macintrye review of moral luck

8/7/2019 MacIntrye Review of Moral luck

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Review: The Magic in the Pronoun "My"Author(s): Alasdair MacIntyreSource: Ethics, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Oct., 1983), pp. 113-125Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380660 .Accessed: 07/02/2011 03:47

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REVIEW ESSAYS

The Magic in the Pronoun "My"*AlasdairMaclntyre

A collection of excellent philosophical papers does not always make anexcellent book. That Bernard Williams's new collection does make sucha book is the first interesting fact about it. For at one level the topicsdiscussed are of very different kinds: "Moral Luck," "Justice as a Virtue,""Internal and External Reasons," and "Wittgenstein and Idealism" arenot obviously chapter headings from one and the same book. Whereindoes the very real unity of Williams's book then consist? It is a negativeunity. Each of the essays is relevant in some way to Williams's dissentfrom and negative evaluation of all attempts to portray the essentiallymoral standpoint as one of the acknowledgment of impersonal standardswhich are impartial between persons and which hold, if at all, universally.He is thus equally at odds with any Kantian account of the place ofrational universalizability in moral judgment and any utilitarian accountwhich entails that we ought to accord equal weight to each person'spreferences in deciding what we ought to do. His arguments often focusupon the specific contentions advanced by particular authors and notablyon particular theses propounded by Thomas Nagel and John Rawls, butthey are always in fact more generally directed. Indeed if there is a bookwhich more than any other constitutes the thesis to Williams's antithesisit is one published only after these papers had appeared in their originalversions, R. M. Hare's Moral Thinking.' If Hare had not existed, Williamsshould perhaps have seriously considered inventing him.Williams's techniques and methods of argument are, like those ofthe 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 alludesto either Hegelian or phenomenological attempts to characterize suchexperience. And when he refers to particular moralities embodied inparticular 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, "TheExperience of Values," Inquiry 16 (1973): 267-79.Ethics 94 (October 1983): 113-125C)1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/84/9401-0007$01.00

