If there were some privileged frame of reference or some 'ultimate fact of nature' which might undergird Lewin/Reichenbach 'genidentity, or if mathematics could have what Godel termed an 'Absolute Proof', then there may be some algorithmic way of generating all the truths of the world or, at the least, have some criteria of demarcation for 'naturality'. Sadly, developments in mathematical logic and things like Einstein's theory of relativity showed this to be a pipe dream. This meant that all morality can only be relative to specific situations. This is not to say that intuition regarding morality are themselves context dependent. They may be. They may not be. However deontic logic would have no non-arbitrary or canonical form.
Daniel Calcutt writes in Aeon-
The acclaimed British philosopher Bernard Williams, writing in the 1970s, showed that a common way of arguing for moral relativism is confused and contradictory.
Sadly all ways of arguing are confused and contradictory. Don't do it unless you want to annoy the other party or are getting paid to do so.
Nonetheless, he went on to defend a philosophical worldview that incorporated some of relativism’s underlying ideas. There is much to learn, when we think about the ongoing culture wars over moral values, from the encounters with relativism that recur throughout Williams’s work.
Culture wars are about bullying or harassing each other. The safest thing to do is to accuse your interlocutor of using black magic to control the Nicaraguan horcrux of your neighbour's cat which is ILLEGALLY surveilling you
First, however, it’s useful to understand why a prevalent feature of the culture wars, arguing over which words to use, itself quickly leads to arguments over relativism.
One way round this is to insist that everybody speak only Tamil. Every other language is complicit in genocide against Tamil peeps.
Consider the following memorable scene in Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends (2017). The central character, Frances, who is sleeping with Bobbi, rejects her friend Philip’s insistence that ‘in basic vocabulary she is your girlfriend.’
Frances thinks of Bobbi as the lesbian equivalent of a cum-dumpster.
Frances is right to resist Philip’s attempt to put a familiar label on things: she is trying to live in a way for which there aren’t words yet. Elsewhere in the book, Frances questions not only the word ‘couple’ but even the term ‘relationship’ to depict her life with Bobbi. If she isn’t sure how to describe her complicated situation, it’s in part because it doesn’t easily fit into the grids of conventional thought. She wants, to use an image from James Joyce, to ‘fly by’ the nets of language.
Lots of people don't want to admit their g.f is an ugly tart from the wrong side of the tracks. Also they told their parents they were dating a member of the Royal Family.
The words your society uses, as Frances is highly aware, shape the self you can become.
Very true. This is why babies never grow up. You should address them as 'Uncle' or 'Aunty' not 'my sweet little baby'.
Language is loaded with ethical expectations. If you agree that you are in a ‘couple’ with someone, for instance, then that commonly (though not always) carries with it the expectation that you will not be in bed with anyone else.
Which is why it is worth agreeing that is the case. Language is about the strategic manipulation of expectations.
That norm can be challenged, and has been, by those who are in open relationships.
Norms are challenged by people saying they are shitty or hypocritical or the result of wanting to fuck your Mummy and kill your Daddy. The norm against farting at the dinner table is not challenged by my doing so. Indeed, you violate a norm of civilized conversation when you raise a hue and cry about it.
However, if you are trying to live in a way that is new, and doesn’t fit into accustomed categories, then it’s likely that you will be misunderstood and deprived of social recognition.
Nonsense! If you marry a chicken and set up as a Tax Consultant to Guatemalan goats you aren't misunderstood at all. Society recognizes that you are a chicken fucker with a piss poor Accountancy practice.
Even so, as the American philosopher Judith Butler has argued in Undoing Gender (2004), there are situations where it’s better to be unintelligible than to force oneself into the existing menu of social options.
The point about menus is that you get something by choosing from them. There is no point asking for a bowl of Bliss at the local Wagamama. Being a chicken fucking tax consultant to goats doesn't open a lot of social opportunities you you. Nobody cares if a person nobody talks to is or isn't intelligible.
If everyday language can sometimes feel oppressive,
Like when somebody comes up to you and says 'Hi! Could I have a double cheese burger?' and you shout 'Language is totes oppressing me! Fuck you Language!'
it’s perhaps because it is inescapably descriptive and evaluative: it tells you not just how things are, but how they should be.
This can be useful. Language doesn't have to be about arguing or bullying. It can be informative and prescriptive in a useful manner.
If you are someone’s ‘girlfriend’, for instance, then a vast number of beliefs kick into action about how you should behave.
Don't stab your girlfriend.
