PERSON
Bernard Williams
The British moral philosopher who spent a career demonstrating that the dominant ethical traditions demand cleaner resolutions than moral life delivers—and whose concepts of
agent-regret,
moral luck, and
moral remainder have become the most precise instruments available for thinking honestly about the AI transition.
Bernard Williams was not interested in technology, but he spent his career developing exactly the philosophical apparatus the age of AI demands: a vocabulary for inhabiting moral complexity without resolving it into a clean verdict, a set of concepts for naming what the dominant ethical traditions systematically exclude, and an insistence that the demand for completeness in moral reasoning is not a virtue but a pathology. He and David Wiggins argued jointly that in moral philosophy, unlike science, “what defines the subject is a highly heterogeneous set of human concerns, many of them at odds with many others of them, many of them incommensurable with many others of them”—and that no theory adequate to this heterogeneity was forthcoming or even possible. The utilitarian promise that every dilemma can be resolved by computing the greatest aggregate good is false, and dangerous in its falsity, because it treats the loss of the lighter
Keep reading with YOU ON AI
Unlock the full book, 10,000+ field-guide entries, and a 1000+ thinker library. If you have a book code, register now — it takes a minute.