новая папка / Вernard Williams

The first thinker upon whom our spotlight will turn will be Bernard Williams. Williams is well known for reviving Aristotelian conceptions of the good life in modern analytic philosophy, and his belief that the only ethical belief that might survive the challenge of reflective endorsement put forward in our previous chapter would be the claim that ‘that a certain kind of life was the best for human beings.’61

Note first that, by his own admission, this claim is devoid of any substantive content that lets us know what kind of life is best for human beings. He would therefore likely be sceptical of the claim to universality present within the PGC. This is not to say that Williams is dismissive of claims of moral truth; on the contrary, he believes that the very fact of moral disagreement presupposes that a correct answer to moral problems does exist. Were there no correct answer, he suggests a moral disagreement would be exactly the same as two men on a boat – one of whom is seasick and one who isn’t – disagreeing as to the merits of ocean travel. The fact that moral statements necessarily contain a truth claim and do not merely reflect the speaker’s own attitude sets them apart from subjective perceptions such as this.62 Williams’ position should therefore be seen as one which recognises that critical, normative morality exists – but that it is practically impossible to discern its requirements to a degree where they were seen as uncontroversial. It is for this reason that he would be inclined to subject the PGC to scrutiny. Williams’ first objection might be to criticise the formalism of the PGC; that the level of abstraction taking place in the identification and application of such a test robs the agent to whom it should apply of the subjective features necessary for a meaningful standard of moral deliberation.63 Any formal, impartial principle is simply too impersonal and, by extension, is unrealistic given the personal interaction necessary for moral deliberation to take place: Of course, in general a man does not have one separable project which plays this ground role: rather, there is a nexus of projects, related to his condition of life, and it would be the loss of all or most of them that would remove meaning.64 In locating individual actions in the abstract and removing them from the personal context in which they arise, Williams suggests we are no longer undertaking something that can be recognised as realistic moral deliberation. The moral project exists to give direction and meaning to life and must therefore necessarily reflect the lived experience.65 Abstraction thus undermines the entire enterprise. To give an example of the subjective experience he considers essential for moral deliberation, Williams suggests that it is an incontrovertible fact that individuals gain attachments to other agents over the course of their lives. Given it seems natural that one would be inclined to behave more sympathetically to a close friend or family member than to somebody seen in a neutral or negative light, Williams argues that to claim that moral deliberation can take place in the abstract is to deny value in lived human existence and should be rejected.66 This objection is powerful, but does not engage on a substantive level with the normative argument presented by the PGC. Williams’ point is an example of collective morality; an empirical account of how agents interact with one another based on their subjective preferences. This is a different meaning of what it means to act morally than that which is the focus of the argument for the PGC, and presents a standard which cannot be assessed for its normative validity. Since the two enquiries are qualitatively different, Williams’ attack does not hit its target and should be rejected. Williams might contend that this is exactly the point – that morality is not something which lends itself well to critical analysis such as that which forms the basis of the Gewirthian project. Yet it is difficult to see how this rejection can be reconciled with Williams’ own observation that moral disagreement is suggestive of moral truth;67 if moral truth is something which exists, then a tool must exist for its identification. Any such test for moral permissibility must necessarily be impartial in order to be universally acceptable to all, necessitating the level of agential abstraction employed by Gewirth in choosing to construct his argument for the PGC from the inescapable fact of human agency. Reasons provided by such a test for the permissibility of action must necessarily be internalised by the agent to provide a reason for them to act,68 which requires the agent to apply it to a particular motivation for action.69 And since the PGC applies to all agents, it must be internalised by agents and applied to all conceivable action equally. The internalisation required in order for a principle to exert reason-giving force on an individual that Williams requires is therefore achieved through deliberative reasoning on how to act, thus meeting his own requirements for the internalisation of any reason.70 He may reject

this, arguing that any such internal statement is falsified by ‘the absence of an appropriate element from [the agent’s motivation],’71 but as the dialectically necessary reason to comply with the PGC is contained in the fact of bare agency, the only way that the falsification claimed by Williams can exist is if no agent were ever to act ever again. Since agents do act, the internalisation is compliant with Williams’ own conception of action – the reasons for which must be internal or no action would take place.72 In thus locating action on the internal plane, Williams is bound to accept the rules of deliberative rationality that this internalisation requires. He is thus bound to acknowledge the operation of the PGC, or else he misunderstands the nature of action itself. Williams might suggest that this is but a neat sidestep of the argument he originally raised; that any principles which derive from the abstract level are too imprecise to be applied to moral dilemmas in the real world, and therefore are of no real use to the resolution of moral conflict. In locating morality at the level of practical reason, Gewirth’s formula is limited to the production of ‘general and formal principles to regulate the shape of relations between rational agents’ that are unrealistic in their rigidity.73 This objection can still be rejected, however, as it is incompatible with Williams’ own characterisation of action and the possibility of location value within what it means to be an agent. This can be seen in Williams’ belief that all agents necessarily possess a general desire not to have their freedom frustrated. This can be identified in that agents necessarily desire the outcome of their actions as, without this desire, they would possess no reason to act. In