This is why Frances is so wary about accepting the label.
She wants to keep that option open.
Perhaps the clearest example of how language can be at once descriptive and value-loaded is in the case of what philosophers have come to call thick ethical concepts.
Philosophers are thick. That is true enough.
Think of words such as ‘friendly’, ‘mean’, ‘aggressive’, ‘rude’, ‘impatient’, ‘brutal’ and so on, and notice how these terms evaluate behaviour positively or negatively at the same time as they describe it.
They are adjectives and qualify a noun- e.g. friendly cat as opposed 'mean cat which scratches your eyes out'.
Thick ethical concepts are named by contrast with thin ethical concepts such as ‘right’ and ‘should’ and ‘ought’.
These aren't necessarily ethical concepts at all. They may be purely utilitarian or pragmatic. The computer should turn on if properly connected. It doesn't. There is something wrong with it. Yet computers have no inner ethos.
These highly abstract terms are almost purely evaluative and don’t seem to describe any specific actions.
They may do. It depends on the context.
Rather, as the American philosopher Christine Korsgaard has put it in The Sources of Normativity (1996), they seem like those gold stars used at school that can be stuck upon anything.
No they can't. You get in trouble if you stick them on the Headmistress's bum. That's the reason I had to give up teaching.
The culture wars that take place over controversial moral questions are, in part, battles over which ethically loaded concepts should win out within a society.
Which concepts win does not matter. How people behave matters. But they may do so because of fear of punishment or hope for reward. This is an economic, not an ethical matter. Language is pure pragmatics. Semantics can be anything goes.
Should sexuality be conceptualised in terms connected with sexual purity and restraint (‘sanctity’, ‘chastity’ and so on)
No. It should be conceptualised in terms of what is done with sexual organs. It is a different matter that Society may want to suppress some of the things which can be done with them. You are welcome to offer me your hand to shake. Your penis- not so much.
or in terms of sexual self-expression and experimentation (‘liberation’, ‘kink’ and so on)?
Not to mention offering people your penis to shake.
This brings home the fact that ethical words and concepts are not just abstract ideas:
they may be wholly abstract. We speak of beatitude or inner sanctity of the quality of being in the world but not of it.
they are the product and expression of different ways of living.
or being. There may be such a thing as a 'pratyeka buddha' or 'jivanmukta' or 'lamed wufnik' or 'qutb' who justifies man to god.
Seen this way, the political intensity surrounding what is sometimes disparaged as ‘arguments over words’ makes total sense.
We don't need to see things in any particular way to know that there are stupid bullies who like harassing others. As for holier than thou virtue signallers- that nuisance we shall always have with us.
The culture wars are concept wars over how best to live.
No. They are wars between cliques in unimportant places- e.g. shitty University departments.
We all use ethical concepts in the broad sense I have introduced. People who think that they can live without values are failing to think through what that would really mean.
But no great loss is incurred by this failure. I am welcome to say 'people who think they can live outside a Skorokhod space are failing to think through wat that would really mean'. The problem here is that people suspect that I'm too stupid to actually know what a cadlag function is. Also, I smell bad.
But if we all, inevitably, evaluate our experience, we don’t all do so in the same way.
Only in the sense that we all inevitably evaluate a cadlag function. My way of doing so is by farting.
In a recent podcast on the lessons from the Roman Empire, the historian Tom Holland stressed the dramatic contrast between the sexual mores of ancient Rome and those of the modern West.
which modern West? Most of us live in Cities where different people have vastly different sexual mores. However, lack of access to goats has indeed changed sexual mores for many.
This is just one, perhaps already familiar, example of the commonplace fact that ethical norms vary across, as well as within, cultures. Moreover, even ethical concepts that are superficially shared can be understood in deeply different ways.
Unless it is more useful to have a 'Schelling focal' understanding. Thus the concept of 'prudence' is understood in a unique manner in the Accountancy profession. At least this was the case when I was young.
Consider how respect is shown in a nod of the head: it can symbolise respect as a form of mutual recognition, or respect as deference to another’s superior strength.
Lots of people who are stronger than me and who think I'm an utter shithead will still nod to me- more particularly if they are blood relatives.
The fact of moral diversity therefore raises the issue of moral relativism.
Facts should resolve issues, not raise them. Many religions and other ethical systems have a notion of exigent circumstances (apadh dharma in Sanskrit). It is obvious that different rules apply in different circumstances.
This, too, has become a part of the culture wars, especially as these debates have played out in the United States.
Surely these are au fond political struggles?
