Abstract
In his later writings, the British philosopher Bernard Williams increasingly turned his attentions to issues concerning practical politics and in political theory. He advanced a moderately sceptical and realist liberalism that features distinctive views concerning the appropriate relations among moral, ethical and political theory, and concerning legitimacy, freedom and equality, and democracy. This article examines these and related features of his thinking and locates them in the context of currently influential formulations of liberalism.
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Notes
London: Penguin Books, 1978.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978.
Ibid. I think his hopes for the natural sciences are unrealistic. Whether one reads James, Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, Putnam or any one of several French authors, in my view it is well-established that even the empirically and conceptually most rigorous natural scientific investigations involve presuppositions that cannot be demonstrated and perhaps cannot even be subjected to critical examination.
Thus, despite his emphasis on the first-personal character of moral, ethical and all practical deliberation, it would be wrong to say that his views on these matters are Cartesian in character.
ELP, p. 193. His endnote to this remark (no. 19, pp. 223–224) cites his discussion of internal and external reasons in ML and observes that ‘much depends on what counts as having a reason. I do not believe there can be an absolutely ‘external’ reason for action, one that does not speak to any motivation the agent already has. ‘There are indeed distinctions between, for instance, simply drawing attention to a reason he already has and persuading him to act in a certain way. But it is basically important that a spectrum is involved, and such distinctions are less clear than the morality system and other rationalistic conceptions require them to be’.
These dispositions and commitments can be to other people. On page 18 he writes: ‘one reaches the necessity that such things as deep attachments to other persons will express themselves in the world in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartial view, and that they also run the risk of offending against it. They run the risk, if they exist at all; yet unless such things exist there will not be enough substance or conviction in a man's life to compel him, his allegiance to life at all. Life has to have substance if anything is to have sense, including adherence to the impartial system, and that system's hold on it will be, at the limit, insecure’. See also in this connection his essay ‘The Makropulus case: reflections on the tedium of immortality (Williams, 1973)’.
In a remark addressed to what he takes to be his overly or insufficiently fastidious fellow academicians, he observes that ‘It is widely believed that the practice of politics selects at least for cynicism and perhaps for brutality in its practitioners. This belief … notoriously elicits an uncertain tone from academics, who tend to be either over- or under-embarrassed by moralizing in the face of power. … I shall defer the more heady question of politicians being criminals in favor of the more banal notion that they are crooks’ (ML, p. 55).
See T&T, p. 207: He says that against the general argument for truthfulness in government ‘there stands a moderate version of Machiavelli's thesis: the responsibilities of government are different enough from those of private individuals to make governmental virtue a rather different matter from the virtue of individuals in particular, as he rightly pointed out, from the virtue of individuals who are being protected by a government. Any government is charged with the security of its citizens, a responsibility that cannot be discharged without force and secrecy. It will be lucky if it can discharge it without deceiving someone, and if that does not already include the citizens, it is very likely that it will come to do so’.
‘The world of the anarchists is too far away from anything to ground complaints in liberty at all’ (IBD, p. 92; see also pp. 69, 85, 136–137).
‘Modernity is a basic category of social and hence of political understanding, and so a useful construction of liberty for us should take the most general conditions of modernity as given. This was the lesson of Benjamin Constant's marvelous speech The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns. …
In this he disagrees with Rousseau and in important respects with Dworkin, both of whom he understands to claim that in a just society there can be no conflict between liberty and equality. (see IBD, pp. 118, 123).
IBD, pp. 125–126. We need double-mindedness in part ‘because the on-going political framework is not given to us, as, for instance, the institutional protocols of the Supreme Court supply the framework for its decisions. We have constantly to reinvent the political framework in part, through our attitudes to our fellow citizens. It is a contribution to this process that we bear in mind that when their activities are restricted in the name of objectives which they seriously do not accept, they are indeed being coerced against their will, and that when they describe that as a loss of liberty, we should not simply tell them that they are wrong’ (pp. 126–127). A ‘political decision’ does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong, or indeed wrong at all. ‘What it immediately announces is that they have lost’ (pp. 13, 120–122).
The major works of the writers mentioned will be well-known to readers of this essay.
References
Smart, J.J.C. and Williams, B. (eds.) (1973) Utilitarianism for and Against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 85.
Williams, B. (1973) Problems of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, B. (1981) Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Paperbacks, p. 77.
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Flathman, R. In and out of the ethical: The realist liberalism of Bernard Williams. Contemp Polit Theory 9, 77–98 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.32