II. Dispensing with Localized Moralities

In the final chapter of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985),Footnote ² entitled “Morality, the Peculiar Institution,” Williams, somewhat surprisingly, presents his case for dispensing with morality. His views in this chapter are sometimes likened to those of Friedrich Nietzsche and to the latter's doubts about (Christian) morality, but this seems to me to miss just how much Williams was preoccupied with moral philosophy and with the question of how we shall live.Footnote ³

What Williams seems concerned to reject, in our terms, is particular conceptions of the nature and importance of morality and the role morality should play in our lives. We know from Utilitarianism: For and Against (1973),Footnote ⁴ and a host of other writings, that he found utilitarianism a radically impoverished account of morality, and his work is filled with examples of how wrongheaded utilitarianism seemed as a guide to how we should live our lives. We know from the final chapter of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy that he found Kantianism impoverished as well. Indeed, his indictment of it and what we might think of as the ethics of obligation is severe, at least according to what he took Kantianism to be, which others have disputed. Moreover, no form of egoism was for Williams a plausible account of how we should live our lives, and it is clear also from the final chapter of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy that he did not think W. D. Ross and his talk of prima facie duties represented insight of the deepest character into ethics.Footnote ⁵ Famously, Williams in general thought well of the moral writings of the ancients, as he made clear in a number of places (especially in Shame and Necessity),Footnote ⁶ but no small reason for this was because he found in those writings a rejection of what he thought of as the particularly egregious faults of modern moral philosophy, one of which I am concerned to notice in this essay. Of course, Williams distinguishes between ethics or (roughly) moral philosophy, on the one hand, and these committed strategies of how we should live, on the other,Footnote ⁷ and the former, of which he was a distinguished practitioner, remained for him a viable and valuable subject, whereas the latter strategies, which he thought of as “localized moralities,” represented, in essence, dead ends. They simply amounted to deeply impoverished accounts of how we should live. There is much that is important to a life that utilitarian or Kantian accounts of the moral life cannot capture.

I shall not rehearse the many particular faults that Williams found with modern moral philosophy or the various reasons that some have found for resisting his claims. Entire literatures have been spawned with respect to each of these. Again, I shall not summarize all of Williams's claims in the final chapter of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy; indeed, it would consume too many pages to do so. I shall simply locate my discussion in the context of this chapter and proceed with that discussion. It concerns the matter of luck and goals or projects in a life.

III. Luck and Obligation

Part of Williams's complaint against modern moral philosophy is that it leaves no room for luck in a life. In a postscript to his well-known essay “Moral Luck,”Footnote ⁸ Williams writes of using the term “morality,” as opposed to “moral philosophy,” for “the local system of ideas that particularly emphasizes a resistance to luck.”Footnote ⁹ This resistance is, in turn, founded upon other characteristics that modern moral philosophy has, namely, “its insistence that the conclusions of moral reasoning should take the form of obligations.”Footnote ¹⁰ What then follows is a whole series of considerations about obligations, including, most importantly, the thought that the only thing that can outweigh a moral obligation is another moral obligation. It is this central thought that explains the appeal of Ross, who held that we determine our ultimate duty in a particular situation by determining which of the conflicting prima facie duties is most stringent in the circumstances.Footnote ¹¹ What most who objected to Ross seized upon was that he did not say by what principles we were to determine stringency in the circumstances,Footnote ¹² so that we were unable to determine what our actual duty was. What Williams seizes upon, however, is the thought that Ross seems to believe that moral considerations alone are relevant to this determination. Ross never seems to consider whether nonmoral considerations could decide this issue of stringency; he never seems to consider, that is, whether something which was not itself a moral obligation could determine what we should do in a particular situation. For him, the only thing that can outweigh one moral obligation is another moral obligation, and our task as moral reasoners, deciding how we should live, is to try to determine, among the conflicting moral obligations that characterize the situations in which we find ourselves, which is the weightiest of these obligations.Footnote ¹³

