Bernard Williams > Quotes

“Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.”
― Bernard Williams

“People who say, 'Let the chips fall where they may,' usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.”
― Bernard Williams

“Utilitarians are often immensely conscientious people, who work for humanity and give up meat for the sake of the animals. They think this is what they morally ought to do and feel guilty if they do not live up to their own standard. They do not, and perhaps could not, ask: How useful is it that I think and feel like this?”
― Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

“The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a pirate”
― Bernard Williams

“Without selfish partiality—to people you are deeply attached to, your family and friends, to place—we are nothing. We are creatures of kinship and loyalty, not blind servants of the world.”
― Bernard Williams

“What will the professor’s justification do, when they break down the door, smash his spectacles, take him away?”
― Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

“Books had instant replay long before televised sports.”
― Bernard Williams

“So far I have not said much about objectivity, though earlier chapters have had a good deal to do with it. If an Archimedean point could be found and practical reason, or human interests, could be shown to involve a determinate ethical outlook, then ethical thought would be objective, in the sense that it would have been given an objective foundation. Those are possibilities—or they might have turned out to be possibilities—within the perspective of practical reason. Very often, however, discussions of objectivity come into moral philosophy from a different starting point, from an interest in comparing ethical beliefs with knowledge and claims to truth of other kinds, for instance with scientific beliefs. Here a rather different conception of objectivity is involved. It is naturally associated with such questions as what can make ethical beliefs true, and whether there is any ethical knowledge. It is in this field of comparisons that various distinctions between fact and value are located.”
― Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

“That an action would be cowardly is not often found by an agent to be a consideration in its favor, but it could be, and in a counterethical way, ministering to a masochism of shame.”
― Bernard Williams

“The trouble with religious morality comes not from morality's being inescapably pure, but from religion's being incurably unintelligible.”
― Bernard Williams, Morality

“Disagreement does not necessarily have to be overcome. It may remain an important and constitutive feature of our relations to others”
― Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

“... while transparency is a natural associate of liberalism, it falls short of implying rationalism. It is one aspiration, that social and ethical relations should not essentially rest on ignorance and misunderstanding of what they are, and quite another that all the beliefs and principles involved in them should be explicitly stated. That these are two different things is obvious with personal relations, where to hope that they do not rest on deceit and error is merely decent, but to think that their basis can be made totally explicit is idiocy.”
― Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

“The idea that this end of philosophy— at least, of political philosophy and (I claim) moral philosophy— has close relations with history overlaps with a more ambitious view held by a consistently underestimated Oxford philosopher, R. G. Collingwood. The trouble with Collingwood’s kind of commitment is that it requires one to know some history. My two associates in the view I am sketching are Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. They are both Roman Catholics, though of different sorts. I used to find this a disquieting fact but no longer do so. All three of us, I could say, accept the significant role of Christianity in understanding modern moral consciousness, and adopt respectively the three possible views about how to move in relation to that: backward in it, forward in it, and out of it. In any case, we all assume some historical commitments, they on a more ambitious scale than I, and perhaps there is a rather nervous competition for who writes the most irresponsible history.”
― Bernard Williams

“The only serious enterprise is living.”
― Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

“The marks of philosophy are reflection and heightened self-awareness, not maximal transcendence of the human perspective. . . . There is no cosmic point of view, and therefore no test of cosmic significance that we can either pass or fail.”
― Bernard Williams

“What distinguishes analytical philosophy from other contemporary philosophy (though not from much philosophy of other times) is a certain way of going on, which involves argument, distinctions, and, so far as it remembers to try to achieve it and succeeds, moderately plain speech. As an alternative to plain speech, it distinguishes sharply between obscurity and technicality. It always rejects the first, but the second it sometimes finds a necessity. This feature peculiarly enrages some of its enemies. Wanting philosophy to be at once profound and accessible, they resent technicality but are comforted by obscurity.”
― Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

“It may be that considerations of justice are a central element of ethical thought that transcends the relativism of distance. Perhaps this, too, comes from a feature of the modern world. We have various conceptions of social justice, with different political consequences; each has comprehensible roots in the past and in our sentiments. Since we know that we do not accept their past legitimations, but otherwise are not sure how to read them, we are disposed to see past conceptions of justice as embodiments of ideas that still have a claim on modern people. To this extent, we see them as in real confrontation with each other and with modern ideas.”
― Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

“[Political realism] "does not mean that we throw our political convictions away: we have no reason to end up with none, or with someone else’s. Nor does it mean that we stare at our convictions with ironical amazement, as Rorty suggests. But we do treat them as political convictions which determine political positions, which means, for one thing, that we acknowledge that they have obscure causes and effects. It also means that we take certain kinds of view of our allies and opponents. Even if we were utopian monarchs, we would have to take into account others’ disagreement as a mere fact. As democrats, we have to do more than that. But remembering the points about the historical conditions, we should not think that what we have to do is simply to argue with those who disagree: treating them as opponents can, oddly enough, show more respect for them as political actors than treating them simply as arguers – whether as arguers who are simply mistaken, or as fellow seekers after truth. A very important reason for thinking in terms of the political is that a political decision – the conclusion of a political deliberation which brings all sorts of considerations, considerations of principle along with others, to one focus of decision – is that such a decision does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost.”
― Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument

“In other cases, again, there is no room for any appropriate action at all. Then only the desire to make reparations remains, with the painful consciousness that nothing can be done about it; some other action, perhaps less directed to the victims, may come to express this. What degree of such feeling is appropriate, and what attempts at reparative action or substitutes for it, are questions for particular cases, and that there is room in the area for irrational and self-punitive excess, no one is likely to deny. But equally it would be a kind of insanity never to experience sentiments of this kind towards anyone, and it would be an insane concept of rationality which insisted that a rational person never would. To insist on such a conception of rationality, moreover, would, apart from other kinds of absurdity, suggest a large falsehood: that we might, if we conducted ourselves clear-headedly enough, entirely detach ourselves from the unintentional aspects of our actions, relegation their costs to, so to speak, the insurance fund, and yet still retain our identity and character as agents.”
― Bernard Williams, Moral Luck

“[Political reaslism] "does not mean that we throw our political convictions away: we have no reason to end up with none, or with someone else’s. Nor does it mean that we stare at our convictions with ironical amazement, as Rorty suggests. But we do treat them as political convictions which determine political positions, which means, for one thing, that we acknowledge that they have obscure causes and effects. It also means that we take certain kinds of view of our allies and opponents. Even if we were utopian monarchs, we would have to take into account others’ disagreement as a mere fact. As democrats, we have to do more than that. But remembering the points about the historical conditions, we should not think that what we have to do is simply to argue with those who disagree: treating them as opponents can, oddly enough, show more respect for them as political actors than treating them simply as arguers – whether as arguers who are simply mistaken, or as fellow seekers after truth. A very important reason for thinking in terms of the political is that a political decision – the conclusion of a political deliberation which brings all sorts of considerations, considerations of principle along with others, to one focus of decision – is that such a decision does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost.”
― Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument

“What I have to say, since it is itself a piece of philosophy, is an example of what I take philosophy to be, part of a more general attempt to make the best sense of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves.”
― Bernard Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline

“It is not that disagreement needs explanation and agreement does not, but that in different contexts disagreement requires different sorts of explanation, and so does agreement.”
― Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy