BERNARD WILLIAMS: Sir Bernard Williams (73), arguably the greatest British philosopher of his generation, a witty, learned and combative thinker known for his work in ethics, questions of moral identity, the history of philosophy and the nature of truth, has died while holidaying in Rome. He had cancer.
Over the years, in a series of pioneering and densely argued books, he explained early Greek ethical philosophy and the works of Descartes, and analysed Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. His works on moral philosophy drew on political theory, history and metaphysics. His books included Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993) and Truth and Truthfulness (2002).
In addition to a life as a philosopher and professor at such institutions as Oxford, Cambridge and London universities, Williams chaired and served on royal commissions and government and Labour Party committees. His first wife was the politician Shirley Williams.
Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was a native of Essex and a 1951 graduate of Oxford's Balliol College. While reading greats he was already a golden boy. Politics, philosophy and economics undergraduates, who fashionably scorned tutorials as a waste of time, gathered in the junior common room to take notes while their fellow student conducted impromptu seminars on philosophy.
He then spent what he always maintained were the happiest years of his life, flying fighters with the Royal Air Force in Canada. In later years, he enjoyed driving sports cars.
After his military service, he returned to Oxford, where he taught until 1959. He later taught at the University of London, was a professor of moral philosophy and provost at Cambridge, and again returned to Oxford, where he was an honorary fellow of Balliol at the time of his death.
In 1972, Williams (by then Knightbridge professor at Cambridge) published his first book, Morality: An Introduction To Ethics. Excoriating the emptiness of moral philosophy as it was then practised, he diagnosed its "original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all."
Using trivial or non-contentious illustrations, he argued in a radio talk, is fine in a branch of philosophy like the theory of knowledge, but not in moral philosophy, where "the category of the serious and the trivial is itself a moral category".
The following year, he brought out Problems Of The Self, a collection of papers, several of which had been written when he was in his 20s. Like the great David Hume, Williams conveyed an exhilarating and exhilarated sense of a young man thinking unhampered by preconceptions and formulae with a vertiginously free deftness.
He also produced his critique of utilitarianism which contained two famous examples, now the subject of innumerable PhD theses. In one, he imagined a man, Jim, who finds himself in the central square of a small South American town, confronted by 20 trussed Indians. The captain who has quashed their rebellion declares that if Jim, as an honoured foreigner, kills one of them, the others will be allowed to go free; if he does not, they will all, as scheduled, die.
According to utilitarianism, which considers the goodness of an action to reside in how much it increases the overall sum of happiness, there is no problem for Jim - he should simply kill one of them.
But as Williams's illustration and argument showed, there is a problem. The "distinction between my killing someone, and its coming about because of what I do that someone else kills them" is crucial. For utilitarianism, he argued, each of us is merely an impersonal pipeline for effects in the world. It thus strips human life of all that makes it worthwhile, failing sufficiently to take account of each person's integrity and the projects central to their lives, the especial obligations owed to family and friends.
In the late 1970s he chaired a government Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, whose 13 members included a psychologist, a police officer, a lawyer, a bishop, a schoolteacher and a newspaper film critic. The recommendations would, Williams claimed, if implemented, clear up pornography in Britain. Among other things, they suggested simultaneously outlawing pornography from shops entered by children and unsuspecting members of the public, while allowing it to be shown in designated cinemas under a special licensing system.
Mrs Thatcher had just come to power, so the proposals were ignored as too liberal, although ultimately most were implemented piecemeal. In its obituary The Times quoted him as explaining, "I did all the major vices - gambling, drugs, pornography and public schools."
Over the years, he had been a visiting professor in Africa and Australia and in the late 1980s, disgusted at Thatcher's philistine destruction of Britain's academic life, he decamped to a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, claiming that serious intellectual work could not be pursued in Britain (though having recently produced his own best books, Moral Luck (1981) and Ethics And The Limits Of Philosophy (1985)). His riposte to the obvious accusation was that not only rats but also human passengers were entitled to leave sinking ships. Ultimately, however, he returned to Oxford, saying he did not feel at home in America.
Williams, who was knighted in 1999, was a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served on the board of the English National Opera and wrote extensively about music, including the highly regarded entry for "opera" in the Grove music dictionary.
In 1955 he married Shirley Brittain who as Shirley Williams became a Labour cabinet minister before breaking with the party as one of the "Gang of Four" to help found the Social Democratic Party. As Baroness Williams of Crosby, she became a leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords. He helped her in her campaigning work, continuing to be generous of his time to political service after their marriage broke up in 1974.
That same year he married Patricia Law Skinner. She survives him, as do their two sons and a daughter from his first marriage
Bernard Arthur Owen Williams: born September 21st 1929; died June 10th, 2003.