Bernard Williams on Morality Part 1

Williams starts his first chapter of Morality - An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge, 1972) by interrogating the figure of the amoralist. The amoralist asks Why is there anything that I should do? He shows his indifference to moral considerations. This comes out in his asking whether there is anything that he should do. ‘Should’ like ‘ought’ and ‘must’ expresses a special kind of reason for doing something.

         The amoralist isn’t insensitive to every kind of reason. He is not a nihilist, at least not in every sense of the word. There are things the amoralist cares about, pleasure perhaps or power. What he does not care about, and what is essential to morality, is the interests of other people. The amoralist would not reject an action on the ground that it was unfair or that it disregarded the pain or discomfort of others or even caused these to occur. Williams adds to these a more formal consideration, namely that the amoralist does not stand back and say that it is all right for others to act like he does. He does not universalize, for universalization is a particular aspect of morality. ‘All right’ has a moral sense here. What the amoralist doesn’t do is say that it is permitted for others to act as he does; he can perhaps take others’ acting like him in his stride, or dislike it, or fight it, but he cannot resent it. For to resent an act is to take a moral stance towards it.

         The amoralist may of course feign moral outrage “and so discourage some of the more squeamish in his environment from hostile action” (p.19). The possibility, indeed the great likelihood of the amoralist’s dissembling show that he is likely a parasite on the moral system. He can only behave as badly as he does, because most people don’t. The amoralist is what the theory of games calls a free rider: he rides the tram for free and can continue to do so since most other people do pay for their ticket. The amoralist, of course, will not be impressed by charges of behaving in a way that is parasitic. The appeal to consequences of (an imagined) universalization is itself a moral appeal, that the amoralist perfectly consistently does not set store by.

         Just as the amoralist cannot say that others have no right to hold his behaviour against him, he cannot make any appeal to justifications, at least not those of a moral kind. Nor can he appeal to notions such as courage, or even to being particularly splendid. The use of such notions invite moral questions. Moreover they share a presupposition that other would behave like the amoralist if they just had the courage or the guts to do so. This presupposition is familiar from the debate between Glaucon and Adeimantus on the one hand and Socrates on the other in Book II of Plato’s Republic. Suppose, they say, that one had a device that would allow one to get away with anything. Wouldn’t one take the opportunity? Isn’t acting with impunity all it takes to dispense with morality? Plato of course says it isn’t. It is essential to a man’s being properly human that he act morally.

         Though Williams refers to the impunity device, i.e. Gyges’ ring in the Republic, he does not here adopt Plato’s answer, though Williams’s answer is at least at this stage compatible with Plato’s. Morality, Williams states, is internalized. “[T]e more basic moral rules and conceptions are strongly internalized in upbringing, at a level from which they do not merely evaporate with the departure of policemen or censorious neighbours. This is part of what it is for them to be moral rules, as opposed to merely legal requirements or matters of social convention.” (p.21). It is part and parcel of being a moral subject that one wants to act morally.

         The amoralist cannot take a moral stance towards people’s behaviour. He will care about himself, but if he cares only about himself, the amoralist is no more than a psychopath and he can neither be argued into morality, nor does his existence pose any serious challenge to morality. There simply would not be any question of justification there with this figure. If there is any point to justifying morality, it must be because there is a serious alternative to it that it can justified against. Does the amoralist offer such an alternative? He does have a possible attraction as a glamorous gangster might.  Is there anyone the amoralist or gangster does care about?

         He may care for his child, his mother or his girlfriend. No general considerations weigh with him, but the idea of doing something for someone because that person, rather than the amoralist himself, needs it is one the amoralist is able to have. The amoralist will only do something for someone if he feels so inclined, but the idea of doing something for somebody isn’t alien to this gangster figure. He is capable of thinking in terms of others’ interests. Therefore “there is no bottomless gulf between this state and the basic dispositions of morality” (p.25) For the gangster to universalize his considerations in principle requires only an extension of his imagination and his understanding. The moral plane is not inaccessible to him but he needs  to extend his sympathies.

         If we can get the amoralist we started with to so extend his sympathies, we have at least the beginnings of morality. “[I]f we grant a man with even a minimal concern for others, then we do not have to ascribe to him any fundamentally new kind of thought or experience to include him in the world of morality, but only what is recognizably an extension of what he already has.” (p.26) Moreover, Williams says, although it does not follow from what has so far been said that having sympathetic concern for others is the only way into morality, but it is true that it is.

         If one can come to care for others, morality is possible. That is the point of considering the figure of the amoralist. The amoralist in a strict sense of the word would be a psychopath, and as a consequence his only significance would be that he appals us precisely because he does not care for others. As soon as the figure of the amoralist is conceived of as including concerns for others, he is no longer a genuine amoralist, just someone with a limited morality.

         Williams moves from the amoralist to the subjectivist. The subjectivist has a morality of his own, but he insists that it is just his morality: others have different moralities and there is no question of justifying one morality as against another. Whereas the amoralist purportedly poses a challenge to morality by questioning its sway over him, the subjectivist contends that morality does not have the universal aspect it is often made out to have. Nor is a morality a question of truth or justification. Whereas the figure of the amoralist is easily dismissed on the grounds of its utter psychological implausibility, the subjectivist is a figure that many people easily identify their position on moral matters with. Or at least they think they do.

