Shame and Necessity

"This is a highly regarded book, though in terms of the standard free will literature, it’s very different in its approach. Unlike some of the other books I’ve mentioned, it’s not an easy book to read. There’s no simple position or model that Williams is interested in articulating. It’s a book that’s focused on ancient Greek conceptions of agency and responsibility. Not only is he interested in the contrast between the ancient Greeks and us, but he’s also interested in the difference between the Greek tragedians — Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer — on the one hand, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle on the other, thinkers who are really the founders of the western philosophical tradition. What’s interesting about this book is that it’s not just about free will, it’s also about our views concerning the nature of philosophy . Williams argues that methodologically, philosophers need to be historically sensitive and informed, and that typically they aren’t. That’s a problem with many discussions about free will, there is a lack of historical self-consciousness. One of the great merits of Williams’s book is that he is, among other things, a distinguished scholar of classical literature. Not only is he open to the possibility of learning from history , he also thinks we can learn from literature, and from tragedy in particular. So it’s a very interesting and challenging book. Williams has multiple agendas – including a very ambitious agenda that involves a critique of our whole modern conception of morality. There’s a well-entrenched view that the Greeks didn’t have any adequate conception of freedom and responsibility at all. They were, it is suggested, full of primitive views about fate and the gods and the limits of agency and they didn’t really appreciate the importance of intention and voluntariness. On this view, we moderns have managed to get past all this and now, fortunately, have a sophisticated, adequate conception! Williams argues that while the ancient Greeks’ views were certainly very different from ours, and there is no question of going back to the world they lived in, they nevertheless understood and appreciated things that we can still learn a great deal from. Part of Williams’s project in the book is to suggest that there are very important respects in which the early Greeks were much more realistic about the human predicament as it concerns human agency itself, and in particular our vulnerability to fate and luck as it affects our own moral or ethical lives. Exactly. One common-sense view is you’re only responsible for what you control. An absolutely vital vein of Williams’s book is to say that the Greeks didn’t have that view and that, in fact, the Greeks are more accurate about this. There’s a kind of dishonesty built right into our moral system now, which trickles into the free will problem. We try to evade or cover up this troubling truth about the human predicament as it relates to agency and morality. The really troubling truth is that, on one side, we are free and responsible, and it is evasion to try and deny that. We’re aware of this ourselves and, for all the reasons we have already discussed, we have the relevant abilities needed to see ourselves in these terms. On the other hand, it is also dishonest to suggest that the exercise and operation of those capacities that render us free and responsible somehow leave us immune to fate and luck. Almost all the other authors who I’ve mentioned so far are, in various ways, evasive about that and want to be more optimistic. This is what Williams rejects. He uses the Greeks and a genealogical or historical self-understanding to argue this point. It’s really a very powerful book. On the face of it it’s about free will-related problems, but it cuts deep to our whole ethical self-image and our existential predicament. Yes. My own inclination is to use the word ‘fate’ but it might have baggage that you want to avoid, so you could say our vulnerability to contingencies that are not of our own making in the exercise and practice of our own ethical lives. We can’t escape this. The Greeks spoke in the language of the gods, we might talk about something like ‘blind nature’ landing us in certain predicaments where the consequences of what we do could be catastrophic. But we can’t evade responsibility in these circumstances by saying “Oh that was just bad luck or fate!” The Oedipus story is, for Williams, very powerful. From the point of view of western aspirations to be free agents, Oedipus might just say, “Oh well, I don’t have a real moral problem here at all. It looks like I’ve murdered my father and married my mother, but since the gods have arranged all this I can wash my hands of it – I am not really responsible.” But it’s not like that. Even now we recognize that this is not truthful about our predicament because otherwise the tragedy of Oedipus wouldn’t speak to us — and clearly it does. I think so. Williams spends a lot of time talking about this situation and other examples from ancient literature, where the agents can’t live with themselves. Even though they’ve been, in some sense, caught up in fate or bad luck, they’ve nevertheless performed deeds that they cannot live with. This may include things they did not intend or do voluntarily, which is a theme Williams draws our attention to. This is, no doubt, where philosophy meets temperament. These aren’t just theoretical problems, they resonate with our own metaphysical attitudes, our hopes, fears, and so on. I find Hardy very powerful in these respects. He was quite interested in these ancient paradigms, such as being caught up in a bad fate, in circumstances where you’ve got a cloud of doom over you. But you’re not just like a leaf that is cast along by the wind, because a crucial aspect of your fate is the way it works into the exercise of your own agency and character. That’s what makes our fate and our human predicament ethically interesting and powerful."