The Limits of Philosophical Conviction

c. Edward Hopper, ‘An Excursion Into Philosophy’

In the midst of a critique of Kantianism and utilitarianism, Bernard Williams, in his characteristic style, pivots to a question which will seem almost entirely irrelevant: “Why…should we regard death as an evil?” (207). Why fear death? Not puzzling for long, Williams writes: “One answer to that is that we desire certain things; if one desires something, then to that extent one has reason to resist the happening of anything which prevents one from getting it, and death certainly does that.” This is simply to say that death is a harm because it keeps us from the things we desire. 

But, of course, there is something of an immediate counter. Yes, inasmuch as we have these desires, we should be afraid of death, but it is not as if, after we die, we will need to deal with the fallout of not being able to satisfy them. We will not feel the disappointment of failure, so, in a sense, there is nothing to mourn. Our desires are “conditional” on our living, so once we are no longer alive, they no longer have any force. Once more: there is nothing to fear; we will not fail to satisfy our desires after death because we will no longer have them. Williams is skeptical of such a sentiment.

This skepticism gets off the ground with an examination of suicide. “Not all desires can be…conditional. For it is possible to imagine a person rationally contemplating suicide, in the face of some predicted evil; and if he decides to go on in life, then he is propelled forward into it by some desire which cannot operate conditionally on his being alive, since it settles the question of whether he is going to be alive. Such a desire we may call a categorical desire” (207; italics mine). The idea, then, is that the desires we have, the ones which are answers to the questions of suicide, in the sense that they close such a question, supplying it with a clean and final “no,” are beyond those desires such as thirst, hunger, or the wish to be thought of highly in the mind of another, in that we take them to stretch beyond our lives. We take them to be such that their very not being satisfied provides us with a reason to go on living. And thus, conversely, to leave them unsatisfied on our deathbed is to fail.

For Williams, these desires are important because 'conventional morality' does not, he worries, leave enough space for them. Of those projects (he calls them 'ground projects') that impart meaning to our lives, Williams writes: “A man who has such a ground project will be required by utilitarianism to give up what it requires in a given case just if that conflicts with what he is required to do as an impersonal utility-maximizer when all the causally relevant considerations are in. That is a quite absurd requirement; but the Kantian, who can do rather better than that, still cannot do well enough. For impartial morality, if the conflict really does arise, must be required to win; and that cannot necessarily be a reasonable demand on the agent.” (210). Williams’s worry is that both moral theories abstract away from the person. According to one, we must think in terms of pure benefit and must, therefore, advance whatever project in our vicinity is the most beneficial (leaving no special place for our project, the one that answers our question of how to live). To the other, we may have such personal projects; we may pursue our categorical desire, but only until it runs up against our moral duties, in which case our moral duties must win.

For Williams, this is a backwards ordering of priorities. These desires, these ‘ground projects,’ after all, are not just any desires. They are desires that settle the question of whether to go on living. For Williams, then, it is simply “quite unreasonable for a man to give up, in the name of the impartial good ordering of the world of moral agents, something which is a condition of his having any interest in being around in that world at all.”

And though this seems quite right, it is worth asking in what sense it is right. What kind of objection is being made here? 

Such a question may not make immediate sense, but let us consider it for a moment. Here is one way that a person may object to utilitarianism: he may show that it entails a logical contradiction. Williams does not seem to be doing this. At least, not obviously. Another kind of objection is to show that it leads to a morally icky conclusion. Perhaps utilitarianism requires us to violate the rights of the few for the benefit of the many–and, this line of thought goes, that is surely wrong, and thus, so must be any moral theory which leads to such a conclusion. But Williams doesn’t seem to be making such a point either. He does not simply mean to say that utilitarianism and Kantianism give bad recommendations in their suggestion to place their rules entirely above our own desires and projects. 

At the end of the article, Williams takes a shot at specifying the nature of his objection. He writes, “Unless [ground projects and categorical desires] exist, there will not be enough substance or conviction in a man's life to compel his allegiance to life itself. Life has to have substance if anything is to have sense, including adherence to the impartial system; but if it has substance, then it cannot grant supreme importance to the impartial system, and that system's hold on it will be, at the limit, insecure” (215; italics mine). This is to say that it is not simply a bad verdict if a moral theory requires that we subordinate our ground projects to it, but a failure of said moral theory to get a grip on us, to be a moral theory we can, ourselves, take up and be motivated by. For us to have reason to follow any theory, Williams seems to think, we must first take ourselves to have reasons to go on in the world. And, for a theory to have a hold on us, it must relate in some way to what we take to be our reason to go on living, it must derive some of its force from that. 

