Review: The Magic in the Pronoun "My"

Reviewed Work(s): Moral Luck by Bernard Williams

Review by: Alasdair MacIntyre
Source: Ethics , Oct., 1983, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Oct., 1983), pp. 113-125
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2380660

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 REVIEW ESSAYS

The Magic in the Pronoun "My"*

Alasdair Maclntyre

A collection of excellent philosophical papers does not always make an

excellent book. That Bernard Williams's new collection does make such
a book is the first interesting fact about it. For at one level the topics
discussed are of very different kinds: "Moral Luck," "Justice as a Virtue,"
"Internal and External Reasons," and "Wittgenstein and Idealism" are
not obviously chapter headings from one and the same book. Wherein
does the very real unity of Williams's book then consist? It is a negative
unity. Each of the essays is relevant in some way to Williams's dissent
from and negative evaluation of all attempts to portray the essentially
moral standpoint as one of the acknowledgment of impersonal standards
which are impartial between persons and which hold, if at all, universally.
He is thus equally at odds with any Kantian account of the place of
rational universalizability in moral judgment and any utilitarian account
which entails that we ought to accord equal weight to each person's
preferences in deciding what we ought to do. His arguments often focus
upon the specific contentions advanced by particular authors and notably
on particular theses propounded by Thomas Nagel and John Rawls, bu
they are always in fact more generally directed. Indeed if there is a book
which more than any other constitutes the thesis to Williams's antithesis
it is one published only after these papers had appeared in their original
versions, R. M. Hare's Moral Thinking.' If Hare had not existed, Williams
should perhaps have seriously considered inventing him.
Williams's techniques and methods of argument are, like those of
the authors whose specific positions he discusses, those of analytic phi-
losophy. Although he from time to time speaks of and even appeals to
"personal experience" (p. x) he nowhere draws upon and rarely alludes
to either Hegelian or phenomenological attempts to characterize such
experience. And when he refers to particular moralities embodied in
particular social and cultural forms and institutions, it is always without

* A review of Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1981), pp. xii + 173, $32.50 (cloth), $10.95 (paper).
1. R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
2. For a particularly interesting example of the latter, see Frithjof Bergmann, "The
Experience of Values," Inquiry 16 (1973): 267-79.

Ethics 94 (October 1983): 113-125

C) 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/84/9401-0007$01.00

113

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 114 Ethics October 1983

giving any suggestion that the detailed sociological and anthropological

study of such forms and institutions might yield findings of philosophical
importance.3 These restrictions have both disadvantages and advantages.
I shall notice some of the disadvantages later, remarking here only that
more attention to the varieties both of moral experience and of ways of
life would have made it plainer than Williams does how his opponents
seem committed in ethics to a fairly crude brand of essentialism which,
I suspect, they would disown in other areas of science and philosophy.
But the advantages are plain. Because Williams shares the idiom, and
the standards of clarity, rigor, and relevance of analytic philosophy, it is
very plain when he scores a palpable hit. As he often does. This is guerrilla
warfare with all the excitement provided by tactical argumentative bril-
liance. Yet as so often with guerrilla warfare the issue is rarely brought
to a conclusive outcome.
I begin at the end with the concluding paper, "Another Time, Another
Place, Another Person," in which Williams discusses A. J. Ayer's successive
treatments of some central problems of verifiability. Ayer abandoned an
earlier view, formulated in Language, Truth and Logic, that "a sentence
uttered by A on a given occasion, if it was to have empirical meaning,
had to make a statement which was verifiable by A on that occasion,"4
which in the form that Ayer held it entailed such paradoxical consequences
as that statements about the past were reducible to statements about
present evidence. He replaced it by a view in which a key part is played
by the concept of a type of sentence which describes events in a way that
is neutral in respect of the temporal or spatial location of the speaker.
"Hence, on Ayer's theory, there lies behind the apparatus of token-
reflexive speech a representation of the world sub specie aeternitatzs, a
representation of it as seen from no point of view (time, place, person)
rather than any other, and the neutral sentences form this representation"
(p. 166). Ayer, committed as he was to identifying a connection between
meaning and verifiability, elaborated a view according to which it is
required only that statements employing such neutral sentences could
be verifiable by someone and that the speaker could (in a specified sense)
have been that person. Williams suggests that "there is a very poor fit
between, on the one hand, the matter of verification by me, which in
the form of conceivable verification by me, continued to preoccupy Ayer,
and on the other hand, the sub specie aeternitatis view of the world, with
its descriptive context embodied in neutral sentences" (p. 171). And he
is prepared to generalize his conclusion: "Verificationism of this kind
must be incoherent in relation ... to any view which seems to offer what
may be called an 'absolute' representation of the world, in the sense ...
of a representation of the world as it is, as opposed to how it peculiarly