In essence, Williams's objection to Ross's picture is that it simply fails to take into account those features of our lives and experience which themselves do not take the form of moral obligations and are not themselves moral in character. Williams discusses these features under the heading of “importance,” thinking of them as things that are important to a life. All kinds of things can fit this description, including things over which we have no control; they can make our lives worthwhile, yet they themselves take no particularly moral form. He distinguishes importance from deliberative priority: if you find something important, then that will affect your life in one way or another, and so affect your deliberations; but those effects do not have to be found directly in the content of your deliberations.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, in Ross's picture, how do these things get into your deliberations? And if they do not get into your deliberations, how does his picture of how we shall live capture them at all? Unless Ross can turn whatever is in question into a moral obligation, how does his picture of assessing the weight of conflicting moral obligations capture these considerations at all? For Williams, the mistakes here are to think (i) that only obligations can flesh out what is important to a life, and (ii) that only a moral obligation of greater weight can override a moral obligation. For Williams, a person's projects and commitments will ultimately figure into this broader picture of what is important to a life, and pursuit of these projects and commitments can come to weigh against and even to outweigh some of the person's moral obligations. Williams's famous fictionalized example of the painter Gauguin is supposed to capture this fact.Footnote ¹⁵

Should Gauguin continue to honor his obligations to his wife and children and live out the life of a businessman? Or should he seek to become the great artist he thinks he can become and so go off to devote himself to his painting? Of course, there is an obvious difficulty here: it will typically only become apparent how (and to what extent) one's projects and commitments weigh in a life after a period of time elapses. At the time when he must decide whether to abandon his wife and children in order to pursue his project to become a great painter, the fictionalized Gauguin does not know either that he has it within him to become a great painter or whether he will in fact become such a painter. Williams therefore introduces the notion of rational justification, which is an after-the-fact kind of justification, carried out in the light of how Gauguin's career has transpired and whether he has in fact achieved his goal. At the time of deciding whether to abandon his family, no such justification is available to Gauguin; but, afterwards, it is, and Williams's point is that what transpires in Gauguin's pursuit of his career is partly a matter of luck. How his career develops and unfolds is not entirely within Gauguin's control, though such things as how seriously he devotes himself to his goal and how he otherwise structures his life may well be. Still, if he achieves his goal, he can, Williams thinks, offer a rational justification of the abandonment of his family. That justification turns not merely on the presence of good fortune in the pursuit of his career as an artist but also on the project he has of pursuing such a career; neither of these things appears to be a consideration of the sort that Ross's picture demands.

Is this right? Can one rationally justify breaking one's obligations and abandoning one's family? Though Williams never says exactly what is involved in rationally justifying setting aside one's moral obligations, and never portrays exactly how Gauguin deliberates about the matter after the fact, it seems to me right that there is a way that luck enters into this kind of discussion and can (arguably) justify what is done.

IV. Luck and Responsibility

That luck plays a role in responsibility seems clear. (I should perhaps refer to a certain kind of discussion of responsibility. Different approaches to the subject are on offer today, such as one featuring appeal to reactive attitudes, such as praise, blame, and shame, as opposed to one featuring, as here, appeal to what one causes.)

Suppose two men set out to assassinate the president. Both buy weapons, practice, take up positions in windows of the School Book Depository, and fire. The bullet of the first assassin strikes home, while the bullet of the second, as the result of a puff of wind, is blown astray and harmlessly dents the pavement. Assassin 1 is responsible for the death of the president and a killing; Assassin 2 is not. Assassin 1 is a murderer; Assassin 2 is not. Legally, there seems to be a way in which Assassin 2 benefits from luck, whereas, morally, I suppose many will want to suggest that they do not want him to benefit. Can we use the charge of attempted murder to deny him this benefit?

Suppose a pickpocket plies his trade at Heathrow Airport, and suppose he puts his hand into a man's pocket which turns out to be empty: this individual cannot be guilty of theft because he takes nothing. According to English law, however, neither can he be guilty of attempted theft,Footnote ¹⁶ since attempts require that it be possible to complete the offense, and if there is nothing to steal, the offense cannot be completed. Our friend, therefore, is not guilty of theft, since he did not take anything; and he is not guilty of attempted theft, since he could not have taken anything. Of course, we may want to discourage his sort of behavior, so we may charge him with creating a public nuisance or, if we want to be especially hard on him, with assault, at least if he touches the man into whose pocket he puts his hand. But he is not a thief and is not responsible for a theft. He benefits from the fact that the pocket is empty.

Famously, something similar can be true in the murder case. Suppose that Smith is about to stab Jones, but the latter dies of a heart attack the moment before Smith's knife strikes home. Smith cannot be guilty of murder, since it is impossible to murder a dead person, and he cannot be guilty of attempted murder, since one can only attempt to murder a living person. Once again, what one is (legally) responsible for is, in part, determined by luck.

