Gay - Bernard Williams on Practical Necessity

Mind Association

Bernard Williams on Practical NecessityAuthor(s): Robert J. GaySource: Mind, New Series, Vol. 98, No. 392 (Oct., 1989), pp. 551-569Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2255040 .Accessed: 28/01/2015 14:09

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Bernard Williams on Practical Necessity ROBERT J. GAY

This paper is not just about certain things which Bernard Williams has said, but about practical necessity-that is, about the experience of practical necessity. Williams has pointed out a recognizable type of experience, and he maintains that this experience is quite general: it is not merely the consequence of a particular view of what morality is, which would be experienced only by those who held the view or had inherited its after-images, but a general feature of the deliberative thinking of human beings, or at least of those who speak a language and have been brought up to share in a society and its culture.'

I wish to claim that this experience is irreducible, and that it is properly basic-if we were starting afresh and thinking how we should live, the mere fact that certain specific considerations were presented to us in this way, as practically necessary, might give us a reason to retain these considerations and give them a special place in the outlook we adopted.

A claim that a type of experience is irreducible and in itself provides reasons for action may well seem implausible. It does feel obscurantist and, somehow, 'metaphysical'. But at least the type of experience has been picked out by someone who does not have an unusual axe to grind- Williams's own inclinations are in the quite opposite, plausible-seeming, direction of having the ethical be understood in terms just of desires and other such mental states, and desires in turn be understood simply as tendencies towards goals, without letting anything about what it is like to have a specific desire be doing work in the explanation of an action. And, in sections 2, 3, and 4, I will be setting out and examining three ways of accounting for this type of experience that I find in what Williams has written; if one has tried to explain a type of experience reductively and the explanations one attempts all turn out to be liable to objections, then it should become more plausible that the experience is irreducible. And

1 According to Williams, it is not that an idea of necessity is supplied by a system of morality (or by an idea about the will of God, or whatever) and then there is an experience of necessity, but that the experience of practical necessity comes first, and the systems of morality take their idea of necessity from it. (Cf. B. A. 0. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London, Collins/Fontana, I985 (henceforth, 'Ethics &') p. i88: 'Practical necessity, and the experience of reaching a conclusion with that force, is one element that has gone into the idea of moral obligation (this may help to explain the sense, which so many people have, that moral obligation is at once quite special and very familiar).' And, Williams says, this experience can occur in relation to a consideration which moral thinking would label as supererogatory, or as a merely aesthetic consideration (Ethics &, pp. 179, I88-9).

Mind, Vol. 98 . 392 . October I989 ? Oxford University Press I989


552 Robert ]. Gay

finally, in section 5, I will say something about how what an experience is like might give us a reason to act.

i. The experience of practical necessity Sometimes a conclusion that one must + is the result of a process of thought which has taken a particular goal for granted ('I must leave now-that is, if I am to get to the movie'). But there are also conclusions to what we may call overall deliberations: deliberations in which all considerations are admitted. Here it is not 'Given that I am to i, I ought to 4', or 'If I am to *, I must ?', but if the conclusion is expressed by 'must' then the thought is of a must which 'goes all the way down' (Ethics &, p. i88). And when an overall conclusion is expressed by 'must' it seems peculiarly forceful. We can perfectly well understand someone who concludes 'So, I ought to 4' and, without changing his mind and revoking his judgement, does something else: we know that one can conclude that one ought to have only a single course at lunch, and yet take some of the sweet. We find it less easy to understand someone who says he must do a thing, and then, without revoking the judgement, does not do the thing (that is, if it is not that some further consideration has occurred to him and he says 'No, I see now I don't have to do that' but that he simply fails to act). When an overall conclusion is expressed by 'must', there certainly is not enough space for cheerful, easy-going, acrasia.2

In some cases, this 'practical' use of 'must' will be simply an expression for the conclusion of overall deliberation where there is a lot to be said on one side and very little on the other. When we hold up the scales, and they incline one way, we say we ought to 4; when the scales do not merely incline one way but tip right over, we say we must 4. And in these cases we might explain the peculiar force of the conclusion by remarking that if

2 In 'Practical Necessity', in Moral Luck, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, I98I (henceforth, 'PN') Williams takes the very strong line that if one thinks one must not do a thing, then, unless one is mistaken in the thought that one must not, one simply will not do that thing intentionally (p. 129). He remarks about 'You have to' and 'You have no alternative', 'It is an impressive fact that their use in the past tense indeed implies that the agent did do the act in question' (p. 128).

But (thinking only of cases of prudence, and of the most straightforward notion of a person's own interests, with nothing to do with any special experience or any moral necessity) one might say 'I simply had to telephone my father and ask him to send some money at once, but I did not realize in time that I had to do that,' and even 'I saw that I had to telephone my father... but I was tired, and I was afraid of what he would say, and I failed to do it while I could.' And (returning from the case of simple prudence) someone in the situation of Joseph Conrad's Jim - who had joined the rest of its officers in deserting a ship with 8oo passengers when they were sure it was about to sink - someone in that position could say 'I saw what I had to do, but I did not do it, and... I found that I had jumped' (cf. Lord jim, Harmondsworth Middx, Penguin, printing of i969, end of ch. 9, p. 88).

However, the space 'must' and 'have to' leave for simply failing to act does seem very narrow: we seem driven to suppose something like what we picture when we imagine a creature charmed by a snake, with the creature thinking 'I must do so and so', but finding that it is fixed to the spot and cannot escape.


Bernard Williams on Practical Necessity 553

all the serious considerations are on one side and there is virtually nothing to be said on the other, it will matter too much that one do the right thing in this case for the losses of doing the wrong thing to be canceiled out by the overall benefits of a little more spontaneity. It is no good if one is very pleasantly laid-back, and dead.