This comes out in one further way in the paper. At the end, Williams is discussing a case. Two people are drowning: your wife and a stranger. We can save one. How are we to decide whom to save? One answer – we think about it from a utilitarian or Kantian perspective. “It is morally permissible to save one’s wife,” or “in matters of this kind it is best for each to look after his own, like house insurance.” (214). But, says Williams, this is too intellectual – it is “one thought too many.” Rather, “it might have been hoped by some (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one’s wife” (215). To appeal to moral theory here is already to get one’s priorities out of order. Rather: A feeling about a case of this kind is not one which requires the approval of a moral theory, but, rather, is the sort of conviction from which a commitment to a moral theory can, in the first place, spring. In Williams’s words, it must be our categorical desires, our ground projects, which “both limit and help to define” our moral theory. 

---

Williams’s thinking here runs up against a problem I’ve been struggling with in my own conception of philosophy. 

Philosophy asks a number of basic questions, each of which admits of a variety of possible answers, and all of which, at least on their face, stand to make a difference in how we go about living our lives. Most basically: What should I do? What am I responsible for doing? Now, there’s a sense in which Williams pushes some of these questions out of the purview of a certain kind of philosophy–moral philosophy. His point is that moral theories cannot be the starting point of their answers. But in a sense he is still answering them – the question of what we should do – or, perhaps, delimiting the range of possible acceptable answers. Which is to say that he still believes philosophy has something to say to such questions. 

The goal of this short piece, then, is to better characterize philosophy’s role. Who is Williams’s article meant for? Is his picture of how to answer the question of what to do, unlike these moral theories, a place at which one can begin? 

It will help to work with an example, as this is all terribly abstract. A high school student is having an existential crisis. He does not know what to do with his life. On the one hand, he seeks to devote his time to creating art, but on the other hand he has watched Star Trek, and is inspired by Captain Picard’s commitment to duty.

Question: Will reading Williams be of any help to this child? And I don’t mean simply that Williams’s writing style will be beyond him (though it surely will be!). First, if the child goes into the paper not sure whether or not moral theory is to be of ‘supreme importance,’ unsure whether it should crowd out his values, it is a particular feature of the kind of objection Williams hopes to levy that it will only have force against someone who is already sympathetic to the idea that morality cannot take away our reason to live. Someone might simply respond: “Yes, and morality is worth dying for!” 

But secondly, there is also a sense in which something is already wrong if our high schooler is turning to philosophy to answer the question of whether it is okay to pursue one thing or another. 

In a parallel, yet crucially different way from Kantian or utilitarian morality, philosophy abstracts away from the person. Now, this is a rule that has exceptions: some works of philosophy are confessional, and are compelling precisely because of how personal they are (Proust comes to mind). Yet, generally, philosophy is an economy which deals in mutually intelligible arguments and objections and ideas. If your argument is convincing only to you, then you’ve made a mistake. Or worse: a bad argument. 

And so philosophy is the battleground of our most intimate attitudes and judgements: Kant and Mill attack them, while Williams mobilizes a garrison to defend them. Yet, because of its form, philosophy is also almost guaranteed to produce an answer that is an impersonal one. This is why it would be so, so odd if our imagined high schooler, upon reading Williams, were to come away with a new understanding and appreciation for his categorical desires. Rather, this suggests a nearly pathological engagement with the literature (e.g., I read Nietzsche, am convinced that power is important, and give up everything in pursuit of it).

For one then to feel the import of Williams’s point, he must have exactly the thing that Williams defends. And so Williams is not making an argument for having categorical desires as much as he is defending our confidence in our categorical desires from the skeptical and overreaching hands of moral theory. This is no accident, either: in the same way that moral theory is limited by its impersonality and must subordinate itself to our categorical desires, philosophy, too, is too impersonal. It cannot, in this case, be that alone which excites the generation of categorical desires in our student; no, that is something he must come to on his own, and quite apart from logical or formal argumentation. He may turn to philosophy only when–and it may be inevitable–his confidence is threatened.