Many moral traditions are based on the idea that there are universal values, perhaps rooted in human nature. Perhaps you yourself were raised with the universalist idea that there is a single true morality that applies to everyone, everywhere. But if living many different ethical ways of life is natural to human beings, then this encourages the idea that humans create multiple ethical worlds, and that ethical truth is relative to the world in question.
No. It is enough to say that there is some innate 'synderesis' or intuition or 'voice of conscience' which enables you to pick the right rule to follow. True, you may misjudge the circumstances of the case. Still, maybe God will have mercy on your immortal soul.
I can choose to watch a rom-com instead of an action movie. This does not mean I am creating different cinematic worlds. I am merely making a choice involving an opportunity cost. You may say 'by watching a rom-com you are entering a higher world of Lurve and Peas. You are rejecting violence and sexy shenanigans. Blessed art thou, for thou hast chosen the path of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and rejected that of Bruce Willis in Die Hard.'
Moral truth, like the truth about etiquette, simply varies from place to place. So far, so bad, for universalism.
Not really. There is a distinction between questions of law and questions of fact. Once all facts are known there may be a unique, non-arbitrary, 'universal solution' which all would accept.
When battles over moral relativism have featured in the culture wars, they tend to be framed in the following way. One side of the argument celebrates cultural diversity and unites this with an emphasis on the socially constructed nature of values. This is the outlook popularly associated with postmodernism, identity politics, and the rejection of universalist tradition.
Alternatively, this is just the game theoretic insight that there are a range of evolutionarily stable strategies. This explains why a certain percentage of the population is likely to be homosexual.
The Liberal bourgeoisie and intelligentsia may have few kids but spend a lot of money educating them. The ultra-orthodox may have a lot of kids and raise them in a very strict manner. The Liberals may not like this but they realize that the economy would collapse if the religious people stopped making a lot of babies.
However, this seemingly ‘relativistic’ destination is precisely what alarms the moral conservative.
Not really. The conservative may say 'I only want this country, not any other, to follow its time honoured customs and traditions'.
Hence the other side of the culture wars: if there is no common human standard upon which to ground moral universalism, then something beyond the human is needed.
But the same problem arises with a Divine Standard. God may want different nations to follow different laws.
This is the side of the culture wars associated with the need to return to religion, and a morally reactionary response to social diversity.
But a diverse society can have a common religion.
These debates about the sources of morality have become part of mainstream culture.
Not down my neck of the woods. Mainstream culture consists of watching pornhub videos on your smartphone while waiting for your pizza.
The old-school secular humanist, faced with the difficulty of finding a universal basis for a human-centred morality, is presented with a dilemma: either choose a culture-centred ethics, or return to a God-centred one.
No. The 'secular humanist' doesn't have to turn to God because he would cease to be a humanist if he did. A culture-centred ethics is welcome to recognize that it owes much to a particular religion. There is no dilemma here.
Call it the anti-Humanist Fork: relativism or religion?
A religion can be highly relativist- e.g. Hindu dharma which is different for different classes of people and which changes as you grow older. Similarly, relativism can be religious because of 'Kavka's toxin' or Newcombe type problems. Essentially, there are some situations where it is useful to have unquestioning Faith.
Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury in the United Kingdom, recently stated in the New Statesman magazine that ‘The modern humanist is likely to be a far more passionate defender of cultural variety than their predecessors.’
Williams is wrong. He has never met me. No modern humanist is a passionate defender of the type of culture I incarnate. This is because our Society does not appreciate farting as an art form or mode of metaphysical inquiry.
What he didn’t dwell upon is the following irony: that proper recognition of moral diversity has tended to undermine the universalism upon which humanism is typically founded.
Not to mention Hamas or ISIS turning up to behead you.
It’s important to note that diversity of belief doesn’t by itself entail relativism.
Because it doesn't entail anything. Nothing does.
After all, different cultures have held different beliefs about the shape of the Earth. Does it follow that there is no non-relative fact of the matter and that all we can say is that the Earth is truly round relative to one culture, and truly flat relative to another? If your friend said the Earth was flat, you would perhaps show them the photo known as ‘Blue Marble’, taken as the Apollo 17 crew made its way to the Moon in 1972. If you are wealthy and extravagant enough, you might book them on a trip to space. You are unlikely to ‘go relativist’.
You are even more unlikely to give two hoots about this question. On the other hand, back in 1968 diplomats in some Arab countries were advised not to mention the Moon landing as there was some apprehension that religious people might find the subject offensive. It is perfectly proper to act prudently and respect the shibboleths of your hosts- more particularly if they are in the habit of beheading blasphemers.
