Morality and Agency Themes From Bernard Williams Andras Szigeti Full Chapter
Morality and Agency Themes From Bernard Williams Andras Szigeti Full Chapter
Morality and Agency Themes From Bernard Williams Andras Szigeti Full Chapter
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936410
ISBN 978–0–19–762656–6
eISBN 978–0–19–762658–0
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197626566.001.0001
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
András Szigeti and Matthew Talbert
Index
Acknowledgments
Stephen Bero
School of Law
University of Surrey
Guildford, UK
Stephen Darwall
Department of Philosophy
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Miranda Fricker
Department of Philosophy
The Graduate Center CUNY
New York City, NY, USA
Ulrike Heuer
Department of Philosophy
University College London
London, UK
Brian Leiter
Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA
Agata Łukomska
Department of Philosophy
University of Warsaw
Warsaw, Poland
Geraldine Ng
Philosophy Lab CIC
London, UK
Matthieu Queloz
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Gideon Rosen
Department of Philosophy
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ, USA
Paul Russell
Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project (LGRP)
Lund University
Lund, Sweden
Department of Philosophy
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
András Szigeti
Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project (LGRP)
Lund University
Lund, Sweden
Department of Philosophy
Institute for Culture and Society (IKOS)
Linköping University
Linköping, Sweden
Matthew Talbert
Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project (LGRP)
Lund University
Lund, Sweden
Department of Philosophy
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV, USA
Daniel Telech
Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social
Sciences
The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
Jerusalem, Israel
Marcel van Ackeren
Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy
Würzburg University
Würzburg, Germany
Department of Philosophy
Oxford University
Oxford, UK
Aness Kim Webster
Department of Philosophy
Durham University
Durham, UK
Introduction
András Szigeti and Matthew Talbert
References
Bernard Williams was one of just two prominent figures within the
mainstream of Anglophone moral philosophy in the second half of
the twentieth-century to devote serious attention to Nietzsche.
Philippa Foot was the other comparably famous figure to do so, and
she, unsurprisingly, shared with Williams skepticism about many
orthodoxies of analytic moral philosophy during this time.1 Derek
Parfit, slightly younger but probably more influential (unfortunately)
on the shape of the Anglophone profession, also ended up
professing to take Nietzsche seriously—or at least giving him a lot of
attention—in his final work On What Matters. Unlike Williams and
Foot, however, it was rather too obvious that Nietzsche was Parfit’s
enemy to be alternately defanged, defamed, and ultimately
disposed.2 Williams, by contrast, was clearly a friendly and
appreciative reader of Nietzsche, even referencing him explicitly on
many occasions in his two most important monographs, Ethics and
the Limits of Philosophy from 1985, and Shame and Necessity from
1993.3 My aim here is to assess the Williams–Nietzsche relationship,
the extent to which Williams learned from Nietzsche, and the extent
to which he retreated from or ignored Nietzsche’s actual views.
Williams’s reaction to Nietzsche will also tell us something about the
distinctive and conservative nature of Anglophone philosophy over
the past century. This deserves some further comment at the start.
Of the various fault lines between Anglophone philosophy of the
past century in the “analytic” tradition and the multiple, and often
conflicting, traditions in post-Kantian Continental European
philosophy, two are especially important in connection with the
relation between Williams and Nietzsche. First, in Germany,
beginning arguably with Herder in the eighteenth century,4 there
was a strong “historicist” turn in philosophy. Historicism, for our
purposes, consists of two theses, one stronger than the other. The
first “weak” historicist thesis is that the reference of concepts or
terms typically varies by historical context, so much so that the same
concept or term can pick out radically different referents at different
historical moments, and thus it is a mistake to assimilate them or
assume the concepts have the same meaning across historical
periods. The second, “strong” historicist thesis holds that these
concepts have no “correct” referent that transcends the historical
period. The concept “good” may, as Nietzsche argues, pick out
“elevated, proud states of the soul” (BGE, 260) and “nobility” (GM, I:
4–5, 11) in antiquity and then, in the Christian world, pick out “the
warm heart, patience industriousness, humility, and friendliness,”
until “the words ‘good’ and ‘stupid’ . . . come close together” (BGE,
260). Neither is the correct meaning of “good,” although the claim is
stronger than one about semantics: it is that “good” qua
metaphysical fact does not exist but rather is created and projected
onto the world by people with very different interests and attitudes.
