Abstract
The formation of the moral point of view in Bernard Williams’ work might be understood as taking place between two central concepts: the individual and the community. It is through the tension between these two poles that some form of knowledge is acquired. In Williams’ work, the individual virtue takes the name of authenticity, and the communitarian knowledge is, importantly, ethical confidence. A philosophical peer of Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, has dealt with the same question, although in very different ways. They are usually taken to be philosophical rivals in many respects, especially regarding their political views, their views on religion and their thoughts on Aristotle. But if we look deeper into their claims, we should discover that not only do they have similar ethical concerns, as their responses to those concerns are not, in essence, as different as they seem. My purpose with this paper, however, is not to deny the important differences between the two philosophers, but rather to make conspicuous Williams’ demanding ideas on the formation of the moral point of view by (1) connecting significant portions of his work and (2) contrasting his ideas with that of a philosophical “rival,” namely by interpreting MacIntyre’s own declarations on Williams’ work. It will stand out that both philosophers’ motivation to do ethics is to grant an equilibrium between the individual conscience and the moral knowledge that is acquired within a community.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In this self-comparison there was a third element (Charles Taylor) and another characteristic (optimism vs. pessimism): “Taylor and MacIntyre are Catholic, and I am not; Taylor and I are liberals, and MacIntyre is not; MacIntyre and I are pessimists, and Taylor is not (not really). A word that seems to me not to help in describing any of these positions is ‘communitarian’”.
These are the doctrines that Williams explicitly rebuts in Morality – An Introduction to Ethics (1993).
The idea of an “independent practical reasoner” is developed in Dependent Rational Animals (1999), especially in Chap. 8. An independent practical reasoner can pursue the ends of a truly flourishing human life in an independent manner, meaning that they are able to suspend their primary desires and think about their motives and what is good for them qua human beings. For MacIntyre we can only become independent practical reasoners within a community or a “network of giving and receiving.” This thought, argues MacIntyre, has been neglected by most moral philosophy. See especially MacIntyre 1999, 81–87. Here MacIntyre compares his views with Williams’ regarding internal and external reasons.
This is not the same as saying that each community has their own moral standards and that there is no universal truth. That would be relativism. It means that each community seeks the truth through their tradition of inquiry. It would be as wrong to say that a specific tradition encompasses the whole of truth as it is wrong to say that none does, or that there is no such thing as truth. By defining the contours of the good life, the tradition is doing its best with the available intellectual resources to provide the conditions for human flourishing. Indeed, the very expression “human flourishing” acknowledges a common truth to the whole of Humanity while allowing for different ways to seek it.
I would just like to notice that like Anscombe in “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt the Youth?” (1957) MacIntyre sees that academic moral philosophy is but the mirror of the moral misery of the world of managers, psychoanalysis, and hedonism, as he argues in After Virtue. This criticism is especially pressing in his text “On Having Survived Twentieth Century Academic Moral Philosophy” in MacIntyre 2013, 17–36.
MacIntyre has not been alone in claiming the centrality of narrative identity in ethics. Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, for instance, have developed elaborate theories of narrative identity from a teleological standpoint as MacIntyre. Ricoeur is more based on a reading of Aristotle’s Ethics and Poetics, and Taylor’s work consists in a profound analysis of our history of ideas and how it has shaped our sense of self. Notice that Taylor is also extremely concerned with the issue of authenticity as a central category in modern ethics (see The Ethics of Authenticity, which is a summary of his astoundingly broad Sources of the Self). There is also a cohort of philosophers who have tried to argue against narrative identity and their arguments are basically based on psychology: see Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (1984), where he argues that personal identity boils down to a relation between psychological continuity and psychological connectedness, and Galen Strawson’s paper “Against Narrativity” (2004), in which he defends that there are two kinds of people: Episodic and Diachronic individuals. Since their approaches are heavily based on psychology and dismiss the teleological basis of MacIntyre’s theory, they do not seem to be adequate replies or rival theories. MacIntyre does respond to Strawson’s arguments as well as to László Tengelyi’s challenges in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016).
What seems so trivial was not so for either Utilitarian, Kantian, or Emotivist-inspired ways to think about ethics, which often focus on fragmented episodes of moral agency. For these types of ethics, character is more often than not a negligible concept. This is the bulk of the argument of After Virtue.
“Reason” is distinguished from “causes” and “motives” in earlier paragraphs of Anscombe’s Intention, in that intention is neither based on a fleeting psychological state nor on an external force.
This is Anscombe’s most famous example: “Since a single action can have many different descriptions, e.g., ‘sawing a plank’, ‘sawing oak’, ‘sawing one of Smith’s planks’, ‘making a squeaky noise with the saw’, ‘making a great deal of sawdust’ and so on and so on, it is important to notice that a man may know that he is doing a thing under one description, and not under another”. (Anscombe 1958, 11–12)
See MacIntyre 195, 32 − 25 and 205.
See the ending of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: “So there is presupposed some further good, an object of desire beyond all particular and finite foods, a good toward which desire tends insofar as it remains unsatisfied by even the most desirable of finite goods, as in good lives it does. But here the enquiries of politics and ethics end. Here natural theology begins.” (MacIntyre 2016; p. 315).
