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.