Even Hegel, perhaps the most famous (albeit atypical) historicist,
can mostly agree with this characterization of historicism, with the
caveat that he thinks historical fluidity comes to an end in which the
semantics and the metaphysics coincide on God’s intentions for His
creation as interpreted by Hegel. But Hegel is an outlier in the
historicist tradition, unlike Nietzsche. And Williams, as I will argue, is
in an important sense an anti-historicist, unlike Nietzsche, but very
much like most analytic philosophers who write as though they are
illuminating the right and the good—or, in Williams’s case, “the
ethical life.”5
There is, however, a second view distinctive of most, but not all,
of the post-Kantian traditions in European philosophy,6 one that
should be unsurprising in light of the historicism. These post-Kantian
philosophers eschew appeals to “common sense,” or “our moral
thinking,” or current “intuitions” since these are simply historically
contingent data points suitable for diagnosis—for example, as
artifacts of capitalism or the slave revolt in morals, or the modern
era of bio-power, and perhaps all three—but not for understanding
the world. These post-Kantian philosophers all embrace the idea
that, on the one hand, philosophers should aim to diagnose and
assess what is really happening in culture and society—politically,
psychologically, and sociologically—and, on the other hand,
philosophers should help human beings (or some human beings)
achieve a kind of liberation. Marx, Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Adorno,
Marcuse, and Foucault are all what we might call “emancipatory
realists” in this broad sense—aiming at emancipation by giving a
realistic diagnosis of our cultural situation—even though the Marxian
idea of emancipation of the individual is rather different from
Nietzsche’s, needless to say. (Roughly, we might say that Marx thinks
individuals are liberated when they can engage in free productive
activity unrelated to securing the means of survival, while Nietzsche
is only concerned with liberating certain higher human beings from
their false consciousness about the dominant morality, which in fact
is incompatible with their flourishing.) What these Continental
emancipatory realists all share is a rejection of the conservative
conception of philosophy well-articulated by Judith Jarvis Thomson,
a leading Anglophone analytic philosopher at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology: “[T]he main, central problems [of
philosophy] consist in efforts to explain what makes certain pre-
philosophical, or non-philosophical, beliefs true . . . [namely] those
that we rely on in ordinary life.”7 She associated this conservative
approach to philosophy, quite rightly, with G. E. Moore and
Wittgenstein, but it is utterly foreign to those who begin with the
assumption that “ordinary life” is shot through with falsehood,
illusion, and historically contingent commitments. Williams, it turns
out, is closer to Thomson than he is to Nietzsche on this score—and
closer than he often pretends to be.
I begin my discussion with Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
and then turn to Shame and Necessity, although I will note certain
continuities of concern between the two and between these
monographs and some of Williams’s articles.
Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer
able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” thus
asks the last man, and he blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes
everything small. . . .
“We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink. They
have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One
still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth. . . .
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the
same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
“Formerly, all the world was mad,” say the most refined, and they blink.
One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so, there is
no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled—else it
might spoil the digestion. (Z, Prologue: 5)
We may have other motives for thinking ourselves free, but we are
as little responsible for what we do in real life as what we do in our
dreams. The same themes are sounded in one of his very last works,
The Antichrist.
Formerly man was given a “free will” as his dowry from a higher order:
today we have taken his will away altogether, in the sense that we no
longer admit the will as a faculty. The old word “will” now serves only to
denote a resultant, a kind of individual reaction, which follows necessarily
upon a number of partly contradictory, partly harmonious stimuli: the will
no longer “acts” [wirkt] or “moves” [bewegt]. (A, 14)
Since the faculty of the will “no longer ‘acts’ or ‘moves’ ” (A, 14)—
that is, it is no longer causal—then there remains no conceptual
space for the compatibilist idea that the right kind of causal
determination of the will is compatible with responsibility for our
actions. If, as Zarathustra puts it, “thought is one thing, the deed is
another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of
causality does not roll between them” (Z, I: 6), then there is no
room for moral responsibility: I may well identify with my “thoughts”
or my will, but if they do not cause my actions, how could that make
me responsible for them? Unlike Williams, compatibilism about free
will is not an option for Nietzsche.
Williams acknowledges, throughout Shame and Necessity, that
there are “differences we must approve, between ourselves and the
Greeks” (1993, 7) because there has been “progress” (1993, 6–7),
meaning moral progress. He points particularly to our ideas about
women and slaves but says this is not a matter of “some new
structural conception called ‘morality’ ” (1993, 8). Here the word
“structural” is doing a lot of work: for it was plainly a radically new
conception of morality that viewed all human beings as moral equals
in virtue of being human, a view with which Nietzsche, the only
serious inegalitarian of modernity, had no sympathy.21 Williams’s
efforts to dismiss this difference as not being “structural” is indicative
of how deep the anti-historicist impulse runs in Shame and
Necessity, but perhaps also how little Williams veers from Judith
Jarvis Thomson’s conception of philosophy as vindicating “what
makes certain pre-philosophical, or non-philosophical beliefs true . . .
[namely] those that we rely on in ordinary life” (2013, 54).22
My conclusion, then, is that Bernard Williams’s debt to Nietzsche
is superficial although not illusory.23 Yet it marks such a dramatic
departure from the creditor’s main ideas and claims as to make the
suggested affinity more misleading than illuminating. This need not
strike one as an objection to Williams, of course. As a political
theorist, reviewing Williams’s Shame and Necessity at the time of its
publication, put the point nicely,
[O]ne pervasive feature of the book is the way the carefully modulated
sentences of Williams the analytic philosopher seem to resist the heroic and
romantic project he takes over from Nietzsche. . . . [T]he Nietzschean
Williams resists the smugness and trivializing fastidiousness of most
philosophical analysis, while the Analytic Williams keeps any inclinations to
wretched excess of the Nietzschean . . . sort well under control.24
Language: French
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