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114 Ethics October1983giving any suggestion that the detailed sociological and anthropologicalstudy of such forms and institutions might yield findings of philosophicalimportance.3 These restrictions have both disadvantages and advantages.I shall notice some of the disadvantages later, remarking here only thatmore attention to the varieties both of moral experience and of ways oflife would have made it plainer than Williams does how his opponentsseem 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, andthe standards of clarity, rigor, and relevance of analytic philosophy, it isvery plain when he scores a palpable hit. As he often does. This is guerrillawarfare with all the excitement provided by tactical argumentative bril-liance. Yet as so often with guerrilla warfare the issue is rarely broughtto a conclusive outcome.I begin at the end with the concluding paper, "AnotherTime, AnotherPlace, Another Person," in which Williams discusses A. J. Ayer's successivetreatments of some central problems of verifiability. Ayer abandoned anearlier view, formulated in Language, Truth and Logic, that "a sentenceuttered 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,"4which in the form that Ayer held it entailed such paradoxical consequencesas that statements about the past were reducible to statements aboutpresent evidence. He replaced it by a view in which a key part is playedby the concept of a type of sentence which describes events in a way thatis 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,arepresentation 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 betweenmeaning and verifiability, elaborated a view according to which it isrequired only that statements employing such neutral sentences couldbe verifiable by someone and that the speaker could (in a specified sense)have been that person. Williams suggests that "there is a very poor fitbetween, on the one hand, the matter of verification by me, which inthe form of conceivableverification by me, continued to preoccupy Ayer,and on the other hand, the sub specieaeternitatisview of the world, withits descriptive context embodied in neutral sentences" (p. 171). And heis prepared to generalize his conclusion: "Verificationism of this kindmust be incoherent in relation ... to any view which seems to offer whatmay 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 theAnalysis of Kinship and Marriage,"in Remarksand 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 115appears to any group in virtue of that group's peculiarities. Some willdoubt that any such absolute picture of the world can be achieved....But those who have hoped for a philosophy centred on the scientificworld-view have not doubted this . . ." (p. 173). So Williams identifies atleast a tension, and perhaps more than that, between any verificationistattempt to understand the meaning of the natural scientist's assertionsas tied to and necessarily limited by the good reasons which some particulargroup of scientists at some particular time and place have for makingthose 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 framedwith an eye to highly general philosophical considerations and problemsrather than to the specific context provided by the actual history of thenatural sciences -and by placing the paper in which he identifies it atthe very end of his book, Williams may conceal from the reader, mayindeed to some degree have concealed from himself, the extent to whichthe problems in moral philosophy with which he is concerned parallelproblems 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 havealways been central which embodied an appeal to what any rational personought to believe; and yet the history of both morality and science revealsequally that at any particular historical time and place the reasons whichhave in fact influenced the acceptance of the best moral or scientificbeliefs defended in that time and place have been good reasons relativeto a certain context of understanding and not good reasons in terms ofsome timeless standards of truth or right. The recognition of this factwithin the philosophy of science has led to a transformation of its enquiries,a transformation with two central features. First, the importance of genuinehistorical studies has been widely acknowledged: we cannot determinewhat science is either by scrutinizing only the best science of the presentor by trying to lay down some timeless set of necessary and sufficientconditions or by using examples taken out of historical context to supportparticular contentions. And second, although there remain deep dis-agreements about wherein the objectivity of science resides and aboutthe nature of claims to truth in science, there are certain important,although not universally shared, agreements, one of which is that thatobjectivity and those claims to truth need to be interpreted in the lightof the kind of direction and the kind of directedness that informs scientificenquiry.What we need to understand is the abilityof those engaged in scientificenquiry to find good reasons relative to the state and circumstances oftheir enquiry at some particular historical stage for advancing and de-fending theories of a kind which then will further enable them to transcendthe limitations of that particular stage, and so to transform not only their


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116 Ethics October1983beliefs about nature, but also their beliefs about what constitutes goodreasons for holding a particular set of beliefs about nature. It is from itscontributions to such understanding that enquiry into the nature of thelarge continuities and discontinuities within the history of the sciencesderives part of its importance. The outcome is the instructive blend ofhistory 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 happeningin some distant galaxy. One consequence is that commentary on workon moral philosophy has to be far more concerned than would otherwisebe seemly with omissions and absences, with what authors do not sayrather than what they do. One central absence, for example, in Williams'saccount of the moral life is any sense of direction or directedness eitherwithin a single life or historically across generations, a directedness thatboth makes use of and moves toward a certain kind of universality andimpersonality, analogous to that which we can discern in the history ofscience. Kantians and utilitarians cannot make room for any account ofsuch directedness, since for them universality and impersonality are nec-essary features of any morality. But it is notably absent in Williams'swritings, too. Consider his claims in "Internal and External Reasons," apaper whose argument is central to the book's major contentions. Williamsdistinguishes two ways in which a particular agent may be said to havea reason for acting in a particular way. We may, on the one hand, sayof a particular agent A that "A has a reason to + if and only if A hassome 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 independentlyof his existing set of desires and other motivations. So "we say that aperson has reason to take medicine which he needs" (p. 106), and wemay do so even if that person has no desire or other motivation to pursuethe 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 internalreason for action, of the latter that the reason is external. To ascribeinternal reasons thus involves reference to the agent's "subjective mo-tivational set,"and "aninternal reason statement is falsified by the absenceof some appropriate element" (p. 102) from that set. Moreover a particularmotivation "will not give A a reason for 4-ing if either the existence of[that motivation] is dependent on false belief, or A'sbelief in the relevanceof 4-ing to the satisfaction of [that motivation] is false"(p. 103). Deliberationthus plays a crucial part in determining an agent's internal reasons, bothbecause the agent may reevaluate his or her beliefs and because in thecourse of deliberation his motivations may be transformed.Williams's account of external reasons is somewhat barer than hisaccount of internal. But the reason why the conception is important isclear. For although "external reason statements do not necessarily relateto morality," the "supposed categorical imperative in the Kantian senseof an 'ought' which applies to an agent independently of what the agent


