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This chapter examines a proposal concerning the nature of practical reasons: that all such reasons are internal reasons. It is the first obstacle that was placed in the way of the Wittgensteinian cognitivists’ position by Bernard Williams. Williams’s arguments are presented in a different light from the way in which they are usually understood. The mention of Humeanism in his initial presentation of his ideas led to Williams being viewed as a representative of someone committed to the Humean theory of motivation, or to a Humean view of the self or of the psychological. Williams’s position is seen as a set of relatively neutral constraints on the very idea of a practical reason.

This chapter discusses the non-objectivist position. The non-objectivist argument emerges from an immanent, transcendental placing of the various ways in which we conceive of different areas of thought or language. Rather than announcing itself as a sceptical conclusion, the sceptical line of reflection that emerges can be allowed, in Tractarian fashion, to show its truth. It is in this way that the non-objectivist critique emerges as the most powerful means of undermining the cognitivist argument traced so far. Underpinned by a worked-out programme in the philosophy of truth, namely minimalism, non-objectivism is also powered by a distinctive vision of a modern society.

In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams criticizes the ‘morality system’ and the associated philosophical enterprise of constructing ethical theories. Williams argues that we would be better off replacing the ‘thin’ concepts favoured by the morality system and its theorists, concepts such as ‘right’ and ‘good’, with ‘thick’ concepts of the sort that were prevalent in the ethical thought of ancient Greece, such as ‘courage’ and ‘treachery’. In this critical essay, Scheffler presents several arguments against Williams's view; among them is the argument that the distinction between thick and thin concepts is not a clear one, and that the elimination of ethical theory would leave Williams without adequate conceptual resources to engage in the kind of social criticism that he himself regards as necessary.

This chapter examines John Rawls's idea of a life plan, Bernard Williams's idea of a constitutive project, and Charles Taylor's idea of life as a quest. Drawing on the work of Kathryn Addelson, each idea is exposed as a version of the “career self”, a kind of individual who aspires to the conscientious and conscious superintendence of itself. The career self is a dominant identity in late modern industrialized societies; it is a culturally embedded ideal that in its abstract philosophical form is called “autonomy”. A dominant identity is a normative ideal for a kind of life particularly valued and visible in a certain kind of society at a particular historical time, not a culturally transcendent and constitutive requirement of personhood. Highly valued dominant identities are not available to all in a given society, and typically require other less valued identities to support and define them.

In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams uses the idea of a “necessary identity” ascribed to women to explain why ancient Greek society viewed the condition of slavery as coercive, but viewed the condition of women as inevitable. Williams fails to notice that female sex did not for the Greeks in itself constitute a social identity; rather, it is the fact of coercion into a social role that is denied in the case of women but not slaves. The key fact, then as now, is that justifying some people's subjection by others requires making coercion hard to recognize and easy to deny. Social arrangements that make identities appear necessary include naturalizing, privatizing, and normalizing the ascription of identities, and disqualifying the voice and testimony of those who bear them. Identities are made to appear necessary by a combination of force and epistemic rigging through physical, social, and legal arrangements.

In his influential discussion of thick concepts Williams argues that the facts that make judgements, which apply thick concepts correctly, true, provide reasons for action — albeit only for the members of a community who have a disposition to be guided by the concepts in question. His internalism about practical reasons may help to explain this claim: the disposition to be guided by a thick concept provides the link to existing motives that all reasons must have. Understood thus, Williams makes room for explaining and vindicating Oscar Wilde's ‘…not one of my words’-dictum about certain thick concepts. However, the chapter argues that the combination of the account of thick concepts that Williams expounds with reasons internalism leads into a dilemma: either the facts that thick concepts, correctly applied, refer to, do not provide reasons (not even for those who have a disposition to be guided by them) — except perhaps in the way in which any other, non-evaluative fact may provide a reason; or they provide reasons for everyone, independently of the disposition to be guided by the concepts. Getting out of the dilemma requires giving up on reasons internalism or, alternatively, modifying the account of thick concepts that Williams sets out.

At the end of ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’, Bernard Williams discusses the case of a man who, faced with a situation in which he can save only one of two people in equal peril, chooses to save his wife. Williams famously observes that a moral justification defending the man against the charge that he ought to have been impartial provides the rescuer with ‘one thought too many’. Most of Williams’ commentators agree, interpreting his remarks as a reminder that a morally good person need not, and perhaps should not, be thinking about what is morally justifiable all the time. This chapter draws and defends a more radical interpretation of Williams' remarks. One attractive ideal of love would prohibit the lover not only from thinking about morality all the time, but also from being unconditionally committed to acting according to morality all the time. This does not imply that a person is positively permitted or justified in disregarding moral requirements. It rather supports Williams's thought that ‘some situations lie beyond justification’.

