beginning and end were great, middle was a little confusing

Nozick en  Anarquía, Estado y utopía critíca la idea de Williams de necesidad de igualdad en la percepción de la salud.

full of great arguments but I just can’t deal with this writing style

A profound walk through a history of philosophy, starting with the Greeks, which reveals the inadequacy of enlightenment philosophy and secular relativism. The atheist dives into the realization that there is something weighty, something "thick," something with depth that calls out like a moral compass, in the relationships we have with each other and existence. It's technical, but a worthwhile read if you have a good bit of philosophical reading already in your pocket.

More than 200 pages to not say very much at all.

A keen vision which help us to understand the dynamics of our contemporary struggle of dilemmas and options and the principles under which we move...

I found this engaging and compelling throughout, and frankly wish it had been longer. My biggest regret is that at times I felt like I wasn't as mentally "on" as I needed to be, and probably ended up skimming over some valuable parts. I find myself strongly inclined to agree with Williams on his critique of modern moral philosophy (admittedly not having that much knowledge about many of the paradigms he attacks), and find his call to a synthesis of Ancient moral philosophy with modern understanding inspiring and sensical. It's hard to think of any point I distinctly diverge from him on, but I do wish he spent a little more time fleshing out his conception of how a practical/individualistic morality would work. His critiques of utilitarianism and deontology are both powerful (though there are additional points I wanted him to make), and his general understanding of the impossibility of broad ethical theories makes sense to me. Need to go read some responses/critiques, because I found him so convincing.

one of the top books of the 80s for Ethics

Livre très intéressant, avec des forts arguments, mais aussi très frustrant, car Williams ne semble pas assumer les conclusions qui s'imposent avec les arguments qu'il présente.

Dans ce livre, Williams défend que l'éthique telle qu'elle a été pratiquée au 20e siècle ne pose pas les bonnes questions. L'éthique se pose la question suivante: « Que dois-je faire? » et tente de fournir une réponse objectivement argumentée. Il dit que cette tentative d'objectivité est réductrice dans la mesure où elle monopolise tout le discours éthique qui, selon Williams, est beaucoup plus vaste. Mais surtout, il pense que cette tentative d'objectivité est impossible, que la philosophie n'est pas en mesure de fournir une argumentation objectivement valable permettant d'objectivement justifier un devoir être.

En découle que les théories morales (déontologie, utilitarisme, etc.) sont illégitimes, sont ceux qui promulguent cette entreprise réductrice en morale. Sa critique de l'utilitarisme est relativement connue et est présente dans ce livre. Néanmoins, elle est beaucoup plus développée dans le livre ''utilitarianism for and against''. Essentiellement, il dit que l'utilitarisme implique une perte d'intégrité de l'agent morale amené à délibération. Ce qu'il veut dire est que l'utilitarisme nécessite de sortir de son identité personnelle pour prendre une décision impartiale, par exemple si je suis dans une situation où j'ai un choix à faire entre sauver ma femme ou sauver 3 étrangers, l'agent parfait utilitariste devra sauver les 3 étrangers. Ce que dit Williams est que cette agentivité impartiale n'existe pas et que de forcer des agents rationnels à constamment tenter de tendre vers cette impartialité crée une perte d'identité personnelle, de ce qui fait qu'une personne est ce qu'elle est. Ce n'est probablement pas le meilleur résumé de l'argument, la raison est que je ne l'ai jamais si bien compris haha, mais c'est ce que j'en comprend. Le problème que j'ai avec cet argument est qu'il suppose que l'identité personnelle a une importance accrue qu'elle n'a pas vraiment il me semble. Les projets de vie que les individues se donnent, s'ils contrviennent au bien être général peuvent être légitimement critiqué et la perte d'intégrité occasionnée aux individus devant mettre en doute ces projets est bonne et donc la perte d'intégrité ne pose pas problème. En fait, tout le problème de l'éthique est de trouver une justification objective pour un énoncé normatif/prescriptif/évaluatif. Je ne vois pas en quoi l'intégrité aurait une valeur plus grande que le bien-être collectif.

