Williams

ABSTRACT.
This paper probes any possible relation between Bernard Williams

writings on personal identity and his positive views on morality. Williams is silent
about such a relation. However, one can be established. Focussing mainly on his
earlier writings, this paper reveals a thread weaving together Williams views on
personal identity, projects, and morality. Moral philosophy may only concern
itself with a finite, embodied, historically-placed, or empirically-compelled agent.
This paper traces Williams journey into the world of morality from his reflec-
tions on the self or personal identity, assuming that his positive views on moral-
ity are ultimately traceable to his notion of personal identity.
KEYWORDS. Bernard Williams, personal identity, bodily continuity, projects,
morality, character, personal relations
INTRODUCTION
O
ne constant in Bernard Williams writings is the idea of persons as
material objects. This idea provides a vital link between his views
on personal identity, projects, and morality. Williams insists that only the
finite, embodied, and historically-placed agent could be the concern of
moral philosophy.
1
A moral agent, to put it differently, is always some par-
ticular person. Williams deploys this view in his writings on personal iden-
tity, where he insists that bodily continuity is always a necessary criterion
of personal identity. This is linked with his idea of projects. Williams
emphasizes that projects cannot exist unless the agents occur in this
ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ETHICS NETWORK 14, no. 1 (2007): 13-28.
2007 by European Centre for Ethics, K.U.Leuven. All rights reserved. doi: 10.2143/EP.14.1.2021810
Personal identity, projects, and morality in
Bernard Williams earlier writings
*
Joseph Okumu
K.U.Leuven
* I am grateful to Arnold Burms, Bart Pattyn, and Thomas Nys for their helpful comments
on an earlier version of this article.
0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 13
world.
2
Simply put, only material agents relative to the conatus of desire
and personal interests can have projects. Williams maintains that, at any
given time, what one is living is actually a life,
3
i.e., a singular life, relative
to the conatus of desire and other forms of empirical compulsion. Hence,
he disallows abstract or impartial conceptions of the self or person.
4
How
can an I that has taken on a perspective of impartiality, asks Williams,
be left with enough identity to live a life that respects its own interests?
5
Interpersonal relations, then, are possible only among embodied agents.
Thus, he also eschews any abstract or impartial theories on morality,
which misunderstand the self that enters into moral relations.
This paper takes up personal identity and the notion of projects in
turn to spur reflection on the implications they create for morality.
1. PERSONAL IDENTITY
The problem of personal identity as a modern philosophical problem goes
back to John Lockes memory claims. [A]s far as this consciousness can
be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, wrote Locke,
so far reaches the identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was
then.
6
According to Locke, therefore, the criterion of personal identity
is memory or mental states.
This picture, the memory criterion, is the object of Williams writings
on personal identity. Williams casts serious doubts on the memory crite-
rion, insisting on bodily continuity as the criterion of personal identity.
7
Sameness of the body in turn is based on a one-one relation. Williams
expresses that relation in Bodily Continuity and Personal Identity
8
as
follows:
The principle of my argument is, very roughly put, that identity is a
one-one relation, and that no principle can be a criterion of identity for
things of type T if it relies only on what is logically a one-many or
many-many relation between things of type T. What is wrong with the
ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES MARCH 2007
14
Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1
supposed criterion of identity for persons which relies only on mem-
ory claims is just that being disposed to make sincere memory
claims which exactly fit the life of is not a one-one, but a many-one,
relation, and hence cannot possibly be adequate in logic to constitute
a criterion of identity.
Thus, logically, identity is a one-one relation. Any criterion of identity that
does not appeal to the one-one relation fails the test of being such a cri-
terion.
This turns on sameness of the body as the criterion of personal iden-
tity, and Williams emphasizes that bodily identity is always a necessary
condition of personal identity, a criterion which he takes for granted,
assuming that it includes the notion of spatio-temporal continuity.
9
However, Williams does not divorce bodily identity from other fea-
tures, and points out that [i]dentity of body is at least not a sufficient con-
dition of personal identity, and other considerations, of personal charac-
teristics and, above all, memory, must be invoked.