Williams’ own words: ‘[O]mne appetitum appetitur sub specie boni’; everything pursued is pursued as something by dint of the agent’s perception of it as desirable.74 Agents thus necessarily desire that their actions are not interfered with as, without this, any action would be impossible.75 This claim is the same as that offered by the PGC, requiring a closer examination of why Williams might reject Gewirth’s conclusions. This rejection can be summarised thus: that our shared starting point, the fact all agents necessarily claim their freedom to act should not be interfered with, does not in itself give an agent a reason to see this as a right. Williams instead characterises the value an agent places on their action as purely pragmatic, and argues formalistic principles are incapable of generating the universalising step necessary to transform this pragmatic claim into a rights-claim.76 It cannot provide one agent with a coherent reason as to why they should refrain from interfering with others’ ability to act. This may seem a clear and coherent position to take, but one need only take it to its logical conclusion in order to show why it is misplaced. This would be that Williams must concede that other agents also do not possess adequate reason to refrain from interfering with his capacity to act – meaning that he would be happy to accept that there is no reason why his will could be constantly frustrated by agents who want to ensure he can never achieve any end at all. He would reject this characterisation by arguing that his lack of proscription is not permission for others to interfere, but rather silence on the matter;77 yet this riposte is clearly unsatisfactory and can be rejected on two connected grounds. Firstly, in claiming that lack of proscription is not analogous to permission to interfere, Williams in effect asks the interfering agent to decide whether they see a reason to interfere with his capacity to act. Shifting the burden in this way assumes that the agent whose actions might be interfered with would be entirely neutral as to whether their ends are frustrated, thus contradicting Williams’ own starting point that all agents necessarily have a pragmatic reason to value that their ability to act remains unimpeded. An agent would clearly be aggrieved if another agent were to frustrate their ends against their will, which is precisely the reason Williams suggests agents see a pragmatic value in their ability to act in the first place. Thus, if Williams wishes to claim that an agent should be neutral as to whether another agent has a reason to frustrate their ends, he must abandon his own starting maxim of ‘[O]mne appetitum appetitur sub specie boni’; to do this would be to abandon the standard view of what it means to be an agent. The objection can therefore be seen to be founded on a mischaracterisation of the very concept of action itself. A second reason as to why we should reject Williams’ claim that a lack of proscription is not the same as permission for others to interfere would take the following form. Even were we to grant that an agent can be disinterested enough in their ends to be neutral as to the desirability of allowing another agent to frustrate them, a decision must still be made as to whether the interference should take place. All Williams has done is shift the burden of assessing the desirability of interference away

from the original actor, onto the interfering agent. The interfering agent thus has two options open to them. If she does interfere, she concedes that the principle of non-interference is purely pragmatic and accepts that she also ought to be neutral with regard to whether others are able to legitimately frustrate her ends. If she decides that she ought not to interfere, then she is accepting that her own pragmatic claim would be damaged by her choice to ignore the pragmatic claim made by the original actor. If she decides that she wishes to protect the foundation of her own pragmatic rights claim, she is acting in accordance with the PGC; that if I make a pragmatic claim that I value non-interference with my GCAs because of the fact of my own agency, then all agents necessarily make the same claim. The universalisation Williams is sceptical of has taken place, thus allowing the claim to be legitimately characterised as a right. Williams’ objection cannot overcome the argument presented by the PGC and can be rejected. Such a conclusion is clearly undesirable for Williams. For although he recognises that moral conflict is indicative of moral truth, he is sceptical about the extent to which rational deliberation can solve ethical dilemmas.78 This arises from his characterisation of moral deliberation, which begins with the observation that perceived moral obligations frequently do conflict.79 It follows that the conflict must be grounded in options that are perceived as equally valid, otherwise the conflict would be easily resolved and would not exist.80 Williams thus concludes that a certain degree of moral relativism must exist, meaning that rationality cannot fully identify moral truths.81 If this conclusion is true, the

PGC necessarily fails. The claim must therefore be explored further to test its validity. Williams’ scepticism is connected to his belief that acts can never be concretely linked to a given end due to the inherent uncertainty which exists in the world. Luck inevitably plays a role in the ability of an individual to successfully execute their will; yet the nature of luck means that individuals cannot predict whether it will operate in a given situation. If luck cannot be planned for in the execution of our actions,82 one can never adequately predict whether our actions will lead to a given end. This introduces a level of arbitrariness and indeterminacy in all action, which in turn makes deliberation ultimately arbitrary and indeterminate itself. It follows that if one cannot adequately predict the outcome of an action, then one cannot use reason and rationality to assess whether the outcome is morally permissible. Reason and rationality thus cannot ground moral norms. Williams would here find an ally in Hannah Arendt, who similarly argues that the unknowability of whether our ends will ultimately be attained both renders our desires imprecise and uncertain and renders the will incapable of generating normative claims.83 These statements seem sound, but do not succeed when directed at the claim made by the PGC. This is because they express a scepticism grounded in causation and the ability of an end to be realised, rather than in the rational formulation of the end itself. The PGC operates at the level of desire formulation at the level of deliberative rationality itself, not at the stage of the attempted execution of the will. Moral obligations thus arise at the conception of the will, not at its execution as characterised by Williams and Arendt in the above objections. The criticism is therefore not engaging substantively with the argument for the PGC and can be rejected. Agency and rationality can, as shown by Gewirth, be used to identify binding moral norms capable of resolving moral conflicts. This subsection has attempted to demonstrate that Williams’ scepticism with regard to the ability of rationality to identify moral norms is misplaced. It is either founded on a mischaracterisation of the arguments that do make this claim, or relies on a differing conception of what is meant by the term ‘moral’ that prioritises the empirical observation of collective belief over sound normative arguments. Not only do these positions not engage substantively with the argument for the PGC, but both also operate on assumptions that instead presuppose that the starting point of bare agency, from which the PGC is derived, is itself legitimate. In thus accepting the

PGC’s starting point, Williams ought to accept its conclusion. His scepticism is ultimately concerned with doubt,84 and the argument for the PGC can satisfy this doubt by providing rationally inescapable justification for its practical applicability.85 If Williams is to stand by his own view of what it means for a demand to be rationally inescapable, that it is ‘one that a rational agent must accept if he is to be a rational agent,’86 then he should accept the PGC as valid.