Le problème majeur que j'ai avec le livre est que Williams accorde une importance accrue à ce qu'il appelle les ''ethical dispositions'' et à ce qu'il appelle les ''thick ethical concepts''. Les ''ethical dispositions'' sont des dispositions non normatives/prescriptives/évaluatives présentes chez pas mal (si ce n'est pas tous) les hommes tendant à considérer autrui moralement. Par exemple, le remord est une ethical disposition. Ce sont les composantes de notre psychologie qui font en sorte qu'on considère les intérêts d'autrui et que l'on fait des décisions désintéressées. Williams nous dit que l'on voit ce genre de dispositions partout et donc que l'importance accordée dans la philo du 20e siècle à l'argumentation morale rationnelle est ''overrated'' puisque de toutes manières les dispositions éthiques font en sorte qu'on ne se tuerait pas, qu'on se contiendrait quand même. Autrement dit, même si la morale n'est pas objective nous sommes naturellement dotés de dispositions faisant en sorte que les intérêts d'autrui sont considérés. Le problème que j'ai avec cela est que personne ne nie que nous avons des ethical dispositions, mais que sans théorie morale ce ne sont que des faits et nous ne savons pas si elles sont bonnes ou mauvaises (puisque le bien et le mal n'existent pas objectivement sans théorie morale). Au niveau de la justification si nous restons qu'au niveau factuel l'éthique n'a aucune direction, nous pouvons faire une étude psychologique des différentes dispositions éthiques, on pourrait même comparer les différentes dispositions des gens par rapport à la culture dans laquelle ils ont grandi. Ce serait certes très intéressant, mais nous restons au niveau des faits, cela ne nous permet pas de savoir si nous devrions accepter ou rejeter ces dispositions morales.

L'autre problème que j'ai est avec celui des ''thick ethical concepts''. Williams nous dit qu'ils sont à la fois ''world guided'' et ''action guiding''. Ce qu'il entend par là est qu'ils sont à la fois descriptifs et normatifs, ils ont une définition factuelle et impliquent une motivation à agir. Un exemple serait le courage, pour être courageux il faut accomplir certains critères, puis de manière implicite nous voulons tous être courageux plutôt que lâches donc il motive à agir. Le problème est qu'en philosophie nous tentons de justifier nos assertions, oui c'est vrai qu'historiquement nous semblons toujours avoir préféré le courage à la lacheté, mais pourquoi est-ce que ce fait historique est moralement pertinent? Avons-nous réellement une raison d'être courageux plutôt que lâche avec les outils conceptuels que nous donnent Williams? La réponse est non. Il pense que les théories morales sont veines, qu'on ne peut établir un devoir être objectif donc le courage et tous les autres concepts épais ne sont pas normatifs, ils ne sont que purement descriptifs! Le fait qu'ils nous poussent à agir est un fait descriptif, le courage ne contient pas en lui-même une raison pour laquelle nous devrions être courageux. Autrement dit, les concepts épais ne nous aident pas parce que bien qu'ils semblent implicitement contenir un élément normatif, dans les faits ils n'en contiennent aucun. Le courage est le courage, nous pouvons en donner une définition et plusieurs personnes peuvent avoir la préférence personnel d'être courageux, mais vu que l'objectivité en morale est impossible selon Williams personne n'est injustifié à être courageux ou lâche, rien ne lui permet de dire qu'un est préférable à l'autre. Le mieux qu'il puisse faire est une description.

Bref, il est vrai que nous n'avons pas de point d'Archimède, de point à partir duquel nous pouvons fonder objectivement une morale (je ne suis pas entré dans le détail de cette preuve puisque je la trouve bonne et qu'il est plus intéressant de parler des points de discorde haha). Néanmoins, je n'aime pas les conclusions que Williams tirent à partir de ce constat de départ. Il cache son relativisme moral (le fait qu'on ne peut justifier objectivement une proposition ayant la forme X est moralement blamable de faire Y) derrière ses concepts épais et des dispositions éthiques, mais malgré ces 2 outils conceptuels on ne peut pas plus blâmer quelqu'un pour avoir fait quelque chose.

Je pense qu'un utilitarisme des préférences très minimal et pragmatique est une meilleure réponse à se manque de fondation. Il part du constat que nous vivons avec autrui et qu'autrui a des intérêts tout comme nous. À partir de ce fait brute nous pouvons, à l'aide de l'abstraction conceptuelle, émettre la proposition suivante: « Mes intérêts, parce qu'ils sont mes intérêts, n'ont pas plus de valeur que ceux d'autrui » en découle qu'il est moralement blâmable de ne pas considérer les intérêts d'autrui lorsqu'un agent moral délibère. Je ne pense pas avoir trouvé une fondation à la moralité absolument certaine et irréfutable, je pense avoir trouvé une règle raisonnable qui nous aide à interagir et qui permet de considérer les intérêts de TOUS et non seulement de ceux qui ont la chance d'être privilégié par mes dispositions éthiques naturelles.

williams here discusses and elaborates on a position that those frustrated by the typical teaching of ethical philosophy will find a relief to read in print: it seems that the more one thinks about ethics, the more unethical (or idiotic) one's positions become (singer's famine argument, most population ethics, etc.). his approach to the ethical's relation to historical and social context i also find attractive, as this is often quite embarrassingly ignored in moral philosophy. williams develops his ideas clearly and methodically, although if there were one critique of his prose it would be that he often seems to circle around a point of profundity or interest and then move on to the next one as if you and him are on the same page, which can be frustrating. the commentary by a.w. moore at the end of the routledge edition is helpful with this. were i to critique the book overall, i would simply say i wish it was longer. williams is really a joy to read. his humanistic and passionate approach is sure to resonate with anyone concerned with the value of human integrity generally.