10
He disallows,
though, that these personal characteristics or features could be a suffi-
cient ground for speaking about personal identity.
This point might be put in terms of what matters in identity. This
helps dispose of a notorious assumption that these features are of signif-
icant weight in identity. Perhaps we can get around this confusion by con-
sidering the following example.
11
Why would I be interested in an old
friend whom I have not seen for many years? The natural assumption is
that my interest in him is relative to the personal characteristics, features
in virtue of which I liked him in the past. This belies the idea that iden-
tity in bodily terms is in fact what matters. But that is to confuse things.
Imagine that I am going to meet this old friend. A man turns up and
I assume that he is the one. At the end of the conversation, I feel that
thats exactly what I expected. But then he informs me that he is not my
old friend and was only pulling my leg. He assures me, however, that he
is a much better continuation of my friend who has since become a dread-
ful bore and therefore I would not have enjoyed the conversation had he
15
J. OKUMUPERSONAL IDENTITY, PROJECTS, AND MORALITY
been the one. Naturally I find myself disappointed at this revelation. But
what is the explanation of this disappointment? I was not only interested
in the persistence of certain features but also in the identity. That is, bod-
ily identity. So, it is somewhat paradoxical that, even though the charac-
teristic features that attracted me to him are no longer there, I am still
interested in him, not because of what he is but what he was.
What is the relevance of this example and the puzzle it creates? It
undermines the objection that bodily continuity is the basis of personal
identity. However, this objection seems to have some force. The point is
that if we are to speak of identity in terms of what matters, and not what
could matter, and we connect the notion of personal identity to what mat-
ters to us in general in our relation with other people, bodily continuity
does not seem able to provide an answer, because we cannot imagine that
we would care about bodily continuation itself. We care rather about some
unique meaning that could not be without a unique body. That does not
imply that we are really speaking about the body as such we are speak-
ing about meaning but a meaning which is embodied and not one that
is identical with content.
Importantly, the relevant features are always in connection with bod-
ily continuity, i.e., as part of something larger in which they are incorpo-
rated.
12
According to Williams, personal characteristics, significant as they may
be, cannot be prized apart from the body, and require its corroboration.
In thus objecting to the memory criterion, Williams invites us to imag-
ine a situation in which one persons memory claims
13
are continuous with
the dead Guy Fawkes. That is, his memory claims point unanimously to
the life-history of Guy Fawkes. Does this mean that he is Guy Fawkes?
Williams indicates that at most it points to the similarity of characteristics.
That is to say that this person has the same character and the same sup-
posed past as Fawkes, i.e., they are exactly similar but not identical. Simi-
larity and sameness are two different things. Williams further asks us to
imagine a similar situation but now one in which two people are mentally
16
or psychologically continuous with Guy Fawkes, and to suppose psycho-
logical or mental continuity as a sufficient ground for personal identity. He
probes the possibility of logically identifying them with Fawkes. Appealing
to the principle that an important judgment should be asserted and denied
only on importantly different grounds, he argues that to admit psycholog-
ical continuity is to identify either of the two with Guy Fawkes, yet we
should have the same ground to identify both of them with him. Accord-
ing to Williams, therefore, similarity of memory claims and other personal
characteristics cannot be a sufficient condition of personal identity. He thus
reinstates the sameness of the body, insisting that the omission of the
body takes away all content from the idea of personal identity.
14
Williams is profoundly right in that we cannot make sense of iden-
tity without the possibility of the body. The body can be identified in
ways in which personal characteristics cannot. If one tries to describe my
personality, he or she will quite quickly come to the conclusion that per-
haps many people fit that sort of description; if identity is based on the
body, then there is guaranteed unicity because nobody can take my spa-
tio-temporal location. It is, of course, an empty unicity but it creates other
forms of unicity, as it were, the container of relevant features.
Central to the notion of bodily continuity is the spatio-temporal con-
dition, which the logical principle is meant to satisfy. But the criterion of
identity in terms of spatio-temporal continuity is itself open to objection.
