Bernard Williams

Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (September 21, 1929 – June 10, 2003) was an English moral philosopher, noted by The Times as the "most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-712787,00.html

Critique of utilitarianism

Williams was particularly critical of utilitarianism, a consequentialist theory, the simplest version of which argues that moral acts are good only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, regardless of any issues of personhood or moral agency.

Related Topics:
Utilitarianism - Consequentialist - Happiness

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One of Williams' famous arguments against utilitarianism centres on Jim, a scientist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator. One day, Jim finds himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 rebels, captured and tied up. The captain who has defeated them says that if Jim will kill one of the rebels, the others will be released, in honour of Jim's status as a guest. But if he does not, they will all be killed (Utiliarianism: For and Against, 1973). Simple act utilitarianism says that Jim should kill one of the captives in order to save the others. For most consequentialist theories, there is no moral dilemma in a case like this. All that matters is the outcome. Against this, Williams argued that there is a crucial moral distinction between a person being killed by me, and being killed by someone else because of what I do. The utilitarian loses that vital distinction, he argued, thereby stripping us of our humanity and of everything that makes human life worthwhile, turning us into empty vessels by means of which consequences occur, rather than preserving our status as moral actors and decision-makers with integrity. Moral decisions must preserve our integrity and our psychological identity, he argued.

Related Topics:
South America - Humanity - Consequence - Integrity - Identity

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An advocate of utilitarianism would reply that the theory cannot be dismissed as easily as that. The Harvard philosopher of economics Amartya Sen, for example, argued that moral agency, issues of integrity, and personal points of view can be worked into a consequentialist account; that is, they can be counted as consequences too (see Sen and Williams, 1982). For example, to solve parking problems in London, Williams wrote, a utilitarian would have to favour threatening to shoot anyone who parked in a prohibited space. If only a few people were shot for this, illegal parking would soon stop, and the shootings would be justified, according to simple act utilitarianism, because of the happiness the absence of parking problems would bring to millions of Londoners. Any theory that has this as a consequence, Williams argued, should be rejected out of hand, no matter how intuitively plausible it feels to agree that we do judge actions in terms of their consequences. We do not, argued Williams, and we must not.

Related Topics:
Harvard - Amartya Sen - Parking - London - Intuitively

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However, as Sen and others have argued, rule utilitarianism would ask what rule could be extrapolated from the parking example. If the rule is "Anyone might be shot over a simple parking offence," the utilitarian would argue that the implementation of that rule would bring great unhappiness to Londoners, and that, on those grounds, threatening to shoot people would be wrong. For Williams, however, this type of argument simply proved his point. We do not, as a matter of fact, need to calculate whether or why threatening to shoot people over parking offences is wrong, and any system that shows us how to make that calculation is a system we should reject.

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