Many find it tempting, in order to make clear their moral disapproval in these cases, to make some claim about the characters of the agents involved. In the case of the two assassins, for instance, many may claim that both have an equally black character, thereby making plain that they do not want Assassin 2 to benefit from luck. But claims about character are quite beside the point, since the issue here is one of what one is causally responsible for. Let both men have equally black characters: Assassin 2 is not a murderer and has not killed anyone; he is not responsible for a death. In terms of what he is responsible for, his position is quite different from Assassin 1's. Equally, the pickpocket is not responsible for a theft, though his character may be as black as pitch.

V. Intention and Responsibility

Elizabeth Anscombe tries to deal with Assassin 2. She introduces a distinction between moral and legal murderFootnote ¹⁷ and thus wants to say of our assassins that, while Assassin 1 is guilty of legal murder, Assassin 2 is guilty of moral murder. Legal murder involves, for example, a dead body; moral murder, for Anscombe, need not. Assassin 2, after all, kills no one. So one can be guilty of murder for Anscombe though one has killed or murdered no one. She wants it to be true that moral murder is a case of having one's will compromised; it is a matter of intention.

President Jimmy Carter is said to have remarked that he had committed adultery “in his heart.” We might say of our assassins that they committed murder “in their hearts.” Are they not then, morally speaking, guilty of murder? They are guilty only if one can be guilty in this regard by intention alone. Our case of Assassin 2 is a bit misleading, because for Anscombe it is not necessary that this individual do anything by way of carrying out his intention.Footnote ¹⁸ Suppose he intends to assassinate the president but oversleeps on the morning when he is to perform: if his will is compromised, if he really does intend to perform, he is for Anscombe, morally speaking, a murderer, even if he takes no overt steps to realize his intention. There is no need to deal with this point, however, since Anscombe's distinction between moral and legal murder does not deal with the point about responsibility.

This is the case because we are responsible for more than we intend. Suppose Jack is out for a morning stroll with Jill. As they both move forward, they spy simultaneously, lying on the path before them, a wallet bulging with money. They both begin to trot toward it, then they begin to rush, then they begin to run. As they are running, they bump into each other, and on one of these occasions, Jack bumps Jill sufficiently hard to send her flying off the path into a tree, and she dies. Jack does not intend to kill Jill, but if she dies Jack seems clearly responsible for her death. This is why, in after-the-fact judgments of responsibility, we do not focus upon who intended what; rather, we are interested in what actually occurred, and in this, luck can play a part. (Put differently, what you cause lies beyond any mere concern with what you intend.)

I turn now to a more indirect case, one in which I benefit from luck but where I am free from any taint that may arise from anything like putting my hand in another person's pocket. Suppose I love my rich uncle, who has raised me and whose heir I am. It is his birthday this week, and I know he likes to read in bed at night. I send him as a gift the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), all twenty-six volumes. He is delighted with his gift. I realize, of course, that he receives parcels downstairs and his bedroom is upstairs, and that, if he begins to carry the various volumes upstairs, he could have a heart attack and die. (I might, as a good nephew, send him a note that reads, “Uncle, please do not carry these books upstairs in order to read them in bed.”) Sure enough, he carries the books upstairs, and on one of these trips has a heart attack and dies. I inherit. In sending my uncle the OED, I neither kill him nor murder him. I do not intend his death. If one is a deontologist and accepts that the intention/foresight distinction is morally significant, then while I foresee that my uncle may carry the OED upstairs, I neither intend his death nor intend that he carry the volumes upstairs and so die as a result. True, I have supplied the means of death, but then so have the car manufacturer who supplies the engine that gives off carbon monoxide and the knife manufacturer who supplies kitchen knives for the home.

Am I, morally speaking, responsible for my uncle's death? I do not think so, even though that death is to my advantage and even though I realize that my uncle may well carry the books upstairs to read them in bed. After all, his decision to carry them upstairs intervenes. One must be careful here, for it may appear that, as a result of my uncle's decision to carry the books upstairs, I am not the cause of my uncle's death, and that it is this notion, causation, that carries the weight in Anscombe's discussion of being, morally speaking, this or that. But this is not the case. Assassin 2 is thought by Anscombe to be, morally speaking, a murderer, but Assassin 2 is not the cause of anyone's death. For Anscombe, one can be a moral murderer without being the cause of death, grievous bodily harm, or injury. For her, causation is not what is crucial here.