15
We can imagine a man splitting, amoeba-like, into two simulacra of him-
self and it would not make sense to identify either of the resultant men
with the original one. At the same time, it would not make sense to iden-
tify both of them with the original man unless they were identical with
each other. Hence, the spatio-temporal condition is called into question.
It is important in dealing with this objection to bear in mind a one-one cri-
terion vis--vis a one-many. Our man may well divide in time and space
but that does not mean that the resultant bodies will satisfy the require-
ment of continuity in the strict sense of the term. In such cases of fission,
the resultant entities cannot be strictly spatio-temporally continuous with
17
the original thing as they remain susceptible to the logical possibility of
reduplication. So, whereas a one-many criterion of identity might appar-
ently fulfil the spatio-temporal condition, it fails to enable us to identify
uniquely the thing that is identical with the thing in question.
16
To do that,
we need certain features identified with this criterion: for instance, histor-
ical reasons. Williams insists that the logical condition goes hand in hand
with empirical compulsion, and that is the idea of the self (moral self) that
he has in mind.
In a number of problem cases in The self and the future, Williams
lays stress on the first-personal side, which he identifies with considera-
tions of bodily continuity as opposed to the third-personal side, which he
identifies with mentalistic considerations. Thus, he presents a case in which
someone under whose authority I am confronts me with the prediction:
You are going to be physically tortured in the future. This person refers
to me directly (as you) and not in neutral terms, i.e., it is I, this particu-
lar self who is going to undergo torture. He also informs me that my tor-
ture will be preceded by mental derangements and loss of memory. This
fact that torture is represented as going to happen to me makes me
look to the future with fear irrespective of any psychological changes or
loss of memory that will precede it.
17
This example supplies a number of significant points. The first, against
the mental criterion, can be expressed as follows. Despite the fact that I
am going to undergo extreme mental transformation, I still think that it is
going to be me. There is no clear point when I could say I do not care any
longer because that is not me. I seem to care all the time in spite of the
radical character of the changes. So it seems that we care because we iden-
tify ourselves not with the mental content but with one unique meaning
which can only be singled out by pointing to ones body: There he is
again, our old patient comes in! So, even if one undergoes a mental oper-
ation, still ones body functions as the locus of identification. Thus, we
should not say too quickly that identity is in our minds. Over and above
that, the idea of physical torture points towards a concrete individual.
18
Williams also disallows Lockes idea that one can use memory as a cri-
terion for oneself, i.e., as what makes a man be himself to himself.
18
Suppose a man to have had previously some set of memories S, and
now a different set S1. This should presumably be the situation in
which he should set about using the criterion to decide the question
of his identity. But this cannot be so, for when he has memories S, and
again when he has memories S1, he is in no doubt about his identity,
and so the question does not even occur to him. For it to occur to him,
he would have to have S and S1 at the same time, and so S would be
included in S1, which is contrary to the hypothesis that they are, in the
relevant, sense different.
19
According to Williams, this case just demonstrates that [t]here is no way
in which memory could be used by a man as a criterion of his own iden-
tity.
20
Relative to that, Williams decries that many theorists of personal iden-
tity have, (surprisingly), not only ignored that a criterion must be used
by someone else, but some have written in terms that similarly require
an externalized view of the contents of a mans mind, a view obtainable
from no conceivable vantage-point. Theorizing which is in this sense
abstract must be vacuous, because this privileged but positionless point
of view can mean nothing to us.
21
As he recommends, this view should
be abandoned and instead a more realistic approach, one relative to pub-
lic criteria, adopted. So ultimately, we cannot omit the body in deciding
the criterion of personal identity. At the same time, we should be wary
of the external or abstract view in matters pertaining to personal identity.
2. PROJECTS
The notion of projects recurs in Bernard Williams earlier writings
22
as
do his attempts to identify it morality.
23
As he indicates in the preface to
the 1972 edition of Morality, the considerations of the moral kind make
19
sense only if they are related to other reasons for action that human beings
use, and generally to their desires, needs, and projects.
One can claim that these sentiments can be heard in the first preface
of Morality. Williams complains that writing about moral philosophy
should be a hazardous business, because one runs the risks both of
revealing the limitations and inadequacies of ones own perceptions more
directly, and misleading people about matters of importance.