Being a non-relativist about the shape of the Earth,
only matters if you teach Science or are required by your job to have exact information in that regard.
however, doesn’t require you to be a non-relativist about everything.
Because nothing requires anything else.
Moral relativism remains an option. As we have already seen, if you combine the idea that Human beings construct ethical reality with the claim that How humans construct ethical reality varies between cultures, then moral relativism becomes hard to avoid.
Both ideas are useless. It is merely a figure of speech to speak of 'ethical reality' as opposed to ethical virtuality and pretend the thing is constructed rather than farted out.
Indeed, those who are quick to move from observing the diversity of moral beliefs to embracing moral relativism are perhaps already inclined to think that morality is a cultural construct whereas the shape of the Earth is not.
Morality is a construct only to the same extent that it is a wistful fart or a cat which has got stuck up a Smullyan Truth tree.
Others are drawn to relativism about morality because they think it a wiser, more tolerant outlook. As someone might say: ‘They have their way, we have ours, and that’s all there is to be said.’
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Bernard Williams (no relation to Rowan) argued incisively against what he called ‘vulgar relativism’ in his first book, Morality (1972). A leading figure in English-language philosophy, he later popularised the term ‘thick concepts’ that I introduced earlier (he was the first to use the term in print, in 1985). Williams had a deep sense of the cultural and historical variety of ethical life. But he also saw that the typical way that moral relativism was taken to support toleration, notably by some anthropologists at the time, was fundamentally incoherent.
Williams was a living in a world which seemed to have turned topsy turvy. Perhaps if he had studied mathematics and turned to category theory he could have understood that what matters in unicity and naturality. Where these obtain there is a bridge from relativism to non-arbitrary agreement or consensus.
The vulgar relativist, Williams says, thinks that whether something is ‘morally right’ means ‘right for a given society’.
Right according to a given set of buck-stopped protocols- sure. Nothing wrong in that. A contract may have a 'morals clause' and Courts may establish protocols in that respect.
As a result, to discuss whether, say, sex with multiple partners is morally right, you must first ask: right for whom?
Why? It is a fact that under certain exigent circumstances, it is morally right for any given person.
There is no universal answer: polyamory will be permitted, indeed celebrated, in some times and places,
so this is a question of law or custom
and morally denounced in others. This is the insight that is supposed to lead to a tolerant outlook.
There is no insight here. One may have a tolerant outlook because one happens to be tolerant and easy going but this has nothing to do with some stupid argument made by a guy who teaches useless shite.
Indeed, the vulgar relativist, as described by Williams, holds that, because morality is tied to a way of life, ‘it is wrong for people in one society to condemn, interfere with, etc, the values of another society.’
Why not condemn a way of life, even if it is only to be found in some far off place, if it is bound to result in famine or genocide? What's so wrong with warning a youngster not to smoke because it will affect her health sooner or later?
The problem for vulgar relativism, as Williams goes on to show, is with the status of the principle of toleration. If it’s right to be tolerant, and ‘right’ is relative, then we must ask: right for whom?
Why must we do so? Will our head fall off if we don't?
After all, if an aggressive warrior society is debating whether it should interfere with its neighbours, then according to its values the answer might be a definite ‘Yes, we should interfere.’
Not if such interference will lead to defeat and enslavement. Warriors have to weigh up the odds for or against victory.
Perhaps, at least for a violent society, war is the answer.
It may be the answer for a peaceful society. Britain entered two world wars not in order to gain territory but because failure to do so would alter the balance of power and imperil its own independence.
The point, as Williams makes clear, is that you can’t coherently say that All moral truth is relative to a culture and espouse a non-relative moral rule that all cultures should respect one another.
Sure one can. Respect others is a good thing. Chances are they will respect you in return and so mutually beneficial transactions will flourish. The fact that one thing does not logically entail another thing or that there are circumstances where they are incompossible doesn't mean that there isn't a concrete model for their conjunction.
The vulgar relativist is putting forward toleration as a universal moral principle, but this is flat-out inconsistent with moral relativism itself.
No it isn't. Toleration as a principle can still be defeated by some higher principle- e.g. self-preservation.
