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

Reasons for action

Williams' insistence that morality is about people and their real lives, and that self-interest and even selfishness are not contrary to morality, is illustrated in what is called his "internal reasons for action" argument, part of what philosophers call the "internal/external reasons" debate.

Related Topics:
Self-interest - Selfishness

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Before Williams, some philosophers tried to argue that moral agents had "external reasons" — by which they meant objective reasons, or reasons external to the moral agent — for performing a moral act. If action X was good, and was part of the Good, that alone was a reason to do X: a reason to act. Williams argued that this is meaningless nonsense. For something to be a "reason to act," it must be magnetic; that is, it must move us to action. But how can something entirely external to us — for example, the proposition that X is good — be magnetic? By what process can something external to us move us to act?

Related Topics:
Objective - Proposition

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Williams argued that it cannot. Cognition is not magnetic. Knowing and feeling are quite separate, and a person must feel before they are moved to act. Reasons for action are always internal, he argued. If I feel moved to do X (for example, to do something good), it is because I want to. I may want to do the right thing for a number of reasons. For example, I may have been brought up to believe that X is good and may wish to act in accordance with my upbringing (something we might call conscience); or I may want to look good in someone else's eyes; or perhaps I fear the disapproval of my community. The reasons can be complex, but they are always internal and they always boil down to desire.

Related Topics:
Cognition - Conscience - Desire

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With this argument, Williams left moral philosophy with the notion that goodness must always be self-interested: that it springs only from the desire to be good, a desire that might, at any given moment, in any given person, be terrifyingly absent.

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