122 Book Reviews
Ulrike Heuer and Gerald Lang (eds.) Luck, Value and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams (Oxford: University Press, 2012), 304 pp. isbn 0199599327 (hbk). $67.50.
Bernard Williams’ work in ethics tended to be, though not outright skeptical, at least deeply suspicious of moral theories and theorizing. In his best work that suspicion was fueled by incisive psychological insight that exposed ways moral theorizing tended not to capture, and indeed distort, the lived experience of our ethical life. Richard Hare reportedly thought Williams’ outlook was merely destructive to moral theory. “What will you put in the place of it?” Hare is said to have asked Williams. “Well, in that place, I don’t put anything,” Williams replied. “That isn’t a place anything should be.” The essays collected in Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams do an admirable job making the case that that is a place something helpfully can be. To be sure, this is not the explicit aim of the collec- tion as a whole, or of the contributors individually. (With the exception of the entry by Brad Hooker, none of the contributors offers an explicit defense of moral theory.) Still, most do not share Williams’ anti-theoretical outlook, and the volume ends up being, for the most part, a critical appreciation. Full disclosure: I find myself in broad sympathy with Williams about the prospects for moral theory. The reflexive urge to construct a moral theory to buttress our ethical reactions has always struck me as a bit mysterious, like the evidently primordial urge that drives men to prod earnestly at campfires already ablaze long after it has any positive effect. Regardless of where one’s sympathies lie, though, one will find this collection richly rewarding. The essays here are from some of the most important and interesting philosophers writing in this area (John Broome, Jonathan Dancy, Gerald Lang, Joseph Raz, Michael Smith, R. J. Wallace, and Susan Wolf, among others), their arguments are deftly articulated, and their conclusions are uniformly penetrating and thought provoking. There are the three main sections of the book, on ethical theory, moral luck, and notions of reasons and ought. The remaining two sections each comprise a single essay. Jonathan Dancy tackles Williams’ moral epistemology and Gerald Lang provides a nod to Williams’ work in political theory with a fasci- nating discussion of justice, speciesism, and what Williams called “the human prejudice.” With few exceptions, the articles collected here do not follow closely a particular article or argument of Williams. Most are quite broad ranging, using Williams’ own work as a jumping off point for their own explorations. Thus the “themes from Williams,” in the subtitle is quite appropriate, indeed.
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The first two sections of the collection, the first on “Ethical Theory” and the second on “Moral Luck,” make a good pairing. The two topics are connected, of course, since the existence of moral luck – which allows that agent’s can be morally responsible for events they neither intended nor had contr ol over – cuts against the conceits of many ethical theories. I found two essays in this vein particularly illuminating. Brad Hooker defends directly the desirability of moral theory, arguing that an ethics with the structure and content that moral theory often aspires to – unified justifications, impartial principles, codifiability, etc – are genuine goods. I wonder, though, if at that at the end of the day, the distance dividing Hooker and Williams is that large. Williams’ pessimism need not take the form of denying that the goods Hooker identifies aren’t genuine. Rather, Williams might settle for the claims that impartiality, codifiability, etc., are simply not unalloyed goods. Each comes at some significant moral cost. Williams’ pessi- mism is more likely to take the form that a determinate ranking of such goods is possible, and that is what threatens the possibility of moral theory. David Enoch’s entry could also be read as a defense of the aspirations of moral theory (though it certainly isn’t offered in this vein). Enoch denies that responsibility is susceptible to luck. His essay offers an alternative diagnoses of what is going on when, as Williams points out, we expect a driver who kills a pedestrian to regret the outcome in a deeper and more profound way than a bystander might regret it, even when there is no doubt that the death was beyond the driver’s control, involved no negli- gence, etc. Williams introduces the idea of “agent-regret,” to designate this special sort of regret we expect people to feel when they are more inti- mately involved in the causal chain leading to the outcome. And he argues that we would take it to be a moral failing if the driver did not feel agent regret, instead of feeling merely the regret of the bystander, even when the outcome was equally beyond their control. Enoch concedes that there is some difference between the bystander and the driver, but argues that it is not that the driver is, through no fault of his own, responsible for the outcome. Rather, Enoch contends that the difference lies in this: the driver has a moral duty to take responsibility for an action that before such taking is not his responsibility at all. (The argument leans heavily on an analogy with promising: very roughly, through promising we can take on responsibilities that we had no duty to perform before promising.). Enoch’s view would have the palliative effect of reestablishing the link between culpability and control that moral luck threatens. But one might have concerns about how far Enoch’s argument takes us, as he himself candidly admits. He is explicitly arguing for the claim that sometimes people should journal of moral philosophy 13 (2016) 113-134