Vulgar relativism is ‘absurd’, Williams concluded,
Anything can be made to look absurd by taking it to extremes.
but this can give a misleading impression: he took seriously many of the ideas that underpin moral relativism. In fact, he agrees with the moral relativist that ethical reality is a human construction,
In which case we can hire a builder to construct a nicer ethical reality for us- one where my farts are sweet smelling rainbows which bring delight to the angels.
and, like the relativist, he emphasises the variety of moral outlooks. Some moral and religious traditions hold that moral reality is as objective and universal as facts about the shape of the Earth.
We can posit the existence of 'karma binding particles'. This is a materialistic meta-ethics.
Williams certainly didn’t think this and went so far as to call his own moral position ‘nonobjectivist’.
It was nonsense.
Perhaps Williams’s respect for the moral relativist’s motivations emerges most strikingly in the following passage from his middle-period book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985):
If you are conscious of nonobjectivity, should that not properly affect the way in which you see the application or extent of your ethical outlook?
I am conscious of having farted. Why should that consciousness properly affect anything in my ethical outlook? Williams is making an arbitrary stipulation. I may as easily say 'If you are conscious of nonobjectivity should you not eagerly seek out and devour dog turds'?
… If we become conscious of ethical variation and of the kinds of explanation it may receive, it is incredible that this consciousness should just leave everything where it was and not affect our ethical thought itself.
Why? I became conscious that different languages have different words for Mummy when I was about 5 years old. This consciousness left everything where it was. My Mummy was still my Mummy. Other people had their own Mummies and spoke to them in different languages. So what?
We can go on, no doubt, simply saying that we are right and everyone else is wrong (that is to say, on the nonobjectivist view, affirming our values and rejecting theirs), but if we have arrived at this stage of reflection, it seems a remarkably inadequate response.
But 'this stage of reflection' is stupid shit. It would be remarkable if it led to some useful thought or action.
Williams argued for appropriate recognition of the cultural and historical location of one’s ethics
Because Shirley kept mistaking the cultural and historical location of his ethics for the shitter.
and combined this with a shrewd sense of when moral assessment has a point and when it doesn’t.
Morally assessing chipmunks tends to be pointless. Williams was quite shrewd in that respect.
This took him close to the spirit of relativism – in fact, he even espoused what he called a ‘relativism of distance’.
A man who once espoused Shirley might later espouse anything at all.
The belief at the heart of Williams’s relativism of distance is that it doesn’t makes sense to assert the truth of one’s moral outlook across the entire span of human history.
Why not? Economists have a game theoretic view of morality and find evolutionarily stable strategies in the Animal Kingdom just as easily as in the entire span of human history. Williams had studied Latin instead of Math and thus was out of the loop.
He would have supported the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, but at the same time questioned the value and wisdom of mentally applying it to warrior cultures thousands of years in the past.
Why not? The fact is those 'warrior cultures' which turned into stable Empires promoting long distance trade and cultural exchange tended to have a 'homonoia' of a universalistic type. Even if they did go in for enslavement and resettlement of populations for economic or strategic reasons, they did promote a universal ethics for some favoured classes and these rights and entitlements could be broadened and deepened to catalyse economic growth and technological progress.
There was no need, Williams urged, for a ‘relativistic vow of silence about the past’ but on the other hand, ‘comments about it are not obligatory, either.’
Previously, English people thought they had a duty to condemn atrocities committed by the ancient Aztecs. This cut into their working time. Williams revealed they could just go ahead and fix the fucking toilet rather than gas on about the Mayas and the Manchus and so forth.
Writing in The New York Review in 1998, Williams gave memorable expression to these ideas and sentiments:
Must I think of myself as visiting in judgment all the reaches of history?
If that's what gets you hard- why not?
Of course, one can imagine oneself as Kant at the Court of King Arthur, disapproving of its injustices, but exactly what grip does this get on one’s ethical thought?
Not to mention your cock. Fuck. I just did. Kant would have been so not amused.
Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century moral philosopher, believed that everyone knew the same universal moral law, so that it was always intelligible to appeal to its presence.
Which is why nobody wanks.
Williams, for the most part, thinks that what makes ethical sense is more culturally limited.
Not if you take a game theoretic view of the evolution of morality.
When we look inside, what we find is not the moral law, but our historically formed identity.
When I look inside I tend to find Beyonce except she has gotten fat and has become quite morose. Also, for some reason, she speaks only Telugu. Fuck. I've just realized, I subscribed to a Telugu channel by mistake.
The danger with an acute feel for history is that you can end up trapped in a relativist bubble.
Not if your acute feel is expressed by finding a good structural causal model and finding proxies for econometric testing.