The recognition of unpredictability as an ineliminable condition of human life arises in the context of a reaction to the social sciences and behaviorism more specifically, which try to plan, predict, and regulate all human behaviour based on laws that such social scientists (the ones that MacIntyre has in mind) take to be similar to the laws of nature, whose formulation is wrongly taken to be infallible. MacIntyre brings together several arguments that point to the idea that unpredictability is in fact an undeniable dimension of human life, namely by recalling the preponderance of contingency in historical events; by stressing the inability to foresee the result of certain types of actions and also by refuting game theory. MacIntyre argues that human life is a complex net of games with people interacting with each other, rather than a simple, one-on-one game, where the interests and ends of others can be easily presupposed. (MacIntyre 1985, 93–102)
Grossman (1905–1964) was a writer who worked for the Stalinist regime, and at one point challenged Soviet policy, in part because of his Jewish-Ukrainian history and identity.
O’Connor (1930–2023) was the first justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who was not always understood by her conservative wing, for the way she made decisions in Court.
Father Faul (1932 − 2006) was a Catholic priest who, in times of conflict, supported the victims of both Irelands.
James (1901 − 1989) was the writer from colonial Trinidad and Tobago, who managed to dedicate his life to cricket as well as journalism, academia and political activism (from a Marxist and anti-colonialist perspective.)
It should be noted that this “infinite good” does not necessarily have to be theological, but it is a good that we cannot individually encompass, such as, for example, social justice (something common to these four biographies, although two of them clearly had a reference to a theological good).
Here, Williams is probably referring to the story of the collapse of the “ethical order,” a state of deep contact with the Notion of the ethical, which came into ruin with the tragic choice of Antigone between two models of justice, as he describes it in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This gave rise to “culture” [Bildung] and thus to the alienation of consciousness. (Hegel 1977, 266–295)
A more recent defense of this point of view can be found in Callard 2018. Agnes Callard discusses Williams’ idea of proleptic reasons, i.e., reasons for action that are only understood in the light of a future set of values that the moral agent does not possess at the time of action. They do so to explain what is implied in a moral agent’s aspiration to be something different than what they currently are, e.g., someone who comes to understand and appreciate classical music.
MacIntyre used the mythical version of Gauguin’s story in After Virtue and later, in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, recognized the historical inaccuracies in which he incurred. (MacIntyre 2016, 141–142) In that book, he tells us that a much more interesting story to reflect on the separateness of the moral and the artistic sphere (which was his topic) is Oscar Wilde’s. In a historically accurate version, Gauguin was actually unsuccessful in providing for his family, while in Denmark, and it was his wife and her family who asked him to leave. This is absolutely relevant because it rebuts MacIntyre’s own argument in After Virtue, according to which the practice of painting conflicted with his commitment to the community. After all, it seems that Gauguin was simply not fit for a community life that took the form of the mainstream, European, fin-de-siècle family household. Although (of course) this does not excuse him of his questionable mores while in Tahiti, it tells us that he simply had a different call, that would require a different type of community and corresponding practices.
Indeed, this is the conclusion of the first chapter of Morality – An Introduction to Ethics: “The Amoralist” in Williams 1993, 3–13.
See Kant 1797.
In this passage, Williams talks about truthfulness in a way that invokes the idea of authenticity as we have been describing it: “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.”
References
Altham JEJ (1995) Confidence and Reflection in World, Mind, and Ethics. Edited by J.E.J. Altham and Ross Harrison. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Anscombe GEM (1957) Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt the Youth? The Listener, February 14th 1957: 266–271
Anscombe GEM (1958) Intention. Reprinted 1979. Blackwell, Oxford
Anscombe GEM (1958) Modern Moral Philosophy. Philosophy 33:124
Aristotle (1985) Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terrence Irwin. Hackett, Indianapolis
Aristotle (1989) Metaphysics In Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols.17, 18 Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; William Heinemann Ltd., London
Callard A (2018) Aspiration: the Agency of becoming. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Hegel GF (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Hume D (1969) A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by Ernest Mossner. First Edition 1739. Penguin/Pelican, Harmondswort
Kant I (1797) On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy. In Practical Philosophy Translated and edited by Mary Grego. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 611–615
MacIntyre A (1985) After Virtue – A Study in Moral Theory 2nd Edition (1st. ed 1981.) Reprinted 1990. Duckworth, London
MacIntyre A (1999) Dependent Rational Animals Duckworth, London
MacIntyre A (2013) On Having Survived Twentieth Century Academic Moral Philosophy. In What happened in and to moral philosophy in the twentieth century? philosophical essays in honor of Alasdair MacIntyre Edited by Fran O’Rourke. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press
MacIntyre A (2016) Ethics in the conflicts of modernity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Williams B (1981) Moral luck – philosophical papers 1973–1980 reprinted, 1999. Cambridge UP, Cambridge
Williams B (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy Reprinted, 1993. Fontana Press, London
Williams B (1993) Morality – An Introduction to Ethics (Canto Edition.) Reprinted 1996 (1st edition 1972.) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Williams B (1995) Replies in World, Mind, and Ethics. Edited by J.E.J. Altham and Ross Harrison. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Williams B (2002) Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Acknowledgements
Valuable discussion was held with my thesis supervisor, Prof. Miguel Tamen. A considerable part of the paper is a translated and revised version of the second chapter of my unpublished MA thesis (Universidade de Lisboa). Substantial findings and changes of argument were included in this version.
Funding
Funding for this research was provided by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia under grant number SFRH/BD/146796/2019. The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Franco, P.A.M. Bernard Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre on Authenticity. Topoi 43, 387–402 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-024-10049-4
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-024-10049-4