Did Williams Do Ethics?

Bernard Williams came to bury ethics, not to criticize or revise it. He did not, of course, mean by that that there was nothing in traditional forms of ethical thinking (or nothing in traditional moral injunctions) that was of any substance or of any use or significance for human life. He did, however, think that the traditional notion of “ethics,” namely as an autonomous, knowledge-based, reflective, discursive doctrine which could give completely general and rationally persuasive answers to the question, “How should one live?” was unsalvageable. What, then, should replace ethics? Well, first of all, perhaps nothing will or should replace it. Instead of a single hegemonic discipline, which gave us answers or the framework for finding answers to the question how one should one live, there will just be a variety of different things. Perhaps human life is characterized by a welter of different goods that form no cognizable unity; perhaps the very idea of a single, or a single dominant, notion of “normativity” just is a mistake. After all, the very term “normativity” is a recent invention— it has no entry in the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and its currency as a technical term in philosophy can scarcely date back to a period earlier than the 1980s. The fact / value or “is”/ “ought” distinction is older than that, and the adjective “normative” has sporadic earlier uses, but the idea that there was a single “thing” or phenomenon that could be designated by the single term “normativity” may be thought to represent not a mere verbal quirk, but a not-insignificant step in giving the discussion of substantive issues a particular turn or slant or structure.