Bernard Williams and Shaming

Philosophy’s relation to its own past is distinctively peculiar. The modern astronomer may solemnly and respectfully lay Ptolemy to rest, while by contrast the modern philosopher must concern herself with the possibility that Plato is not only alive but also, as it were, kicking. The greats of philosophy are always with us, and it was in this spirit that Jonathan Lear and Mark Hopwood organized their memorial conference on Bernard Williams this past weekend. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the conference and take in the presentations and discussion that resulted from the gathering together of various luminaries in the field of ethical philosophy. 

The conference afforded its attendees a unique opportunity to reflect, not just on the legacy of Williams’ critique, but also on the ways in which his voice is, as Lear put it, “absent from the philosophical landscape.”  A gadfly and a persistent critic he was, but behind Williams’ negative appraisals of modern moral philosophy lay the conviction that if we could correct our persistent errors, philosophy could be, as he put it, “thoroughly truthful and honestly helpful”.  This leads us to a difficult question: in the eight years since Williams’ passing, have we followed his lead and begun to approximate this ideal?  Or have we regressed into the modes of philosophizing which he caustically described as “unhelpful, boring, [and] sterile”?

I want to argue that a good portion of Williams’ ethical philosophy was distinct from more common modes of analysis and argumentation.  This is because many of Williams’ most important arguments were exercises in shaming, a first-order moral performative speech-act designed to invoke in its targets a sense of having failed to meet the basic ethical standards of a community.  By contrast, the most common modes of ethical critique in professional philosophy are second-order conceptual exercises, designed to expose logical fallacies or destructive conceptual unclarity in their targets.  Neither activity is more important than the other, and Williams’ own texts demonstrate that they can be instantiated in the same line of thought, but in noting an absence of shaming in philosophy, we are recognizing one way in which Williams’ distinct voice has indeed faded from the philosophical landscape.

Consider a famous few pages from Williams’ “Persons, Character and Morality”.   His targets in these passages are D.A.J. Richards and Charles Fried.  Richards argued, incredibly, that people should not show love to one another unless that love is based on ‘traits of personality and character related to acting on moral principles’.  Williams responds, in an unmistakably acidic tone:

This righteous absurdity is no doubt to be traced to a feeling that love, even love based on 'arbitrary physical characteristics', is something which has enough power and even authority to conflict badly with morality unless it can be brought within it from the beginning, and evidently that is a sound feeling.

Here, there is a suggestion that love is just the kind of emotion that can come into conflict with the demands of impartial morality, and therefore that Kantians, as impartial moralists, are right to be concerned with love. Of course, Williams’ ironic tone indicates that he takes the priorities that lead to this kind of concern to be misguided. The idea that morality should enjoy this kind of priority over the necessities of love is just absurd, and the absurdity in question does not take the form of a reductio; Richards is not logically forced to give up his doctrine.  Rather, the absurdity is evaluative in nature.  I believe that Williams is calling upon us, as an actual community of persons, to recognize that the implication is absurd.  Not contradictory, but unacceptable.

A few paragraphs later, we find Williams tousling with Fried, who believes that in a case where one must choose between saving a drowning stranger or one’s drowning spouse, that some kind of “sufficient randomizing event” can justify giving preference to one’s spouse.  Williams’ caustic tone appears again:

Surely this is a justification on behalf of the rescuer, that the person he chose to rescue was his wife? ...[this is] an explanation which should silence comment.

Williams notes that many moral theorists will not be satisfied here, that they will have in mind a higher-order justification which goes beyond the mere silencing of commentary. He argues, famously, that this higher-order justification must embody “one thought too many”.

We might well ask about the logical structure of this argument, and in taking it as an argument we might be lead, as many have, to theories and conceptions which will accommodate what has come to be called the “One Thought Too Many Problem”.  But we should not ignore what Williams himself seemed to think was sufficient, here: the thought that the woman is my wife is supposed to silence comment on my decision.  What does it mean to "silence comment"?  Surely not that Fried or anyone else has been convinced by reason alone that his position is incorrect.  Rather, Williams' wants Fried to be shamed into silence.

And what about the rest of us?  Well, we may be philosophers reading Williams’ texts, but we are also persons with first-order evaluative beliefs.  Can we, as a community, wholeheartedly endorse the theoretician’s concern to provide moral justifications for acts of love?

Importantly, Williams’ performative shaming is effective because it is embedded in a larger, more traditional philosophical argument about practical identity and about the centrality of ground projects in relation to that identity.  On its own, this kind of shaming is problematically conservative; it invites us to take common ethical feeling as a fixed standard for philosophical evaluation.  Yet, in context, Williams’ sarcastic tone is extremely important.  It conveys the possibility that a concern for theoretical integrity can bring a philosopher into territory which is unacceptable, not because the territory is logically absurd, but because we cannot join him there.  And this, in any ethically functioning society, is a source of shame.