24
Although Williams neither mentions directly what counts as important in
moral philosophizing nor what adequate perception entails here,
25
he
seems to put his finger on the notion of desire as a prime candidate for
selection, as one without which moral considerations would lack their
sense. On that interpretation, serious moral philosophizing would have to
include peoples deepest desires or projects things that count as impor-
tant or meaningful in their lives. In other words, matters of importance
intimate the human problems that animate philosophy in the first place.
These include questions of deep concern, questions with which one iden-
tifies. In sum: personal interests or projects.
The Makropulos Case
26
goes back to the same question of desires
or projects that marked Morality. It advances the thesis that desire is the
needlepoint at which life finds its bearing. Ones life, it suggests, can only
be truly meaningful if it is propelled into the future by the conatus of
desire. Put differently, desire has an inner force which orients one towards
what is truly meaningful, or important (to one).
For desire to perform this pivotal role in ones life, two conditions
must be fulfilled, namely that it should be clearly me and that the
state in which I survive should be one which, to me looking forward, will
be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims which I now
have in wanting to survive at all.
27
The first condition means that the
person whose life is in question must occur in this world. As Williams
also puts it, if there is no X in a given world then a fortiori there are
no [desires].
28
Williams discusses the first condition via the Lucretian
view on death, which takes death as annihilation and hence not as a
20
misfortune. According to Williams, however, death can be a misfortune
depending on what desires one has. Williams makes a distinction between
the desires that an individual can have, namely, categorical and condi-
tional desires. He claims that the former have more leverage than the lat-
ter as they form the condition of ones existence, while conditional
desires hang on the assumption of existence.
But the point for Williams is that to view death as misfortune is to point
towards ones occurrence in the world. The type of misfortune we are con-
cerned with in thinking about Xs death is Xs misfortune and whatever
sort of misfortune it may be in a given possible world that X does not occur
in it, it is not Xs misfortune then X must occur in the world.
30
The second condition emphasizes the importance of categorical
desires or projects in ones life, ones conception of oneself, and relatively
ones future.
In Persons, Character and Morality projects do not only provide
the reason for what happens within the horizon of ones future, but also
constitute the condition of there being such a future at all.
31
Moreover,
and importantly, they constitute an individuals character, an indispensa-
ble element in Williams conception of morality.
31
3. CHARACTER AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS
Williams is concerned with the importance of individual character and
personal relations in moral experience. As is the case in general, these
positive aspects of his moral thought come out more forcefully in his
objections to morality as a peculiar institution.
32
They both involve the
idea that [a]n individual person has a set of desires, concerns or ... proj-
ects which help constitute a character.
33
Individual character concerns the
connection between ones projects and ones reason for living at all and
Williams aims to emphasize the primacy of the ordinary self,
34
i.e., the idea
of an empirically-conditioned self or embodied self.
21
Williams constructs his argument for character and personal relations
against Kantianism and, in a particular way, Aristotle. He attacks the Kant-
ian abstract and impoverished notion of the individual as a moral agent.
He writes: Among Kantian elements are, in particular, these: that the
moral point of view is specially characterized by its impartiality and its
indifference to any particular persons, and that moral thought requires
abstraction from particular circumstances and particular characteristics of
the parties, including the agent, except in so far as these can be treated
as universal features of any morally similar situation; and that the moti-
vations of the moral agent, correspondingly, involve a rational application
of impartial principle and thus different in kind from the sorts of moti-
vations [relative to personal interest].
35
Williams concedes to the Kantian that these demands need not
exclude other more intimate types of relations nor prevent one from act-
ing in ways demanded by and appropriate to them, but points out just
how difficult they make it to assign to those other relations their signifi-
cance and importance in life. The moral point of view demands detach-
ment from any particular relations to particular persons. My relationship
with my wife and the spontaneous acts arising out of such a relationship
which ordinarily have no explanation suddenly require a moral justifica-
tion. My attachment to her just because of who she is to me suddenly
becomes a moral issue.
