listen to our sympathies and extend them, not only to wider groups of human beings, but into a concern for other animals, so far as they are in our power. This is already a human disposition. The OED definition of the word “humane” reads: Marked by sympathy with and consideration for the needs and distresses of others; feeling or showing compassion and tenderness towards human beings and the lower animals. . . We can act intelligibly from these concerns only if we see them as aspects of human life. It is not an accident or a limitation or a prejudice that we cannot care equally about all the suffering in the world: it is a condition of our existence and our sanity. Equally, it is not that the demands of the moral consciousness require us to leave human life altogether and then come back to regulate the distribution of concerns, including our own, by criteria derived from nowhere. We are surrounded by a world which we can regard with a very large range of reactions: wonder, joy, sympathy, disgust, horror. We can, being as we are, reflect on these[…]” Excerpt From: Schaler, Jeffrey. “Peter Singer Under Fire”. Apple Books. (From ea forum) Extrapolated volition Who is BW quoting there? [https://apps.carleton.edu/people/dgroll/assets/Singer_Review_Published.pdf](https://apps.carleton.edu/people/dgroll/assets/Singer_Review_Published.pdf) Williams’s argument consists of two broad claims: first that the human prejudice does not commit us to the view that humans, as such, are more valuable “from the point of view of universe” than other living creatures; and second that, if taken seriously, the Ideal Observer theory that Singer favors is unable to make sense of the Utilitarian commitment to the badness of suffering. As in much of his other work, Williams wants to show that when we talk about what matters, all we have to go on are our actual, human attachments and that any moral theory that sees those attachments as (unjustifiably) prejudiced is not a theory that can speak to us. This paper is extremely interesting, containing all kinds of fascinating discussions and asides, while also being somewhat frustrating. As with much of Williams’s work, I found myself wishing for more explicit argument and a little less suggestive gesturing. ## Singer's Reply to Williams in "Singer Under Fire" book (eBook in Apple Books) “It may be that human existence, or even all sentient life on this planet, will one day come to an end, and it will be “as though nothing had happened,” but in fact something will have happened. Given that at least some of the sentient beings living on that planet were happy ones, there is no muddle involved in thinking that the history of the universe would have been worse if that had not been the case, and instead were full of unredeemed and endless misery. Just how much of a difference this will make in any judgment of the history of the universe will depend on something we do not know: the proportion of sentient life in the universe as a whole that is to be found on this planet. In the unlikely event that the Earth is the only place in the universe where sentient beings ever exist, then our judgment of how well the universe has gone should depend entirely on how well the existence of sentient beings on Earth has gone. ” Excerpt From: Schaler, Jeffrey. “Peter Singer Under Fire”. Apple Books. “To say this does not involve the quasi-religious claim that the universe actually has a purpose or a point of view. The denial of a purposeful universe does not compel us to accept that the only sense in which our existence matters is that it matters to us. We can still maintain that our lives, and the satisfaction or frustration of our preferences, matter objectively. Nothing Nietzsche or Williams says refutes this possibility. All that is needed is the ability to imagine an impartial observer who puts herself in the position of all of the sentient beings involved, and considers which of various possible universes she would prefer, if she were to live all those lives. There is no need for this imaginary observer to be actual.” Excerpt From: Schaler, Jeffrey. “Peter Singer Under Fire”. Apple Books. “The fact that our values are human in this sense does not exclude the possibility that our distinctively human nature includes an ability to develop values that would be accepted by any rational being capable of empathy with other beings. ” Excerpt From: Schaler, Jeffrey. “Peter Singer Under Fire”. Apple Books. # Morality ## What is morality about? It must surely be possible to recognise as moral views (though utilitarians will be disposed to think that they are mistaken moral views) outlooks which hold that people very often want and enjoy the wrong things. We must be able to recognise as moral views (though cynics will think them mistaken) outlooks which deplore contentment, if secured at too low a level of consciousness and activity. Happiness surely has something to do with his not suffering; or his not suffering too much; or at the limit, not suffering int he way that matters most, as we might just about say of a man with a physically painful condition that he was nevertheless happy, if he resisted despair, self-pity, and so forth, and retained interest and pleasure in other things—and he would have to be at least some of the time moderately cheerful. [...] if happiness is ultimately incompatible with too much, or too total, suffering, there can perhaps be recognizably moral outlooks which reject the notion that happiness is the concern of our arrangements. Romantic outlooks which speak in terms of a free response to life; or of 'honesty' to one's impulses, including destructive ones; or of the significance of extreme experiences [...] It may be that certain of these outlooks say less about the general framework of morality than they do about certain personal ideals. These indeed enter into morality in the sense that for those who respond to such an ideal, it provides a model of life to be lived through and to which a special kind of importance is attached, but they are less concerned with what rules, institutions, dispositions, etc., are required in society as a whole. But this raises large issues, since the relation between personal ideals and general social norms is itself an important moral issue. It seems an open question whether some such [romantic] outlooks may not genuinely cut the link with happiness as the focus on human moral activity. A central question to be asked in considering this will always be, I think, to what extent the moral outlook makes, perhaps tacitly or vestigally, a transcendental appeal of some kind. And even where there is no transcendental appeal in the sense of a reference, such as the religious moralist makes, to something outside human life which provides in some way a pattern for that life; nevertheless, there may be an appeal to something there in human life which has to be discovered, trusted, followed, possibly in grave ignorance of the outcome. D. H. LAwrence commentary on the complacent moral utterances of Benjamin Franklin: 'Find your deepest impulse, and follow that.' The notion that there is something that is one's deepest impulse, that there is a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision; and the notion that one trusts what is so discovered, and although unclear where it will lead – these, rather, are the point. The combination – discovery, trust, and risk – are central to this sort of outlook, as of course they are to the state of being in love. It is even tempting to find, among the many historical legacies of Protestantism to Romanticism, a parallel between this combination and the pair so important to Luther: obediance and hope.  Both make an essential connection between submission and uncertainty; both, rather than offering happiness, demand authenticity. Perhaps the outlook I have gestured towards could not possibly constitute a complete morality, because it has nothing, or not enough, to say about society, and hence not enough to say about even one man's life as a whole. Perhaps even so far as it goes it rests on an illusion. But the very fact that it exists and has power demands some response from anyone who thinks it evidence that general happiness must be the focus of morality Men do, as a matter of fact, find value in such things as submission, trust, uncertainty, risk, even despair and suffering, and these values can scarcely all be related to a central idea of happiness. Perhaps [...] even if some sorts of moral ideas reject happiness as the central notion, there is still a wider, yet contentful, notion of well-being [...] On the one hand, the most extreme cases seem to leave us with a notion of well-being which is really at no great distance from "being as men ought to be" where no content is left. On the other hand, in characterising these outlooks, one speaks of what men in fact find value in, or need, or want; and if someone said - obscurely enough - that men need a world in whcih there is risk, uncertainty and the possibility of despair, then a morality which emphasised this, as opposed to moralities which want as much as possible tidied up, might still be said to be concern with men's well-being. Something will still be excluded by the use of this term: systems of values or precepts which paid no attention at all to what we can understand men as needing or wanting. ## Utilitarianism What are the attractions of the utilitarian outlet for moral thought? one. It is non transcendental and makes no appeal outside human life, in particular not too religious considerations. It can even seem to help hyphen because of a certain conservatism which I shall consider later hyphen with a demand for less reasonable, indeed rightly perceived by nature to be idiotic, that the morality thus freed from Christianity should be very much the same as the one previously attached to Christianity. In more radical hands, however, utilitarianism promises more radical change. 