But there are cases where 'must' has the same peculiarly forceful relation to action, which are not of that kind. To get an example of these special cases, let us imagine a schematized Luther. We leave out all the historical context and all the theological views, and just picture a person saying 'Here I stand; I can no other'. We surely do not envisage someone who simply does not care about anything other than loyalty to the truth as he sees it, nor someone who has carefully weighed up considerations on both sides, and has decided that on balance loyalty to the truth matters most to him. Rather, although there are in the situation before him a number of considerations which might engage his attention and affect a deliberation of the 'balance of considerations' sort, here and now truthful- ness and what it requires of him is presented in a special way. He may well have gone in for a long and painstaking process of thought; but this would have been a process of seeing whether, when he had examined the situation carefully and had tried to articulate exactly what was appearing to matter so, this consideration still struck him in the same way, and whether any other consideration was also marked out in this way. We might call that process 'deliberation' in a general sense for which any thinking with a view to deciding what to do is 'deliberation'; but it would not be 'deliberation' in the more technical sense for which deliberation is a process naturally expressed by the metaphors of weighing up and balancing. He may say that this is what matters most to him; but this 'mattering most' will not be the result of any weighing up of considerations, but of the way this consideration has been singled out in his thinking.

Our topic, then, is an experience which occurs in relation to a particular consideration within deliberative thinking, and which can explain a person acting on the consideration which is marked out in this way.

But that is not just a description of the experience of a strong emotion? What makes an emotion an emotion is that it moves one. In an emotion, a thought triggers an alteration in one's mood, that is, in one's biochemistry and bodily state and in what Ryle called 'the day's weather' of one's mind.3 When one is gripped by a strong emotion, one's mind keeps returning to one set of thoughts and one is hardly able to attend to anything else, and in this way every other consideration is excluded from one's deliberations. This phenomenon is merely an aspect of what a mood is: as Ryle said, 'moods monopolize'.

However, I think there seems to us to be a distinction between what are

3 G.Ryle, The Concept of Mind Harmondsworth, Penguin, I963, ch. IV sect. (4), pp. 95-6.


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merely strong emotions, and states which we would properly express by 'I must'. We have a sense that strong emotions are disturbances, which tend to distort our perception of what is the case. Even when an emotion is triggered by a true belief, it may prevent us from seeing and fully appreciating the whole of what is so: when I am angry, I may have seen clearly one particular thing which another person has done, but my anger may prevent me from seeing the whole of the situation and appreciating how things are likely to have appeared to that person. By contrast, we may have a sense that the states we should properly express by 'I must' would be fully compatible with seeing clearly the whole of what is the case, and that on a clear view of the whole, this impulse to act and the thoughts which belong to it would be singled out as a guide to follow in action. We may try to say that we can distinguish in our experience between the power which a strong emotion possesses, and the appearance of authority which leads us to say 'I must'. And we may try to echo Butler's words: They observed these two perceptions totally different, not in degree, but in kind: and the reflecting upon each of them, as they thus stood in their nature, wrought a full intuitive conviction, that more was due and of right belonged to one of these inward perceptions, than to the other; that it demanded in all cases to govern such a creature as man.4 Possibly we are deeply mistaken in how we would describe our experience. But at all events, this is how it seems to be.

2. Practical necessity as impossibility I will look first at the line of explanation we find in Williams's 'Practical Necessity'. In this paper Williams wishes to speak not so much about an experience, but about a necessity, which we would be aware of in this experience5; this necessity is not to be constituted by our experience, and the way it makes us do this or prevents us doing that will not involve the character of our experience.

Suppose, for instance, a politician who is convinced that his opponent's policies would ruin their country, blighting many lives and causing a good few preventable deaths. The politician's cause is just, but the opinion polls are against him, he has no cards left to play, and election day is close. However, if he set his mind to it, he would be able to organize an assassination and get away with it. As observers, we might comment from outside that he has this way of escape; but we might also comment that although we can see this, he cannot. His character is such that the idea of ordering the assassination cannot occur to him.6 Williams may remark that

4 Butler, Fifteen Sermons, preface, paragraph I6 (counting paragraphs as in the edition of J. H. Bernard (London, i900)).

S 'PN' (op. cit. n. 2), pp. 127-8. 6 Cf. PN', pp. I28-9.



here at least we have a psychological impossibility of doing an action which genuinely is an impossibility.

And if we suppose that someone were to suggest this way out to him, we may imagine that the same aspect of the politician's character which means that the idea cannot occur to him will also mean that the suggestion appears unreal: this way out would not be presented to him as a genuine possibility. '

Williams invites us to think about the view from inside upon this sort of psychological impossibility. Now, when a thought simply cannot occur to one, there is nothing at all in the subject's awareness to represent that fact, and when it cannot be seen as a possibility, there is not much. We may have to relax the degree of the impossibility a little, in order to get something which will present a substantial appearance to the inner view. But we may suppose a case where the suggestion can engage one's interest and one can begin to think how it would be good if such a thing were done, but one is aware that in the end one will not be able to do it.

Williams suggests that one becomes aware that one must do something, in the way that concerns us, as one becomes aware that all the alternatives which might have attracted one are blocked off by such impossibilities. And we may well feel that there could be a sense that the alternatives are not open after all, and that this sense could enter into deliberative thought and foreclose it.

Ie recognizing such an impossibility, one would be recognizing something which was personal. A different politician, from a different culture, might order the opponent's death-and if he had a serious and justified belief that the opponent's policies would be disastrous, and was genuinely actuated by a wish to save lives from ruin and premature death, one might not think what he did morally wrong. But one cannot order an assassination oneself. It is a matter of one's own character, and one's own culture.

But one's thinking about what to do would not itself be constituting this impossibility and necessity. One's thinking would be recognizing something which existed independently of it. This is to be an aspect of one's character, which is the framework for one's thinking about what to do.

7 If we doubt the existence of this sense of what is not a real option, we may suppose the politician's situation being discussed by a group from his party and a sympathetic visitor from another country with a different culture. Hesitantly, trying to feel his way into the situation here, the visitor starts asking about the difficulties in this country: the risk that the assassin might be caught, the danger that one's agents might blackmail one, the chance of a sympathy vote for one's opponents if their leader were killed. And he finds that he has lost his audience, and is speaking into a blank silence: his hosts want not to be discourteous to a guest from another country, and do not start on expressions of being appalled, but they cannot pretend to enter into what he is talking about.