Een vrouw

Er is een vrouw met de storm in haar armen

Haar dijen een hemel vol bliksem

Zij is evenzoveel stille uren

Zoveel wijze meren waarin de vissen van haar liefde zwemmen

Zij is het water en het licht in het water

Het drinken van de vogels, het zingen van de merel

Zij is het land waar ik woon.

Lentegedicht

Februari

De zon schijnt, het is februari;

nog zoeken Shetlandpony’s de luwte van een haag

de reiger echter staat met de hals gestrekt de weide af te speuren

niet langer de ineengedoken stoïcijn.

de paarden, die ik elkaar toch al zo vaak zie kussen, staan te wachten

nog dragen zij een paardedeken, maar het hoofd is al vers gras en het zeker wankelen van veulens .

Hier jubelt al het blauw van de hemel

De hagel een armzalige vlaag

De zon een veelbelovend overdag.

Publish? Only once every five years

Publish? Only once every five years!

Academic publications are seldom read. Anecdote has it that a young man who had just got his doctorate stuck a € 50 bill on page 100 of his dissertation, with a note attached saying that the studious reader who had got this far deserved the award, and deposited this work in the university library. After a year’s time he borrowed the volume from the library – only to find the € 50 bill was still there. Most dissertations are read only by the dissertation committee; most academic publications are read by no more than four people. Yet the pressure to publish is now greater than ever before. Even undergraduates are encouraged to send their stuff to special journals and it is simply impossible to obtain a permanent post without a ridiculously impressive list of publications – quantitatively impressive that is. Whence fraudulent publications of academics trying to save their jobs, whence the dismal state of academic life in general.

         How has this state of affairs come about and what, if anything, could be done about it?

         The Dutch poet and classicist Ilja Leonard Pfeijfer in the newspaper NRC/Next evoked the swan-song of the academia he experienced when he was a doctoral student and a junior lecturer: one could do research into whatever took one’s fancy and one could lecture on whatever one wanted to lecture about. This academia of what in Dutch is called academische vrijheid – academic freedom – has disappeared. In its stead there is now a ratrace of academics scurrying and tripping, crushing each other in the throng of little men trying to reach their ‘targets’. The university has to all intents and purposes become a knowledge factory. For there is so little difference between a factory and a university that managers who used work at soup factories now run universities along the same lines.

         Anyone who looks around at a university will find this out in five minutes’ time, provided they have not imbibed any mind-narrowing business school theories. The university of today, being a business, is looked upon as a system that has students and academics as its input into two subsystems that have a respective output of BAs and Mas and publications. The quality of the publication has its measure in the rating of the journal in which it is published; if you go to the right sort of conferences, chat with the right colleagues and abide by the fashionable opinions in the fashionable research programmes – a sort of fashion collections in academia – you will publish in top journals, therefore you are taken to be an excellent academic.

         The point of this is not to suggest that all excellent academics are yes-men (some of them are not), but rather that ‘excellence’ or ‘quality’ essentially have nothing whatsoever to do with the level of research or teaching, since ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ are merely accounting notions. One is excellent if and only if one has so many publications in journals with precisely this and this rating. There is no question of what it is that one is saying.

         It is an illusion to think that the business culture of the yes-men could be changed by anything less than a revolution, since most of the organizations mediating between government and the universities as well as many academics themselves will think they have too much to lose in the demolition of the current system. And yet there is one very concrete point that might assist in bringing back the university Pfeijfer talked about. What we must have is a publication quota, a limit on the number of publications an academic is allowed.

         We publish too much and we publish too much of the same thing. We repeat ourselves over and over, but since nobody reads our work nobody cares. However, science does not progress through repetition, it progresses through creativity. Creativity requires insight and insight requires time. And it is time which we don’t have because of the pressure to publish, due to which we will keep repeating what we have said in our dissertations, or what we will say in our dissertations yet to be written up.

         The problem is more pronounced in the humanities than it is in the natural sciences, because in the natural sciences gained insights are cumulative in a way that research in the humanities is not, especially where experimental research is concerned. In the humanities there are no experiments or proofs. The arts, theology and philosophy demand a steady development of insight. Every philosopher for example must go through the history of philosophy for himself to so much as start having insights of his own. I can only know whether Aristotle has said anything of value for my investigation into perception when I have read Aristotle, which is something else entirely than reading the latest publication on the topic, which says that Aristotle is ‘a thing of the past’.

         As George Steiner once said “The young man tells us that Keats is a very complicated poet. I had gathered as much.” The need to mature in a humanistic discipline implies that it is simply silly to ask of someone before or just after their doctorate to produce a stream of publications containing genuine insight. It also implies that even academics who have had time to develop need time to think through a topic that’s new to them. The only one, after all, who can judge where he is, as far as his topic is concerned, is the academic himself.

         The ideal, then, would be perfect academic freedom. Given the addiction to numbers that plagues current academia however, a measurable criterion may not be a bad idea. It will at least keep the auditing wolf from the doors of learning. That is why it would be a good idea if academics were allowed to publish only once every five years – were allowed to(, not have to)! They would have to think hard whether they really want to put this book out into the world, since they won’t have another chance to publish anything else for the coming five years. A publication quota may not be good news to the makers of league-tables and other accountants, but it would be a blessing to the academic world. There would finally be time to think, read and write – books of course, not articles. And to read the work of your colleagues. Which will probably make fairly nice reading then.

Part of this piece has recently been quoted in the education column of Mark Bauerlein of Emory University in the USA. See http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/face-time-learning-styles-stem-avoidance-faculty-productivity/43642