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MacIntyre Review Essay 117happens to want" (p. 106) would presumably have the status of an externalreason. 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, butwho lacks the motivation to act on it, is to that extent irrational.Williams argues that "it is very plausible to suppose that all externalreason statements are false. For, ex hypothesi,there is no motivation forthe agent to deliberatefrom, to reach this new motivation" (p. 109). Hencean agent who lacked motivation for treating the external reason as agood reason for him or her to act in some particular way could not haveacquired such motivation through rational deliberation. Williams is relyinghere on the account of deliberation which he provided as part of hisexplication of internal reasons, but that account is a cogent one, so thatWilliams's denial that we can "define a notion of rationality where theaction rational for A is in no way relative to A's existing motivation" alsoappears cogent.It is important at this point to emphasize that Williams does notsuppose that the agent's set of motivations at any one time is "staticallygiven," but allows that "the process of deliberation can have all sorts ofeffect" on that set and its components which may include not only desires,but also "dispositionsof evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personalloyalties, and various projects. . . embodying commitments of the agent"(p. 105). Nonetheless the present and future limits of my motivationalset are the limits of my present and future practical reasoning, in sucha way that it seems that Williams must conclude that I can never berationally moved by the simple consideration that some particular typeof action would be the thing for any rational agent whatsoever to do inthis type of situation. This is also how Thomas Nagel interprets Williams'sargument in an important review of it, retorting to it, "Why can't therebe, as different defenders of impartial morality have thought, a form ofinsight 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?"5If the argument is posed in these terms, Williams is surely going towin it. The transformation of me with purely personal motivations thatare distinctively mine into a moral agent of pure impersonality who isanyonelegislating for everyoneseems a project for moral alchemists ratherthan for philosophers. The problem for Williams ought to be that winningthis particular argument may be as unfruitful as losing it. For if we accepthis line of reasoning and the conclusion with which it terminates in therealm of morality, it would seem difficult to avoid commitment to aparallel line of reasoning and a parallel conclusion about the naturalsciences. Where Williams speaks of the individual agent's motivational

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


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118 Ethics October1983set, the parallel line of reasoning will speak of the individual enquirer'sreasons for belief; where Williams concludes that there can be no externalreasons, the parallel conclusion is that there can be no considerationswhich the individual enquirer ought to accept independently of thatenquirer's present or future set of reasons for belief. The project ofdiscovering a representation of how the world is, independently of thestandpoint of any particular observer, is necessarily unachievable. Williamsmay of course be prepared to accept this conclusion, and indeed thereare philosophers of science with a not dissimilar standpoint. But anyreasons that we have for dissenting from this point of view in the philosophyof science will also be reasons for dissenting from it in moral philosophy.That there are such reasons is therefore of interest in itself; but anadditional motive for exploring them is provided by the fact that whatsuch reasons support is perhaps not the possibility of attaining to somecompletely impersonal point of view, the achievement of which wouldconstitute pure objectivity, so much as a denial that the disjunctions anddichotomies of the debate between Williams and those whom he criticizesreally exhaust the available alternatives. They compel us to ask whetherwe can ever hope to frame the problem of impersonality in moralityadequately in terms of a stark opposition between my standpoint and myreasons and motivations on the one hand and the standpoint of anyonelegislating rationally for everyone.When someone is initiated into the practice of physics or some othernatural science, he or she has to learn how to consider as a good reasonwithin physical argument only what is accorded that status by the standardsof contemporary physicists. What counts as a good reason and as goodreasoning is determined not by my preexisting standards and beliefs butby standards that are impersonal and objective. But their claim to im-personality does not entail that they are such as would be judged goodreasons and good reasoning by any rational agent whatsoever, and theirclaim 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 eachstage has been to free their reasoning from limitations and partialitiesof standpoint that had inhibited their reasoning at some previous stage,and the goal of physicists at each stage has been and is similarly totranscend the as yet undetected limitations and partialities of the present.This makes it clear that there is a defensible distinction betweenwhat might be called internal and external reasons, but it has to be drawnin a very different way from that in which Williams draws it. A goodreason within a practice such as physics for adopting a certain belief orembarking upon a particular line of enquiry has to be a good reason foranyonewho shares the goals and goods of that practice in its contemporaryform. What determines that a good reason is a good reason is thusindependent of any particular individual's beliefs, desires, or other mo-tivations. And in such contexts at least therefore a distinction can bemade between what makes a reason a good reason and what gives that


