Williams has completely destroyed my conception of morality, as having some fundamental service to an ethical life. Throughout this heavily analytical work, Williams offers critiques of objective foundations for ethical theories; criticizing in particular the works of Kant, Mill and Aristotle. Williams' project in this one is to reorient our new way of life - permeated by technology, cultural differences and serious self-awareness - to the ancient ways of thinking about ethics, epitomized in Socrates' question: "How should one live?" It is a deep and important question to which Williams believes philosophy cannot fully answer, hence its "limits".

Additionally, Williams reflects on how ethical theories emerge, in that historical tension between theory and prejudice and he introduces some important terminology about ethical concepts and how we evaluate the actions of others. Apropos, he discusses the fact-value distinction and the differences between science and ethics. He also places much emphasis on the necessity of social understanding in drafting ethical theories, if we dare to undertake such an enterprise. Williams simply wants us to recognize that whatever ethical dispositions we take towards agents, actions and outcomes, they are couched in a fundamentally anthropocentric perspective and correspondingly must reflect our flawed natures. A brilliant read for those interested in meta-ethicists.

Bernard William gets at the core of the issue, while still covering the basics of both utilitarian and relativist thoughts. His thesis is skepticism that there can be a universal basis for ethics, but that the arguments most commonly involved do form the basis for each individual to adopt a consistent approach. He also separates ethics from morals, for which the latter usually assumes some basis of tradition or collectivism and carries some degree of obligation. I especially enjoyed his introduction to the classical perspective -- the search for "how should one live?"

A singular and intriguing approach to the philosophy of ethics. Lots of powerful insights, but a bit too cleverly written.

This is so close to being really, really good, but then he drops the ball. Consistently. Still one of the best books in Anglo-American ethics written over the past 30 years. (Trying to imagine what else should be on that list is a depressing thought.)

I'm really glad I read this book. There are series of objections in this book to Aristotelian, Kantian, and utilitarian moral theories. Some of these objections (e.g., to Hare's specific arguments for utilitarianism) are convincing, but I don't think they will say much that's of interest to the best of the modern day theorists of either utilitarianism or Kantianism. I don't know enough about virtue ethics to evaluate whether that's also true of them.

I think the most interesting parts of the book for me were:

(i) the methodological criticism of analytic moral philosophy, and the case for being anti-theory. I'm not convinced by the case for eschewing moral theory entirely, as I think systematising theory can be useful for highlighting moral blindspots. Still, this is a pragmatic argument which needs to actually be defended.

(ii) the discussion of obligation, and the distinction made between obligations and deliberative priority. I think Williams offers a really nice account of how our concept of obligation functions and is useful in our way of life.

I didn't understand the discussion of 'moral knowledge' in the chapter on relativism, where Williams seemed to be working with a non-standard conception of what knowledge is. This will hopefully become clearer once I read subsequent discussions of Williams' work.

Overrated.

Misunderstood by those who feel like he's at least contributing to the debate. Funny at times. Though, again, misunderstood as to where and when he's kidding or poking fun at a theme or a philosopher. The distinction is crucial. I suppose he owes his readership to those willing to read their own viewpoint between the lines. Which is possible.
He could have taken the normative/morality distinction and ran with it some further instead of tweaking it and hollowing out words, rendering us without any to speak of the ethics and only virtue vagueness to take its stead.
Though he's quick (though patient) to mark that Aristotle's doctrine of the mean is "not informative". He's right. This book thus ranks lower for me than Tim Ferris' 4 Hour Work week and his view that the "Extremes inform the mean". I understand that Williams wants to set the limits. But he just looks at problems without proposing (rather obvious) solutions and than reinvents some (without explaining why it's a problem once more).
If I've failed to understand the author, that's also on him.
It's not a horrible book. It's philosophy of a certain pedigree. That's all the good I have to say about it. The Good, that is.

Don't let my 'low' score mislead you. Relatively seen, it is a very high score. I normally don't like works which are qualified as 'analytic philosophy' (or as you can put it: most of the philosophical works from the Anglosphere). Bernard Williams seems to break that habit of mine.
His work might , however, not be as clear as he was hoping it would (A. W. Moore confirms this in his commentary on the text), but nevertheless he made some very good points.

I really appriciated his vision on - as the title shows - the limits of philosophy, i.e. what philosophy can say about the ethical. Though it might look as this work can be used as an introduction to ethics, I personally do not advice it, due the somehow difficult style of writing. A better alternative for an introduction is his other work: Morality: An Introduction to Ethics

This was a reread for me, but an important one. It really showed how my understanding of ethics has changed since grad school. I got more out of it.

I can't remember the last time a book made me feel too stupid to be reading it - this one did. A.W. Moore said it well in the "Commentary on the Text" that appears in the back of the Routledge Classics (2011) edition: "It has a kind of clarity. But it does not have the kind of clarity that makes for easy reading. Williams never belabors the obvious; and he rarely makes explicit what he takes to be implicit in something he has already said. His writing is therefore extremely dense. It leaves an enormous amount of work for the reader. It clarity lies in its content: it is the clarity of understanding by which the reader's work is eventually rewarded." I found this an extremely difficult read, especially in the early chapters. The "Commentary on the Text" was a great help when I found it after finishing Chapter 6.

Phenomenal work by one of the twentieth century's great moral philosophers.

I can't recommend this work enough to students of moral and political philosophy. Williams's elusive style, by which his arguments are elaborated gradually and key passages seem to come out of nowhere, is maddening for the casual reader; I would absolutely not recommend this book to non-specialists. This work is an intervention into several deep debates within contemporary moral philosophy, a grasp of which is probably necessary to understand the profundity of what Williams proposes.

As someone with substantial neo-Kantian training (Rawls, Scanlon, Korsgaard) and so as someone who thinks in those sorts of terms, Williams's argument presents a deep challenge to the way I've come to think about morality, obligation and how to go about doing philosophy. All the same, I've had Hegelian worries about this strand of thought since the explosion of the multiculturalism literature, and this is the Big Book developing an alternative to the dominant analytic paradigm.

As a vegan and an (idiosyncratic) Utilitarian I really enjoyed this one (or as much as I understood of it). Not so persuaded by the Utilitarian bit since it only seems to invalidate a purely rationalistic and inflexible version of that philosophy. He has useful insights nonetheless. By far the weakest part of his argument concerns non-human animals and other such sentiences. I am not fond of the epithet "speciesism" or the moral equivalence that it seems to imply between man and animals. Williams isn't either but his critique is different. He asserts Humanity (seems a bit Utilitarian here?) to the be sole arena for a system of human ethics. This is not a prejudice! Extraterrestrials cannot assimilate and will presumably be sent to Rwanda. Sapient machines (we are getting pretty close on this one) aren't discussed but they are also presumably beyond ethical consideration. Maybe we build an anti-Utility monster, self-aware and capable of extreme pain and subject it to that pain for a period of time it experiences as an eternity. How can we say if some sort of cruelty was enacted here? Furthermore, what, after all, is a human being? If I went back in time killing one example of each stage of human evolution is there some sort of hard line which once passed, the heinous murders turn into the inconsequential killing of an animal? Restricting ethical considerations to humanity is arbitrary. Even if we consider ethics as only applicable to the functioning of communities it is not obvious that aliens or intelligent machines could not, albeit speculatively, be part of that community.

This book is the greatest work of general moral philosophy written in the 20th century. Read it and find out.