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Politics can be Hell

Jeremy Waldron, 22 August 1996

Machiavelli’s Virtue 
by Harvey Mansfield.
Chicago, 371 pp., £23.95, April 1996, 0 226 50368 2
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... on the other. In a paper entitled ‘Politics and Moral Character’, written some years ago, Bernard Williams remarked that ‘only those who are reluctant or disinclined to do the morally disagreeable when it is really necessary have much chance of not doing it when it is not necessary.’ The disturbing thing about Machiavelli’s argument is his ...

What’s wrong with poverty

John Broome, 19 May 1988

On Ethics and Economics 
by Amartya Sen.
Blackwell, 131 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 631 15494 9
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The Standard of Living 
by Amartya Sen, edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn.
Cambridge, 125 pp., £15, September 1987, 0 521 32101 8
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... of living. Keith Hart considers the effect on living standards of the spread of the market. Bernard Williams turns a searching eye on the concept of capabilities. Sen has recently moved from Oxford to Harvard. This is a consequence of the decline that is being forced on British universities. It is also a significant part of the ...

The kind of dog he likes

W.G. Runciman: Realistic Utopias, 18 December 2014

Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy 
by David Miller.
Cambridge, 254 pp., £18.99, January 2013, 978 1 107 61375 1
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... the dilemmas posed by the practical application of Bentham’s celebrated maxim. Yet decades after Bernard Williams pronounced that ‘the day cannot be too far off in which we hear no more of it,’ Richard Layard, in a book with the title of Happiness, holds out the vision of a Benthamite utopia in which the pursuit of self-interest gives way to a ...

Keep the baby safe

Stephen Sedley: Corrupt and Deprave, 10 March 2022

A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern England 
by Christopher Hilliard.
Princeton, 320 pp., £28, September 2021, 978 0 691 19798 2
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... to the Home Office by the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, chaired by the philosopher Bernard Williams, which advances a case for moral pluralism. The Labour-appointed committee found itself addressing a newly elected Conservative administration which dispatched its findings swiftly into the long grass.It is not obvious why Hilliard takes ...

Grounds for Despair

John Dunn, 17 September 1981

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 252 pp., £24, July 1981, 0 7156 0933 5
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... in relation, for example, to the recent thinking of philosophers like David Wiggins and Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, Thomas Nagel and Charles Taylor. (It might also be even harder.) As it is, there seem to be no grounds for optimism at all. For more than a quarter of a century I have found Alasdair MacIntyre the most stirring and the most ...

Diary

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Watch the birdy!, 2 November 1995

... as it is mysterious in its cause, we came to need nature ‘to bound our activities’, as Bernard Williams argues in a recent essay.† We came to need to define a sphere where we could sustain the illusion that there is still something that we don’t define. The ‘we’ who feel these needs, however, are various. The twitchers, for ...

What to Tell the Axe-Man

Jeremy Waldron: Hypocrisy and Mendacity, 6 January 2011

Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond 
by David Runciman.
Princeton, 272 pp., £13.95, September 2010, 978 0 691 14815 1
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Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics 
by Martin Jay.
Virginia, 241 pp., $24.95, April 2010, 978 0 8139 2972 9
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... made up of millions of quarrelsome, naive and opinionated people. Without this unpleasantness, as Bernard Williams once observed, important and worthy political projects would fail. There is no question of a politics of pure authenticity or uncontaminated sincerity. So, if hypocrisy is still a vice in the political realm, it has to connote something more ...

Not Just Yet

Frank Kermode: The Literature of Old Age, 13 December 2007

The Long Life 
by Helen Small.
Oxford, 346 pp., £25, December 2007, 978 0 19 922993 2
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... days’. To die thus at just the right moment depends, in life, not on narrative logic but on what Bernard Williams calls ‘moral luck’. It is what enables a person to die when full of days, old but not in terminal misery, correctly mourned by a numerous and prosperous family. It is not an ending one can choose, it is a matter of aesthetics. For ...

Can I have my shilling back?

Peter Campbell, 19 November 1992

Epstein: Artist against the Establishment 
by Stephen Gardiner.
Joseph, 532 pp., £20, September 1992, 9780718129446
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... in a few quotations Gardiner gives from people who were not critics, artists or journalists. Mrs Williams, for example, mother of the philosopher Bernard Williams, said that Genesis ‘captured the feelings of a pregnant woman in a way that no person could ever have imagined’. And although one of the leaders of the ...

God loveth adverbs

Jonathan Glover, 22 November 1990

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity 
by Charles Taylor.
Cambridge, 601 pp., £25.95, November 1989, 0 521 38331 5
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... but none of them should play any part in moral philosophy’s critical thought about principles. Bernard Williams, on the other hand, has queried whether theory has any authority to override our intuitive convictions. Many other philosophers are uncomfortable with both of these positions. The dismissal of intuitions seems to open up the danger of a ...

How philosophers live

James Miller, 8 September 1994

A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises 
by Stanley Cavell.
Harvard, 196 pp., £20.75, July 1994, 0 674 66980 0
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... makes him part of a philosophical generation that includes, among others, Foucault, Habermas, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and Derrida. Currently Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, he came of philosophical age in the early Fifties, in a milieu where the very idea of professing, say, a ...

Straight Talk

Mary Beard, 9 February 1995

Marginal Comment 
by Kenneth Dover.
Duckworth, 271 pp., £20, November 1994, 0 7156 2630 2
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... We hardly ever hear of any pupils, beyond one or two notable undergraduates, including Bernard Williams, to whom he taught prose composition (translation from English into Greek). There is no sense whatever, in the book at least, of an intellectual descent group, of graduate students and younger colleagues, whose ways of understanding the ...

Someone else’s shoes

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 23 November 1989

A Treatise on Social Justice. Vol. I: Theories of Justice 
by Brian Barry.
Harvester, 428 pp., £30, May 1989, 0 7450 0641 8
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Innocence and Experience 
by Stuart Hampshire.
Allen Lane, 195 pp., £16.95, October 1989, 0 7139 9027 9
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... it was raised by Hume, who was rather casual about it, and has more recently been extended by Bernard Williams – is how to bring us to stand in someone else’s shoes and disdain all personal advantage when that someone could be virtually anyone at all. It’s not easy to see how this wide a concern can develop under the normal conditions of any ...

Good Things

Colin McGinn, 5 September 1996

Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory 
edited by Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence and Warren Quinn.
Oxford, 350 pp., £35, July 1996, 0 19 824046 5
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... according to certain rules and not others. Yet Foot and those who think like her (including Bernard Williams) reject the analogous position with respect to morality. Assuming that they would not embrace the view that logical reasons depend on our desires, they must then hold that goodness and validity differ fundamentally when it comes to providing ...

What is it about lemons?

Thomas Nagel: Barry Stroud, 20 September 2001

The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour 
by Barry Stroud.
Oxford, 228 pp., £19.99, January 2000, 0 19 513388 9
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... ambition which has dominated philosophy since the 17th century – that of reaching what Bernard Williams calls an ‘absolute conception of reality’. The aim is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the world, consistent with modern science, which distinguishes between what exists objectively, independent of our minds, and what is ...

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