3. For an unusually illuminating example, see Rodney Needham, "Remarks on the

Analysis of Kinship and Marriage," in Remarks and Inventions (London: Tavistock Publications,
1974), pp. 38-71.
4. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936), p. 164.

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 MacIntyre Review Essay 115

appears to any group in virtue of that group's peculiarities. Some will

doubt that any such absolute picture of the world can be achieved....
But those who have hoped for a philosophy centred on the scientific
world-view have not doubted this . . ." (p. 173). So Williams identifies at
least a tension, and perhaps more than that, between any verificationist
attempt to understand the meaning of the natural scientist's assertions
as tied to and necessarily limited by the good reasons which some particular
group of scientists at some particular time and place have for making
those assertions and any radically realist interpretation of those assertions.
But by identifying this tension in the context of Ayer's successive for-
mulations of the verification principle-formulations which are framed
with an eye to highly general philosophical considerations and problems
rather than to the specific context provided by the actual history of the
natural sciences -and by placing the paper in which he identifies it at
the very end of his book, Williams may conceal from the reader, may
indeed to some degree have concealed from himself, the extent to which
the problems in moral philosophy with which he is concerned parallel
problems in the philosophy of science and, more particularly, those prob-
lems which arise from the tension between verificationism and realism.
Why does this matter?
In the history both of morality and of science types of claim have
always been central which embodied an appeal to what any rational person
ought to believe; and yet the history of both morality and science reveals
equally that at any particular historical time and place the reasons which
have in fact influenced the acceptance of the best moral or scientific
beliefs defended in that time and place have been good reasons relative
to a certain context of understanding and not good reasons in terms of
some timeless standards of truth or right. The recognition of this fact
within the philosophy of science has led to a transformation of its enquiries,
a transformation with two central features. First, the importance of genuine
historical studies has been widely acknowledged: we cannot determine
what science is either by scrutinizing only the best science of the present
or by trying to lay down some timeless set of necessary and sufficient
conditions or by using examples taken out of historical context to support
particular contentions. And second, although there remain deep dis-
agreements about wherein the objectivity of science resides and about
the nature of claims to truth in science, there are certain important,
although not universally shared, agreements, one of which is that that
objectivity and those claims to truth need to be interpreted in the light
of the kind of direction and the kind of directedness that informs scientific
enquiry.
What we need to understand is the ability of those engaged in scientific
enquiry to find good reasons relative to the state and circumstances of
their enquiry at some particular historical stage for advancing and de-
fending theories of a kind which then will further enable them to transcend
the limitations of that particular stage, and so to transform not only their

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116 Ethics October 1983

beliefs about nature, but also their beliefs about what constitutes good
reasons for holding a particular set of beliefs about nature. It is from its
contributions to such understanding that enquiry into the nature of the
large continuities and discontinuities within the history of the sciences
derives part of its importance. The outcome is the instructive blend of
history and philosophy which we find in the writings of Kuhn, Lakatos,
Grene, Shapere, and so many others.
Yet so far as moral philosophy is concerned all this could be happening
in some distant galaxy. One consequence is that commentary on work
on moral philosophy has to be far more concerned than would otherwise
be seemly with omissions and absences, with what authors do not say
rather than what they do. One central absence, for example, in Williams's
account of the moral life is any sense of direction or directedness either
within a single life or historically across generations, a directedness that
both makes use of and moves toward a certain kind of universality and
impersonality, analogous to that which we can discern in the history of
science. Kantians and utilitarians cannot make room for any account of
such directedness, since for them universality and impersonality are nec-
essary features of any morality. But it is notably absent in Williams's
writings, too. Consider his claims in "Internal and External Reasons," a
paper whose argument is central to the book's major contentions. Williams
distinguishes two ways in which a particular agent may be said to have
a reason for acting in a particular way. We may, on the one hand, say
of a particular agent A that "A has a reason to + if and only if A has
some desire the satisfaction of which will be served by his 4-ing" (p. 101).
We may, on the other hand, ascribe a reason to an agent independently
of his existing set of desires and other motivations. So "we say that a
person has reason to take medicine which he needs" (p. 106), and we
may do so even if that person has no desire or other motivation to pursue
the satisfaction of the need that would be served by taking the medicine.
Williams says of the former type of case that the agent has an internal
reason for action, of the latter that the reason is external. To ascribe
internal reasons thus involves reference to the agent's "subjective mo-
tivational set," and "an internal reason statement is falsified by the absence
of some appropriate element" (p. 102) from that set. Moreover a particular
motivation "will not give A a reason for 4-ing if either the existence of
[that motivation] is dependent on false belief, or A's belief in the relevance
of 4-ing to the satisfaction of [that motivation] is false" (p. 103). Deliberation
thus plays a crucial part in determining an agent's internal reasons, both
because the agent may reevaluate his or her beliefs and because in the
course of deliberation his motivations may be transformed.
Williams's account of external reasons is somewhat barer than his
account of internal. But the reason why the conception is important is
clear. For although "external reason statements do not necessarily relate
to morality," the "supposed categorical imperative in the Kantian sense
of an 'ought' which applies to an agent independently of what the agent

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 MacIntyre Review Essay 117

happens to want" (p. 106) would presumably have the status of an external
reason. Indeed, an external reason is such that to ascribe one is to say
"that a rational agent would be motivated to act appropriately" (p. 109)
and hence to imply that someone to whom such a reason is ascribed, but
who lacks the motivation to act on it, is to that extent irrational.
Williams argues that "it is very plausible to suppose that all external
reason statements are false. For, ex hypothesi, there is no motivation for
the agent to deliberatefrom, to reach this new motivation" (p. 109). Hen
an agent who lacked motivation for treating the external reason as a
good reason for him or her to act in some particular way could not have
acquired such motivation through rational deliberation. Williams is relying
here on the account of deliberation which he provided as part of his
explication of internal reasons, but that account is a cogent one, so that
Williams's denial that we can "define a notion of rationality where the
action rational for A is in no way relative to A's existing motivation" also
appears cogent.
It is important at this point to emphasize that Williams does not
suppose that the agent's set of motivations at any one time is "statically
given," but allows that "the process of deliberation can have all sorts of
effect" on that set and its components which may include not only desires
but also "dispositions of evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personal
loyalties, and various projects. . . embodying commitments of the agent"
(p. 105). Nonetheless the present and future limits of my motivational
set are the limits of my present and future practical reasoning, in such
a way that it seems that Williams must conclude that I can never be
rationally moved by the simple consideration that some particular type
of action would be the thing for any rational agent whatsoever to do in
this type of situation. This is also how Thomas Nagel interprets Williams's
argument in an important review of it, retorting to it, "Why can't there
be, as different defenders of impartial morality have thought, a form of
insight about our non-unique place in the world which leads us to ac-
knowledge that we should live in a way we can endorse from outside,
and for everyone similarly situated, as well as from within?"5
If the argument is posed in these terms, Williams is surely going to
win it. The transformation of me with purely personal motivations that
are distinctively mine into a moral agent of pure impersonality who is
anyone legislating for everyone seems a project for moral alchemists rather
than for philosophers. The problem for Williams ought to be that winning
this particular argument may be as unfruitful as losing it. For if we accept
his line of reasoning and the conclusion with which it terminates in the
realm of morality, it would seem difficult to avoid commitment to a
parallel line of reasoning and a parallel conclusion about the natural
sciences. Where Williams speaks of the individual agent's motivational