Williams observes that the Kantian outlook with its impoverished
and abstract character of persons as moral agents cannot allow for the
importance of individual character and personal relations in moral expe-
rience. As he writes: moral philosophys habit, particularly in its Kant-
ian forms of treating persons in abstraction from character is not so much
a legitimate device for dealing with one aspect of thought, but is rather a
misrepresentation, since it leaves out what both limits and helps to define
that aspect of thought. Nor can it be judged solely as a theoretical device:
this is one of the areas in which ones conception of the self, and one-
self, most importantly meet.
36
22
In short, the Kantian perspective fails to attach importance to indi-
vidual projects. According to Williams, my projects both condition my
existence and interest in the world. The Kantian notion that the world is
a kingdom of moral agents would otherwise have no particular claim on
my presence or, indeed, interest in it.
37
Thus Williams goes back to the earlier condition that it should be me
as an embodied person rather than some neutral self. For as it seems to
him, only then can my current projects provide the ground for my inter-
est in the world. Impartial selves, on the other hand, lack that specific
character constituted by the conatus of desire and other forms of empir-
ical compulsion, which are essential ingredients of moral agency and hence
personal relations. According to Williams, to insist on impartiality is to
ignore the significant role projects play in constituting a character. Once
one thinks of what is involved in character, one can see that the Kantians
omission of character is the condition of their ultimate insistence on
demands of impartial morality, just as it is a reason for finding inadequate
their account of the individual.
38
Kantians ignore the role projects play in constituting a character and
personal identity. As Williams reiterates, they ignore the idea of one per-
sons having a character, in the sense of having projects and categorical
desires with which the person is identified.
39
The notion of projects allows Williams to emphasize the importance of
personal attachments in moral relations. He insists that such projects can-
not be applications of impartial morality as they will express themselves in
the world in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartial view,
while they also run the risk of offending against it.
40
Accordingly, submits
Williams, unless there are deep attachments, there will not be enough sub-
stance or conviction in ones life to compel allegiance to life itself.
If Kantians rightly invite criticism for their abstractive conception of
individuals, why should Aristotle, who, like Williams, conceives of indi-
viduals in material terms? Aristotle comes in for his view on friendship.
But first Williams point is worth stressing. Williams indicates that the
23
significance given to individuality in our own and others lives, would cer-
tainly change if there were not between persons indefinitely many differ-
ences which are important to us.
41
The many differences Williams has in mind are the differences in
character. Difference in character directly plays a role in the concept of
moral individuality, particularly in the area of personal relations, as it
gives substance to the idea that individuals are not inter-substitutable.
42
Personal relations such as love, friendship, and others, which constitute
the very fabric of our daily life, cannot thrive in situations where the
uniqueness of the partners is not recognized and respected. Williams
chides Aristotle for what he takes to be Aristotles view that a good mans
friend was a duplication of himself. This, as Williams points out, is con-
nected with another feature of Aristotles view which makes friendship
somewhat risky. It has to do with Aristotles inability to reconcile the role
of friendship with his ideal of self-sufficiency.
43
However, as Papaluk has pointed out, in Aristotles view, friendship
is a relationship in which the love for the other is for his own sake, the
kind of love we have for another because of him; love him in his own
right.
44
This is the standard case of friendship for Aristotle, and it involves
a relationship of affection between two equal and similar adults who
have affection because each recognizes and enjoys the virtues of the
other. The idea is that a friend is an other self, because according to
Aristotle a good person is related to his friend as he is to himself. This
notion of other self , which for Aristotle constitutes the fundamental
ideal of friendship, finds its best expression in spending time together or
in sharing in thinking, i.e., where friends enjoy the company of one
another. It amounts to a kind of mutual sharing in perception and
thought. Friendship finds its greatest fulfilment when friends are think-
ing about the same truths and each recognizes that the other thinks the
same as he, and each recognizes that each recognizes this.
45
Though it appears Aristotle does not lay weight on sameness as
Williams thinks, Williams is on to something very important when he
24
insists on the separateness of persons. Like John Findlay, Williams thinks
that the separateness of persons is a basic fact of morals, and he could-
nt be more right in that.