Consider a teenage girl who is contemplating motherhood. Prior to her becoming pregnant, it seems that she might truly judge that it would be a bad thing on balance to have a child at this stage in her life. After giving birth as a teenager, however, she might also truly judge that it is not a bad thing on balance that her child exists. These attitudes have commonly been thought to be in tension with each other. This chapter argues, however, that when correctly interpreted in deliberative terms, as judgments about the agent's reasons, the apparent conflict disappears. Giving birth changes the girl's situation, in ways that give rise to corresponding changes in her reasons for action and for various emotional responses. A consequence of this analysis, however, is that there may be mistakes or errors in deliberation that the agent is unable to regret having made. The teenage mother ought not to having conceived and given birth to a child at that stage in her life; and yet, as a mother, she can hardly regret having made the wrong decision in this particular matter. This raises large questions about the relation between justification and regret. Williams argues in ‘Moral Luck’ that our decisions can be justified or ‘unjustified’ retroactively through intervening circumstances that make regret either impossible or unavoidable. The chapter challenges Williams' assumption that justification and regret are necessarily connected in this way, and shows that the things that drive a wedge between justification and regret need not have anything to do with epistemic luck.

According to Bernard Williams, all reasons for action are what he calls ‘internal reasons’, where an agent has an internal reason to act in some way just in case she would be motivated to act in that way if she were to deliberate correctly. Though Williams is supposed to have an anti-rationalist conception of what it is to deliberate correctly, his official account includes separate roles for knowledge and the imagination. An agent would desire something if he were to deliberate correctly, according to Williams, only if he would desire that thing if he knew all the relevant facts and only if he were to fully and accurately imagine what it would be like for that thing to obtain. This provides us with a puzzle, as rationalist accounts of deliberation can be understood as assigning separate roles to knowledge and the imagination. Williams's official account of deliberation thus looks just like the rationalist's. Solving this puzzle requires us to get clearer about what it means to deliberate correctly and about the differences between rationalist and anti-rationalist accounts of desire.

The Stoics invented cognitive therapy, in which: I attack my judgement that the situation is bad — e.g., by recalling that I am not the only one, or that things are only unexpected not bad, or by redescription of the situation. I attack my judgement that mourning or revenge is appropriate by reminding myself it makes me neglect the living, or that I have often behaved provocatively myself. But where, as Bernard Williams asked, does philosophical analysis come in? For example by showing that rethinking can remove emotion since it depends on judgement, by showing what two judgements are open to attack, and by telling us to avoid William James' phenomenon of judging, ‘I am crying, so I must have been maltreated’. The relevance of time, self, and the disutility of some emotion also needs to be considered. The Stoic connexion between philosophy and therapy is, rightly, seamless.

Bernard Williams influentially attacked ethical theory. This chapter assesses arguments for the ‘anti-theory’ position in ethics, including mainly arguments put forward by Williams but also arguments put forward by others. The chapter begins by discussing what is supposed to be theory in ethics, what ethical intuitions are taken to be by those involved in the theory versus anti-theory debate. Then the paper responds to all of the following objections to ethical theory. Ethical theory is mistaken to prize principles, mistaken to prize rationalism, and mistaken to presume or prize foundational unity. Ethical theory is mistaken to presume morality is deeply impartial, mistaken to presume to tell agents how to deliberate, mistaken to presume or prize ethical codifiability, mistaken to presume value commensurability, and mistaken to eliminate ethical dilemmas.

Drawing on some of Bernard Williams's work, especially his essays ‘The Idea of Equality’ and ‘The Human Prejudice’, this chapter argues that ‘speciesism’ is very unlike racism or sexism, and that much of the philosophical apparatus which has been mobilized on behalf of anti-speciesism, such as moral individualism and the argument from marginal cases, is unsound. Moral individualists hold that the standards of appropriate ethical treatment of a creature must display fundamental sensitivity to only the intrinsic non-relational properties exemplified by that creature. But this doctrine cannot tell us, all by itself, when a creature has been unfortunate, and hence deserving of protection or compensation. Those questions can only be settled by locating the creature in a community of fellow creatures, which define the relevant standards of flourishing and misfortune. It is further contended that there is nothing unintelligible or morally obnoxious about defining these communities in species-sensitive ways, and that our understanding of the wrongness of racism and sexism is actually dependent on the background thought that those individuals who are victimized by racist or sexist treatment belong to a particular community: the human community.

