Williams I

Bernard Williams: "Persons, Character, and Morality"

Remember:  We are going to skip the Susan Wolf paper for now.  We will come back to some of its themes later, so if you already read it, you are a bit ahead of the game.

Introductory Remarks

I.  Reading Williams is a bit like reading Kant: There are a lot of layers, and it is almost impossible to understand all the layers at once. In fact, I’ve read this particular article at least half a dozen times before this semester, and when I re-read it again, I noticed still more subtleties that I had not noticed before. So don’t get too discouraged–we will get you the main ideas.

II.  Bernard Williams–who is also still alive though part of that aging "Generation of Great Moral Philosophers" that includes Rawls, Gewirth, Hare, Gauthier, Nagel, and Parfit, has been a lifelong warrior against utilitarianism. He wrote the remarkably influential "A Critique of Utilitarianism" which is part of the very widely read Utilitarianism: For and Against. His more recent work consists of a series of often wildly influential articles (which have been collected in a couple of anthologies) and several books, including the rather important Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.

III.  This particular article–"Persons, Character, and Morality" (1976) is one of the most widely read bits of Williams’s work in moral theory. It develops some of the ideas in "A Critique of Utilitarianism"–in fact, some of the ideas that are contained in the parts of that work that I asked you to read earlier.

IV.  The article before us is not an easy read, at least for the first several tries. Like a lot of Williams’s work (in my opinion), the ideas in this are enormously important but are not spelled out with as much detail, precision, or clarity as we might like. Powerful rivers often meander. So too sometimes with powerful philosophical minds, though it is up for debate whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Impartial Ethics:  Williams’s "Kantian" target

I.  Williams repeatedly refers to things Kantian, even when he speaks of utilitarianism.

II.  At first glance, this is likely to seem odd, since we normally think of Kantianism as being radically different from utilitarianism.

III.  By now, however (especially after reading Hare), we should have begun to wonder whether some of the key Kantian ideas really are anti-utilitarian after all.

IV.  The Kantian idea that Williams sees as being in both Kantian ethics and utilitarianism are the ideas of IMPARTIALITY and (more importantly) the idea that MORALITY IS SUPPOSED TO BE SEPARATE FROM AND TO TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER ONE'S "CHARACTER."  Character in this context means something a bit different from what we normally mean by that word:  It means something more like "what one cares most about in life."

V.  Now it is easy to see how utilitarianism calls for us to be impartial and to subordinate our own character to morality.  You have to maximize utility impartially. Or if you are a rule utilitarian, you have to adopt the rules that are good not just for you, but good for everyone impartially.  Either way, you are to do this without regard for your own character (that is, for the things that most concern you). 

VI.  With Kantian ethics, we see these same themes:

A.  Kant thinks that the moral value of a person derives ONLY from her status as a pure rational will (after all, it is because a person is an autonomous being that she has ANY moral status at all).

1.  Now the Kantian rational will is, of course, completely separate from inclination. Inclination includes anything we desire, no matter how important it is to us.

2.  All of our goals and attachments, hopes and dreams, are outside my rational agency which, according to Kant, I must regard as my "proper self."

3.  So our attachments, goals, hope, dreams, and loves (or what Williams will later call "projects") are MORALLY IRRELEVANT since they come from mere inclination.

B.  We can see this theme again in the humanity formula of the Categorical Imperative, which says that we are to respect the HUMANITY in ourselves and others. 

A.  The humanity (this is a bad translation) is just our rationality AND NOTHING ELSE. 

B.  Kantian respect is not to be directed primarily toward the whole person in all of her particular psychological detail, but toward her "humanity," her status a rational agent.

C. If we let partiality to relatives, or love (or lust) toward our partners, our fascination with certain people’s personality, or whatever else, get in the way of our moral duty, then we have given in to inclinations that are clouding our perspective on what is REALLY valuable, namely rational agency.

VII.  Now the common theme here between Kantian ethics and utilitarianism is that the moral point of view is in an IMPARTIAL POINT OF VIEW WHICH IS SEPARATE FROM AND WHICH IS TO TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER OUR OWN DEEPEST CONCERNS IN LIFE.

A.  In being moral, we must forget our particular attachment to ourselves, our worries, our hopes and dreams and loves. 

B.  Instead, we have to (if we are utilitarians) act so as to maximize the satisfaction of EVERYONE’S HOPES AND DREAMS, and if that means that ours must be sacrificed, then we should not even MIND this, since it is what morality requires.