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MacIntyre Review Essay 119reason force for some particular agent. Williams's conception of an internalreason conflates these two very different kinds of consideration, as indeedHume's whole account of practical reasoning conflates them. Williams,initially separating his first statement of his own view from the detailedsophistication of Hume's account, calls that statement 'sub-Humean' andthen offers his own detailed sophistication of it. But the basically Humeancharacter of his account, at least in this respect, remains. And what heshares with Hume is the view that the limits of my morality are set bythe limits of my motivation, where the my is characterized in a way thatnever allows for the kind of transformation of motivation that can occurwithin scientific and other practices. So Williams in saying that the setof the agent's motivations is not "statically given" (p. 105) allows only forits extension by "processes of deliberation." But it is often not by processesof deliberation that our motivations are transformed.Harry Frankfurt has argued that, in what he calls standard types ofcase, when I want the desire to X to be, what it is not now, one of myeffective motivations, those that actually issue in action, I must alreadywant to X,6 and this type of case provides no difficulty for Williams'saccount. But in a footnote Frankfurt allows that there are nonstandardcases where the agent may desire to desire-and to be effectively motivatedby that desire-whatever someone else desires that the agent shoulddesire, even although at present the agent may even not know or un-derstand what that someone else desires that he or she should desire, letalone desire it. So a child may want to want whatever a parent or teacherwants him or her to want, and thus not through deliberation initially,but by nonrational suasions, the child is induced to value the goods andstandards of some practice-reading Greek poetry, mathematics, workingon the family farm-thus acquiring a point of view from which thedistinction between what makes a reason a good reason and what givesit force for me has application. It is such nonrational transformationsthat enable me to deliberate from a relatively, if not absolutely impersonalstandpoint, the standpoint of anyone whose values are those of the relevantpractice. This kind of impersonality and objectivity is not of course thatrequired by conceptions of the universal rational moral legislator, whetherKantian or utilitarian.But perhaps the kind of impersonality and objectivitywhich practices afford provide the key to the possibility of escaping fromthe limitations of a purely personal standpoint. Whether and how far itis possible to move to any more universal standpoint than that affordedby particular practices then of course becomes a crucial question. But itis one that cannot be pursued here, for it would take me too far awayfrom Williams's text.What I have been arguing is that Williams and those Kantians andutilitarians 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 ofPhilosophy68 (1971): 1-20, p. 10.