5. Thomas Nagel, review of Moral Luck, by Bernard Williams, Times Literary Supplement
(May 7, 1982), p. 501.

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118 Ethics October 1983

set, the parallel line of reasoning will speak of the individual enquirer's
reasons for belief; where Williams concludes that there can be no external
reasons, the parallel conclusion is that there can be no considerations
which the individual enquirer ought to accept independently of that
enquirer's present or future set of reasons for belief. The project of
discovering a representation of how the world is, independently of the
standpoint of any particular observer, is necessarily unachievable. Williams
may of course be prepared to accept this conclusion, and indeed there
are philosophers of science with a not dissimilar standpoint. But any
reasons that we have for dissenting from this point of view in the philosophy
of science will also be reasons for dissenting from it in moral philosophy.
That there are such reasons is therefore of interest in itself; but an
additional motive for exploring them is provided by the fact that what
such reasons support is perhaps not the possibility of attaining to some
completely impersonal point of view, the achievement of which would
constitute pure objectivity, so much as a denial that the disjunctions and
dichotomies of the debate between Williams and those whom he criticizes
really exhaust the available alternatives. They compel us to ask whether
we can ever hope to frame the problem of impersonality in morality
adequately in terms of a stark opposition between my standpoint and my
reasons and motivations on the one hand and the standpoint of anyone
legislating rationally for everyone.
When someone is initiated into the practice of physics or some other
natural science, he or she has to learn how to consider as a good reason
within physical argument only what is accorded that status by the standards
of contemporary physicists. What counts as a good reason and as good
reasoning is determined not by my preexisting standards and beliefs but
by standards that are impersonal and objective. But their claim to im-
personality does not entail that they are such as would be judged good
reasons and good reasoning by any rational agent whatsoever, and their
claim to objectivity arises from their place in a particular kind of history,
a history in which a key part of the achievement of physicists at each
stage has been to free their reasoning from limitations and partialities
of standpoint that had inhibited their reasoning at some previous stage,
and the goal of physicists at each stage has been and is similarly to
transcend the as yet undetected limitations and partialities of the present.
This makes it clear that there is a defensible distinction between
what might be called internal and external reasons, but it has to be drawn
in a very different way from that in which Williams draws it. A good
reason within a practice such as physics for adopting a certain belief or
embarking upon a particular line of enquiry has to be a good reason for
anyone who shares the goals and goods of that practice in its contemporary
form. What determines that a good reason is a good reason is thus
independent of any particular individual's beliefs, desires, or other mo-
tivations. And in such contexts at least therefore a distinction can be
made between what makes a reason a good reason and what gives that