556 Robertj. Gay

The chief objection to this explanation has to do with the relation of the subject-that is, the conscious thinking about what to do-to the tendencies and impossibilities which it is to be recognizing.

In general, when we recognize psychological tendencies and impossibilities, we as subjects do not have to acquiesce in them. If we recognize a tendency to drift one way, we may deliberately try to lean the other way.8 If we recognize a genuine psychological impossibility of doing something, we may take steps to get round this blockage.9 Suppose (to make what is recognized be something positive, rather than something negative) we see that if we go on reflecting we will in the end decide to 4. This might lead us to save the bother of thinking further by deciding to 4 without more ado. But it might foreclose the process of thinking in the other direction -one sees that if one goes on thinking about it one is bound to 4; so one determines to escape by deciding to do not-?, now. (That is exactly how we may react if we suspect our thinking is being taken over by a strong emotion.)

The root of this objection is that when a person recognizes one of these psychological tendencies, it will appear in his thinking about what to do not on the side of his desires, as one of the springs of his actions, but on the side of the facts which affect how he can work out his purposes. But an experience of practical necessity would have to appear on the side of the springs of action.

But there is a response to this objection. Surely it will affect the relation between the agent who is deciding what to do and these tendencies and impossibilities, that the source of these tendencies is to be the agent's character? Character is not so much the framework within which one's deliberative thinking is carried on, as the collection of the springs of one's actions, and so the source of one's deliberative thinking. When one is recognizing that such and such a desire is about to prevail in one's reflections, one will not be detached, viewing this as a fact which affects how one should work out one's purposes, but identified. One's character is one's self: one will not be making discoveries about some thing which is trying to interfere in what one decides to do, but about oneself:

8 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (EN) II .9.4-6, i io9bi -I 2. For example, if I am a miser because I need to feel secure and I cannot stand the thought of letting

go of my money, and I am offered a course of action which is otherwise desirable but involves me in putting up a lot of money, my insecurity and fear may set to work and slant my deliberations, exaggerating my sense of the risks of the course of action and diminishing the liveliness of my appreciation of the ways it is desirable. But when I recognize the way that my deliberations are tending in a particular direction, I may stand back from this exaggerated idea of the risks and try to see clearly what is really to be said on each side.

9 Where I was at school, all the students had to pass a swimming test which entailed jumping off the deep end of a pool. I knew someone whose fear made it impossible for him to jump. But what he could do was to stand in the right position on the edge and have someone tap him on the back and impel him in; and so he was able to pass the test.



This much of that response is true, that we should not be considering motives which are not really parts of one's self and therefore have to set to work covertly, round the back of one's deliberative thought. But even when one accepts a specific motive as one of the sources of one's deliberative thinking and one's actions, there will still be more to one's deliberative thinking as a whole than what belongs to this single motive. And so one might wish to upset the tendency within oneself by which this single motive was going to determine what one would decide to do, and then try to see clearly whether the action that this single motive was prompting really was the thing that, overall, one most wanted to bring about. (We do try exactly this when we feel that, if we do not stop it, the force of an emotion is going to determine what we will decide to do.)

Of course, there would not be any difficulty about accepting the result that the workings within oneself were serving up to one, if this result simply presented, without the conscious processes of working it out, the same decision that one would independently have made after a fair and properly balanced deliberation. But is that what we would be having? In our example of Luther, his thinking was going to end in his making a stand for the truth; but the thinking was going to settle upon that, because this consideration was singled out by the experience of practical necessity. We may wonder whether that would independently have been the result of deliberation.'0

Thus, the issue remains, Why should one be identified with those workings within oneself which are serving up this result to one? It would have to be that, in a way, there was not any more to the agent's practical thinking as a whole than what belonged to one single motive. The agent would have to be identified with this one motive in a peculiar way which meant that he could not be detached from it at all.

So, psychological tendencies and impossibilities cannot be enough to explain what is going on in the experience of practical necessity. We need to ask why a person's conscious thinking should not be trying to circumvent these psychological facts. It proves that we have to speak of a person finding himself identified with one motive in a special way which means that he will not become detached from it at all. But surely it is this peculiar identification with one specific motive which is our experience of practical necessity, and this explanation has not even begun to tackle that.

'o Indeed, I am not sure that we could even set about answering that question. Our ideas of deliberation may assume that some considerations will be singled out by this experience; a fair, evenly balanced weighing-up is only appropriate when there are not considerations which matter in that special way. (Compare David Wiggins's doubts about whether we can conceive of a neutral prudence, which would settle what to do in the light of a number of considerations while prescinding from all moral judge- ments about them: 'Universalizability, Impartiality, Truth', in Needs, Values, Truth, Oxford, Blackwell, 1987, p. 86, n. 26, point (i).) If we tried to ask what weight our Luther's loyalty to the truth would have in an even-handed weighing up of what was important to him, there might not be any answer.


558 Robert]. Gay

3. Practical necessity as hypothetical necessity The second line of explanation begins from a passage in Williams's 'The Makropulos Case'." Here Williams is concerned with what might answer the question whether to carry on with one's life. He makes a firm distinction between the bare animal nisus to carry on, which is there but cannot answer that question when it is asked, and the 'categorical desires' which can give us 'reflective reasons' to carry on, and so can answer the question ('MC', at the foot of p. 86). The animal nisus will naturally be for the continuation of this living biological organism. For Williams, the life of this physical body is what constitutes personal identity, and so the bare animal nisus will relate to bare identity, as such. But at the other level, of 'reflective reasons', the future is of interest to me only in so far as it offers some prospect which engages my present desires.

And we may easily have the thought that my desires will not find any special reason to wish there to be a continuing life for a future person who is identical with me here and now, simply as such, but only for a person who is not merely identical with me but also close enough in character to what I now am, and only to- the extent that there is this continuity of character.