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120 Ethics October1983in morality of particular social structures and relationships and notablyof the structures, relationships, and forms of activity which constitutewhat I have called practices here and elsewhere.7 They share a moraluniverse without social or institutional mediation. Some consequencesof this appear in the essay placed first in this book, an essay already justlyfamous, "Persons, Character and Morality."I shall ignore the illuminatingand insightful things that Williams has to say about the relationshipbetween one's present and one's future in the moral life, in the courseof 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 projectswhich are closely related to [a man's or woman's] existence and whichto a significant degree give a meaning to [his or her] life" (p. 12). Aproject which plays this ground role is such that if it were permanentlyfrustrated the person whose project it was "may feel in those circumstancesthat he [or she] might as well have died" (p. 13). Moral commitmentsmay of course play a part in the formation of such projects and ourallegiance to them may be partly or wholly altruistic, even to the pointat 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 thisground role: rather, there is a nexus of projects, related to his conditionsof life, and it would be the loss of all or most of them that would removemeaning" (p. 13).It is in key part the place of such personal ground projects in humanlife that leads Williams to reject utilitarianism and Kantianism: "A manwho has such a ground project will be required by Utilitarianism to giveup what it requires in a given case just if that conflicts with what he isrequired to do as an impersonal utility-maximiser when all the causallyrelevant considerations are in. That is a quite absurd requirement. Butthe Kantian, who can do better than that, still cannot do well enough.For impartial morality, if the conflict does really arise, must be requiredto 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 spelledout in "Internal and External Reasons."Williams's emphasis on the fact that such projects need not be eitherselfish or self-centered is insufficient to rebut the charge that in this essayhe is able to contrast the personal demands upon an agent of his or herown projects with the impersonal requirements of utilitarianism or Kant-ianism in the starkway that he does only because he has failed to distinguishtwo quite different ways in which someone may be related to the set ofground projects which give their life meaning.What matters fundamentally to me about my ground projects maybe 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 121this way such projects need not be either selfish or self-centered; but itwill always be possible to trace back the reason for my involvement tosome 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 onethat exists independently of and antecedently to, and which identifiesitself as continuing to exist independently of and antecedently to, theproject in which it is involved. By contrast what matters fundamentallyto me about my ground projects may on the other hand be the characterof the projects themselves, a character which I appreciate because Iunderstand 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-definedpart in a large-scale experimental investigation or to me qua farmer ofa particularkind engaged in restoring the family farm through experimentsin crop rotation that the project matters. The self to which the projectsare related cannot be defined, and its continuing commitments cannotbe understood, except in terms of the role to which the project hasassigned the self and the impersonal goals and requirements which thatrole imposes upon the self. The self is transformed by its roles withinprojects and practices so that its motivations become those required fromthe impersonal standpoint of the role.This distinction between two different ways in which the self maybe related to its ground projects has as its counterpart a distinctionbetween types of project. There certainly are ground projects of such akind that a particular individual might relate to it in either of the waysspecified; but there are also some types of project that of themselvesrequire the kind of transcending of self that relegates to a position ofunimportance the fact that this project happens to be mine. And theseare the ground projects in which an individual agent has had to take forhis or her goods and standards the good and standards of some practice,with the requirement of impersonality that these embody. But from thisit follows that human relationships which receive their definition withinpractices will have a very different moral status from relationships notnecessarily so defined. And this has important application for a thesiswhich Williams defends in the last section of this first essay.In that section Williams deploys an argument in which personalrelationships are treated very much as ground projects are in the earlierpart of the essay. The kind of reasons which such relationships may giveme for acting may conflict with the requirement of any impersonallygrounded morality; and it may on occasion be unreasonable for me togive priority to the requirements of impersonality. Indeed in certain typesof case at least justification ought to terminate with a simple appeal tothe fact of the relationship. The example that Williams considers is drawndirectly from the writings of Charles Fried, but it is an example with along and distinguished ancestry among moral philosophers. "The illustriousarchbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his valet, and there arefew of us that would hesitate to pronounce if his palace were in flames,