Just watching 'I Claudius' on TV and saying 'incest became fashionable coz the Pharaohs were into it' doesn't make you a fucking historian.
But if Williams shared the relativist’s sense of the culturally rooted nature of ethical life,
which it obviously isn't. Ethical personalities tend to rise above their cultural roots. For example, in traditional Tamil culture, people seldom give access to their farts to all and sundry. I am considered a Mahatma for my generosity in this respect. Indeed, I was encouraged to settle in the West so as to share this great ethical resource with the spiritually impoverished denizens of affluent societies.
he also wanted to incorporate into his moral philosophy the kind of critical tools that mean you don’t have to accept the worst things associated with moral relativism:
like what? Being raped and beheaded by Hamas?
either that ‘anything goes’, or that societies can’t assess and evaluate each other, or that you must accept the status quo in your own society.
Assessing and evaluation is stuff auditors and Stock Analysts and Doctors and Engineers and other such professionals get paid for doing. There is little point doing so oneself. As for the status quo in our Society, we are welcome to seek to change it by voting for a political party with the ability to change things for the better. In England, this meant voting for Thatcher, not Shirley.
Williams’s great late work Truth and Truthfulness (2002) celebrated the virtues associated with the pursuit of truth.
How novel! Most philosophers think Truth is totes overrated. I heard it tried to feel up Sincerity behind the bike shed.
There is no objective and universal morality, according to Williams,
But there may be a non-arbitrary game theoretic structural causal model of its evolution a la Binmore.
but moral philosophy could still draw on the fact that some truths, like the shape of the planet, are objective and universal.
Because we have a good Structural Causal Model which also generates lots of useful tech like GPS location.
If a moral outlook depends on blatant falsehoods, then it can be undermined by revealing the truth.
Sadly, this isn't true at all. We hint that you are a bougie CIA agent in the pay of the Lizard People from Planet X.
To reject the claims of climate-change denial, for instance, you don’t have to debate whether there is an objective truth about morality. It’s enough to know that there is an objective truth about the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, what has happened to global annual temperature since the Industrial Revolution, and so on.
But this isn't why we reject or accept claims. What matters to us is our disposable income. We don't want to pay a lot more in tax or to be unable to pay inflated utility bills.
Williams had little time for the idea, associated with postmodernism, that all of reality is a cultural construction.
Which is cool if you want to get a PhD in Grievance Studies.
Humans have dramatically reshaped the Earth but they didn’t create the planet they live on.
But, according to the Anthropic Principle, the Universe is the way it is because it is the only way we could be in it. Anyway, it may turn out that the Universe is a hologram.
Ethical reality is constructed via interaction with ‘an already existing physical world’ that is not a cultural product.
Cats interact with an already existing physical world as do electrons. Do they have ethical realities of their own?
He tussled on numerous occasions with the American philosopher Richard Rorty, who, in the latter decades of the 20th century, became a kind of cultural figurehead for postmodernism in the academy. In fact, when I was a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, I spoke to Rorty about the contrast between his ideas and those of Williams. ‘Yes,’ Rorty said, Williams’s view chimed more with common sense but, as Rorty unforgettably concluded, ‘I want to change common sense!’
Then he died. Sad.
Like Rorty, however, Williams did emphasise the culturally constructed nature of ethical life.
Because he didn't know Math.
Influenced by the 19th-century thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, Williams became particularly interested in conceptual genealogy as a method in philosophy.
But philosophy is useless. The Mathematics genealogy project is useful.
What this means, in a nutshell, is that you can trace the origin and development of a concept or idea – liberty, for instance – to see whether the resulting narrative encourages use of the concept in question or whether it debunks it.
Sadly Begriffsgeschichte is misleading when it is not actively mischievous. Hohfeldian analysis and insights from Mechanism Design enable us to understand what is Liberty and how to have a virtuous circle whereby more of it is available to more and more people.
A concept’s history helps you understand whether you want to be part of the conceptual tribe that uses it
Don't be a member of a useless tribe. Learn Math or practice Law or become a Doctor or set up a business. Philosophers still have not found out a way to gain enlightenment from my farts.
Think about this in relation to culture wars debates over love and sexuality. Not everyone will want to avoid, like Rooney’s character Frances, traditional concepts connected to romance.
Because they want sex not Lurve.
But conceptual genealogy invites you to reflect on the history of a word or concept such as ‘girlfriend’ and decide whether you want to continue to employ it.
What is the genealogy of girlfriend? Used by a woman if just meant a friend who was female. In Rooney's novel it means a particular type of Lesbian relationship. But there is no deep history here.