Christine Korsgaard surveys several ways of warranting ethics (Hobbes, Puffendorff, Moore, Ross, Nagel, Hutcheson, Hume, Mill, Williams). She chooses a neo‐Kantian approach. But Goodman finds her solution suppositious and her problematic artificial. Ethics, he argues, needs no justification. The dependence of all values on God does not imply an arbitrary authority. Indeed, monotheism finds incoherent the notion that divine authority would be arbitrary. Goodman engages critically with exponents of Jewish legal positivism and with Hare regarding divine command ethics, arguing against the ideas of original sin and the inadequacy of the Mosaic law.

Previous chapters have discussed the form of the constraint on harming other people and how this relates to rights that individuals have. This chapter considers agent-focused concerns that may also have a role in constraining agents from transgressing negative rights and in deciding to let die rather than kill. The doctrine of negative responsibility holds that individuals are just as responsible for things they allow to happen or fail to prevent as they are for things they bring about. In an attempt to criticize this doctrine, which he believes is an important component of consequentialism, Bernard Williams uses a case commonly referred to as Jim and the Indians. This chapter examines the concepts of negative and positive responsibility, moral responsibility, Williams's criticisms of consequentialism, the Integrity Objection to consequentialism, and physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Chapter 4 draws some of the broader consequences of the anti-naturalist assumptions of the theory of autonomy defended here, by looking both at alternative readings of Kant and at broader questions addressed in contemporary moral philosophy about the precise force of practical reasons in our lives. First, focusing on Guyer’s and Korsgaard’s arguments, it is shown that naturalism provides the framework for influential contemporary interpretations of Kantian autonomy but that its support is dispensable. Following this, the chapter addresses the external reasons and categoricity debates and examines their application to Kantian autonomy. The aim is to show that it is possible to develop an account that is externalist and so anti-Humean about practical reasons but not necessarily anti-Humean about motivation. Having established this, attention turns to the ethical substance of autonomy, its intersubjective normative content. This discussion links up with the first chapter and addresses the universalizability formula of right and apriority in ethics. Consistent with the argument of the previous chapter that focuses on ‘right’ rather than the derivation of specific duties, it is argued that universalizability has moral content and the different ways it can guide our moral thinking are shown.

This chapter interprets and assesses Williams's ‘“Ought” and moral obligation’, together with a later unpublished lecture of his on ‘ought’. It describes a notion of ownership for oughts. For instance, in 'Alison ought to get a sun hat' the ought is intuitively owned by Alison, whereas in 'Alex ought to get a severe punishment' the ought is intuitively not owned by Alex. It argues that Williams in ‘“Ought” and moral obligation’ meant to deny that any oughts are owned. It also argues, however, that actually some oughts are owned.

This chapter focuses on Bernard Williams's ‘What does Intuitionism Imply?’ (1988). It considers the justice of certain complaints that he makes about the position he associates with John McDowell. The chapter first considers, and reject, McDowell's appeal to the analogy with secondary qualities in his ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’ (1985). The chapter then considers and defends McDowell's reply to John Mackie's complaint that objective values do not pull their own weight; I try to show the justice of McDowell's reply in a way that detaches it from any reliance on the dispositional conception of value. Finally, the chapter turns to Williams's attempts to show that the objectivity of moral values cannot be sustained within the constraints of McDowell's approach, because of various explanatory failures. The chapters argues that everything that needs to be explained can be explained, and that we should prefer a sort of optimism to a Williams-style pessimism. The chapter ends by considering whether Williams is right to think of McDowell as an intuitionist.

When should we trust our judgments about far‐fetched imaginary cases? This chapter argues that if the imaginary scenario is adduced to illuminate a concept structured around a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, and if these conditions play a role in how we identify candidates as falling under that concept, then our judgments about the far‐fetched imaginary cases may help us to separate essential features of the concept from accidental ones. But if the concept is not structured in that way, or if the features in question do not govern our application of the concept, then our judgments about imaginary cases are likely to be misleading. The chapter then argues that the concept of personal identity falls into the second of these classes, and hence that far‐fetched thought experiments may not illuminate the concept in the way that they have been purported to. The chapter includes detailed discussions of John Locke's Prince and Cobbler case, Derek Parfit's case of teletransportation, and Bernard Williams's A‐body/B‐body case.