4. CONCLUSION
I have been probing a possible relation between Williams writings on
personal identity and his positive views on morality. Although Williams
is silent about such a relation, I have shown that there is thread that
weaves together his views on personal identity, projects, and morality.
Williams insists that moral philosophy may only concern itself with a
finite, embodied, historically-placed, or empirically-compelled agent. I
have shown that this idea, which is ultimately traceable to his reflections
on the personal identity, resonates with his positive views on morality.
One thing that such views do is to rightly point to the idea that moral-
ity is about concrete individuals, living all sorts of lives. It does more than
that, for it proves the claim that Williams positive views on morality his
views of character and personal relations, for instance are intimately con-
nected with his view on personal identity. Williams thinks that persons are
material objects, hence the idea that only an embodied agent can step into
the world of morality. To enter the moral world such an agent, by virtue
of being empirically compelled or historically placed, needs projects relative
to which she makes sense of her life, the world around her, and morality.
WORKS CITED
Papaluk, Michael. 2005. Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics: an Introduction. Cambridge: Univer-
sity Press.
Williams, Bernard. [1972] 1993. Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. With a new preface.
Cambridge: University Press.
. 1973. Personal Identity and Individuation. Reprinted in Problems of the Self: Philo-
sophical Papers 1956-1972. Cambridge: University Press.
25
. 1973b. Personal Identity and Bodily Continuity. Reprinted in Problems of the
Self.
. 1973c. The Self and the Future. Reprinted in Problems of the Self.
. 1973d. The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality. In
Problems of the Self.
. 1973e. Utilitarianism: For and Against. New York: Cambridge University Press.
. 1981. Persons, character and morality. Reprinted in Moral Luck: Philosophical
Papers 1973-1980. Cambridge: University Press.
. 1993. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. 3
rd
impression with amendments.
London: Fontana Press.
NOTES
1. 1993, 58.
2. 1973d, 89.
3. 1973d, 94.
4. 1973a, 14.
5. 1993, 69.
6. Locke, J. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P. H. Nidditch (ed.) (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1975) 335.
7. See 1973a; 1973b; 1973c.
8. 1973b, 21.
9. 1973a, 2-3.
10. 1973a, 1.
11. I owe this example and the thought that follows from it to Arnold Burms and Roland
Breeur. In their forthcoming article, Persons and Relics (Ratio 2008), Burms and Breeur have
developed a line of thought that comes very close to what Williams has in mind. The authors try
to show that there is a tension between bodily continuity and mental or psychological continuity
for the simple reason that bodily continuity does not guarantee the transmission of relevant fea-
tures.
12. See Burms and Breeur.
13. 1973a, 5-10.
14. 1973a, 10.
15. 1973b, 23.
16. 1973b, 24; cf. 1973c, 46ff, seq.
17. 1973c, 63; 1973d, 96.
18. Locke, J. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 10, quoted by Williams, 13.
19. 1973a, 13.
20. 1973a, 13.
21. 1973a, 14.
22. See for instance 1972, 1973d, 1973e, 1981.
26
23. That is Williams positive view of morality (what moral philosophy should be) as opposed
to what he dismissively refers to as the peculiar institution, especially in the final chapter of Ethics
and the Limits of Philosophy.
24. xvii.
25. He takes up that question in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy in terms of the Socratic
question of how one should live, and importance comes up in the closing chapter of that text.
26. 1973d.
27. 1973d, 91.
28. 1973d, 89.
29. 1973d, 88-89.
30. 1981, 11.
31. That is, Williams conception of morality as against the modern conceptions.
32. That is, a particular style of ethical thought which emphasizes the notions of obligation
and the purely voluntary. As against that there is what Williams calls ethics which is just moral
philosophy by another name.
33. 1981, 5.
34. 1981, 5.
35. 1981, 2.
36. 1981, 19.
37. 1981, 12.
38. 1981, 14.
39. 1981, 14.
40. 1981, 18.
41. 1981, 15.
42. 1981, 15.
43. 1981, 15-16.
44. Papaluk, 264.
45. Papaluk, 259-260.
27

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ABSTRACT.

This paper probes any possible relation between Bernard Williams

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