Not as good as S&N, but I do think that Morality, the Peculiar Institution is an outstanding chapter title.

In the last few books I've read, I found myself passing from Kant's "Philosophy of Law", which asked What is Right to reading Plato's "Theaetetus", which asked What is Knowledge, to Socrates asking What is Justice in Bernard Williams' "The Sense of the Past"; juxtaposed between these various texts, I was quite unclear how the relations between these different projects are to be conceived. Does their importance lie in the ordinary regime of testimonial faith, or is it the success of the spirit of freedom in this faithless world that these texts are to be measured against?

Bernard Williams tells us that Plato designates Socrates as the discoverer of the universal concept. But this discovery does not take the form of a new kind of knowledge but a new kind of non-knowledge. The question "what is" contains within itself the method of Socratic induction. And so it remains true, even within highly developed knowledge systems that each newly acquired concept is an attempt, a beginning, a problem; its value lies not in its copying of definite objects but in its opening of new logical perspectives, thereby permitting a new penetration and survey of an entire problem complex. While among the basic logical functions the judgment closes and concludes, the concept, by contrast, has essentially the function of opening up. Here again we find that the concept is far less abstract than prospective; it not only fixes what is already known, establishing its general outlines, but also maintains a persistent outlook for new and unknown connections. It not only takes up the similarities or connections which experience offers, but also strikes up new connections; it is a free line stroke that always must be attempted anew if the inner organization of the realm of both empirical intuition and of logical-ideal object is to be brought out clearly. For the progressive thinker, the effect of these directives is one of ecstatic intoxication; we are no longer mistaken, never has life seemed more delicious or more enlightened. In his text Williams reveals that pleasure for the political thinker becomes the pain of the ideological thinker, as structuralism's dangerous truths are put words into the mouth of arguments used to reproach truth for not understanding the attributes of God... In his conception of the binary pair of Plato and Socrates, Williams confronts the inexorable failed limits of academic tragedy which the philosophy of childhood instructs us in all the way from primary school to the heights of a mature affected aestheticism.

Kant's doctrine of right is often understood to explain the authority of law by reference to the way law secures important general interests such as security and welfare. We say that rooting legal obligation in the instrumental benefits conferred by law is a misreading of Kant's argument. Instead, we suggest that at the center of Kant's sophisticated and multifaceted legal philosophy is a moral concept of law, or right, which has interpretative priority. Kant's argument for right demonstrates that the establishment of an omnilateral will is the only for persons' wills to be aligned consistently with the categorical moral duties they owe to each other. Rights can never be secured unilaterally, but only given effects by a constitution which secures various democratic and substantive (innate) rights. This explains Kant's opposition to despotism, colonialism and revolution. We distinguish this moral concept of law from related juridical (positive) and ethical concepts, and we trace some of the complex relationships which exist between juridical law and the moral concept which, in Kant's world, gives law its brain. While this is impressive on its face, it has the danger of degrading into absurd political sloganeering - a self-delusion that creates a mournful possibility of transforming a philosopher's arguments into that of Hollywood film director's talents for organization and coordination of departments for the purposes of production of serving low-brow audiences, a production process that is necessarily blinded to the dominant structure of traditional aesthetic creation. But what kind of paradox is the contemplation of absence, which regards the universe as the manifestation of God, of taking the edict of thou shalt not kill itself as the essence of a truth worth more than life itself?

Socrates was not in the business of defining such refractory terms. Instead he searched for explanations in conversations with others, pressing them on the outer ranges of their arguments to better understand what they mean. Plato has him grounding values in an Ideal plane of existence where perfect justice exists, with the human variety a pale imitation. Since justice, like other ethical concepts, is a multi-faceted concept involving competing values, it cannot be summarized succinctly. We do know that Socrates refused to give in to political pressure when he himself served on citizen juries, as well as refusing to lie to save his own life when he was put on trial in what probably was a show trial. He believed he owed loyalty to his own city-state by living in it his whole life, as partial as the justice offered there was, so he submitted to the point of death even though his friends wanted to spirit him away. As close as you may get might be to say he believed in being honorable, honest, dispassionate, and fair, which we could all still learn from. By contrast, contemporary fetishized mass culture turns the positive into a negative, a wish-fulfilling binary opposition; no such compromise is possible for Judaism, Christianity, Islam or Marxism. How can we account for these facts without bringing into play our reaction to radical evil's decision of the Jewish question, which is in fact a legitimate part of the religious question on the allegorical level of sense-experience? Only the radical event-like character of being, as it is understood in the light of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the son of God, does it seem possible for philosophy to think itself as more than a reading of the signs of the times without this being a purely passive record of the lives of the Biblical heroes we were once called on the emulate.