C.  If we are Kantians, we must obey the (very impartial) categorical imperative, even when it conflicts with our deepest concerns.

VIII.  OK, now back to Williams. On page 2, he sums up all of this stuff that I just told you: "the moral point of view is specially characterized by its indifference to any particular relations to particular persons, and that moral though requires abstraction from particular characteristics of the parties, including the agent. . . "  

A.  The next couple of pages elaborate this theme, but the details that go beyond the basic idea need not detain us here. In particular, we need not worry now about Williams’s references to particular Kantians (Richards, Rawls, Fried, etc.).

Character, the Self, and Future Concern

I.  An important theme in this article involves the fact that persons have a set of desires and concerns or PROJECTS that help to constitute a CHARACTER. 

A.  This character will give a person reason to see at least some future selves as HERSELF. 

B.  It will give her a basis for concern for her own future that is different from her concern for other persons. 

II.  Two Aspects (5)

A.  The first is the connection between character and a "reason for living" or a condition for having a meaningful life that is worth even going on with.  

B.  The second is the connection between having a specific character and being an individual.

III.  Problems with Scalar Identity (6)

A.  Something that admits of degrees is called SCALAR. 

B.  Williams’s point is that Parfit wants us to adapt a largely non-scalar moral vocabulary to a SCALAR way of thinking about PID.

 

An important objection to Parfit

I.  On page 6, Williams says: "The problems that face utilitarianism about agency can arise with any agent whose projects stretch over enough time and are sufficiently grounded in character, to be in any substantial sense his projects, and that condition will be satisfied by something that is, for Parfit, even ONE self."

II.  The point here is that if a person’s character (personality, psychology) is relatively stable over even a short period of time (say six months), and if such a person has forward-looking projects, then such a person will have no reason to switch to utilitarianism at least in the short term. 

A.  That is, even if she does not see any reason to favor her self-twenty-years-from-now over any other nearly total stranger, she will have reason to see herself 5 months from now as a nearly total stranger. 

B.  She will see herself five months from now as HERSELF, and if she has desires that can be fulfilled in the next five months, she will have no reason not to see them as HER OWN projects. 

C.  She will have no reason to see them as being the projects of a nearly total stranger, for the self that will have them is not a total stranger.

III.  So, says Williams, Parfit’s stuff can only help to dissolve agency-over-time (or diachronic agency) and not AGENCY ITSELF.

IV.  And thus Parfit has given us no reason not to care specifically about our own projects, at least as far into the future as we have the same character we have now.

Problems with incorporating Scalar Identity into non-scalar moral framework

I.  Another problem with Parfit's view is that our moral vocabulary often does not admit of scalar terms (7) 

II.  Thus it is unclear how even to think of a promise unless we take ourselves and the recipients of the promise to be persisting agents over time. How is the institution of promising to be made scalar?

III.  On page 8, Williams admits that these considerations do not show that there is no way to make morality scalar. 

IV.  However, he does think that the "displacements" would have to be pretty radical to do so. 

A.  Although he does not say what these radical displacements might be, presumably they would include simply scrapping the institution of promising altogether.

B.  This seems to me to be a weak argument, by the way:   Why not simply think that we can artificially "incorporate" successive selves in much the same way that a corporation is an artificial person capable of binding promises over time despite the fact that its make-up changes radically over time so that in a metaphysical sense it is not clear whether it is the same person?   We let legal personhood be constant even though metaphysical status of the identity of a corporation over time is every bit as murky as that of the Ship of Theseus.

V.  On page 8, Williams admits (though it does not read like a concession in his text!) that concern for future is PARTLY (but only partly) scalar.

A.  Why only partly? I think that this is the meaning of the reference to pain: No matter how much I may change psychologically, I still want to ensure that my future self does not experience pain. This is somewhat debatable: Some argue that future pains are no worse for the present self than past pains.

B.  But partly: We could imagine changes to his character that would make him cease to care about his future projects, even if he does care about his future pain. 

VI.  However (9) he seems to suggest that if we knew the steps that we would take in evolving into the person with the different character, then we might begin to care about the future projects after all.

