PERSON
Bernard Williams
British moral philosopher (1929–2003), widely regarded as the most important English-language ethicist of the second half of the twentieth century, whose attacks on systematic moral theory and concepts of agent-regret, moral luck, and ground projects reshaped the field.
Bernard Williams (1929–2003) was a British moral philosopher whose career spanned five decades and whose concepts — agent-regret, moral luck, thick ethical concepts, ground projects, internal reasons, moral remainder — reshaped the field. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, he held professorships at Cambridge (Knightbridge, 1967–1979), Berkeley (Monroe Deutsch, 1988–2003), and Oxford (White's, 1990–1996). His major works include Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He challenged the foundations of both utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, arguing that systematic moral theories distort the texture of actual moral life. He was knighted in 1999.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Williams's philosophical style was distinctive: analytic in precision but continental in its refusal of system-building, grounded in close attention to literary and historical examples, skeptical of foundational projects, and