2. It's basic good is happiness and this seems minimally problematical. however much people differ they at least all want to be happy, and aiming as much happiness as possible must surely, whatever else give way, be a reasonable aim. 3. Moral issues can, in principle, be determined by empirical calculation of consequences. Moral thought becomes empirical, and on questions of public policy, and that of social science. All moral obscurity becomes a matter of technical limitations. 4. utilitarianism provides a common currency of moral thought colon the different concerns of different parties and the different sorts of claims acting on one party can all be cashed in principle in terms of happiness. this provision, importantly, has the consequence that a certain kind of conflict is impossible iPhone the conflict that is to say of two claims which are both valid and irreconcilable. under some other systems, a man may come to be in a situation in which whatever he does involve doing something wrong. The utilitarianism, this is impossible. one can certainly reduce conflict, and make life simpler, by cutting down the range of claims one is prepared to consider semicolon but in certain cases, that might not seem so much of Triumph for rationality, as a cowardly evasion, a refusal to see what is there to be seen.p we are going to be able to use the greatest happiness principle as the common measure of all and everybody's claims, only if the happiness involved is in some sense comparable and in some sense additive. At a technical level these problems have been the concern NZ of welfare economics and preference theory. is there a way to think about happiness so that utilitarianism can deliver on its third and fourth promises, while happiness is also the indisputable aim which was promised in the second? The answer to that just seems to be no. Bentham offered an account of happiness, namely is pleasure and the absence of pain, which was supposed very clearly to deliver on all the promises that once. But even if it had satisfied as of course it did not the conditions of being calculable, comparable, and additive, it failed the condition of being an indisputable objective colon the more it looks like the source of pleasure that can could conceivably be dealt with in those quasi arithmetical terms the less it looks like something that any rational man must evidently be aiming at as Mill came to see if on the other hand the conception of happiness is made generous enough to include anything that might reasonably be aimed at as a satisfying life or ingredient of a life then it looks less and less like something which could fit in with the third and fourth conditions. This is the first general difficulty then with utilitarianism. It's happiness has to satisfy certain conditions, if the point of utilitarianism I'd to be retained semicolon and the condition, that it should be indisputably the aim of human aspiration, conflicts with the other conditions which it must satisfy if it is to be treated as utilitarianism required to be treated. faced with this general difficulty, one way in which utilitarianism tends to react is to dispute the values involved in the more intractable conceptions of happiness, as irrational, perhaps, or as hangovers of the past age. such arguments may involve some interesting points on the way, but the strategy is shamelessly circular: utilitarian rationality is made the test of what counts as happiness, in order to remove that sort of happiness which constitutes an objection to utilitarianism. all that is needed to counter this at the theoretical level is a suitable unwillingness to be bullied. Do utilitarian is committed to something which in practice says that there are no ultimately incommensurable values. there is great pressure for research into techniques to make larger ranges of social value commensurable. Some of the efforts should rather be devoted to learning hyphen or letting again, perhaps iPhone how to think intelligently about conflict of values which are incommensurable. Rule-utilitarianism is supposed to help address the computational intractability of act-utilitarian decision-making. It is also supposed to help avoid the most counterintuitive implications of a pure act-utilitarian outlook. Williams wants to say that either the utilitarian cannot go far enough to solve the intractability and counterintuitive issues, or he has to go so far that he ceases to be a utilitarian. modern utilitarian understanding more effort in reconciling utilitarianism with existing beliefs than in rejecting those beliefs on the strengths of utilitarianism. rule utilitarianism, as the enterprise of trying to hold onto something distinctively utilitarian, while knocking the rougher edges of it, seems to me a failure. This middle ground is not logically habitable. utilitarian must always be justified in doing the least bad thing which is necessary to prevent the worst thing that would otherwise happen in circumstances hyphen and what his dust justified in doing may often be something which taking itself is fairly nasty. The preemptive act is built into utilitarian conceptions, and certain notions of negative responsibility that you are responsible for what you felt to prevent as much as for what you do are characteristic of it. It's being so, it is especially probable that an escalation of preempted activity may be expected semicolon and the total consequences of this, by utilitarian standards themselves, will be worse than if it had never started. if utilitarianism is true, and some fairly plausible empirical propositions are also true, then it is better that people should not believe in utilitarianism. If, on the other hand, it is false, then it is certainly better that people should not believe it. So, either way, it is better that people should not believe in it. # Introduction to Nietzsche's The Gay Science # Annotation Summary of The Gay Science.pdf. #### Introduction (vii) *Highlight [page 9]:* Between the two editions of The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote two of his best-known works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886); the last section of Book Four of The Gay Science (342)1 is indeed virtually the same as the first section of Zarathustra. So the complete Gay Science brackets these two books, which are different from it and from each other *Highlight [page 10]:* arrangement of the shorter sections is not as fortuitous as it may look. It is often designed to gather thoughts which will, so to speak, circle in on some central theme or problem. *Highlight [page 10]:* he sensed that Book Four, which is called 'Sanctus Januarius' and invokes the spirit of the New Year, might be found obscure, and he was anxious about whether his correspondent, Peter Gast, would understand it. He knew that this was not just a set of penetrating, perhaps rather cynical, aperfus. 'Aphorism', the standard term which I have already mentioned, implies too strongly that each is supposed to be a squib, or a compact expression of a truth (often in the form of an exaggerated falsehood) in the style of the French writers La Rochefoucault and Chamfort, whom Nietzsche indeed admired, but whom he did not simply follow in giving a self-conscious expose of some human failing, foible or piece of self-deception. There is a certain *Highlight [page 11]:* amount of that, particularly in the earlier books, but he was very aware of the risk that such aphorisms run of sliding from the daring through the knowing to the self-satisfied (it is not merely cynicism that he intends when he says in 379 that 'we are artists of contempt'). His ambitions are deeper; the effect is meant to be cumulative, and its aim is more systematically subversive. A philosopher who had a similar inten_ tion, though in totally different connections, is the later Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche might have called the sections of this book, as Wittgen_ stein called the paragraphs of his manuscripts, 'remarks'. *Highlight [page 11]:* sometimes he does claim to detect an egoistic origin of some ethically approved reaction (as he does, for example, in the shrewd observation about magnanimity and revenge at section 49). The search for the 'shameful origin' of our moral senti_ ments was later to become an important principle of his genealogical method. But he is very clear that mere reductionism, the readily cynical explanation of all such attitudes in terms of self-interest, is a mistake. Partly this is because he does not think that self-interest is an indivi_ dual's basic motive anyway, and this book contains some quite complex, if unresolved, refl e ctions on that question, in particular when he considers whether the virtues have a value for the individual who possesses them, or for the group. But, more broadly, Nietzsche thinks that the reductive spirit itself can be in error, a form of vulgarity (3), and that the 'realists' who congratulate themselves on having the measure of human unreason and self-deception are usually themselves in the grip of some ancient fantasy (57). *Highlight [page 11]:* Above all, it is simply not enough, in Nietzsche's view, to 'unmask' some supposedly honourable sentiment or opinion and leave it at that. 