Williams on Kant – a discussion by Martha Nusbaum

Boston Review Oct/Nov 2003

Kantianism, as Williams understood it, was a theory that made the concept of moral obligation central while neglecting the contribution to the moral life of the emotions, personal relationships, and necessity. By making "What is my moral duty?" the salient question for ethics, he argued, Kant neglected the importance of starting from a much broader question-"How should one live?"-and attending to the variety of commitments that a full human life includes. Williams's account of Kant is in many respects narrow and unsympathetic, ignoring, for example, Kant's accounts of virtue and education; but it fairly represented a good deal of the influential Kantianism of that time.

The narrow focus of Kantian theories meant, for Williams, that even Kant's account of moral obligation was wanting. In the important essay "Ethical Consistency," in Problems of the Self, he argues that tragic dilemmas like that of Agamemnon-told by the gods that in order to save his men he must sacrifice his daughter-cannot be understood at all if we follow Kant's insistence that genuine conflicts of obligation do not exist, a key point in Kant's attempt to keep the moral domain pure from the effects of luck. Kant understood moral worth to be the sort of thing that retains its full splendor regardless of the ravages of chance, and thus he could not allow that the bad luck of being caught in a tragic dilemma could ever cause the moral agent to form morally bad intentions. But we have to acknowledge, Williams argued, that the world can sometimes force a person of good will to act in a way that is ethically heinous and violates a genuine obligation, even if one course is less reprehensible than the other alternatives that may be available.

Such a tragic situation leaves behind both regret and remorse, and these emotions are appropriate even when the person could not have done anything to avoid the predicament. More generally, in "Morality and the Emotions" he assailed the silence of both major traditions on that topic, so important to the Greeks and to many other important figures in the history of moral philosophy.