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 MacIntyre Review Essay 119

reason force for some particular agent. Williams's conception of an internal

reason conflates these two very different kinds of consideration, as indeed
Hume's whole account of practical reasoning conflates them. Williams,
initially separating his first statement of his own view from the detailed
sophistication of Hume's account, calls that statement 'sub-Humean' and
then offers his own detailed sophistication of it. But the basically Humean
character of his account, at least in this respect, remains. And what he
shares with Hume is the view that the limits of my morality are set by
the limits of my motivation, where the my is characterized in a way that
never allows for the kind of transformation of motivation that can occur
within scientific and other practices. So Williams in saying that the set
of the agent's motivations is not "statically given" (p. 105) allows only for
its extension by "processes of deliberation." But it is often not by processes
of deliberation that our motivations are transformed.
Harry Frankfurt has argued that, in what he calls standard types of
case, when I want the desire to X to be, what it is not now, one of my
effective motivations, those that actually issue in action, I must already
want to X,6 and this type of case provides no difficulty for Williams's
account. But in a footnote Frankfurt allows that there are nonstandard
cases where the agent may desire to desire-and to be effectively motivated
by that desire-whatever someone else desires that the agent should
desire, even although at present the agent may even not know or un-
derstand what that someone else desires that he or she should desire, let
alone desire it. So a child may want to want whatever a parent or teacher
wants him or her to want, and thus not through deliberation initially,
but by nonrational suasions, the child is induced to value the goods and
standards of some practice-reading Greek poetry, mathematics, working
on the family farm-thus acquiring a point of view from which the
distinction between what makes a reason a good reason and what gives
it force for me has application. It is such nonrational transformations
that enable me to deliberate from a relatively, if not absolutely impersonal
standpoint, the standpoint of anyone whose values are those of the relevant
practice. This kind of impersonality and objectivity is not of course that
required by conceptions of the universal rational moral legislator, whether
Kantian or utilitarian. But perhaps the kind of impersonality and objectivity
which practices afford provide the key to the possibility of escaping from
the limitations of a purely personal standpoint. Whether and how far it
is possible to move to any more universal standpoint than that afforded
by particular practices then of course becomes a crucial question. But it
is one that cannot be pursued here, for it would take me too far away
from Williams's text.
What I have been arguing is that Williams and those Kantians and
utilitarians with whom he is in contention share a disregard for the place

6. Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," Journal of
Philosophy 68 (1971): 1-20, p. 10.

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120 Ethics October 1983

in morality of particular social structures and relationships and notably

of the structures, relationships, and forms of activity which constitute
what I have called practices here and elsewhere.7 They share a moral
universe without social or institutional mediation. Some consequences
of this appear in the essay placed first in this book, an essay already justly
famous, "Persons, Character and Morality." I shall ignore the illuminating
and insightful things that Williams has to say about the relationship
between one's present and one's future in the moral life, in the course
of commenting on Derek Parfit's work on problems of personal identity,
in order to focus attention on two central theses.
The first concerns the idea of "a ground project or set of projects
which are closely related to [a man's or woman's] existence and which
to a significant degree give a meaning to [his or her] life" (p. 12). A
project which plays this ground role is such that if it were permanently
frustrated the person whose project it was "may feel in those circumstances
that he [or she] might as well have died" (p. 13). Moral commitments
may of course play a part in the formation of such projects and our
allegiance to them may be partly or wholly altruistic, even to the point
at which suffering death on behalf of the project would be appropriate.
For without such projects human life would be meaningless. "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 conditions
of life, and it would be the loss of all or most of them that would remove
meaning" (p. 13).
It is in key part the place of such personal ground projects in human
life that leads Williams to reject utilitarianism and Kantianism: "A man
who has such a ground project will be required by Utilitarianism to give
up what it requires in a given case just if that conflicts with what he is
required to do as an impersonal utility-maximiser when all the causally
relevant considerations are in. That is a quite absurd requirement. But
the Kantian, who can do better than that, still cannot do well enough.
For impartial morality, if the conflict does really arise, must be required
to win; and that cannot be a reasonable demand on the agent" (p. 16).
The meaning of 'reasonable' in this passage is clearly that which is spelled
out in "Internal and External Reasons."
Williams's emphasis on the fact that such projects need not be either
selfish or self-centered is insufficient to rebut the charge that in this essay
he is able to contrast the personal demands upon an agent of his or her
own projects with the impersonal requirements of utilitarianism or Kant-
ianism in the stark way that he does only because he has failed to distinguish
two quite different ways in which someone may be related to the set of
ground projects which give their life meaning.
What matters fundamentally to me about my ground projects may
be on the one hand precisely that they are mine. For them to matter in

7. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981), pp. 175-89.

