Bernard Arthur Owen Williams

Life and Career

Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (1929–2003) was a British philosopher widely regarded as one of the most original moral thinkers of the late 20th century. Educated at Chigwell School and Balliol College, Oxford, he read Greats (classics and philosophy) and quickly distinguished himself as an incisive, wide‑ranging intellect. After national service in the Royal Air Force, he returned to academic life, holding posts at University College London and then at Oxford.

Williams became Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge (1967–1979) and later Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley (from 1987). He also served as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge (1979–1987). Beyond academia, he participated in public life, contributing to committees on higher education and obscenity law, and was known as an exceptionally lucid public intellectual.

His personal life was intertwined with British cultural and political circles. He was first married to the historian Shirley Williams, a prominent Labour (later SDP and Liberal Democrat) politician, and later to the literary scholar Patricia Law Skinner. Williams died suddenly in Rome in 2003, leaving a body of work that continues to shape ethical theory, moral psychology, and the historiography of philosophy.

Critique of Moral Theory

A central theme of Williams’s work is a sustained critique of systematic moral theories—especially utilitarianism and Kantian ethics—which he believed oversimplify ethical life. In influential essays collected in Problems of the Self (1973) and Moral Luck (1981), and in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), he argued that these theories aspire to a kind of impersonal, impartial standpoint that is neither psychologically realistic nor ethically adequate.

Williams’s critique of utilitarianism is encapsulated in his famous examples of Jim and the Indians and George the chemist, where agents are asked to sacrifice their own moral commitments for the sake of maximizing overall utility. Williams introduced the notion of “integrity” to highlight what he took to be a key flaw: utilitarianism, he argued, alienates agents from their own projects and convictions by treating them as mere channels through which consequences are produced. Proponents of utilitarianism respond that concern for integrity can itself be incorporated into a utility calculus, while critics of utilitarianism have adopted Williams’s examples as paradigms of conflict between personal commitments and aggregate welfare.

Williams was equally critical of what he called “the morality system”—a network of ideas found in many modern ethical theories (including Kantianism) that emphasizes obligation, blame, and a sharp distinction between moral and non‑moral considerations. He contended that this system tends to treat moral requirements as overriding, exceptionless, and detached from the rest of human life. In his view, this encourages a distorted picture in which moral agents are primarily bearers of duties rather than people embedded in relationships, histories, and social practices.

In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams contrasted “morality” (in this narrow, systematizing sense) with “ethics” more broadly conceived as reflection on how to live. He argued that ethical thought should be more pluralist, historically self‑conscious, and attentive to the particularities of human life, rather than aspiring to a single, universal, action‑guiding calculus. Supporters of Williams see in this a powerful antidote to reductive moral theories; critics contend that it risks undermining the aspiration to provide clear guidance and justification in hard cases.

Ethics, Integrity, and Moral Psychology

Williams’s contributions to moral psychology are closely connected to his critique of theory. He insisted that philosophy must take seriously the complexity of motivation, character, and emotion, and that many moral theories rely on a thin or implausible picture of how agents actually think and feel.

In his influential essay “Internal and External Reasons,” Williams argued that an agent has a reason to act only if that reason can be connected, by sound deliberation, to the agent’s existing “subjective motivational set”—their desires, commitments, and dispositions. This internal reasons thesis challenges the idea that there can be purely external reasons that apply to an agent regardless of any link to what they care about. Supporters claim that this better captures how reasons function in deliberation; detractors argue that it makes it too easy for badly motivated agents to evade criticism and that it neglects the normative force of reasons that we can recognize even before we are motivated to act on them.

Williams was also a central figure in debates about moral luck. He and Thomas Nagel both explored how factors beyond an agent’s control—such as circumstances or outcomes—affect our moral assessments. Williams argued that our ordinary ethical judgments are in fact deeply permeated by luck, for example when we blame or praise agents differently depending on consequences they did not control. This challenges the idea, common in many moral theories, that moral responsibility must track only what lies within the agent’s control. Some philosophers accept this diagnosis and revise their views about responsibility; others try to show that our considered moral outlook can be purified of luck, or that the appearance of luck can be reconciled with more traditional accounts.

The concepts of integrity, self‑respect, and identification with one’s projects also play a major role in Williams’s work. He maintained that ethical life is structured around ground projects and loyalties that give meaning to a person’s existence. An ethical outlook that fails to respect such projects, he contended, undermines the very agents it seeks to guide. This orientation contributed to the late‑20th‑century revival of virtue‑based and character‑focused approaches in Anglophone ethics, even though Williams himself resisted being labelled a virtue ethicist in any straightforward way.

History, Relativism, and Legacy

In later work, especially Shame and Necessity (1993), Williams turned to the history of ethics, challenging the assumption that we are ethically more advanced than the ancient Greeks. Through a close reading of Greek literature and tragedy, he argued that ancient ethical thought—organized around notions such as shame, honor, and necessity—is not a primitive stage surpassed by modern morality but a sophisticated alternative, sometimes better attuned to aspects of human life that modern frameworks neglect. Historians of philosophy have welcomed his attempt to integrate literary, historical, and philosophical analysis, while some classicists and systematic ethicists question the extent to which the Greek outlook can or should be treated as an alternative to modern moral concepts.

Williams was frequently associated with moral relativism, though he rejected simple relativist views. He introduced the ideas of “relativism of distance” and “thick ethical concepts”—terms that combine descriptive and evaluative content, such as “cruel,” “brave,” or “treacherous.” He argued that ethical understanding is always situated within particular cultural and historical contexts and that we cannot always simply translate or transplant thick concepts across them. Nonetheless, he also held that cross‑cultural ethical criticism is both possible and sometimes necessary. Interpreters disagree about how far his position departs from robust moral realism; some see him as a sophisticated relativist, others as a contextualist realist wary of over‑ambitious metaphysics.

Williams’s style of philosophy—combining analytical precision with broad humanistic learning—had a substantial impact on late 20th‑century Anglophone philosophy. His work reshaped debates on utilitarianism, the Kantian tradition, reasons and motivation, moral luck, and the role of history in philosophy. Admirers emphasize his capacity to expose hidden assumptions and to reconnect ethics with literature, psychology, and history. Critics sometimes fault him for offering powerful criticisms without fully developed positive theories, or for an outlook that may seem skeptical about the possibility of systematic ethical knowledge.

Despite these disagreements, Williams is widely regarded as one of the major moral philosophers of his generation. His writings continue to frame discussions of what ethical theory can—and cannot—do, and of how philosophy might illuminate, without oversimplifying, the question of how human beings should live.