'Only as creators can we destroy', he very significantly says (58). What things are called is fundamentally important, but a conventional set of names - as we may say, an interpretation - can be replaced only by another, more powerful, interpretation *Highlight [page 12]:* 'Let us. . . not forget', he goes on in section 58 of The Gay Science, 'that in the long run it is enough to create new names and valuations and appearances of truth in order to create new " things" '. Indeed, but this immediately raises the question, one to which Nietzsche returned in many different connections: what must someone do to 'create' new names? *Highlight [page 12]:* The words 'The Gay Science' translate the German title 'Die Frohliche Wissenschaft'. No one, presumably, is going to be misled by the more recent associations of the word 'gay' - it simply means joyful, light-hearted, and above all, lacking in solemnity (section 327, on taking things seriously, says something about this). 'Science' has its own difficulties. The word 'Wissenschaft', unlike the English word 'science' in its modern use, does not mean simply the natural and biological sciences - they are, more specifically, 'Naturwissenschaft'. It means any organized study or body of knowledge, including history, philology, criticism and generally what we call 'the humanities', and that is often what Nietzsche has in mind when he uses the word in the text (it is often translated as 'science', for want of a brief alternative). But in the title itself there is an idea still broader than this. It translates a phrase, 'gai saber', or, as Nietzsche writes on his title page, 'gaya scienza', which referred to the art of song cultivated by the medieval troubadours of Provence, and with that, as he explains in Beyond Good and Evil (260), it invokes an aristocratic culture of courtly love. *Highlight [page 12]:* just as the troubadours possessed not so much a body of information as an art, so Nietzsche's 'gay science' does not in the first place consist of a doctrine, a theory or body of knowledge. While it involves and encourages hard and rigorous thought, and to this extent the standard *Highlight [page 13]:* implications of 'Wissenschaft' are in place, it is meant to convey a certain spirit, one that in relation to understanding and criticism could defy the 'spirit of gravity' as lightly as the troubadours, supposedly, celebrated their loves. *Highlight [page 13]:* This is why the original publisher could an_ nounce at the beginning of the book that it brought to a conclusion a series of Nietzsche's writings (including Human, All Too Human and Daybreak) which shared the aim of setting out 'a new image and ideal of the free spirit'. *Highlight [page 13]:* He said that it was the most personal of his books, *Highlight [page 13]:* he was very conscious of the contrast between overcast German earnestness and Southern sun and freedom, an idea which had a long literary history and had been most famously expressed, perhaps, in Goethe's Italian Journey. *Highlight [page 13]:* Nietzsche's general reflections, here as elsewhere, have some recur_ rent weaknesses. There are cranky reflections on diet and climate. His opinions about women and sex, even if they include (as at 7I ) one or two shrewd and compassionate insights into the conventions of his time, are often shallow and sometimes embarrassing; they were, biographi_ cally, the product of an experience which had been drastically limited and disappointing. However, what is most significant for his thought as a whole is the fact that his resources for thinking about modern society and politics, in particular about the modern state, were very thin. *Highlight [page 14]:* the deeply radical spirit of his work was combined with a lack of effective political and social ideas, leaving a blank on which many different aspirations could be projected. His clearly aristocratic sympathies are, in political connections, not so much reactionary as archaic, and while he has many illuminating things to say about the religious and cultural history of Europe, his conception of social relations owes more to his understanding of the ancient world than to a grasp of modernity. *Highlight [page 14]:* his discussions of such subjects as 'corruption' (in section 23 of this book) borrow a lot from the rhetoric of the Roman Empire and the disposition of its writers to praise the largely imaginary virtues of the vanished Republic. *Highlight [page 14]:* elsewhere Nietzsche struggles with the question of what act of creation, by whom, might overcome the emptiness left by the collapse of traditional illusions. But here the news brings, at least in the short term, only joy, a sense of daybreak and freedom, the promise of an open sea: 'maybe there has never been such an " open sea" '. *Highlight [page 15]:* and catastrophic consequences. But on the account that he himself gave of Christian belief and its origins (in this book and in Beyond Good and Evil, but above all in On the Genealogy of Morality), should he really have thought this? He believed that the faith in the Christian God, and more generally in a reassuring metaphysical structure of the world, was a projection of fear and resentment, representing a victory of the weak over the strong. That metaphysical belief has died; it has been destroyed, as Nietzsche often points out, by itself, by the belief in truthfulness - and we shall come back to that - which was itself part of the metaphysical faith. But how much difference should he expect its death to make? He shares with another nineteenth-century subverter, Marx (with whom he shares little else), the idea that religious belief is a consequence, an expression of social and psychological forces. If those forces remain, and the Christian expression of them collapses, then surely other expressions will take its place. If need secretes thought, and the need remains, then it will secrete new thoughts. Indeed, Nietzsche does think this: he thinks that liberalism, socialism, Utilitarianism and so on are just secularized expressions of those same forces. But he thinks that they are too manifestly close to the original, and that our growing understanding that the world has no metaphysical structure whatsoever must discredit them as well. The death of God is the death of those gods, too. He has a particular contempt for benign freethinkers who hope to keep all the ethical content of Christianity without its theology: George Eliot is the unlucky target when the point is spelled out very clearly in The Twilight of the Idols (the section called 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man'). *Highlight [page 15]:* Even if the content of our morality changes noticeably, as for instance attitudes towards sex have done in recent times, much more basic and structural elements of it, its humanitarianism and its professed belief in equal respect for everyone, are in Nietzsche's view too bound up with the mechanisms that generated Christianity, and will inevitably go the same way that it has gone. It is too soon, surely, to say that he was wrong. *Highlight [page 15]:* He saw the unravelling of Christianity as part of the phenomenon that he called European nihilism, the loss of any sense of depth or significance to life. The world *Highlight [page 16]:* might conceivably avoid destruction and overt hatred by organizing a pleasantly undemanding and unreflective way of life, a dazed but adequately efficient consumerism. Nietzsche probably did not think that such a society could survive in the long run, but in any case he could not reconcile himself to such a prospect or regard it as anything but loathsome. Contempt was one of his readier emotions, and nothing elicited it more than what he sometimes calls 'the last man', the contented, unadventurous, philistine product of such a culture. *Highlight [page 16]:* This book, like all his others, makes it clear that any life worth living must involve daring, individuality and creative bloody-mindedness. This is indeed expressed in the 'gaiety' of its title. Gaiety can encompass contentment, as it does on New Year's Day at the beginning of Book Four, but when that is so, it is a particular achievement and a piece of good luck. Gaiety is not itself contentment, and while it rejects solemnity and the spirit of gravity, it does so precisely because it is the only way of taking life seriously. *Highlight [page 16]:* Nietzsche has been thought by some people to have had a brutal and ruthless attitude to the world; sometimes, perhaps, he wished that he had. But in fact, one personal feature which, together with his illness and his loneliness, contributed to his outlook was a hyper-sensitivity to suffering. It was linked to a total refusal to forget, not only the existence of suffering, but the fact that suffering was necessary to everything that he and anyone else valued. 'All good things come from bad things' is one of his fundamental tenets: it signals his rejection of what he calls 'the fundamental belief of the metaphysicians, the belief in the opposition of values' (Beyond Good and Evil, 2). *Highlight [page 16]:* This is, for him, a principle of interpretation, but it presents itself in the first instance simply as a fact, which he thought no honest understanding of the world could evade. If a sense of the world's achievements and glories - art, self_ understanding, nobility of character - cannot in common honesty be separated from the knowledge of the horrors that have been involved in bringing these things about, then there is a question that cannot, Nietzsche supposed, simply be ignored: whether it has all been worth it. *Highlight [page 16]:* Leibniz, with his famous doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds, believed in a cosmic cost_ benefit analysis which would vindicate God's mysterious management. *Highlight [page 16]:* Hegel had told a progressive metaphysical story of the historical *Highlight [page 17]:* development of freedom and reason, which represented the horrors as all dialectically necessary to the eventual outcome, so that we could be sure that none of them was meaningless. Neither of these fantasies, Nietzsche reasonably thought, could be taken seriously in the late 19th century. Nor, he came to think, could one take altogether seriously someone who answered the same question, but in the negative. In his earlier years he had been very impressed, as Wagner was, by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and his references to Schopenhauer in this book are mostly respectful (more so than those to Wagner), but he came to be very sceptical about Schopenhauer's so-called pessimism, which had been expressed in the judgement (for instance) that the world's 'non-existence would be preferable to its existence'. 