Bernard Williams Quotes on Virtue
Bernard Williams's Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and the broader corpus — Moral Luck, Shame and Necessity, Truth and Truthfulness — developed the most influential contemporary critique of post-Kantian moral theory and the most sustained alternative drawn from the resources of Greek tragedy and Aristotelian and Nietzschean ethics. Morality (the modern system of obligations, blame, and duty) is, Williams argued, a peculiar institution that purchases its appearance of universality by abstracting away from the constitutive ground projects, attachments, and personal histories that make a life worth living for the agent who lives it. The framework grounds Williams's analyses of integrity, moral luck, internal and external reasons, and the irreducibility of ethical first-personal reflection to any third-personal moral theory.
Quotes
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Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“There can be no good reason for thinking that the moral point of view excludes any other point of view.”
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Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“Moral luck is the experience of being held responsible for what is outside our control.”
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Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“If a man has integrity, his actions express his deepest convictions.”
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Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“There is no Archimedean point in ethics.”
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Attributed to Bernard Williams:
“Truthfulness implies a respect for truth.”