Williams certainly does think something like that. For he says: What we can say is that since I am propelled forward . .. by categorical desires, what is promised must hold out some hopes for those desires. The limiting case of this might be that the promised life held out some hope just to that desire mentioned before, that future desires of mine . .. be born and satisfied; but if that were the only categorical desire that carried me forward . . . , at least this seems demanded, that any image I have of those future desires should make it comprehensible to me how in terms of my character they could be my desires.

('MC', pp. 9 I -2, my emphasis)'2

" B. A. 0. Williams, 'The Makropulos Case', in Problems of the Self, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973 (henceforth, 'MC').

12 How might Williams have arrived at this thought? He calls the basic categorical desires which give a person reason to carry on 'ground projects' (Williams, 'Persons, Character and Morality', in Moral Luck, p. 12). And the nuances of the word 'project' associate it with commitments and ideals. Despite what Williams says about there being no need for a person to be conscious of what his ground projects are ('MC', p. 86; 'Persons, Character and Morality', p. 12), the word 'project' suggests to me aims which primarily relate to the way things should go in the world (like George, in the Critique of Utilitarianism (in J. J. C. Smart and B. A. 0. Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973), being against CBW), and only derivatively to one's own life. And when they come to apply to one's own life in particular, the derivation by which they do so is (in what is said about George, at least) the idea that one's life should be, as it were, a sculptured representation of one's commitments. (Possibly we should compare Bradley's idea of morality as self-realization-cf, e.g, R. Wollheim, F. H. Bradley, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1959, pp. 237-9.) Now, when I ask whether there is any special reason why I should carry on living, this question is addressed to the self composed of projects. A future will only appeal to that self if it offers a prospect of forwarding these projects, and it will only appeal in the special way which has to do with its being 'my own life' if it offers the prospect of myself acting out of these projects.



Let us consider the case Aristotle mentions, of someone who is confronted with a choice between dying for his country and living on in a comfortable enough way. Aristotle's own view seems to be that one may prefer to be killed rather than run away because in being killed one experiences a surpassing pleasure, as against the moderate pleasure of an ordinary comfortable life.13 While there is something to be said for 'A short life, but a happy one', this application of it is obviously crazy.

But now it could be suggested that if one turned and ran away, one would be making oneself into a different sort of person. The self of reflective reasons is only particularly engaged by the continued life of this human being so long as the human being continues with much the same character. It, here and now, would not be specially engaged by one's life after one had become this different sort of person. So, for this self of reflective reasons, the alternatives are, on one side, death in battle and a very short life, and, on the other side, no life at all, as the self according to this notion would be brought to an end by the change in character.

According to this line of thought, the experience of practical necessity is presenting to me what is necessary if the self of my present desires and present character is to continue: anything else would not fit in with this character. My character would only be making this conduct hypothetically necessary-it would only be that if I did something which did not fit in, I would no longer have this character. But if we take seriously the idea of two notions of one's self, one a biological notion of this human animal, and the other a notion of the desires which make up my present character, which exists only as long as there is enough likeness of character between the future me and my present self' 4, then this hypothetical necessity could give an explanation of the force of the experience of practical necessity.

But when we consider this 'likeness of character', we may think that surely the interest my present 'self' will take in my future should be determined by a discount rate based on the changes of character between myself now and the future that is envisaged. And that could hardly justify the preference of duty above length of days whatever the discount for having played the coward, a whole life subject to that discount should still be worth more than the five minutes left to me if I stay put.

The line of thought requires not a relation of closeness in character that would be just the sum of a great number of separate connections, and would diminish in proportion as these separate relations were snapped off or withered away, but something more all-or-nothing. This will need an idea of a person's character as an organized whole. And, when we had thrashed out the issues, it might prove that our idea of what is essential to a person's character is not independent of the experience in which a specific

13 Aristotle, EN IX.8.9, I I69a22-6. 14 Ethics C5, p. I89 and p. 223 n. I6.


56o Robert J. Gay

consideration is picked out as the one on which we must act. 1 (It might be that the possibility of organizing one's wishes into a whole with a shape depends on the availability of this type of experience.)

Besides, the argument for that line of thought may be undermined when we recall that the ordinary life of conscious experience-the exercise of the senses, eating and drinking and so forth is itself a good which one may look forward to. Some at least of the categorical desires which give us reason to go forwards will be desires for such experiences. And our desires for these experiences are essentially mediated by imagining the experiences as about to happen to us. Now, this first-person imagination of something as about to happen to oneself surely involves only the bare notion of personal identity, without any idea about relatedness of character. 16 Thus, some at least of the desires which can give us reflective reason to keep ourselves alive will not involve any connections of character.17

1 5 This idea will have to be one that can be applied from outside, by an observer. But in general, the ideas we apply in interpreting one another's minds and lives depend on the knowledge of mental states and how thev work which we have from our own case.

16 Williams himself is inclined to say (cf. 'MC', p. 92 with n. Io) that the avoidance of future pain involves only the bare idea of personal identity (that is, for Williams, the idea of bodily continuity). But our movement to avoid future pain is essentially related to our imagining these disagreeable sensations as happening to ourselves. So this imagining as about to happen to oneself will involve only the bare idea of personal identity. But now, it would appear that our desires for future pleasures and enjoyments are related in just the same way to just the same type of imagination.

17 Williams might now side with this point. (He would thus be abandoning the argument for the overall contention of 'MC': that life can only be enjoyable if one is involved in it in such a way that one's character will be affected, and an everlasting life could only be interesting if one's character were to alter completely; but one's life after one's character had altered completely could not positively engage oneself here and now so as to give one reason to choose this everlasting future.)