But neither, contra Anscombe, is intention what is crucial. Suppose everything in my uncle's case is the same except that I intend my uncle's death when I send him the OED. I am still not responsible for my uncle's death; I still have killed no one. My uncle's decision to carry the volumes upstairs still intervenes, a decision over which I have no control. I may or may not be a good person, but responsibility for an outcome does not track a person's goodness or what a person intends. Just as Jack can be responsible for Jill's death, as they dash together in their race for the bulging wallet, even though Jack does not intend that death, so one can fail to be responsible for things that one does intend, as I am in the revised example of my uncle's case.

Nor must we overlook how extraordinary occurrences can intersect this picture. Suppose that my friends and I set out to play football on a field which, if five games of football are played on that field in a single day, will be irreparably damaged, and suppose further that it has never been the case before that more than one game of football has been played on the field in a single day. I neither know nor believe that the field will be damaged, nor do I have any reason to suspect that it will be damaged or to predict that it will be, to even a minor degree of likelihood. Certainly, I do not intend that the field be so damaged. Still, if four additional games of football are played on the field today, I am (partly) responsible for the damage to the field. My intention that it not be damaged has nothing to do with the matter. Bad luck has overtaken me.

Finally, we must not discount how extraordinary occurrences can intersect the picture and make us hesitant about what to say, though not over intention. Suppose that all the conditions that you require for a killing to be a suicide are met: the individual intends to die, proposes to take steps to bring about his death, takes such steps, buys a massive insurance policy for his family, and dies. The case, it might be thought, could not be clearer. Suppose, however, that Baker, who wants and intends to die, decides to buy a ticket on a regularly scheduled flight across the Atlantic: he does so and then takes his seat and awaits his death. Of course, to most people, taking a regularly scheduled flight is just not risky enough to be thought of as a plausible way of killing oneself. But Baker proceeds and there he sits. Amazingly, and quite unrelated to anything that he or anyone else does, the plane once aloft bursts into flames and goes down, condemning all the passengers and crew to a fiery death. Has Baker committed suicide? He wants and intends to die, takes steps to bring about his death, boards the plane, and, most importantly, dies in just the way he contemplated and thought he would. Surely, however, the temptation here is to say (over causation) that Baker is not a suicide or a self-murderer; rather, even though his death is intended and he dies in the way he contemplated, his death is a product of good (or bad) luck (depending upon how you look at it). Is he responsible for his own death? I think that there is a strong case for saying that he is, though we know, as we have seen, that luck can play a part in determining what he is responsible for. Nor is there anything odd about saying that one can be responsible for one's death, yet not be a suicide, even in a case where one intends to die. Luck takes a hand in producing the death.

The foregoing discussion shows that luck plays a role in our lives. Now I want to develop this discussion further, with respect to the goals and projects lives exhibit and the way these goals and projects can come to weigh against our obligations.

VI. Goals and Importance

Anscombe's distinction between moral and legal murder also fails to cut more deeply in another and perhaps more telling respect. It might be thought that what Anscombe's claim of moral murder enables us to do is to know, as we decide what to do, what the morality of our act is. We can know this if (i) we (roughly) restrict the determination of the morality of the act to the intention with which we act, and (ii) we know what our intentions are. With these two conditions met, no ground is permitted for luck to intervene. Anscombe already knows which intentions are permissible and which are not; she has a list of these, derived from somewhere—perhaps from her faith.Footnote ¹⁹ She has this list in advance of acting or intending to act. As we know from her book Intention,Footnote ²⁰ different descriptions can be offered of what one does (or intends to do). What she then does is to run over in her mind the different descriptions under which what the agent proposes to do may fall, and she mentally checks to see whether the intention with which the agent proposes to act in this case figures on her list of impermissible intentions. Thus, under one description, what the agent proposes to do is (for example) to pump water into the house; under another description, it is to poison the inhabitants of the house. Intending to take the life of innocent people figures on Anscombe's list of prohibited intentions. If it so figures, then the act which exhibits that intention is wrong, no matter what the consequences.

