Introduction

Turning from Williams's multi-front assault on utilitarianism, this chapter considers a similarly variegated attack on a perhaps less familiar, but no less formidable, target, the “morality system”. This latter confrontation takes place on contested conceptual territory, occupied, at least in part, by two ungainly contrasts and a dense legacy. The contrasts are between theory and anti-theory, and between morality and ethics. The legacy is Kant's. Just how this pair of distinctions and this legacy interact is a complex matter. It could be argued, for example, that, for Williams, only one distinction truly exists, in as much as either his scepticism towards morality collapses into scepticism towards theory, or his endorsement of ethics amounts to an anti-theoretical approach to the conduct of life. Moreover, it might be claimed that, equivalent or not, the distinctions between theory and anti-theory and between morality and ethics, or at least Williams's preferences concerning them, naturally fall out from a certain interpretation of Kantian ethical theory. As such, something needs to be said, by way of introduction, about the way Williams maps out and orients himself towards this conceptual territory: towards ethical theory, towards ethics itself and towards Kant.

According to the editors of a valuable collection on the subject, “Anti-theorists reject normative theory as unnecessary, undesirable, or impossible, and usually for all three reasons” (Clarke & Simpson 1989: 3). So described, Williams certainly counts as a full-blown anti-theorist. Despite avoiding the term “anti-theory” in his own writing, he consistently maintains not only that moral philosophy “has received more over-general and over-simplified systematization, while inviting it less, than virtually any other part of philosophy”, but that “There is no reason why moral philosophy . . . should yield any interesting self-contained theory at all” (Williams 1972: xx–xxi).