At the beginning of Ethits & he considers the question put forward by Socrates in the Republic, How one should live? and suggests that, unlike questions about what I should do here and now, Socrates' question will tend to detach us from our specific 'motivational set' and lead us to reflect, on the basis of our interests just as individual human beings, about what would be a good set of deliberative considerations for us to have. (Ethits &, pp. I, 4-5 ('reflection on one's life as a whole,... all the way down'), and pp. 19-20; and compare the way the discussion continues in ch. 2 (where we find that we are expected to need a reassurance that from the point of view of this desire for happiness, our deliberative 'set' is the best for us) and ch. 3 (where Williams considers a project which would give us that reassurance).)

We may observe that now there is not to be that firm divide between 'reflective reasons' and the tendencies of the human animal: the nisus to carry on living also impels one away from felt pain and towards pleasure and felt satisfaction, and this general desire for something like happiness which is appearing in 'Socratic' reflection will surely be a manifestation of that nisus in conscious, reflective, thought. And now the self of 'reflective reasons' is not identified solely with the desires and 'ground projects' which make up one's present character: it seems at first glance that this self may, in reflection, become detached from one's character and identified only with that general desire for a fulfilling life; and even if that is not the right interpretation of what Williams is saying, it is clear that this self has now expanded to embrace a general desire for 'a good life' which is not restricted by the limits of one's present character and what might comprehensibly develop from that.

(This conjecture about what Williams would now think was also arrived at by taking the views he expressed in his Hart Lecture 'Voluntary Acts and Responsible Agents', given in Oxford in 1987, and drawing a parallel between ideas of the identity of a person at a time (in the different things we may mean by 'He did it') and ideas of the identity of a person over time. But it would not be proper to discuss views which Williams has not yet published.)


Bernard Williams on Practical Necessity 56I

So, the choice put to one's desires would not be between some fulfilment, if one stands one's ground, and no life at all, if one runs away. The argument that one might prefer to be killed rather than run away will only be shored up again, if we are able to add that one may be identified with what is central to one's present character in such a way as to shut out from one's thinking about what to do all those desires for one's own future enjoyment which are not limited by one's present character.

4. Practical necessity as illusory For the third line of explanation, we should begin from John Mackie's claim that ordinary moral talk and thought have involved an idea of objective values values and requirements which would exist independently of us and our experiences, and the mere perception or thought of which could move us to act, without engaging any desire of ours and that the illusion (as he said it was) of such objective values and requirements may be explained by 'patterns of objectification'. Mackie spoke of the objectification of feelings, of desires, and of demands.'8 But if we do not include the experience of practical necessity among the feelings to be objectified, the objectification of desires and feelings can yield only objectified considerations, to be taken into account in deliberation along with our own wishes. The idea of objective requirements or prescriptions would have to be produced by the objectification of demands.'9

Williams echoes this explanation by the 'objectification of demands' in Ethics &, and in his 'Ethics and the Fabric of the World'.20 But he would argue that it does not explain the whole of the experience of practical necessity which we do have. This specific pattern of objectification would begin from demands for particular actions on particular occasions, and they would have given rise to the 'sense of obligation', which is a feeling that relates only to actions that one can perform here and now. But, Williams suggests, the sense of having to act in a certain way which we do have extends to considerations that are not primarily to do with particular actions which one can do at particular times. For instance, it extends to

18 J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977, pp. 42-4. 19 This explanation is not peculiar to Mackie's ways of thinking. In her 'Morality as a System of

Hypothetical Imperatives', in Virtues and Vices, Oxford, Blackwell, 1978, Philippa Foot contended that we should view morality as telling one what one has reason to do if one has certain ends. Any thought that whether or not one embraces these ends, still one must act in a certain way (pp. i6o-i) is a matter of a feeling that one has to act so; and this is to be explained as a feeling, by the way in which morality was taught to us as children (pp. I62-4). (Compare also G. E. M. Anscombe, 'Rules, Rights, and Promises', on the place where 'stopping modals' and 'forcing modals' begin: 'At the beginning, the adults will physically stop the child from doing what they say he can't do' (in Collected Philosophical Papers, Oxford, Blackwell, I98I, vol. III, p. Ioi ).)

20 B. A. 0. Williams, 'Ethics and the Fabric of the World', in T.Honderich (ed.) Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to 7. L. Mackie, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, I985, especially at p. 213.


562 Robert ]. Gay

considerations of gratitude, which have to do with being, or becoming, a certain sort of person.2'

I would try to work out this argument by making an appeal to the phenomenology, the appearances which our different motivations present in our consciousness. There are two recognizable kinds of motivation which may express themselves by saying 'I must do so and so'. One is a special motivation to do with effort, and it may perhaps be explained as the result of the pressure of others' demands upon us. The other is a state of motivation which does not involve any specific motivation distinct from our 'natural' desires, and this may resist being explained in that way.

The special motivation to do with effort is what appears in Kant's examples of the 'good will'22, and it is what Mill is recognizing when he accepts that the will as an 'active phenomenon' is distinct from desire, as a 'state of passive sensibility'. This special motivation is distinct from the 'natural' desires which ordinarily motivate us: they have the phenomenology which Mill misdescribes by saying that to desire a thing and to find the idea of it pleasant are one and the same thing, while, as he recognizes, this special motivation does not have a phenomenology like that.23 And this special motivation seems to exist in order to fill up the deficiencies of the ordinary desires: in happy circumstances, one acts with love towards one's spouse and children without any effort of will, but when one is tired and depressed (as in Kant's examples of true virtue), one may have to exert oneself to do the right thing. This motivation does relate primarily to particular acts that are in one's power here and now, and possibly it and the way it presents itself to us could be explained as the result of the pressure of other people's demands upon us.

Because this motivation has a distinct phenomenology, if it is present in one's awareness, one's thoughts cannot be completely occupied by any 'natural' desire. Even a sense that this motivation is in the offing, there to be called upon if needed, would have to be something distinct. And this motivation will not be present unless some 'natural' motivation is lacking. There will not even be the idea that it is in the offing, on the edge of one's experience, unless there is some idea of a possibility that one's present 'natural' motivation might flag.