How we define true Socratic justice depends on what we mean by utopianism. The historical Socrates would never offer his own definition of justice or any other moral term, although he did like to question other people about the moral opinions they claimed to hold on such subjects. At the beginning of Plato’s Republic you can see Socrates questioning Cephalos, then Polemarchus and finally Thrasymachus about what they claim justice is. The historical Socrates may well have done something very much like this. But at the beginning of Republic book 2 when others ask Socrates what he thinks justice is and he starts giving a very lengthy definition by comparing the ideal city where justice is “writ large” and easy to see with justice in the soul where it is more difficult to see, we can be sure that this is no longer the historical Socrates speaking but rather Plato speaking through Socrates as a fictional character. If you mean Socrates the fictional character in Plato’s middle and late dialogues then we can say he defines justice by analogy. Just as justice in the ideal city is each of its three social classes minding its own business and doing the one thing for which it is best suited, so justice in the soul is each of its three faculties minding its own business doing the one thing it does best. By the Republic book 4 Plato’s fictional character Socrates turns to defining injustice the same way so he can answer Thrasymachus’ claim that it’s better to be unjust. Again he defines injustice the same way—by analogy! Just as the city is ruined by class warfare, so a soul divided against itself cannot flourish. So despite the popular view about it argued by Thrasymachus, it’s better after all for the good of your soul to be just. Or at least that’s how Plato’s fictional character Socrates defines it. So relentless is Plato's characterization of Socrates in the Theaetetus as to harden every gesture in our sportive competitive society which has no place for love and tolerance, and by extension to the nature of birth and death, are only dying habits of our tranquilizing human nature-world, certainly projects a hierarchical bullying into an exceptional violence rather than an agape which commands us to come to terms with injustice, to love him more dearly on the condition that we sacrifices him.

Plato proved that knowledge is not evaluated by judgment or proper account or correct opinion - maybe it's just playing with the slippery slope of a language-game within the bounds of a terrestrially-grounded consciousness in terms of time, space and causation? According to Bernard Williams, this suggestion should not be interpreted as the “the blankly psychological proposition that one is more disposed to forget what one merely believes than what one knows”. Instead, it should be interpreted as the “point … that knowledge cannot rationally be rendered doubtful” – whereas mere beliefs can be “rationally rendered doubtful”. For a belief to be “rationally rendered doubtful”, I assume, is for the belief to be given up because it is rationally undermined or defeated. Let us also assume that in all the cases that concern us, the belief in question will be given up if and only if (and because) it is rationally undermined. In effect, then, the suggestion is that knowledge (unlike mere belief) cannot be rationally undermined. The appeal to order alone has no claims if it does not prove itself internally and in confrontation with human beings to be fragmentary and entirely volatile to the point that one must expect catastrophes in order for the dangerous philosophy to be validated. William's argument with Plato's style displays an intriguing ambivalence between commentary and critique, that is, of what Western Culture considers sacrificial, industrial, and carno-phallogo-centric, what may eat and what may be eaten, in this global-Latinization of the empirico-philosophical world.

Plato, Plato's representation of Socrates and Aristotle all sought foundations for philosophical and scientific inquiry which would resist skepticism. After these, it is normally supposed that Plato’s next two works were the Parmenides and the Theaetetus, probably in that order. If so, and if we take as seriously as Plato seems to the important criticisms of the theory of Forms that are made in the Parmenides, then the significance of the Theaetetus’s return to the aporetic method looks obvious. Apparently Plato has abandoned the certainties of his middle-period works, such as the theory of Forms, and returned to the almost-sceptical manner of the early dialogues. In the Theaetetus, the Forms that so dominated the Republic’s discussions of epistemology are hardly mentioned at all. A good understanding of the dialogue must make sense of this fact. At any rate, the concept of culture has been neutralized to a great extent through its emancipation from the actual process of life experienced with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the Enlightenment. One reason why Hegelian Marxism has been so dominant in the United States is that it tends to defuse the less comfortable political realities of Marxism itself. This elemental act of faith also underscores the economic and capitalistic rationality of the techno-scientific.