VII.  "The same facts twice over (10)":

A.  I don’t quite know how much to make of this, but here is what I take Williams’s point to be.

B.  If we think of the future as a different self and then ask how similar it is, then we have counted the same facts twice.

C.  This is because the very fact that it is different is the ONLY THING THAT MAKES IT A DIFFERENT SELF. 

1.  So all "different future selves" are BY DEFINITION different from us psychologically. 

2.  If we then point out that these selves are not only separate but different, then we have said the same thing twice but made it look twice as significant. 

3.  Saying that a future self is very different from us is simply to say that in the future we will be psychologically different and in the future we will be psychologically different. 

D.  "Whew! That really DOES rock my world: Not only will I be very different in the future, but I will also be very different."

The Russian nobleman case: Character planning versus character assassination

I.  Williams is suggesting that it is a mistake to think of the present lefty as thwarting someone else’s projects by the promise from his wife.

II.  Instead, what he is doing is to thwart a project that will be his own project later on. 

A.  One thing that BW does not come out and say explicitly here but which seems to make some better sense of this is that we think that Lefty as a moral RIGHT to try to thwart this "other person’s" projects in a way that it would be morally problematic to thwart a GENUINELY other person’s projects.

III.  Indeed, this is the only way that it makes any kind of sense to think of how it is legitimate to contemplate CHARACTER ENGINEERING: 

A.  In a sense, what Lefty REALLY wants to do is to take steps to ASSASSINATE the future self of which he disapproves. 

B.  But of course this is mere character planning and not murder. 

C.  Since we normally think of character planning as legitimate, it must be that we CAN take our future projects and values as having SOME SORT OF AUTHORITY over our future ones. 

1.  Again, I am reading between the lines here (pages 9 and 10), but I THINK that (1) this is the basic point BW is trying to make and (2) this way is clearer than what he actually wrote. I could be wrong about either of these.)

 

I.  The intuitive question:  If we are dying every moment, then what sense does it make to go on living?

II.  BW answers that the reason we go on living is that we have projects. 

A.  We want to make certain things happen, not only to ourselves but to others and to the world itself.

B.  Death is a bad thing because it frustrates these desires, it prevents us from completing our projects.

III.  These projects "propel" us into the future (11). 

A.  They give us a reason to live and make our lives meaningful.

B.  So long as we have these "categorical desires", (or, as he will later say, a "ground project") the question of suicide is simply out of the question.

C.  On page 12 he writes that these desires, projects, etc are the "condition of my existence, in he sense that unless I am propelled forward by the conatus of desire, project, and interest, it is unclear why I should go on at all."

IV.  These desires do not have to be spelled out or conscious.

A.  In fact, in most cases they are not even there until we ask ourselves what the meaning of our life is.

B.  The fact that most of the time most of us do not contemplate suicide or consider our lives meaningless just goes to show that we do have enough (perhaps very ordinary) desires to give our lives enough meaning for the question of suicide never to arise.

V.  Ground projects (12)--this is another name, more or less, for a categorical desire.  On page 13, he writes that if a person’s ground project is frustrated, this is no reason to commit suicide, but it may seem as though "he might as well have died."

How Utilitarianism Alienates us from our Ground Projects

I.  On page 14, Williams discusses how this stuff about ground projects relates to utilitarianism.

II.  He writes:  "A man who has . . . a ground project will be required by utilitarianism, to give up what it requires in a given case just if that conflicts with what he is required to do as an IMPERSONAL [emphasis mind--r.n.] utility-maximizer . . . .   That is a quite absurd requirement. . . .   There can come a point at which it is quite unreasonable for a man to give up, in the name of the impartial good ordering of the world of moral agents, something which is a condition o his having any interest in being around in that world at all."

III.  Williams thinks that this same basic problem infects Kantian ethics as well as utilitarian ethics.  

A.  With Kantian ethics--at least as Williams understands it--your hopes, dreams, and projects do not really matter since they come from inclination rather than reason/autonomy.  

B.  These things--which include your ground projects-- lack moral status, since they are not a part of reason and since, on the Kantian view, it is reason/autonomy alone that has moral value.

C.  It is worth pointing out that not all Kantians think that this is a fair criticism of their views, or even of Kant's own views.  If you like, the question of whether and to what extent this criticism of Kant is fair would make a good paper topic. 