But suppose that someone, seeing another person dying, has a sense that

21 Ethics &, p. 179, I88-9; and compare the difficulties that philosophers thinking in terms of obligations have had in speaking about this sort of consideration, as reported by M. Midgley, 'The Objection to Systematic Humbug', in Heart and Mind, London, Methuen, 1983, pp. 76, 83-4, 97-9.

22 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, pp. 397-9; trans. H. J. Paton (The Moral Law), London, Hutchinson, I948, pp. 63-5.

23 Mill, Utilitarianism ch. IV; Everyman edn. (I972 version) pp. 36-8. Mill's acknowledgement of this difference is especially valuable testimony, because the difference makes a difficulty for his argument that the only thing which is good (i.e, is (rationally) pursued for its own sake) is pleasure (including the avoidance of pain).



human life must be respected, and tries to give voice to this by saying that human life is sacred. We surely should not suppose that he is expressing a conscientious 'sense of duty', ready to summon up efforts of will. Rather, the person's mind may be entirely occupied by his imaginative echoing of the person's fear and his struggles to live, and by his own regret at what is happening. And, if he is entirely possessed by these, there will be no gap for the motivation of effort to fill, nor even the idea of a gap for the motivation of effort to be 'in the offing'.

We may be reminded of Ryle's argument that the enjoyment of, say, a game of tennis cannot be the experiencing of sensations of pleasure, because the more one is enjoying the game, the more completely one's attention is occupied by it, and sensations of pleasure would have to enter one's awareness and distract one from the game. In the same way, this sense that human life must be respected cannot involve the 'sense of duty', because this sense of the sacredness of life involves being entirely possessed by certain thoughts, and if one's mind is filled by those thoughts there is no room for the 'sense of duty', which only occurs to supply deficiencies. If we may picture the 'sense of duty' as black, and the other feelings and thoughts as, say, red, then we should colour the whole of the subject's consciousness at that time red, without any black patches or even a black nimbus around the edges of the red. The 'must' of practical necessity will have to be expressing nothing distinct, but rather (if I may pursue the metaphor one step beyond my explanation of it) the compelling brightness of this red.

But now, it seems to me that the precipitate of other people's demands upon one, a sense of something as demanded, would have to be a distinct feeling. It would have to be, so to put it, black in comparison with the colours of the 'natural' motivations, or to edge their colours with a compelling black border of pressure. It does not seem that the pressure of other people's demands for one to act could, so to put it, make the colours of some natural motivations compellingly bright. And so we are left with one type of cases of 'I must . . .', which we may think of as the genuine cases of practical necessity.

Yet Williams himself might offer to explain these remaining cases in a way very like that 'objectification of demands'.24 We are not to begin with demands that people are to do particular things, and the reaction of blame when they do not, but more generally with people's attitudes of liking and distaste towards other people's characters.25 And we are not to proceed by

24 One hint that Williams might offer this line of explanation is given at Ethics &, p. 223 n. I5; another is what Jonathan Lear says when referring to a forthcoming book by Williams, Shame and Necessity-J.Lear, 'Moral Objectivity', in S. C. Brown (ed.) Objectivity and Cultural Divergence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, I984, p. 135.

2 5 For the way Williams distinguishes between reactive attitudes in general and the specific reaction of blame, cf. Ethics &, pp. 37-8, 192-3, and also 'Ought and Moral Obligation', in Moral Luck, p. 121.


564 Robert J. Gay

way of guilt and the sense of obligation, but by way of shame and the desire to be a certain sort of person. Williams would be proposing that as the 'sense of obligation' is the precipitate of one's response to the demands other people make upon one's actions, so the genuine experience of practical necessity will be the result of one's exposure to other people's likes and dislikes for the character one displays.

Here we might again appeal to the phenomenology which our motivations present in our experience. I urged that anything which had resulted from the pressure of others' demands upon us would have a distinctive phenomenology, and that we could recognize that some states which we express by 'I must' did not have this distinctive phenomenology. Equally, shame and what has resulted from it may have a recognizable character: one might suggest that it should always involve an idea of other people's eyes upon us.

But perhaps, in order to give the proposal a fair hearing, we should not concentrate on shame, or any other substantial feeling which would make there be one thought too many to fit the experience of practical necessity. Instead, we may simply think of other people around one having reactive attitudes-feelings of liking and dislike for people's characters and actions-and of oneself coming also to have the same attitudes. Then one's own reactions to one's own motives would shut certain considerations out of the space of one's thoughts.

Certainly, there are processes by which people come to have reactive attitudes for themselves, and towards their own actions as well as other people's. And there must be some close relation between one's reactions to one's own motives and the experience of practical necessity. For example, if one views a motive as contemptible, it is not as if this reaction only served to focus one's attention inwards on one's inclinations to act, and when one saw that one must not act on this motive, that perception were something quite separate. But yet it need not be that these reactive attitudes are, so to put it, free-standing, and, being formed and standing up independently of the experience of practical necessity, will account for it without remainder.

We may ask about the processes by which people come to form reactive attitudes of their own. With certain reactive attitudes the ones with which we are concerned it might be that this is able to happen because there already is implicitly a sense of precisely those differences in character between one impulse to act and another that will constitute the experience of practical necessity. (If it seems that the process could be simply one of absorption from the environment, with shame to keep one in line until this osmosis is completed, we should reflect that the reactive attitudes current around about are, of course, ones which have been able to take hold of one or another bit of the psychology of human beings, and so are able to be formed within this person also.)



We may also wonder how these reactive attitudes are able to have the force they do. In particular, if it is proposed that reactive attitudes, simply as such, can explain what is going on, we may put the question how our reactive attitudes would be able to display such unity. We do not in fact have a single image and a single determinate sort of person that we wish to be. Rather, all sorts of likes and dislikes and ideas of what is admirable and contemptible are circulating around us, and have taken hold of different bits of our psychologies. Surely we should have expected that there would be a swarm of little admirations and dislikes buzzing off in all directions, and so the reactive attitudes we did have would be dissipated. We should enquire what makes it possible for these reactive attitudes to single out one thought and present it as the one on which we must act.