You might come to decide that, as Oscar Wilde in 1895 said about blasphemy, it ‘is not a word of mine.’
Yet he converted to Catholicism before he died.
Many ideas associated with love, in particular marriage, have historically had very little to do with romance.
And romance, historically, had very little to do with marriage. The 'midons' of the Provencal poet or the 'Courts of Love' involved a spiritualized devotion to a woman married to some other nobleman.
As Stephanie Coontz’s work Marriage: A History (2005) illustrates, ‘most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and political institution’ to be based on love.
They also saw that love was vital for the success of a marriage. It often happened that parents made good choices for their children. Equally many 'love marriages' soon ran short of that commodity.
That’s a much more recent idea. Understanding the history of a concept helps you understand whether you want to be part of the way of life – call it the conceptual tribe – that uses it.
We all belong to actual races, religions, ethnicities and genders. A conceptual history of my gender may cause me to want to become something less horrible.
Sometimes, joining an institution involves modifying its concepts for the better, as in the case of gay and lesbian marriage.
How does this improve the concept? On the other hand, it must be said, Indian Princes were notorious for spending vast sums on the marriages of their cats and dogs. No doubt, this improved the concept of marriage for their starving subjects.
Truthfulness can be bracing, especially when focused on abuse of power.
Very true, when the Head Master sodomizes you you should truthfully tell him he has a needle dick.
Williams drew on the tradition of philosophy known as critical theory,
which came into existence to try to explain why people kept running away for Communist Utopias. The answer was that people had been brainwashed to think that dying in a Gulag wasn't as delightful as a trip to Disneyland.
which stresses the examination and criticism of social structures.
It is a type of gaslighting like the guy who sidled up to you at the Fresher's Fair and tried to convince you that you were Gay and wanted to suck him off. Sadly, you were to stupid to understand that fellatio does not involve punching a person repeatedly.
He writes:
[I]f one comes to know that the sole reason one accepts some moral claim is that somebody’s power has brought it about that one accepts it [and it is] in their interest that one should accept it [then] one will have no reason to go on accepting it.
This is obviously false. Mummy got me to accept that toilet training might be something I would benefit from. This was clearly in her interest. But though I left home many decades ago, I am not incessantly shitting the bed. Williams, obviously, may have taken a different course.
No doubt one of Williams’s most admirable and enduring qualities was his desire to make philosophical room for inconvenient truths
like what? Mummy was right to wean and toilet train us?
and the potentially startling clarity of speaking truth to power.
People with power pay good money to get smart people to speak truthfully to them so that they can keep the power they have or gain more of it.
Why go up to a powerful person and tell him some useful truth without charging him for it?
Williams argued that all human societies have a need for basic notions of accuracy and sincerity: the traits that combine to form the virtue of truthfulness.
All human societies have a need for immortality because we don't Mummy to die- ever. That is why we gain the virtue of being immortal. Also we can fart out rainbows.
This introduced an element of universalism into his worldview.
But that element of universalism drank all the sherry and pissed on the sofa. Also it grabbed Shirley's boobs.
However, while the need for truthfulness is universal, Williams again made clear that different cultures have and will build differently on the need. He ends Truth and Truthfulness with the hope that the more ‘courageous, intransigent, and socially effective forms’ of the virtues associated with truth will live on.
Very good of him, I'm sure. Sadly he was unable to write the sequel 'Niceness vs. Naughtiness' where he expressed the hope that Niceness would live on while Naughtiness was welcome to get AIDS and die horribly.
It’s fair to say, strange as it sounds, that Williams’s defence of truth and truthfulness was an unfashionable undertaking in the humanities at the time.
The 'humanities' had turned into sub-humanities. If you weren't a paranoid nut-job you looked out of place.
He was prescient, writing at the end of his life and at the turn of the millennium, about the various forms of truth denial that would emerge (or re-emerge) in the 21st century. Think of how the age of the internet, of which he saw only the beginning, would make Holocaust denial common again.
in Humanities Departments?
Indeed, in a passage now widely shared online, he wrote about how the internet ‘makes it easy for large numbers of previously isolated extremists to find each other and talk only among themselves.’
Actually, it makes it even easier for isolated extremists like myself to watch porn instead of talking to like-minded nutcases.
Moral criticism must often take the form of making the plain truth widely known.
Which is why before you criticize my morality, you should come clean about the fact that you have a tiny penis. Also your sister is a slut.
