The impact that the Cartesian quest for certainty has had on moral thinking can be seen in the way various Modern theorists have sought to overcome moral relativism. This chapter opened with Williams describing an epistemic anxiety over relativism. In Morality: An Introduction to Ethics Williams was already rejecting the attempt by practical ethicists to simplify moral enquiry. He rejects foundationalism in ethics primarily because it attempts to simplify what cannot be made simple. Simplification is a mistake, according to Williams, because complexity and conflict is a basic fact of moral deliberation. He prefers to see moral deliberation as a complex mix of local and universal concerns that includes the psychological and emotional concerns of the moral agent.68 In Moral Luck Williams again rejects the idea that a completely impartial position is possible for any ethical theory, though his primary target is the alleged impartial consideration advocated by Henry Sidgwick and other utilitarian philosophers. Williams argues
68 Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 23-24.
that the desire for a discrete moral theory, and an accompanying decision making protocol, is misguided.
There cannot be any very interesting, tidy or self-contained theory of what morality is, nor, despite the vigorous activities of some present practitioners, 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.69
Williams returns to this theme in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, in which he asks why moral reductionism arose in the first place and why simplification in ethics is wrong.
If there is such a thing as the truth about the subject matter of ethics – the truth, we might say, about the ethical – why is there any expectation that it should be simple? … Perhaps we need as many concepts to describe it as we find we need, and no fewer?70
Williams says that the fact that we appeal to a variety of ethical considerations is precisely what one would expect to find in the complex world we inhabit. Ethical considerations, according to Williams, are ―genuinely different from one another,‖
and this is precisely what moral agents should expect because all of us are ―heirs to different long and complex ethical traditions, with many different religious and other social strands.‖71 Williams argues nonetheless that a moral agent can be an epistemological skeptic without being an ethical skeptic:
69 Williams, Moral Luck, ix-x.
70 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 17.
71 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 16.
In my sense, to be skeptical about ethics is to be skeptical about the force of ethical considerations; someone may grant them force, and so not be a skeptic, but still not think that they constitute knowledge because he does not think the point lies in their being knowledge.72
Williams argues that Sidgwick‘s requirement that rational agents ought to examine ethical issues from a point of view of the universe is wrong because
―neither psychology nor the history of ethical reflection gives much reason to believe that the theoretical reasonings of the cool hour can do without a sense of the moral shape of the world, of the kind given in everyday dispositions.‖73 Williams claims that Sidgwick‘s point of view of the universe is nowhere to be found,74 and he refers to this type of thinking as government house utilitarianism.75 He suggests that rather than concentrating on a non-existent point of view of the universe, a moral agent should be more concerned with the point of view of here and now and with ―how a practice hangs together in comparison with other practices.‖76 Williams argues that the justification for rejecting the foundationalist enterprise in moral philosophy, in favour of practice-guided enquiry, is the same justification for rejecting it in the philosophy of science.
No process of reason-giving fits this picture, in the sciences or elsewhere. In theoretical connections, the foundationalist enterprise, of resting the structure of knowledge on some favored class of statements, has now generally been displaced in favor of a holistic type of model, in which some beliefs can be questioned, justified, or adjusted while others are kept constant, but there is no process by which they can all be questioned at once, or all
72 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 25.
73 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 110.
74 Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity: and Other Philosophical Papers 1982-1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 169-170
75 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 108-110.
76 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 114.
justified in terms of (almost) nothing. In Neurath‘s famous image, we repair the sea while we are on the sea.77
A moral agent, according to Williams, ought to be concerned with how a practice
―hangs together in comparison with other practices in a way that makes social and psychological sense.‖78 Because Williams argues that a moral agent is necessarily conditioned by culture, psychology, and history he has also been labeled a moral relativist. This is a tag he eventually came to own, or perhaps reform, because he argues that from the point of view of a moral objectivist, he is indeed advocating a type of moral relativism. However, he claims that the moral objectivist is simply wrong to think that the key aspect of moral deliberation is avoidance of relativism.
He uses the phrase, ―relativism from a distance,‖ to show that moral deliberation is always perspectival, always local, and therefore by definition always relative to the types of people we are.79
In the opening chapter to his last book, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay In Genealogy, Williams argues that the commitment to truth and the suspicion of this commitment still dominates the cultural scene.80 In this book he further articulates what was for him a familiar theme, namely, Nietzsche‘s concept of genealogy.81
Our ethical ideas are a complex deposit of many different traditions and social forces, and they have themselves been shaped by self-conscious representations of that history. However, the impact of these historical processes is to some extent concealed by the ways in which their
77 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 113.
78 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 114.
79 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 162-165, 172-173.
80 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay In Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 1.
81 Nietzsche wrote On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) as a sequel to Beyond Good and Evil (1886).
product thinks of itself. The most general reason for this is that a truthful historical account is likely to reveal a radical contingency in our current ethical conceptions.82