3 *Highlight [page 17]:* 'We take care not to say that the world is worth less', he says at 346: The whole attitude of man. . . as judge of the world who finally places existence itself on his scales and finds it too light - the monstrous stupidity of this attitude has finally dawned on us and we are sick of it. *Highlight [page 17]:* Nietzsche recognizes that his own Birth of Tragedy had been full of the Schopenhauerian spirit. Taken in that spirit, the question of 'the value of life', he came to think, had no answer and was indeed not a question. Yet it did not simply go away, because there remained what seemed to Nietzsche, at least, to be a fact, that anyone who really understood and held in his mind the horrors of the world would be crushed or choked by them. That fact left, if not a question to be answered, at least a problem to be overcome. *Highlight [page 17]:* what would you think if a demon told you that everything in life would recur over and over again eternally? How would you answer the question 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again? '? This question, Nietzsche says, 'would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight'. It tests your ability not to be overcome by the world's horror and meaninglessness. *Highlight [page 18]:* There is no belief which could 'justify the world': confronted with the question of its value, or rather with the replacement for that question, which is the prospect of being crushed by the consciousness of what the world is like, the only issue is (as Nietzsche also puts it) whether one can say 'yes' to it, and the test of that is whether seriously and in the fullest consciousness you could will that the course of everything should happen over and over again, including not just its pain and cruelty and humiliation, but also its triviality, emptiness and ugliness, the last man and everything that goes with him. *Highlight [page 18]:* This is an entirely hypothetical question, a thought-experiment. It is not a matter, as I read him, of Nietzsche's believing in a theory of eternal recurrence. *Highlight [page 18]:* if the idea of the Eternal Recurrence is a thought-experiment, how can answering its question lie on our actions 'as the heaviest weight'? If it is a mere fantasy, then how can 'willing' the Eternal Recurrence cost one anything at all? It seems as simple as saying 'yes'. But one has to recall that in facing the question one is supposed to have a real and live consciousness of everything that has led to this moment, in particular to what we value. We would have to think in vivid detail, if we could, of every dreadful happening that has been necessary to create Venice, or Newton's science, or whatever one thinks best of in our morality. Then we would have not simply to say 'yes', but to say 'yes' and mean it. That does not seem exactly weightless. *Highlight [page 18]:* What perhaps does less work in the thought-experiment is the element, which Nietzsche certainly thought essential to it, of eternity. If there is anything in this test at all, why would willing one recurrence not be enough? *Highlight [page 19]:* could willing all those further recurrences cost you very much more? *Highlight [page 19]:* There is another, very natural, reaction to the problem, which is almost everyone's reaction: to forget about it. One can forget that the horrors exist, and also, if one has a taste for metaphysical consolations, that God is dead. The narrator of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby says of Tom and Daisy that they 'retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that held them together', and that is, roughly speaking, the remedy that the 'last man' finds for Nietzsche's problem. David Hume spoke of 'carelessness and inatten_ tion' as the only remedy for sceptical doubts; but that is not the same, because Hume thought that sceptical doubts were unreal. Nietzsche knew that the considerations we all forget were not unreal, and he held obstinately to an idea of truthfulness that would not allow us to falsify them. In this book, he calls on honesty and intellectual conscience at 319 and (as we shall see) at 344; at 284 he speaks of those who have to have an argument against the sceptic inside themselves - 'the great self_ dissatisfied people'. *Highlight [page 19]:* Truth has had to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts, on which our love and our trust in life depend, has had to be sacrificed to it. Greatness of soul is needed for it, the service of truth is the hardest service. - For what does it mean to be honest in intellectual things? That one is stern towards one's heart, that one despises 'fine feelings', that one makes every Yes and No a question of conscience! The value of truthfulness embraces the need to find out the truth, to hold on to it, and to tell it - in particular, to oneself But Nietzsche's own dedication to this value, he saw, immediately raised the question of what this value is. We have taken it for granted, he thinks, and we have seriously misunderstood it: as he says in Beyond Good and Evil (177), 'Perhaps nobody yet has been truthful enough about what " truthful_ ness" is.' *Highlight [page 19]:* This unconditional will to truth - what is it? Is it the will not to let oneself be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? For the will to *Highlight [page 20]:* truth could be interpreted in this second way, too - if 'I do not want to deceive myself is included as a special case under the generalization 'I do not want to deceive'. But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived? *Highlight [page 20]:* The reasons for not wanting to be deceived, he goes on to say, are prudential; seen in that light, wanting to get things right in our intellectual studies and in practical life will be a matter of utility. But those considerations cannot possibly sustain an unconditional value for truth: much of the time it is more useful to believe falsehoods. Our belief in the unconditional will to truth must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of 'the will to truth' or 'truth at any price' is proved to it constantly. 'At any price' : we understand this well enough once we have offered and slaughtered one faith after another on this altar! Consequently, 'will to truth' does not mean 'I do not want to let myself be deceived' but - there is no alternative - 'I will not deceive, not even myself'; and with that we stand on moral ground. . . . you will have gathered what 1 am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests - that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine. . . *Highlight [page 20]:* The title of the section is 'In what way we, too, are still pious'. *Highlight [page 20]:* 'I have every respect for the ascetic ideal in so far as it is honest!' (III.26). *Highlight [page 20]:* It does mean that we want to understand who we are, to correct error, to avoid deceiving ourselves, to get beyond comfortable falsehood. The value of truthfulness, so understood, cannot lie just in its consequences, as Nietzsche repeatedly points out. *Highlight [page 20]:* various beliefs may be necessary for our life, but that does not show them to be true: 'life is not an argument'. *Highlight [page 21]:* Already in Human, All Too Human (517) he had noted: 'Fundamental Insight: There is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the well-being of humanity.' *Highlight [page 21]:* Again, in Beyond Good and Evil ( II ) he says that we must understand that there are some judgements which 'must be believed to be true, for the sake of preservation of creatures like ourselves, though they might, of course, be false judge_ ments for all that'. Truth may be not just unhelpful, but destructive. *Highlight [page 21]:* This antagonism - not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed any longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves - results in a process of dissolution. In what ways are we 'not allowed' to esteem these lies? To some degree, Nietzsche thought that this was already in his time a historical or social necessity: that, at least among thoughtful people, these beliefs simply could not stand up much longer or have much life to them. *Highlight [page 21]:* Nietzsche took it to be an ethical necessity, for himself and anyone he was disposed to respect, not to esteem these illusions. He did think that there were things which, even for honest and reflective people, could rightly compensate in some ways for the loss of the illusions; it is in this spirit that he remarks elsewhere in the Nachlass (The Will to Power 822) 'We possess art lest we perish of the truth.' He does not mean that we possess art in place of the truth; he means that we possess art so that we can possess the truth and not perish of it. *Highlight [page 21]:* debates about what Nietzsche under_ stood truth to be. Q!. Iite certainly, he did not think, in pragmatist spirit, that beliefs are true if they serve our interests or welfare: we have already