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 MacIntyre Review Essay 121

this way such projects need not be either selfish or self-centered; but it
will always be possible to trace back the reason for my involvement to
some desire or similar motivation of mine, through which I, so to speak,
clutch the project to myself. The self to which they are related is one
that exists independently of and antecedently to, and which identifies
itself as continuing to exist independently of and antecedently to, the
project in which it is involved. By contrast what matters fundamentally
to me about my ground projects may on the other hand be the character
of the projects themselves, a character which I appreciate because I
understand myself in terms of my role in the project and not vice versa.
So it is to me qua physicist of a particular kind playing a well-defined
part in a large-scale experimental investigation or to me qua farmer of
a particular kind engaged in restoring the family farm through experiments
in crop rotation that the project matters. The self to which the projects
are related cannot be defined, and its continuing commitments cannot
be understood, except in terms of the role to which the project has
assigned the self and the impersonal goals and requirements which that
role imposes upon the self. The self is transformed by its roles within
projects and practices so that its motivations become those required from
the impersonal standpoint of the role.
This distinction between two different ways in which the self may
be related to its ground projects has as its counterpart a distinction
between types of project. There certainly are ground projects of such a
kind that a particular individual might relate to it in either of the ways
specified; but there are also some types of project that of themselves
require the kind of transcending of self that relegates to a position of
unimportance the fact that this project happens to be mine. And these
are the ground projects in which an individual agent has had to take for
his or her goods and standards the good and standards of some practice,
with the requirement of impersonality that these embody. But from this
it follows that human relationships which receive their definition within
practices will have a very different moral status from relationships not
necessarily so defined. And this has important application for a thesis
which Williams defends in the last section of this first essay.
In that section Williams deploys an argument in which personal
relationships are treated very much as ground projects are in the earlier
part of the essay. The kind of reasons which such relationships may give
me for acting may conflict with the requirement of any impersonally
grounded morality; and it may on occasion be unreasonable for me to
give priority to the requirements of impersonality. Indeed in certain types
of case at least justification ought to terminate with a simple appeal to
the fact of the relationship. The example that Williams considers is drawn
directly from the writings of Charles Fried, but it is an example with a
long and distinguished ancestry among moral philosophers. "The illustrious
archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his valet, and there are
few of us that would hesitate to pronounce if his palace were in flames,

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122 Ethics October 1983

and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two
ought to be preferred.... Suppose the valet had been my brother, my
father or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposi-
tion.... What magic is then in the pronoun 'my', that should justify us
in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?" So asks William Godwin,8
who in the first edition of his work had caused outcry by making it his
mother or sister who was to be left to die in order to save Archbishop
Fenelon. In Charles Fried's An Anatomy of Values9 it has become two
persons drowning, one of whom is a man's wife, and Fried considers in
what way that man's saving his wife rather than the other person might
be justified. To this Williams retorts that, if any justification is offered
over and above an appeal to the fact that it was his wife that he saved,
the agent has been provided "with one thought too many" (p. 18). An
example of such a superfluous and misleading thought would be the
claim made by some rule-utilitarians that, if each of us cares peculiarly
for his own, then the general utility will be maximized. What makes all
such thoughts misleading as well as superfluous is "the necessity that
such things as deep attachments to other persons will express themselves
in the world in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartial
view, and that they also run the risk of offending against it ... yet unless
such things exist, there will not be enough substance or conviction in a
man's life to compel his allegiance to life itself. Life has to have substance
if anything is to have sense, including adherence to the impartial system
."(p. 18).
Two kinds of comment are in order. The first concerns Williams's
picture of the tension between the deep attachments of personal rela-
tionships and the requirements of what he calls "the impartial system."
Williams is always careful to acknowledge that justice, for example, has
a central and ineliminable place in our moral lives. But he nowhere more
than hints at his answer to the question why it is reasonable for us
generally to uphold justice. The essay on Rawls in this book makes only
negative points and the discussion of Aristotle's account of justice in
'Justice as a Virtue" is almost entirely elucidatory of that particular
account.
It is perhaps therefore more worthwhile to press the question about
what precisely Williams is claiming when he asserts that if I save my wife
from drowning at the expense of someone else's life, no furtherjustification
is required over and above the appeal to the fact that she is after all my
wife. One way to open up the discussion is by asking, Does Williams want
us to attend to the word 'my' or the word 'wife'? And when he speaks

