Name: Bernard Williams
ISBN: 9780521665551

What Hacker News says

ErrancerNov 2022

Eh, this article touches on something important but 1. the material aspect of determinism is the most boring one, if everything is materially determined then so is our feeling of freedom therefore it doesn't really change anything. Strawson has a nice article about this called "Freedom and resentment" which shows that the thesis of determinism doesn't really change anything about our ethics. 2. the programming lingo seems to me to make the issue more obscure rather than clear but the problem he is mentioning is discussed under the name "second-order desires" and is quite important since it leads to much more interesting problem of determinism - the psychological determinism. Usually we believe we have certain freedom in choosing our beliefs through weighing and choosing our interpretations of what is happening. The issue of psychological determinism is threefold. First proposition is that our beliefs change due to some causes, they don't simply pop into our head. Second proposition is that our given beliefs will dictate what interpretations will make sense to us. Therefore every cause will make us believe what our current beliefs allow. Third proposition is that our actions are driven by combination of beliefs and desires. So ultimately we can't chose our actions since we can't choose our beliefs and the hope for "freedom" is lost. What is left is the will which is not free but driven by beliefs and desires that are outside "our" control.

Now I don't know if I believe in this formulation of the problem but among all formulations of determinism throughout history this one is in my opinion the only one worth arguing about. I learned about it by reading two texts by Bernard Williams and I would say that he should be named the author of this formulation even though he never used such name. The first text is his book "Ethics and the limits of philosophy" and the second is the essay "How free does the will need to be?". If someone is interested in this issue then I would recommend following the citation trail of the essay.

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cpaoneJun 2013

Time to read some Bernard Williams:

http://books.google.com/books?id=J0w3ER2fWv4C&pg=PA93 http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~cjreg/ethicsModule4.htm

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telemachosJul 2010

  Some from the canon:

Plato: Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro, Crito (translated by David Gallop)

The Modes of Scepticism by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (a beautiful collection of texts from Pyrrhonian scepticism and analysis of their arguments; the best way I know to meet ancient scepticism)

Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy (The Cambridge University Press edition is very good; it's probably worth buying their Selected Philosophical Writings for a good basic Descartes text)

David Hume: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (I recommend the Oxford Philosophical Texts editions)

Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (terribly, terribly difficult, but very rewarding)

  A few contemporary things:

Gilbert Ryle: The Concept of Mind

Willard Van Orman Quine: From a Logical Point of View

J. L. Mackie: Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

Thomas Nagel: Mortal Questions (short essays, well-written, very accessible)

Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Michael Smith: The Moral Problem

  Specialist, technical, odd:

The Frege Reader by Michael Beaney (for modern logic and the beginnings of contemporary philosophy in the analytic style)

J. L. Mackie: The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation

William Kingdon Clifford: The Ethics of Belief (he argues, oddly but powerfully, that it's immoral to believe things on insufficient evidence or irrationally - an offense to morality, not just reason)

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dlkfDec 2023

Hume wrote morality is better felt than reasoned. There is a large tradition in virtue ethics following Hume (eg Bernard Williams) who defend our moral intuitions, our prioritization of family, etc.

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telemachosDec 2011

tl;dr - You reminded me of a favorite article on relativism and understanding other cultures (especially other cultures very far from us in time and circumstances). There's a quote from the piece below, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this issue.

>> As some people say, we're already in a Singularity relative to ancient Grecians, inasmuch as they couldn't understand our world at all... and I think it's true in the opposite direction, too.

This reminded me immediately of a line of thought from Bernard Williams[1]. He's discussing relativism, and he argues that there is some truth to it (roughly: relativism, understood in a very specific way makes sense for ethics, but not for science). In order to make this argument, he considers what it would mean for two or more systems of belief to come into contact. (As a shorthand, he calls a system of belief an S throughout the paper.) He wants to make the claim that relativism is coherent in cases where Ss can to some extent understand one another, but there is no real possibility of a person with S1 giving that up in favor of S2 (or vice-versa).

This is already very long, but my point is that I think it's not so much that "they couldn't understand our world at all" or that we can't understand theirs. It's rather that however well we understand it, we simply could not give up our S and take up theirs - not without massive false consciousness.

Here's the key quote you made me think of:

>> [M]any Ss which have been held are not real options now. The life of a Greek Bronze Age chief, or a mediaeval Samurai, and the outlooks that go with those, are not real options for us: there is no way of living them. This is not to say that reflection on those value-systems may not provide inspiration for thoughts about elements missing from modern life, but there is no way of taking on those Ss. Even Utopian projects among a small band of enthusiasts could not reproduce that life: still more, the project of re-enacting it on a societal scale in the context of actual modern industrial life would involve one of those social or political mistakes, in fact a vast illusion. The prospect of removing the conditions of modern industrial life altogether is something else again -- another, though different, impossibility.[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Williams

[2] "The Truth in Relativsm" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 75, (1974 - 1975), pp. 215-228, on page 224. It's here on JSTOR, in case people have access to that: http://www.jstor.org/stable/view/4544875. It's also collected in Bernard Williams Moral Luck.

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