seen some of his repeated denials of this idea. *Highlight [page 22]:* Nietzsche did not think that the ideal of truthful_ ness went into retirement when its metaphysical origins were discov_ ered, and he did not suppose, either, that truthfulness could be detached from a concern for the truth. Truthfulness as an ideal retains its power, and so far from truth being dispensable or malleable, his main question is how it can be made bearable. Repeatedly Nietzsche - the 'old philologist', as he called himself - reminds us that, quite apart from any question about philosophical interpretations, including his own, there are facts to be respected. *Highlight [page 22]:* He keenly detects elements in our intellectual structures which we mistake for truths. In The Gay Science he stresses the importance of 'a law of agreement', which regulates people's thoughts and provides intellectual security (76). He stresses the historical, indeed the con_ tinuing, importance of these conceptions, but he does not think that they are the truth, or that they are immune to the discovery of truth. They are contrasted with the truth, and the question is, what will emerge from a battle between them and a growing awareness of the truth: as he asks at 110,'to what extent can truth stand to be incorporated? ' *Highlight [page 22]:* In his earliest writings about truth and error, Nietzsche sometimes spoke as though he could compare the entire structure of our thought to the 'real' nature of things and fi n d our thought defective. It is as though the business of using concepts at all falsified a reality which in itself was - what? Formless, perhaps, or chaotic, or utterly unstructured. Later, he rightly rejected this picture, with its implication that we can somehow look round our the edge of our concepts at the world to which we are *Highlight [page 23]:* applying them and grasp it as entirely unaffected by any descriptions (including, we would be forced to admit, the descriptions 'formless', 'chaotic', and so on). 5 *Highlight [page 23]:* He discusses fictions, the practice of regarding things as equal or identical or mathematically structured when they are not so or only approximately so (110, 1 21). He is making the point, certainly, that mathematical representations which are offered by the sciences are in various ways idealizations, and this is entirely intelligible. There is greater ambiguity when he suggests that nothing is really 'identical' or 'the same'. To take an example: the concept 'snake' allows us to classify various individual things as 'the same animal', and to recognize one individual thing as 'the same snake'. It is trivially true that 'snake' is a human concept, a cultural product. But it is a much murkier proposition that its use somehow falsifies reality - that 'in itself' the world does not contain snakes, or indeed anything else you might mention. Nietzsche came to see that this idea of the world 'in itself' was precisely a relic of the kind of metaphysics that he wanted to overcome. As a remark in the Nachlass puts it ( The Will to Power 567): 'The antithesis of the apparent world and the true world is reduced to the antithesis " world" and "nothing" .' *Highlight [page 23]:* Our interpretative outlook, our particular 'take' on the world, is modelled on the analogy of a literal, visual, perspective, and this analogy has two implications: that we understand that there can be alternative perspectives, and, importantly, that these will be alternative perspectives on the same reality. In later works, Nietzsche is often less than definite about what is involved in this second implication, but he is very clear about the first implication, and indeed urges us to combine perspectives, or move between them, which shows that we not only know that there are other perspectival views, but that we know what some of them are. *Highlight [page 24]:* The 'Greeks were superficial - out of profundity', he says in the Preface (and he repeated the remark later, in the epilogue to Nietzsche contra Wagner). But the Greeks in their time could straightforwardly display a delight in surfaces and appearances which was indeed profound. That is not possible for us, after so much history: any such attitude for us will be a different and more sophisticated thing, and it will represent an achievement. *Highlight [page 24]:* At the very end of the book, he returns to the gaiety of the gay science, and calls up the ideal of 'a spirit that plays naively, i.e. not deliberately but from overflowing abundance and power, with everything that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine. . .' This might seem even inhuman in comparison to conven_ tional forms of seriousness, that is to say, solemnity, and in spite of all this, it is perhaps only with it that the great seriousness really emerges; that the real question mark is posed for the first time; that the destiny of the soul changes; the hand of the clock moves forward. . . Then he adds, at the end of that section, ' . . . the tragedy begins'. But immediately there comes the last section of all, Epilogue, in which the spirits of his own book tell him to stop these gloomy noises, these 'voices from the crypt, and marmot whistles'. 'Nicht solche Tone!' they cry in an echo of Schiller's Ode to Joy, 'Not such sounds!' *Highlight [page 24]:* But he does so with a final question, and it is a question which he wanted his readers to ask themselves not just at the end of this book, but throughout it and indeed throughout all his books - 'Is that what you want? ' #### Chronology (xxiii) *Highlight [page 25]:* Reads Friedrich Lange's History ofMaterialism. #### Preface to the second edition (3) *Highlight [page 38]:* There are some things we now know too well, we knowing ones: oh, how we nowadays learn as artists to forget well, to be good at not knowing! And as for our future. one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths� who make temples unsafe at night, embrace statues, and want by all me-.1ns to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, we have grown sick of this bad taste. this will to truth, to 'truth at any price', this youthful madness in the loye of truth: we are too experienced, too serious, too jovial, too burned, too deep for that. . . We no longer believe that truth remains truth when one pulls off the veil; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, to be present everywhere, to understand and 'know' everything. # SEP He rejected the codification of ethics into moral theories that views such as Kantianism and (above all) utilitarianism see as essential to philosophical thinking about ethics, arguing that our ethical life is too untidy to be captured by any systematic moral theory. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 4-6 --- “There cannot be any very interesting, tidy or self-contained theory of what morality is… nor… can there be an ethical theory, in the sense of a philosophical structure which, together with some degree of empirical fact, will yield a decision procedure for moral reasoning” Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 46-48 --- In 1973 Williams also brought out a co-authored volume, Utilitarianism: For and Against, with J. J. C. Smart (= UFA); his contribution to this (the Against bit) being, in the present writer's view, a tour de force of philosophical demolition Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 56-59 --- Williams' thesis is that our deepest convictions are often more like classical Greek ethical thought, and less like the post-Enlightenment “morality system”, as Williams came to call it, than most of us have yet realised. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 71-72 --- The assumption that, if there is to be serious ethical thought, then it must inevitably take the form of moral theory, and that any other approach could not be more than “negative”, is itself part of the mindset that he is attacking. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 93-95 --- Alternatively, the theory does represent experience, but an impoverished experience, which it holds up as the rational norm—that is to say, the theory is stupid.” Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 99-100 --- 186). In real life, Williams argues, there surely are cases where we find ourselves under ethical demands which conflict. These conflicts are not always eliminable in the way that the morality system requires them always to be—by arguments leading to the conclusion that one of the oughts was onlyprima facie (in Ross's terminology: see Williams 1985: 176–177), or pro tanto (in a more recent terminology: see Kagan 1989), or in some other way eliminable from our moral accounting. But, Williams argues, “it is surely falsifying of moral thought[13] to represent its logic as demanding that in a conflict… one of the conflicting oughts must be totally rejected [on the grounds that] it did not actually apply” (PS: 183–4).[14] For the fact that it did actually apply is registered by all sorts of facts in our moral experience, including the very important phenomenon of ineliminable agent-regret, regret not just that something happened, but that it was me who made it happen (1981: 27–30). Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 247-259 --- famously spelled out at 1981: 18, is the agent's commitment to a “thought too many”. If an agent is in a situation where he has to choose which of two people to rescue from some catastrophe, and chooses the one of the two people who is his wife, then “it might have been hoped by some people (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one's wife.” The morality system, Williams is suggesting, makes nonsense of the agent's action in rescuing his wife: its insistence on generality obscures the particular way in which this action is really justified for the agent. Its real justification has nothing to do with the impersonal and impartial standards of morality, and everything to do with the place in the agent's life of the person he chooses to rescue. For Williams, the standard of “what makes life meaningful” is always deeper and more genuinely explanatory than the canon of moral obligation; Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 302-309 --- The notion that moral obligation is inescapable is undermined by careful attention to this concept of importance, simply because reflection shows that the notion of moral obligation will have to be grounded in the notion of importance if it is to be grounded in anything that is not simply illusory. But if it is grounded in that, then it cannot itself be the only thing that matters. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 315-318 --- The notion that moral obligation is inescapable is undermined by careful attention to this concept of importance, simply because reflection shows that the notion of moral obligation will have to be grounded in the notion of importance if it is to be grounded in anything that is not simply illusory. But if it is grounded in that, then it cannot itself be the only thing that matters. Hence moral obligation cannot be inescapable, which refutes the fourth thesis of the morality system; other considerations can sometimes override or trump an obligation without themselves being obligations, Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 315-320 --- We blame people not only for what they have voluntarily done, but also for what they have done as a matter of luck: we might also say, of their moral luck. The way we mostly think about these matters often does not distinguish these two elements of control and luck at all clearly—as is also witnessed by the important possibility of blaming people for what they are. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 351-356 --- Parallel points apply with praise. Someone like the Gauguin of Williams' story can be seen as taking a choice of the demands of art over the obligations of family life which will be praiseworthy or blameworthy depending on how it turns out (“The only thing that will justify his choice will be success itself”, 1981: 23). Here success or failure is quite beyond Gauguin's voluntary control, and thus, if the morality system were right, would have to be beyond the scope of praise and blame as well. A fault-line in our notions of praise and blame is revealed by the fact that, intuitively, it is not: the case where Gauguin tries and fails to be an artist is one where we condemn him “for making such a mess of his and others' lives”, the case where he tries and succeeds is, very likely, one where we say, a little grudgingly perhaps, “Well, all right then — well done.” Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 358-364 --- “The whole of the Oedipus Tyrannus, that dreadful machine, moves towards the discovery of just one thing, that he did it. Do we understand the terror of that discovery only because we residually share magical beliefs in blood-guilt, or archaic notions of responsibility? Certainly not: we understand it because we know that in the story of one's life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done” (1993: 69). Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 375-379 --- as a normative system, utilitarianism is inevitably a systematisation of our responses, a way of telling us how we should feel or react. As such it faces the same basic and unanswerable question as any other such systematisation, “by what right does it legislate to the moral sentiments?” (1981: x). Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 399-402 --- In a slogan, the integrity objection is this: agency is always some particular person's agency; or to put it another way, there is no such thing as impartial agency, in the sense of impartiality that utilitarianism requires. The objection is that utilitarianism neglects the fact that “practical deliberation [unlike epistemic deliberation] is in every case first-personal, and the first person is not derivative or naturally replaced by [the impersonal] anyone” (1985: 68). Hence we are not “agents of the universal satisfaction system”, nor indeed primarily “janitors of any system of values, even our own” (UFA: 118). No agent can be expected to be what a utilitarian agent has to be—someone whose decisions “are a function of all the satisfactions which he can affect from where he is” (UFA: 115); no agent can be required, as all are required by utilitarianism, to abandon his own particular life and projects for the “impartial point of view” or “the point of view of morality”, and do all his decision-making, including (if it proves appropriate) a decision to give a lot of weight to his own life and projects, exclusively from there. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 430-439 --- The point is that [the agent] is identified with his actions as flowing from projects or attitudes which… he takes seriously at the deepest level, as what his life is about… It is absurd to demand of such a man, when the sums come in from the utility network which the projects of others have in part determined, that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his own convictions. It is to make him into a channel between the input of everyone's projects, including his own, and an output of optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which his projects and his decisions have to be seen as the actions and decisions which flow from the projects and attitudes with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 440-447 --- An agent's integrity, in Williams' sense, is his ability to originate actions, to further his own initiatives, purposes or concerns, and thus to be something more than a conduit for the furtherance of others' initiatives, purposes or concerns—including, for example and in particular, those which go with the impartial view. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 452-454 --- unless any particular agents are allowed to initiate actions and to have “ground projects”, then either the agents under this prohibition will be subjects for manipulation by other agents who are allowed to have ground projects—the situation of ideological oppression. Or else, if every agent lies under this prohibition and all agents are made to align themselves only with the ground projects of “the impartial point of view”, there will not beany agents. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 454-458 --- What we previously thought of as individual agents will be subsumed as parts of a single super-agent—the utilitarian collective, if you like—which will pursue the ends of impartial morality without any special regard for the persons who compose it, and which is better understood as a single super-agent than as a group of separate agents who cooperate; rather like a swarm of bees or a nest of ants. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 463-465 --- Williams' point is rather that the whole business of compiling balance-sheets of the utilitarian sort is incompatible with the phenomenon of agency as we know it: “the reason why utilitarianism cannot understand integrity is that it cannot coherently describe the relations between a man's projects and his actions” (UFA: 100). As soon as we take up the viewpoint which aims at nothing but the overall maximisation of utility, and which sees agents as no more than nodes in the causal network that is to be manipulated to produce this consequence, we have lost sight of the very idea of agency. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 500-504 --- To say it again, the point of the integrity objection is not that the world will be a better place if we don't lose sight of the very idea of agency (though Williams thinks this as well[23]). The point is rather that a world-view that has lost sight of the real nature of agency, as the utilitarian world-view has, simply does not make sense: as Williams puts it in the quotation above, it is “absurd”. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 504-509 --- The point is rather that a world-view that has lost sight of the real nature of agency, as the utilitarian world-view has, simply does not make sense: as Williams puts it in the quotation above, it is “absurd”. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 507-509 --- Why is it absurd? Because the view involves deserting one's position in the universe for “what Sidgwick, in a memorably absurd phrase, called ‘the point of view of the universe’” (1981: xi).[ Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 510-511 --- The model is that I, as theorist, can occupy, if only temporarily and imperfectly, the point of view of the universe, and see everything from the outside, including myself and whatever moral or other dispositions, affections or projects, I may have; and from that outside view, I can assign to them a value. The difficulty is… that the moral dispositions… cannot simply be regarded, least of all by their possessor, just as devices for generating actions or states of affairs. Such dispositions and commitments will characteristically be what gives one's life some meaning, and gives one some reason for living it… there is simply no conceivable exercise that consists in stepping completely outside myself and from that point of view evaluating in toto the dispositions, projects, and affections that constitute the substance of my own life… It cannot be a reasonable aim that I or any other particular person should take as the ideal view of the world… a view from no point of view at all. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 514-521 --- “My life, my action, is quite irreducibly mine, and to require that it is at best a derivativeconclusion that it should be lived from the perspective that happens to be mine is an extraordinary misunderstanding” (MSH 170). (Notice that Williams is also making the point here that there is no sense in the indirect-utilitarian supposition that my living my life from my own perspective is something that can be given a philosophical vindication from the impartial perspective, and can then reasonably be regarded (by me or anyone else) as justified. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 529-534 --- he does not believe that the ambition to justify one's life “from the outside” in the utilitarian fashion can be coherently combined with the ambition to live that life “from the inside”.[ Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 534-536 --- The kind of factors that make a life make sense are so different from the kind of factors that utilitarianism is structurally obliged to prize that we have every reason to hope that people will not think in the utilitarian way. In other words, it will be best even from the utilitarian point of view if no one is actually a utilitarian; which means that, at best, “utilitarianism's fate is to usher itself from the scene” (UFA: 134).) Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 537-540 --- The commonsense notion of impartiality is not, unlike the utilitarian notion, a lowest common theoretical denominator for notions of rightness, by reference to which all other notions of rightness are to be understood. Rather, commonsense impartiality is one ethical resource among others. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 552-554 --- there is no reason to believe that there is one currency in terms of which all relations of comparative importance can be represented” (MSH Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 559-560 --- The indeterminacy of the relations between commonsense impartiality and other ethical considerations means that commonsense impartiality resists the kind of systematisation that moral theory demands. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 560-562 --- The internal reasons thesis is a view about how to read sentences of the form “A has reason to φ”. We can read such sentences as implying that “A has some motive which will be served or furthered by his φing” (1981: 101), so that, if there is no such motive, it will not be true that “A has reason to φ”. This is the internal interpretation of such sentences. We can also read sentences of the form “A has reason to φ” as not implying this, but as saying that A has reason to φ even if none of his motives will be served or furthered by his φing. This is the external interpretation of such sentences, on which, according to Williams, all such sentences are false. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 573-579 --- Very roughly, then, the basic idea of Williams' internal reasons thesis is that we cannot have genuine reasons to act that have no connection whatever with anything that we care about. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 579-581 --- He rejected the codification of ethics into moral theories that views such as Kantianism and (above all) utilitarianism see as essential to philosophical thinking about ethics, arguing that our ethical life is too untidy to be captured by any systematic moral theory. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 4-6 --- “There cannot be any very interesting, tidy or self-contained theory of what morality is… nor… can there be an ethical theory, in the sense of a philosophical structure which, together with some degree of empirical fact, will yield a decision procedure for moral reasoning” Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 46-48 --- In 1973 Williams also brought out a co-authored volume, Utilitarianism: For and Against, with J. J. C. Smart (= UFA); his contribution to this (the Against bit) being, in the present writer's view, a tour de force of philosophical demolition Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 56-59 --- Williams' thesis is that our deepest convictions are often more like classical Greek ethical thought, and less like the post-Enlightenment “morality system”, as Williams came to call it, than most of us have yet realised. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 71-72 --- The assumption that, if there is to be serious ethical thought, then it must inevitably take the form of moral theory, and that any other approach could not be more than “negative”, is itself part of the mindset that he is attacking. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 93-95 --- Alternatively, the theory does represent experience, but an impoverished experience, which it holds up as the rational norm—that is to say, the theory is stupid.” Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 99-100 --- 186). In real life, Williams argues, there surely are cases where we find ourselves under ethical demands which conflict. These conflicts are not always eliminable in the way that the morality system requires them always to be—by arguments leading to the conclusion that one of the oughts was onlyprima facie (in Ross's terminology: see Williams 1985: 176–177), or pro tanto (in a more recent terminology: see Kagan 1989), or in some other way eliminable from our moral accounting. But, Williams argues, “it is surely falsifying of moral thought[13] to represent its logic as demanding that in a conflict… one of the conflicting oughts must be totally rejected [on the grounds that] it did not actually apply” (PS: 183–4).[14] For the fact that it did actually apply is registered by all sorts of facts in our moral experience, including the very important phenomenon of ineliminable agent-regret, regret not just that something happened, but that it was me who made it happen (1981: 27–30). Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 247-259 --- famously spelled out at 1981: 18, is the agent's commitment to a “thought too many”. If an agent is in a situation where he has to choose which of two people to rescue from some catastrophe, and chooses the one of the two people who is his wife, then “it might have been hoped by some people (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one's wife.” The morality system, Williams is suggesting, makes nonsense of the agent's action in rescuing his wife: its insistence on generality obscures the particular way in which this action is really justified for the agent. Its real justification has nothing to do with the impersonal and impartial standards of morality, and everything to do with the place in the agent's life of the person he chooses to rescue. For Williams, the standard of “what makes life meaningful” is always deeper and more genuinely explanatory than the canon of moral obligation; Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 302-309 --- The notion that moral obligation is inescapable is undermined by careful attention to this concept of importance, simply because reflection shows that the notion of moral obligation will have to be grounded in the notion of importance if it is to be grounded in anything that is not simply illusory. But if it is grounded in that, then it cannot itself be the only thing that matters. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 315-318 --- The notion that moral obligation is inescapable is undermined by careful attention to this concept of importance, simply because reflection shows that the notion of moral obligation will have to be grounded in the notion of importance if it is to be grounded in anything that is not simply illusory. But if it is grounded in that, then it cannot itself be the only thing that matters. Hence moral obligation cannot be inescapable, which refutes the fourth thesis of the morality system; other considerations can sometimes override or trump an obligation without themselves being obligations, Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 315-320 --- We blame people not only for what they have voluntarily done, but also for what they have done as a matter of luck: we might also say, of their moral luck. The way we mostly think about these matters often does not distinguish these two elements of control and luck at all clearly—as is also witnessed by the important possibility of blaming people for what they are. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 351-356 --- Parallel points apply with praise. Someone like the Gauguin of Williams' story can be seen as taking a choice of the demands of art over the obligations of family life which will be praiseworthy or blameworthy depending on how it turns out (“The only thing that will justify his choice will be success itself”, 1981: 23). Here success or failure is quite beyond Gauguin's voluntary control, and thus, if the morality system were right, would have to be beyond the scope of praise and blame as well. A fault-line in our notions of praise and blame is revealed by the fact that, intuitively, it is not: the case where Gauguin tries and fails to be an artist is one where we condemn him “for making such a mess of his and others' lives”, the case where he tries and succeeds is, very likely, one where we say, a little grudgingly perhaps, “Well, all right then — well done.” Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 358-364 --- “The whole of the Oedipus Tyrannus, that dreadful machine, moves towards the discovery of just one thing, that he did it. Do we understand the terror of that discovery only because we residually share magical beliefs in blood-guilt, or archaic notions of responsibility? Certainly not: we understand it because we know that in the story of one's life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done” (1993: 69). Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 375-379 --- as a normative system, utilitarianism is inevitably a systematisation of our responses, a way of telling us how we should feel or react. As such it faces the same basic and unanswerable question as any other such systematisation, “by what right does it legislate to the moral sentiments?” (1981: x). Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 399-402 --- In a slogan, the integrity objection is this: agency is always some particular person's agency; or to put it another way, there is no such thing as impartial agency, in the sense of impartiality that utilitarianism requires. The objection is that utilitarianism neglects the fact that “practical deliberation [unlike epistemic deliberation] is in every case first-personal, and the first person is not derivative or naturally replaced by [the impersonal] anyone” (1985: 68). Hence we are not “agents of the universal satisfaction system”, nor indeed primarily “janitors of any system of values, even our own” (UFA: 118). No agent can be expected to be what a utilitarian agent has to be—someone whose decisions “are a function of all the satisfactions which he can affect from where he is” (UFA: 115); no agent can be required, as all are required by utilitarianism, to abandon his own particular life and projects for the “impartial point of view” or “the point of view of morality”, and do all his decision-making, including (if it proves appropriate) a decision to give a lot of weight to his own life and projects, exclusively from there. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 430-439 --- The point is that [the agent] is identified with his actions as flowing from projects or attitudes which… he takes seriously at the deepest level, as what his life is about… It is absurd to demand of such a man, when the sums come in from the utility network which the projects of others have in part determined, that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his own convictions. It is to make him into a channel between the input of everyone's projects, including his own, and an output of optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which his projects and his decisions have to be seen as the actions and decisions which flow from the projects and attitudes with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 440-447 --- An agent's integrity, in Williams' sense, is his ability to originate actions, to further his own initiatives, purposes or concerns, and thus to be something more than a conduit for the furtherance of others' initiatives, purposes or concerns—including, for example and in particular, those which go with the impartial view. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 452-454 --- unless any particular agents are allowed to initiate actions and to have “ground projects”, then either the agents under this prohibition will be subjects for manipulation by other agents who are allowed to have ground projects—the situation of ideological oppression. Or else, if every agent lies under this prohibition and all agents are made to align themselves only with the ground projects of “the impartial point of view”, there will not beany agents. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 454-458 --- What we previously thought of as individual agents will be subsumed as parts of a single super-agent—the utilitarian collective, if you like—which will pursue the ends of impartial morality without any special regard for the persons who compose it, and which is better understood as a single super-agent than as a group of separate agents who cooperate; rather like a swarm of bees or a nest of ants. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 463-465 --- Williams' point is rather that the whole business of compiling balance-sheets of the utilitarian sort is incompatible with the phenomenon of agency as we know it: “the reason why utilitarianism cannot understand integrity is that it cannot coherently describe the relations between a man's projects and his actions” (UFA: 100). As soon as we take up the viewpoint which aims at nothing but the overall maximisation of utility, and which sees agents as no more than nodes in the causal network that is to be manipulated to produce this consequence, we have lost sight of the very idea of agency. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 500-504 --- To say it again, the point of the integrity objection is not that the world will be a better place if we don't lose sight of the very idea of agency (though Williams thinks this as well[23]). The point is rather that a world-view that has lost sight of the real nature of agency, as the utilitarian world-view has, simply does not make sense: as Williams puts it in the quotation above, it is “absurd”. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 504-509 --- The point is rather that a world-view that has lost sight of the real nature of agency, as the utilitarian world-view has, simply does not make sense: as Williams puts it in the quotation above, it is “absurd”. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 507-509 --- Why is it absurd? Because the view involves deserting one's position in the universe for “what Sidgwick, in a memorably absurd phrase, called ‘the point of view of the universe’” (1981: xi).[ Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 510-511 --- The model is that I, as theorist, can occupy, if only temporarily and imperfectly, the point of view of the universe, and see everything from the outside, including myself and whatever moral or other dispositions, affections or projects, I may have; and from that outside view, I can assign to them a value. The difficulty is… that the moral dispositions… cannot simply be regarded, least of all by their possessor, just as devices for generating actions or states of affairs. Such dispositions and commitments will characteristically be what gives one's life some meaning, and gives one some reason for living it… there is simply no conceivable exercise that consists in stepping completely outside myself and from that point of view evaluating in toto the dispositions, projects, and affections that constitute the substance of my own life… It cannot be a reasonable aim that I or any other particular person should take as the ideal view of the world… a view from no point of view at all. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 514-521 --- “My life, my action, is quite irreducibly mine, and to require that it is at best a derivativeconclusion that it should be lived from the perspective that happens to be mine is an extraordinary misunderstanding” (MSH 170). (Notice that Williams is also making the point here that there is no sense in the indirect-utilitarian supposition that my living my life from my own perspective is something that can be given a philosophical vindication from the impartial perspective, and can then reasonably be regarded (by me or anyone else) as justified. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 529-534 --- he does not believe that the ambition to justify one's life “from the outside” in the utilitarian fashion can be coherently combined with the ambition to live that life “from the inside”.[ Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 534-536 --- The kind of factors that make a life make sense are so different from the kind of factors that utilitarianism is structurally obliged to prize that we have every reason to hope that people will not think in the utilitarian way. In other words, it will be best even from the utilitarian point of view if no one is actually a utilitarian; which means that, at best, “utilitarianism's fate is to usher itself from the scene” (UFA: 134).) Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 537-540 --- The commonsense notion of impartiality is not, unlike the utilitarian notion, a lowest common theoretical denominator for notions of rightness, by reference to which all other notions of rightness are to be understood. Rather, commonsense impartiality is one ethical resource among others. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 552-554 --- there is no reason to believe that there is one currency in terms of which all relations of comparative importance can be represented” (MSH Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 559-560 --- The indeterminacy of the relations between commonsense impartiality and other ethical considerations means that commonsense impartiality resists the kind of systematisation that moral theory demands. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 560-562 --- The internal reasons thesis is a view about how to read sentences of the form “A has reason to φ”. We can read such sentences as implying that “A has some motive which will be served or furthered by his φing” (1981: 101), so that, if there is no such motive, it will not be true that “A has reason to φ”. This is the internal interpretation of such sentences. We can also read sentences of the form “A has reason to φ” as not implying this, but as saying that A has reason to φ even if none of his motives will be served or furthered by his φing. This is the external interpretation of such sentences, on which, according to Williams, all such sentences are false. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 573-579 --- Very roughly, then, the basic idea of Williams' internal reasons thesis is that we cannot have genuine reasons to act that have no connection whatever with anything that we care about. Peter Hartree, Bernard Williams SEP, loc. 579-581 --- **