8. William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, 3d ed. (1798), vol. 1, p. 127,
quoted in D. H. Monro, Godwin's Political Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press,
1953), p. 9, where Monro suggests that Godwin owes the substance of this thought to
Hutcheson.
9. Charles Fried, An Anatomy of Values (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1970), p. 227.

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 MacIntyre Review Essay 123

of "deep attachments," is he speaking of psychological bonds or bonds

embodied in social roles? Does it need no further justification if the
person whom I save is my mistress or my second cousin rather than my
wife? Different and incompatible answers to these questions may equally
support the claim that I require no further justification for saving my
wife rather than a stranger other than that she is my wife but provide
very different reasons in support of it.
Marriage, as traditionally understood in our culture, is the institution
central to the practice of family life. And that practice cannot flourish
without justice in the relationship of the persons inhabiting the various
roles, ajustice that requires a particular kind of caring, on occasion highly
self-sacrificial caring between husband and wife. If I did not save my
wife in the situation that Fried envisages, I would be guilty of injustice
toward her (as I would not if she were one of two candidates for political
office and I voted for the other candidate). This kind of problem only
arises for Fried, and for a variety of utilitarian and Kantian writers,
because they liquidate the requirements of justice within the household
or family, the requirements of justice within the political community,
and the requirements of justice in a variety of other particular spheres
(church and school, for instance) into some conception of the requirements
of justice, as such, the imposition of which makes all or almost all social
particularity irrelevant. Thus it is not impersonality and impartiality as
such that create those problems which Williams rightly stigmatizes as
false problems. It is rather an impersonality and an impartiality required
to hold between all persons whatsoever equally, a socially contextless
impersonality and impartiality which is the source of those problems.
Williams might well say at this point that these criticisms are primarily
directed not against what he is saying, but against those with whom he
is most anxious to disagree. And if he did, he would be right. But my
criticism of his views in this debate is that he accepts too readily the
accounts of impersonality and impartiality advanced by Kantians and
utilitarians as more or less adequate accounts of what morality requires
and then has to counterpose the kind of allegiance required by ground
projects and by deep personal relationships to the kind of allegiance
required by morality. In consequence he does not consider the kind of
impersonality and impartiality which is legitimately and morally required
of us by certain types of project and certain types of relationship. And
this does lead him to become to some degree at least a victim of what
Godwin calls the magic in the pronoun 'my.' The consequences of this
are apparent in two other essays, that which gives to the book its title,
"Moral Luck," and "Politics and Moral Character."
In "Moral Luck" Williams is concerned with the case of an artist
who, like Gauguin, deserts his wife and family for the sake of his art.
Retrospectively he will, according to Williams, be able to justify his action
if and when he has become a great painter. But there are no considerations
that will legitimate his decision at the time that it is made. And he will