If the essence of virtuous actions lay in rational knowledge exercised by the soul, then there could be no separate motives represented by the various virtues, as conventionally distinguished: justice, self-control, courage, and the rest. Aristotle’s notions of different virtues are much different than that of Plato. Instead of only having four virtues, Aristotle had many moral virtues, also, virtuousness was not merely a universal principle as it was depicted in Plato’s theory, but it was now moderated on more-or-less a sliding scale that is called the “means between the extremes” argument. Aristotle would say that a courageous person is one who is motivated by a sense of honor, not the fear of punishment or the desire for reward, or merely as a sense of duty. The courageous man is afraid, because without fear there would be no courage and the man who feels no fear is in the face of danger and is rather rash. According to Aristotle, a courageous person must have just the right amount of cowardice and just the right amount of rashness. However each situation is different, according to Aristotle, because in some cases a person must be more rash or more cowardly, a virtuous person must be able to gauge an incident with the appropriate amount of virtue. As Marx defines the fetish character of the commodity, the veneration of the thing made by oneself which, as exchange-value, simultaneously alienates itself from producer to consumer, so human beings are the most valuable forms of postmodern subjects which, like much of Derrida's writing, refuse to credit the absurdity that we could have simply jettisoned the metaphysical like a cast off overcoat. Living in a digitized cyberspace fit for art's mechanical reproduction concedes no rights to one's status; it is like the prospect of conjugal love with a priestly celibacy to be immediately transmitted live before thousands in the studio and untold millions around the world, to be followed by so many commercials as to broadcast its radical depth of communication and general universality.

What does our Socratic argument contend? What is the best life? It is not that the pursuit of justice for its own sake has a quite special moral value which vindicates itself. The question of its value, rather, is the question of what makes life worth living, a question to which other non-moral goods might, in principle, provide the answer. Aristotle indicates several times that merely to say that pleasure is a good does not do it enough justice; he also wants to say that the highest good is a pleasure. Here he is influenced by an idea expressed in the opening line of the Ethics: the good is that at which all things aim. He hints at the idea that all living things imitate the contemplative activity of God. Plants and non-human animals seek to reproduce themselves because that is their way of participating in an unending series, and this is the closest they can come to the ceaseless thinking of the unmoved mover. Aristotle makes this point in several of his works, and he gives a full defense of the idea that the happiest human life resembles the life of a divine being. He conceives of God as a being who continually enjoys a “single and simple pleasure”--the pleasure of pure thought—whereas human beings, because of their complexity, grow weary of whatever they do. He appeals to his conception of divine activity only in order to defend the thesis that our highest good consists in a certain kind of pleasure. Human happiness does not consist in every kind of pleasure, but it does consist in one kind of pleasure, the pleasure felt by a human being who engages in theoretical activity and thereby imitates the pleasurable thinking of God. In Aristotle's opinion, a person's happiness relies absolutely on the somewhat authoritarian character of an enforced system of rewards and punishments as well as that which is itself the product of an internalization of the irrational aspects of society. Another prediction revealed to have been strikingly invalidated is that the resurgence of Marxist thinking in the realm of theory did not lead to the reunification of theory and practice in a mass revolutionary movement. Now these differences do not mark insuperable rifts or abysses between regions of discourse but, on the contrary, that night looks like an attempt to overcome or abandon the traditional view of Plato's quasi-Marxist societal consciousness.

Aristotle famously said that if there were a separate and absolute Good, it is obvious that it could not be achieved or possessed by man; but it is to something of that sort our inquiry is directed. What was Aristotle looking for? But if he had not already in his mind the means of differentiating Theaetetus from everyone else, he could not judge correctly who Theaetetus was and could not recognize him the next time he saw him. So to add Logos in this sense to true judgment is meaningless, because Logos is already part of true judgment, and so cannot itself be a guarantee of knowledge. To say that Logos is knowledge of the difference does not solve the problem, since the definition of knowledge as “true judgment plus knowledge of the difference” begs the question of what knowledge is. Their monstrousness would still be sanctioned as a quality of individual human beings in a way that would tend to obscure the gargantuan system whose servile functionaries they are. Looking at it in one light, Aristotle's liberal humanism, his constant trying to give what credit he can to beliefs deeply repugnant to him, involves an ironic provisionality not far from Socrates' criticism of self-agonizing bourgeois liberals. For whomever shall do the will of my father in heaven is the same as my brother and sister and mother; everyone is a disciple of Jesus: everyone who understands his Word and his terminology of desire that is most decisive in human life.