But what if some arguments do ultimately come down to disagreements over values?
Then put a cash value to them. 'Transferable utility' is the relevant solution concept. I value my time spent wistfully farting. You value time I devote to doing your taxes. You pay me a small sum and I do your taxes before resuming my practice of wistful farting.
Perhaps disputes over climate change, for example, go much deeper than familiarity with the relevant science can remedy.
These disputes end when we figure out that paying more in tax today may end up making us wealthier because there are tax-breaks for investing in green energy start ups.
Williams says little about rational argument over values themselves, perhaps limited by his
ignorance of mathematical economics
worldview according to which principles ‘do not admit of any ultimate justification’ (as Korsgaard puts it).
Sure they do. The fact is principles tend to be rather wishy washy and will admit to anything if you ply them with drink.
Williams also expressed a worldly scepticism about what moral arguments can be expected to achieve. ‘What will the professor’s justification do,’ he wrote, ‘when they break down the door, smash his spectacles, take him away?’
If the professor was doing something useful, it would have been in the interest of the State to kill nay hooligans who messed with him.
Williams’s work manifested the tension that one sees in the larger culture wars over values: between the desire to acknowledge what seem like universal and indisputable evils, and the desire to leave behind the legacy of universalism.
Why do useless people think they have to acknowledge that genocide is bad? Is it because they are just as stupid as they are useless.
He did, for instance in a book chapter titled ‘Human Rights and Relativism’, suggest that there are some very basic moral wrongs that almost all human beings recognise, even if elsewhere in his work he adamantly rejected the idea of a universal Moral Law.
We may do wrong things to serve a righteous cause. These are trade-offs of an economic type.
Compare his outlook with that of the moral philosopher Derek Parfit, his longtime Oxford colleague. Parfit really did believe that ethical facts are as objective and universal as facts about the shape of the Earth, and searched for moral arguments that would convince everyone.
He failed. He was a deeply silly man.
In Shame and Necessity (1993), Williams argued, in contrast, that it makes more sense to pursue ‘social and political honesty’ than a ‘rationalistic metaphysics of morality’.
Both were useless. Still if you are paid to talk stupid shite, that is what you are obliged to do.
If Williams had little time for Rorty’s postmodernism writ large, he also did not share Parfit’s hope (now associated with the Effective Altruism movement)
which is now associated with Fraud.
that the study of ethics could become transformed into a science of morality, which would then be applied to solve the world’s problems.
by enriching Sam Bankman-Fried and his family- right?
Truthfulness, conceptual genealogy, comparative ethical study: these ingredients give Williams’s philosophy of value its critical bite.
He bit at air. Economics matters. It is ethical to do more with less. It isn't ethical to talk useless shite. But Econ is mathsy. Any nutter can spout Ethical shite.
There are many resources left for ethical and political criticism after moral philosophy fully emerges from what Williams called ‘the shadow of universalism’ – or so he endeavoured to show.
What you do with resources is the subject of Economics.
His aim was to hold on to the vital distinction between what is and what ought to be while maintaining that norms about what ought to be are themselves ultimately cultural creations.
In which case, you should concentrate on changing culture by writing wonderful novels- like J.K Rowling- or making bingeworthy Netflix series about homosexual werewolves and lesbian witches.
His position, in this respect, is akin to the view that human beings create the norms about what counts as good and bad art rather than discover mind-independent and timeless truths about beauty.
Art creates norms- that is true enough. Sadly, those norms may not be realistic. I developed an eating disorder because I wanted to win the Miss Teenage Tamil Nadu beauty contest. Thankfully, my Doctor explained to me that I needed to take the pizza out of the pizza box before eating it. Cardboard is not easily digestible.
Williams never thought that moral philosophy could make ethical life any easier than it is.
Moral philosophy is stupid shit. A game theoretical approach need not be if done by a smart dude.
Nonetheless, he offers a vision of how philosophy, allied with other disciplines such as history, can provide both criticism and support for one’s ethical orientation in the world.
Yet, it is a matter of common observance that those with a genuine 'ethical orientation in the world' didn't go to Collidge or, if they did, they studied STEM subjects.
And in his engagement with moral relativism, he doesn’t just point to a middle way between his contemporaries Richard Rorty and Derek Parfit.
Both of whom were useless though Rorty wrote well
He offers an example of how to make one’s way through the culture wars.
Why make your way through them. Just tell any Social Justice warrior you meet that you know they are controlling the neighbour's cat with mind-rays. They will give you a wide berth.