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124 Ethics October 1983

have failed in his project only if his failure is due not to external cir-
cumstances and accident, as Gauguin might have failed if his hands or
his eyesight had been injured on the way to Tahiti, but to inadequacies
in himself and his project. He thus depends on moral luck for the possibility
of justification; he needs to be lucky both in external circumstances and
in turning out to be able in fact to achieve what at the time of decision
he hopes that, but does not have any rationally justifiable certainty that,
he will achieve.
Williams is as always careful to give morality as he conceives it its
due. Those family members injured by the desertion are still justified in
their complaint that wrong has been done to them, no matter how mag-
nificently the artist succeeds. Nonetheless Williams sets the problem of
the place of moral luck in human life by making the assumption that
the artist's initial decision can be justified if the art finally produced is
of sufficient quality. And by making this assumption he neatly conflates
two distinct questions into one problem. One question is, What is the
place of risk taking in the moral life? Another quite distinct question is,
How ought we to deliberate when two different kinds of commitments,
as for example, that to family life and that to the life of the artist, require
incompatible courses of action? To this latter question Williams seems
to have denied himself the possibility of any rational answer. For the
incommensurability of, on the one hand, the demands upon me of my
ground projects and deep attachments and, on the other hand, the re-
quirements of justice, which seems to be a necessary consequence of
Williams's accounts of the former, surely rules out any such answer. And
this leaves me quite unclear as to what could be meant by saying that
Gauguin could be justified in his desertion of his family by his actually
having become a great painter. What could be the meaning or the force
of justified'?
I have other difficulties with Williams's description of his Gauguin-
like artist. For one thing that artist cannot know at the time of his desertion
of his family that if he stays with them he will be precluded from becoming
a great artist. Considerations such as this make the problem of moral
risk taking more rather than less difficult, and Williams is quite right in
seeing that this is not at all the same problem as that handled by economists
and utilitarians under the rubric "decision making under conditions of
uncertainty." It is not simply a matter of the unknowability of the prob-
abilities of various costs and benefits, because as Williams points out,
among the things that I characteristically do not know in the conditions
of moral risk taking is what my later self will be like and how different
its evaluation of costs and benefits will be. Indeed which way I choose
now will partially determine which out of a range of possible later selves
comes into being, so that I am characteristically choosing now between
making different conceptions of costs and benefits sovereign in my later
choices. But no answer to the problems of this kind which arise about

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 MacIntyre Review Essay 125

luck and risk taking seems likely to throw any further light on the problem
of rational justification.
The difficulty that I have in understanding what can be meant by
justification' in all those contexts where Williams's views seem to require
a certain incommensurability of considerations arises again in the essay
"Politics and Moral Character." That essay focuses upon types of action
necessary for the routine maintenance of the state, although not necessarily
thereby routine occurrences, which inflict wrongs such that the victims
are justified in their complaints and which are such that no one as a
private citizen would be justified in so acting. Lying of a certain kind or
political bullying would be at one end of the scale of such acts; various
kinds of "structured and unstructured violence" (p. 68) at the other.
Williams sets out four propositions "which some would regard as all true,
and which, if they were all true, would make the hope of finding politicians
of honorable character, except in minor roles and favorble circumstances,
very slim" (p. 68). The first of these is that "these are violent acts which
the state is justified in doing which no private citizen as such would be
justified in doing," a proposition which Williams clearly thinks that it
would be unreasonable to deny unless one were an anarchist (p. 69). My
problem with it, as Williams frames it, is that once again I do not know
what the meaning or force of 'justified" is and therefore I do not know
to what I am committing myself in either accepting or denying it. Thus
at the core of some of Williams's arguments there is an unexpected
obscurity, an obscurity which is not simply a consequence of Williams's
not having yet said enough to become clear, but one which is generated
by the way in which he accords legitimacy to both the impartial and the
impersonal (in some sense and in some areas), and also to the deeply
personal, and yet provides no apparent means of arbitrating between
their rival and incompatible claims in any general way.
Some of the problems of this book then arise from the very feature
that makes it a book and notjust a collection of essays. For as I suggested
at the outset, its unity as a book lies in its denials and its obstructions.
Yet Spinoza was right: omnis negatio est determinatio. And underlying the
denials there does seem to be a presupposed unity of affirmation. But
the piecemeal extended treatment of particular problems, the variety of
Williams's targets, his sensitivity to the range and complexity of issues
in the moral life, a sensitivity which makes this book a major contribution
to the enquiries of moral philosophy, all these heterogeneous virtues in
the end combine to obscure what it is to which we are being invited to
assent. Williams's book finally teaches a lesson that he may not have
altogether intended: although premature systematization is always the
enemy of truth in philosophy, delaying systematization for too long can
be equally injurious.

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