Bernard Williams

Bernard Williams was the most brilliant and wide-ranging English moral philosopher of his generation, celebrated for his ability to identify precisely where philosophical arguments go wrong. He was deeply sceptical of moral theory as a systematic project and spent much of his career dismantling what he saw as the false consolations of consequentialism, Kantianism, and the pretensions of ethical objectivity.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy argued that the attempt to provide systematic theoretical foundations for morality is itself a source of moral distortion. Shame and Necessity found in ancient Greek ethics a more honest and less reassuring account of the human condition than modern moral philosophy affords. Williams championed the irreducible importance of integrity, personal projects, and what he called "one thought too many"—the moment when a moral theory demands we betray what matters most to us.