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Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2016) 19:10731074

DOI 10.1007/s10677-016-9709-6

Bernard Williams: Essays and Reviews 19592002


Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 Hardcover (ISBN
9780691159850) 24.95, 2015 Paperback (ISBN 9780691168609)
16.95. 456 pages

Jake Wojtowicz 1

Accepted: 22 February 2016 / Published online: 29 February 2016


# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

In BWhat Hope for the Humanities?^, one of the essays in Essays and Reviews 19592002,
Bernard Williams considers Gauguins BD'o Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? O Allons
Nous?^ which he thinks is a grand and mysterious painting. Williams clearly thought it a
worthwhile piece of art, since it adorns the cover of his earlier collection, Moral Luck. I beg to
differ on its artistic merits, but the questions that this painting puts forth are clearly worth our
time: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? It is in the pieces that
address these questions, either directly, such as in BThe Need to Be Sceptical^ where Williams
makes explicit why they are questions that should concern us, or indirectly, as in the many
pieces where he criticises others for losing sight of these questions, that this book showcases a
theme running throughout Williamss philosophy and has him at his insightful best.
This comes out particularly well in his reviews of John Rawlss A Theory of Justice, and
Robert Nozicks Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and discussion of their work in BThe Moral View of
Politics^. Williams clearly respects both thinkers, and his reviews make it clear that he sees each
as having produced an important book which is well worth serious critical engagement. But
Williams thinks both have failed to keep the importance of Gauguins questions in sight, and he
is sceptical about just how many of their political recommendations we can adopt, and just how
much we take from them, given the level of abstraction at which they work. He accuses Nozick
of leaving things Brather high in the air^: his abstract principles give us conclusions that fail to
really speak to us or tell us what we should do. The claim against Rawls is that his veil of
ignorance, which is central to his project, takes too much away from who we are; rather than
looking at embodied human beings with their own characters and tastes in a culture with a real
history, it gives us free-floating rational voters and claims that the way they would decide is the
way that we should set up any political system. But Williams doubts how much the supposed
dictates of disembodied rationalities can teach us about politics for us.

* Jake Wojtowicz
Jake.Wojtowicz@kcl.ac.uk

1
Kings College London, London, UK
1074 J. Wojtowicz

He also reviews Rawlss later work, Political Liberalism, which sees Rawls scale back his
claims and present his theory of justice as a political solution to a modern pluralist problem,
rather than as a solution for all people in all times. But Williams thinks that Rawls fails to
notice how much of what he offers rests on American peculiarities not just its constitution-
alism, but how the history of America involves immigration, and how it is a commercialist
society so his theory still fails to be as broadly applicable as Rawls wants. A Theory of Justice
fails to apply to anyone; Political Liberalism applies only to modern Americans. The point
stretching across these criticisms, and throughout Williamss ethical work, is that in order to
work out what we should do, we cannot just work out what, in some disembodied sense,
should be done. There are no such shoulds. Nor can we claim to have solved a problem for us,
where the relevant us here is modern pluralists, if what is offered only applies to 20th-century
post-war Americans living in thrall to a constitution. Rather, we need a realistic understanding
of what we are, and how much this influences our moral conclusions and to reach this
Williams thinks we need an understanding of where we have come from or ethical thinking
will be hamstrung, and we will be unable to decide where we should go.
But a proper understanding of who we are is not just important when it comes to matters of
ethics and politics. Williams also thinks it has something of a role to play in empirical inquiry.
In the pieces on Richard Rorty especially, but also on Hilary Putnam and Thomas Nagel,
Williams defends his Absolute Conception: a way of understanding the world that uses
concepts, but concepts that are free from our peculiarities as human beings, in an effort to
capture how the world is independently of how we are. Williams argues that Rortys claim that
language and metaphor is all that there is, and that there is no world which they must match,
fails; rather, Williams thinks that we can and should work towards the Absolute Conception.
One point that I dont think Williams makes as explicit as he could, but which comes out
more clearly in the work of C.S. Peirce an acknowledged influence on the Absolute
Conception is how much an understanding of what we are is vital here, too. If we know
what we are, then we are aware of our peculiarities. If we are aware of our peculiarities then we
can be alert to parochialism seeping in and colouring our empirical inquiries: we can better
distinguish illusion from reality, we can better distinguish when we project our own peculiar-
ities onto the world from when we successfully capture how the world is. So in both empirical
inquiries and ethics we need to have a robust sense of what we are in order to have any hope of
achieving our aims.
It would do a disservice to this remarkable collection to fail to mention the breadth of issues
with which it deals. The book affords an insight into other areas of Williamss own philosophy;
in some pieces he acknowledges his debt to Nietzsche, and other pieces touch on integrity, what
it means to be a particular person, thick concepts, and truthfulness. But it also provides a view
on other philosophers, with reviews of works by A J Ayer, Stuart Hampshire, Iris Murdoch,
Derek Parfit, Martha Nussbaum, and other big beasts of the latter half of the twentieth century.
Williams also reviews books on culture, science, economics, pornography and censorship, and
the relation between the state and us. Alongside these are essays that look at, among other
things, God, the Church, universities, and the role of history in philosophy. This is a wide-
ranging, erudite book, which provides a fascinating insight into the intellectual output of the
past six decades: in doing so, it tells us a bit about who we are, and what we think.

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