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122 Ethics October1983and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the twoought to be preferred.... Suppose the valet had been my brother, myfather or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposi-tion.... What magic is then in the pronoun 'my', that should justify usin overturning the decisions of impartial truth?" So asks William Godwin,8who in the first edition of his work had caused outcry by making it hismother or sister who was to be left to die in order to save ArchbishopFenelon. In Charles Fried's An Anatomy of Values9 it has become twopersons drowning, one of whom is a man's wife, and Fried considers inwhat way that man's saving his wife rather than the other person mightbe justified. To this Williams retorts that, if any justification is offeredover 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). Anexample of such a superfluous and misleading thought would be theclaim made by some rule-utilitarians that, if each of us cares peculiarlyfor his own, then the general utility will be maximized. What makes allsuch thoughts misleading as well as superfluous is "the necessity thatsuch things as deep attachments to other persons will express themselvesin the world in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartialview, and that they also run the risk of offending against it ... yet unlesssuch things exist, there will not be enough substance or conviction in aman's life to compel his allegiance to life itself. Life has to have substanceif anything is to have sense, including adherence to the impartial system

."(p. 18).Two kinds of comment are in order. The first concerns Williams'spicture 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, hasa central and ineliminable place in our moral lives. But he nowhere morethan hints at his answer to the question why it is reasonable for usgenerally to uphold justice. The essay on Rawls in this book makes onlynegative points and the discussion of Aristotle's account of justice in'Justice as a Virtue" is almost entirely elucidatory of that particularaccount.It is perhaps therefore more worthwhile to press the question aboutwhat precisely Williams is claiming when he asserts that if I save mywifefrom drowning at the expense of someone else's life, no furtherjustificationis required over and above the appeal to the fact that she is after all mywife. One way to open up the discussion is by asking, Does Williams wantus 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'sPolitical Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press,1953), p. 9, where Monro suggests that Godwin owes the substance of this thought toHutcheson.9. Charles Fried, An Anatomyof Values (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1970), p. 227.


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MacIntyre Review Essay 123of "deep attachments," is he speaking of psychological bonds or bondsembodied in social roles? Does it need no further justification if theperson whom I save is my mistress or my second cousin rather than mywife? Different and incompatible answers to these questions may equallysupport the claim that I require no further justification for saving mywife rather than a stranger other than that she is my wife but providevery different reasons in support of it.Marriage, as traditionally understood in our culture, is the institutioncentral to the practice of family life. And that practice cannot flourishwithout justice in the relationship of the persons inhabiting the variousroles, ajustice that requires a particular kind of caring, on occasion highlyself-sacrificial caring between husband and wife. If I did not save mywife in the situation that Fried envisages, I would be guilty of injusticetoward her (as I would not if she were one of two candidates for politicaloffice and I voted for the other candidate). This kind of problem onlyarises for Fried, and for a variety of utilitarian and Kantian writers,because they liquidate the requirements of justice within the householdor 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 requirementsof justice, as such, the imposition of which makes all or almost all socialparticularity irrelevant. Thus it is not impersonality and impartiality assuch that create those problems which Williams rightly stigmatizes asfalse problems. It is rather an impersonality and an impartiality requiredto hold between all persons whatsoever equally, a socially contextlessimpersonality and impartiality which is the source of those problems.Williams might well say at this point that these criticisms are primarilydirected not against what he is saying, but against those with whom heis most anxious to disagree. And if he did, he would be right. But mycriticism of his views in this debate is that he accepts too readily theaccounts of impersonality and impartiality advanced by Kantians andutilitarians as more or less adequate accounts of what morality requiresand then has to counterpose the kind of allegiance required by groundprojects and by deep personal relationships to the kind of allegiancerequired by morality. In consequence he does not consider the kind ofimpersonality and impartiality which is legitimately and morally requiredof us by certain types of project and certain types of relationship. Andthis does lead him to become to some degree at least a victim of whatGodwin calls the magic in the pronoun 'my.' The consequences of thisare 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 artistwho, like Gauguin, deserts his wife and family for the sake of his art.Retrospectively he will, according to Williams, be able to justify his actionif and when he has become a great painter. But there are no considerationsthat will legitimate his decision at the time that it is made. And he will