We should not be content with an explanation of the experience of practical necessity in terms of impacts from outside ourselves which may in fact only be triggers for underlying dispositions within us. (Such an explanation might not so much explain why we have this experience, as presuppose that in certain circumstances human beings will have experiences of this sort.)

5. Practical necessity as irreducible and properly basic

I cannot see any way of arguing that what we have in the experience of practical necessity is something independent and irreducible, except by taking on attempts to account for it reductively.26 But I need also to explain how it can be 'properly basic'.

I do not mean that this type of experience has a distinct and irreducible representational content, and represents that there are objective requirements such as Mackie spoke of-requirements which would exist independently of us and our experiences, and would directly confront us in our experience. Rather, it seems to be simply because we have this experience

26 Why are these three all reductive accounts? The first would make the characteristic experience and what it is like do no work at all in explaining this necessity to act. The second would have the experience be an implicit awareness of a certain sort of reason for one to act-and in general reasons to act will not lead to actual actions except by way of one's awareness of them. But then the reason that makes it true that one has no alternative but to act in this way, would be explained without saying anything about the character of one's experience. The third account would make the necessity we feel that we are under be imposed by our having a certain type of experience. But it is to be imposed by the representational content of the experience-by what we are taking to be the case. And this representational content is to be explained reductively, as the joint product of having things demanded of one (conceived simply as the experience of a pressure) and of an impulse to 'objectify'.

There is a progression of thought along from the first position to the second, the third, and on to the idea that what matters in the experience cannot be explained reductively. And I hope that the arguments which propel us in this direction may make the terminus seem more plausible.


566 Robert]. Gay

that we must act in such a way.27 It seems that in this type of experience there is a distinct and irreducible sensational property-a quality which our experiences have in themselves, in their own right, as distinct from their representational content and the properties which figure in that and that we find ourselves responding to this in a way which involves the idea that we must so respond.

But we would have to take care over the idea of a 'sensational property of experience'. We do require the distinction between the representational content of an experience and what else there is to having this experience beyond the way that it represents things as being. In a stricter sense, however, sensational properties are like the taste of coffee, and the property (Christopher Peacocke's 'red"28) which is produced by a red object in normal circumstances, in having an independent character of their own. And what we are responding to does not have an independent character in its own right. (If there were such a solid, definite, property in the experience of practical necessity, and we were responding to it, then we could have taken a much shorter way with attempts to explain away what we have in these experiences: we would only have needed to remind ourselves of this property, and we might be sure that no explanation could break in between it and our response.)

However, there can be aspects of what it is like to have an experience that are not independent, free-standing, properties of experiences. For instance, when one has an inchoate awareness of something-one is in fact registering some fact beyond this experience, but the experience does not declare on its face what it is answering to; and yet when a suggestion is made about what is in fact being discriminated by this experience, one may recognize 'from the inside' that the suggestion could fit. (For example, we might have what turned out to be a sense for whether our reactions were depending on a full grasp of what a situation would be like, imagining it from the points of view of all those involved, or merely on what Newman would call a notional assent.) What it is like to have such an inchoate

27 Of course, I may go wrong in my perceptions or my reasoning, and so be mistaken about the ordinary facts of the case before me. And an experience which happens when I have certain impulses to act, and singles out one of these impulses because of the kind of impulse to act which it is, might mark out an impulse which in fact is resting on a mistaken idea of the case. And again, I might mistake the pressure of a strong emotion for the genuine experience of practical necessity.

But this sense that I must act in a certain way seems to require only that I have avoided such mistakes: in particular, it will not require anything which could be upset by a general metaphysical argument such as Mackie's 'argument from queerness'. On the other hand, if this were a matter of an irreducible representational content, then while we accepted what our experience was representing to be so, we would of course be guided by the objective values and requirements that we were supposing to exist. But if we became convinced by arguments that there cannot be such independently-existing requirements, or that what we know of what human beings are and how they come into contact with things outside themselves leaves no room for us to become aware of any such requirements, then even if we continued to have experience in terms of such requirements, we could not reasonably let such discredited representational content affect what we do.

28 C. A. B. Peacocke, Sense and Content, Oxford, Clarendon Press, I983, pp. 20-I.



awareness cannot be fully captured: we can only reach after it with metaphors. The only way to produce a decently determinate characteriza- tion is to go beyond the experience and work out what we may have been registering.

Also, we would have to take care to say how the responses we were making would involve the idea that we had to respond thus.

One way of thinking about how we come to act has it that actions spring from desires.29 A desire is thought of as a state which, primitively, would simply and directly issue in behaviour directed towards a goal.30 One cannot decide at a time what desires one will feel here and now. If one considers oneself as a subject of awareness and of choices, these desires will be states with something of a characteristic phenomenology that happen to one.

But there is another way of thinking about how we come to act, for which all that happens to the subject is the awareness of a fact (an observer from outside will say, the content of the subject's perception or belief, but of course the subject is taking this to be so) and one responds to that by an active movement of one's will. Thomas Nagel, presenting this picture, says:

It is as though billiard balls decided where to roll, and at what velocity, after carefully noting the forces and frictions operating upon them, and inferring the appropriate direction from the laws of mechanics.31

This active response is to involve the idea of a consistency in one's pattern of responding. As Nagel goes on to say:

(They would also have to be capable of correcting themselves, or acknowledging the accuracy of a correction, if they made a mistake.)

And this response can involve the idea that it is appropriate to the fact to which one is responding it is not that one simply has to keep to the pattern of one's past responses, as if one had to observe the pattern of some dance in one's movements but it did not matter which dance-pattern one followed. Nagel would suggest that the response can be presented to one as calledfor in the same way that if one thinks that p and that if p then q, to

29 This way of thinking does not deal only in short-lived impulses to act which depend on the perception of a particular thing or on a particular episode of imagining. Given the resources of language, there can be inclinations to act which depend on a representation in language of what they are for, and which are persisting states of inclination, even though they only manifest themselves in conscious thought or in behaviour on particular occasions. Perhaps these states are not naturally called 'desires' in ordinary English, but we may reasonably use the same term, because these states can lead to action in the same basic way. And, for this way of thinking, deliberation and thinking about what to do are to be conceived as further processes in which the same basic tendencies towards goals continue to issue in behaviour directed towards their goals. Moreover, these persisting general inclinations do have something of the phenomenology that the short-lived impulses have.

