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How Bernard Williams Constructed his Critique of Kant's Moral Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2011

Roger J. Sullivan
Roger J. Sullivan
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
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Extract

One of the more striking developments in contemporary philosophic discussions about morality has been the rise of anti-theory — the rejection of moral theories as ‘unnecessary, undesirable, and/or impossible’. Among those associated with this view have been Bernard Williams, John McDowell, Edmund Pincoffs and James Wallace.

Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 3 , March 1999 , pp. 106 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 1999

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References

Notes

1 Clarke, Stanley G. and Simpson, Evan (eds.), Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), P. 3.Google Scholar

2 Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1985. At the time of this writing the book is in its seventh printing, showing how highly it is regarded and how widely it continues to be used.

3 See, for example, Altham, J. E. J. and Harrison, Ross (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Williams's treatment of Kant is not brought up in that book.

4 Williams, , Ethics, pp. 55Google Scholar, 70. His construction of this argument occupies more than half of his chapter on Kant. The argument Williams offers here is also the same argument, in compressed form, that had been used by Alan Gewirth in his Reason and Morality (1978).

5 Williams, , Ethics, p. 64.Google Scholar The fact that the term ‘noumenal’ and the noumenal/phenomenal distinction do not occur until the third section is irrelevant to Williams's claim here.

6 This seems to imply that non-moral intelligence is completely transparent to us, a dubious claim at best.

7 Williams, , Ethics, p. 64.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., p. 55.

9 Ibid., p. 56.

10 Ibid., pp. 58–9. The emphasis is his.

11 Ibid., pp. 59–62.

12 Ibid., pp. 63, 67, 70. Here he in effect repeats the criticisms directed against Gewirth some fifteen years earlier.

13 Ibid., p. 55. Here, despite his discontents with the book, he still describes the Groundwork as ‘the most significant work of moral philosophy after Aristotle.’

14 ‘Vollens überhaupt’; see Kant Akademie edition (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–), 4: 388–91, esp. 390. Kant returned to this same argument in both the second Critique and the Metaphysics of Morals.

15 See, for example, Kant, Ak. 4: 420n.

16 See Kant, Ak. 4: 391.

17 Kant, Ak. 4: 390. The emphasis is mine.

18 Kant, Ak. 4: 391, 402. See Wolff, Philosophia Practica Universalis, pars. 1, Theorium Demonstrans, caput i. De Differentia Actionum Humanarum, §§13–14.

19 See Kant, Ak. 4: 389–91.

20 This, of course, was Kant's view. But whether his implicit claim that the freedom necessary for pragmatic rational agency in general is radically different from and inferior to the freedom adequate for moral agency is the topic of another dispute, one beyond the purview of this paper. Williams frames the problem differently, asking ‘what conception of rational freedom it is reasonable to hold’ (65).

21 This claim questions the very possibility of moral scepticism about or of ignorance of one's own moral status.

22 Williams, Ethics, p. 63.

21 Ibid., p. 55.

24 Ibid., p. 29.

25 The fact that Kant could not offer a positive proof of human freedom in the third section of the Groundwork does not mean that his defence of freedom there was weak, for it was based on a self-awareness of freedom that we find we not only can and do have, but also that we must presuppose is correct. It is only under the presupposition of freedom that we can choose rationally and take ourselves to be doing so, a presupposition that theoretical reason also must presuppose for its own purposes, without, however, being able to confirm or refute it.