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124 Ethics October1983have 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 orhis eyesight had been injured on the way to Tahiti, but to inadequaciesin himself and his project. He thus depends on moral luck for the possibilityof justification; he needs to be lucky both in external circumstances andin turning out to be able in fact to achieve what at the time of decisionhe 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 itsdue. Those family members injured by the desertion are still justified intheir complaint that wrong has been done to them, no matter how mag-nificently the artist succeeds. Nonetheless Williams sets the problem ofthe place of moral luck in human life by making the assumption thatthe artist's initial decision can be justified if the art finally produced isof sufficient quality. And by making this assumption he neatly conflatestwo distinct questions into one problem. One question is, What is theplace 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, requireincompatible courses of action? To this latter question Williams seemsto have denied himself the possibility of any rational answer. For theincommensurability of, on the one hand, the demands upon me of myground projects and deep attachments and, on the other hand, the re-quirements of justice, which seems to be a necessary consequence ofWilliams's accounts of the former, surely rules out any such answer. Andthis leaves me quite unclear as to what could be meant by saying thatGauguin could be justified in his desertion of his family by his actuallyhaving become a great painter. What could be the meaning or the forceof 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 desertionof his family that if he stays with them he will be precluded from becominga great artist. Considerations such as this make the problem of moralrisk taking more rather than less difficult, and Williams is quite right inseeing that this is not at all the same problem as that handled by economistsand utilitarians under the rubric "decision making under conditions ofuncertainty." 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 conditionsof moral risk taking is what my later self will be like and how differentits evaluation of costs and benefits will be. Indeed which way I choosenow will partially determine which out of a range of possible later selvescomes into being, so that I am characteristically choosing now betweenmaking different conceptions of costs and benefits sovereign in my laterchoices. But no answer to the problems of this kind which arise about


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MacIntyre Review Essay 125luck and risk taking seems likely to throw any further light on the problemof rational justification.The difficulty that I have in understanding what can be meant byjustification' in all those contexts where Williams's views seem to requirea certain incommensurability of considerations arises again in the essay"Politics and Moral Character." That essay focuses upon types of actionnecessary for the routine maintenance of the state, although not necessarilythereby routine occurrences, which inflict wrongs such that the victimsare justified in their complaints and which are such that no one as aprivate citizen would be justified in so acting. Lying of a certain kind orpolitical bullying would be at one end of the scale of such acts; variouskinds 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 politiciansof honorable character, except in minor roles and favorble circumstances,very slim" (p. 68). The first of these is that "these are violent acts whichthe state is justified in doing which no private citizen as such would bejustified in doing," a proposition which Williams clearly thinks that itwould be unreasonable to deny unless one were an anarchist (p. 69). Myproblem with it, as Williams frames it, is that once again I do not knowwhat the meaning or force of 'justified" is and therefore I do not knowto what I am committing myself in either accepting or denying it. Thusat the core of some of Williams's arguments there is an unexpectedobscurity, an obscurity which is not simply a consequence of Williams'snot having yet said enough to become clear, but one which is generatedby the way in which he accords legitimacy to both the impartial and theimpersonal (in some sense and in some areas), and also to the deeplypersonal, and yet provides no apparent means of arbitrating betweentheir rival and incompatible claims in any general way.Some of the problems of this book then arise from the very featurethat makes it a book and notjust a collection of essays. For as I suggestedat the outset, its unity as a book lies in its denials and its obstructions.Yet Spinoza was right: omnis negatio est determinatio. And underlying thedenials there does seem to be a presupposed unity of affirmation. Butthe piecemeal extended treatment of particular problems, the variety ofWilliams's targets, his sensitivity to the range and complexity of issuesin the moral life, a sensitivity which makes this book a major contributionto the enquiries of moral philosophy, all these heterogeneous virtues inthe end combine to obscure what it is to which we are being invited toassent. Williams's book finally teaches a lesson that he may not havealtogether intended: although premature systematization is always theenemy of truth in philosophy, delaying systematization for too long canbe equally injurious.

macintrye review of moral luck

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