30 Aristotle, EN VII.3.I0, 1147b34-5. 31 T.Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, I970, p. 22.


568 Robert J. Gay accept that q will be presented to one as the move that one should make.32 One can refuse to make such a response, but one will be refusing something which is presented to one as called for; and we may speak of a sense that one has to act in this way.33

When we read Nagel, or John McDowell's 'Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?'34, we seem to understand the idea that someone's action might be explained in such a way. And the very fact that we can wrap our minds round this idea will indicate that it is not impossible a priori that some actions happen in this way. It does not show that any particular actions do happen in such a way. But it does show that the issue cannot be settled except by asking the question of our experience of particular actions, whether the picture of actions as spilling out from desires or this second picture fits the way we think and feel when we act.

Yet the question is not simply what best suits the things we are inclined to say when we are, so to put it, pulled into acting morally. The second picture's response involves an idea of consistency and appropriateness. The same fact will have to call forth the same response not only from one person on different occasions, but from different persons. Now, McDowell would urge that we respond in this way, directly, to the facts which characteristically move a virtuous person to act. But then everyone who grasps the same facts should have the same actions presented as called for.35 But when we imagine a psychopath, we may find it natural to suppose that he might grasp the same facts which engage our attention when we act, and that what is needed before he will see any reason to act morally is that he be somehow brought to feel certain emotions: then, whatever arguments may also be needed can get started.

However, if there is something it is like to have experiences, besides

32 Nagel, op. cit. n. 3I, p. 20. 33 But is this enough to give us the notion of necessity that we are seeking? We saw (n. 2 above) that

when one says one must do a thing, this does not leave space for a simple self-assertive refusal to comply, but only for something like being under a spell ('I found that I had jumped').

However, we may observe that in 'PN' Williams seems to prefer to be appealing to public phenomena of language rather than to the character of an experience. And that may not be the best way to direct our attention. It might be that when a brute refusal was in prospect one would not use the words 'must' or 'have to', but that still the experience was the same as that for which we would use 'have to' on other occasions.

34 J. H. McDowell, 'Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?', Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 1978.

35 McDowell (op. cit. n. 34, p. I6, and p. 22) tries to escape this consequence by proposing that a person who is not affected in this way does not really grasp the same property. If this is to be a proposal in terms of 'real assent' as against 'notional assent', we could understand it. But it at least appears that a person can fully imagine the very fact which moves a virtuous person, and yet not have the same action presented as required. And if there is to be no explanation of this idea of a different property, except that it is needed to save McDowell's way of applying this picture of motivation, that does not seem enough to justify a different way of individuating properties. (Our usual way of thinking has a property be what is grasped by a person who is able to 'carry on' with a term, applying it correctly to fresh examples, and so it will say that two people who are able to apply the same term correctly have grasped the same property.)



their representational content (and there certainly is), and if the second picture's idea of a response which would involve the idea that one must so respond is not ruled out a priori (and it seems not to be), then it should also be in order to combine the two ideas. We may put the question to our experience, whether the suggestion that we are responding in McDowell's way to something in what it is like to have one and another desire seems to fit the way we come to act on particular occasions.

And this suggestion would respect what we say when we imagine a psychopath. For it would mean that there can be a special reason to act morally, but also that this reason could not be seen except by one who already has certain desires (only then can a person know, and be affected by, what it is like to have such and such inclinations to act).

It may still be felt that all this is formally possible and does seem to fit the way we might naturally describe our experience, but yet it is metaphysi- cally implausible, and cannot be correct. I hope that I would be able to overcome this feeling of implausibility by setting out other things that we should be prepared to accept, and so furnishing a context in which this suggestion will be seen to fit in. In particular, what we have proposed requires an idea of the self which is not the 'empirical self', simply constituted by our desires, and yet enters into the explanation of action; but I would wish to contend that the explanation of action does require something more than the first picture's conception of desires as simple tendencies to act, and that this will not be a Kantian noumenon, which could only be supposed to exist outside the world that we know, but can be located within our experience of our own lives. But that must be a task for another occasion.36

Department of Philosophy ROBERT J. GAY Lehigh University Bethlehem, PA i80I5 U.S.A

36 I am indebted to Michael Smith for a conversation about 'The Makropulos Case', and to John Hare for comments on the last two drafts of this paper.


Article Contentsp. [551]p. 552p. 553p. 554p. 555p. 556p. 557p. 558p. 559p. 560p. 561p. 562p. 563p. 564p. 565p. 566p. 567p. 568p. 569

Issue Table of ContentsMind, New Series, Vol. 98, No. 392 (Oct., 1989), pp. 483-665+1-16+i-iiiVolume Information [pp. ]Front Matter [pp. ]The Schoolman's Advocate: In Defence of the Academic Pursuit of Philosophy [pp. 483-506]The Rule-Following Considerations [pp. 507-549]Bernard Williams on Practical Necessity [pp. 551-569]Minds Divided [pp. 571-583]Black [pp. 585-589]DiscussionsVive la Rvolution![pp. 591-603]Personal and Impersonal Identity: A Reply to Oderberg [pp. 605-610]The Verification Principle: Another Puncture--Another Patch [pp. 611-622]

Critical Notice [pp. 623-634]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 635-637]Review: untitled [pp. 637-639]Review: untitled [pp. 639-642]Review: untitled [pp. 642-646]Review: untitled [pp. 646-649]Review: untitled [pp. 649-652]Review: untitled [pp. 652-657]

Books Received [pp. 659-662]Announcements [pp. 663-665]Back Matter [pp. ]

Documents

Gay - Bernard Williams on Practical Necessity