Character and Individuality

I.  This is the second of the two "aspects" that Williams mentioned earlier.

II.  Here what we are interested in is the fact that persons are unique individuals.  Part of their uniqueness derives from the fact that each person has an individual character, that is, an individual set of hopes, dreams, values, projects, attachments, and so on.  

III.  Up until now, we have not been looking at this aspect of character:  The arguments that have been presented so far do not depend on people having uniquely individual characters.  However, this individuality of character is important for understanding other moral phenomena.

IV.  One such thing is the experience of irreplacibility.  When we have attachments to a particular person, we do not see that person as replicable.  In fact, to be replaced (as a friend, lover, family member, etc.) is an extremely disconcerting experience.  It is to be valued less than one would like.  If you see a friend, family member, or lover as being replicable, then you are not valuing him or her appropriately.

V.  This means that, in order to have close personal relationships with other persons, we must see them as being much more than the interchangeable, generic instances of rational agency.  We must relate to their individual characters.

VI.  If a moral theory does not find a place to give value to individuality of character, then it cannot explain the value--indeed the MORAL VALUE--of close personal relationships.  A moral theory that fails to give moral value to such relationships will fail to take seriously something that is very serious indeed.

VIII.  In addition, if a moral theory fails to take personal relationships seriously--and assuming that we do not just abandon our inevitable belief that personal relationships are "to be taken seriously"-- then it is inevitable that there will be conflicts between our moral duties and our relationships.

 IX.  And we do see that not only with utilitarianism, but also with Kantians.  

A.  Williams quote (page 17) what he takes to be a typical Kantian remark by Charles Fried (a neo-Kantian of sorts):  Fried writes that in cases in which a person's spouse is drowning and some stranger is also drowning, and in which you have to choose whom to save, it is OK to save your spouse. 

B.  That, however, is not the problem, according to Williams.  The problem is how Fried (and other Kantians) would arrive at this conclusion.  They do NOT simply say "Of course, if it is your spouse, then go rescue him."

C.  Instead, they say: "well, the FAIR thing to do is to flip a coin, but in this case we can assume that there has already been a random element involved simply because we can treat it as being mere chance that the only rescuer around was the spouse of one of the victims.  In other words the other victim could not complain because it could just as easily been her whose spouse was available for the rescue.

X.  The theme here, when applied to BOTH utilitarian and Kantian ethics, is that the demand for IMPARTIALITY, the demand to avoid "PLAYING FAVORITES" fails to do justice to the fact that some other people ARE OUR FAVORITES.

A.  This is not to deny, of course, the existence of certain roles or jobs in which you are required to be impartial.  

B.  The point is not to deny that there may be SOME times when we must be impartial.  Instead, the point is to deny that morality requires us to ALWAYS be impartial.  And that is EXACTLY what utilitarianism and Kantian ethics seem to do. 

XI.  A skeptic might object at this point:  "But what about some kind of rule utilitarianism?  Maybe the problem here is just with act utilitarianism.  After all, we could have RULES that (1) allow for playing favorites AND (2) are justified on purely impartial grounds."

A.  Such a position might be based on something like Mill's idea that the most efficient way to maximize happiness is for each person to take care of herself and her loved ones.

B.  And if that is right, then shouldn't rule utilitarianism actually be a way to get around this whole problem?  After all, it seems to be a way to combine an impartial theory with rules that would allow us to "play favorites" and thus to respect the fact that personal relations are indeed serious and important.

XII.  "ONE THOUGHT TOO MANY":  Williams thinks that this rule utilitarian way to take personal relationships into account is too shallow and superficial (18).

A.  To make his point, he returns to the case of the drowning spouse, and declares that "This [rule utilitarian] construction provides the agent with one thought too many: it might have been hoped by some (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 in situations like this it is permissible to save one's wife."

B.  Williams (and this is rather typical) does not draw any conclusion more specific than the claim that SOMETHING is wrong with purely impartial moral theories.  As he puts it, "The point is that somewhere (and if not in this case, where?) one reaches the necessity that such things as deep attachments to other persons will express themselves in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartial view."

XIII.  And, says Williams, these problems will not go away, since it is precisely these attachments, these projects, that make our lives worth living in the first place.  So if morality ignores it, it ignores the very things that are the most important of all.  And if morality tries to do justice to them, then it cannot be as impartial as Kantian and Utilitarian ethics are.