The point here has nothing to do with consequentialism or with whether we know what our intentions are (I assume that we do); it has to do with the thought that we need to know, at the time of acting or deciding what to do, what the morality of our act is, with the result that we need to be able to restrict what is to determine the morality of our acts to that which can be known in advance. It is this last bit that matters. In this discussion, why must we restrict what can affect the morality of our acts to that which can be known in advance? As we saw with judgments of responsibility, why cannot what transpires afterward, so to speak, affect the decision we make? Some of what transpires afterward is, while not moral in character,Footnote ²¹ yet important to our lives, and includes things which we could not know in advance and over which we have little, if any, control. None of this would figure on Anscombe's list of proscribed intentions, and none of it need take the form of prima facie obligations, so as to get into Ross's picture of moral life. In such cases, one is not presenting some further moral claim that other parties to the debate have overlooked, but one is presenting some further claim about importance to a life that other parties have overlooked. The issue here revolves around how one's goals and projects mold and shape one's life and lead one to live out a certain kind of life. As will be seen, I think Williams is right to stress this kind of issue.

Suppose Robert is on his death bed and asks to see his son Alex, a philosopher, one final time. Robert has long admired Alex, and he asks Alex to promise that he will continue his life as a philosopher, work hard at living out this conception of the good life to the best of his ability, and strive to make a contribution to his chosen specialty within philosophy. Alex promises. It is hard to imagine a more dramatic instance of a death-bed promise or an episode in a life more definitive of whom one takes oneself to be; the obligation involved can, I imagine, seem almost overpowering. Now suppose I am Alex's best friend, know him very well, and have had long discussions with him about my own life and his. On the fifth anniversary of his father's death, he asks me what advice I can give him about how he should continue to live his life, and he urges me to be candid and honest with him. In fact, Alex is terrible at philosophy. He has been unable to publish, and all his efforts have been returned by editors with notes urging him to burn his work. He has had to be removed from the classroom, both because he is incompetent as a teacher and because the students in despair have threatened to burn down the university. He has no administrative skills whatever and has lost all the paperwork with which he has ever been entrusted. He has asked for the truth, and I give it: he must, as an urgent matter, give up his career as a philosopher. But what then, he asks, is he to do? Giving him my best judgment, and weighing his talents, I advise him to become a bouncer in a pub. He takes my advice and is now on his way in a new career. He breaks his promise to his father to live the life of a philosopher.

Now there may be technicalities by which one might try to evade the thrust of the example. It might be argued that keeping his promise to his father for five years has discharged his promise and relieved him of the obligation involved. This is not the place to argue about time limits on promises and obligations. It might be argued that the death of his father relieves Alex of promises and obligations to him. This is not the place to argue about the extinction of promises and obligations. In the absence of such technicalities, however, it seems to me that Alex is right to break his promise and to set aside his obligation, that what makes this right is not some further moral feature of Alex's case but rather the mess to which his life has been reduced by living out the life of a philosopher, and that the mess to which his life has been reduced is not something that could have figured on Anscombe's list of prohibited intentions or on Ross's list of prima facie duties. Yet, in terms of rational justification, it certainly seems like something that weighs against Alex's obligation (to live out the life of a philosopher) and justifies setting it aside. How Alex's life turns out, how his career as a philosopher fails to prosper, is not something over which he has complete control.

Very little about Alex's life becoming a mess could be known in advance or could be said to be something that should have been known in advance. It may not have been something that could have been foreseen or ought to have been foreseen. Yet it certainly appears to be something that weighs against his obligation to his father—something, obviously, that seems very much a part of what Alex considers as important to his life. Whether it should have been known in advance seems irrelevant to whether Alex's life becoming a mess should weigh against his obligation. To be sure, Williams does distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic luck,Footnote ²² where the puff of wind blowing the bullet astray is extrinsic; and there need be nothing of this sort that makes Alex's life a mess. But I think this discussion can amount to a distinction without a difference, if, for example, we were to construe Alex's lack of philosophical ability as so multifaceted as to explain various unexpected failures in his life apart from directly philosophical ones.

It might be argued that Alex was right to make the promise to his father and ultimately right to break it; in this way, we might try to treat his life as if it were compartmentalized into a series of separate though not unrelated discrete decisions, each to be seen in its own terms and each quite explicitly moral in character. But the point at issue is not about whether life involves a series of decisions to be engaged in their own terms but about whether something other than another contending moral obligation can weigh against and ultimately triumph over Alex's moral obligation (to live out the life of a philosopher). I think we must answer in the affirmative. This does not mean that Alex should not perhaps feel regret at having to break his promise, but it would, I think, be quite wrong to suggest that he should feel remorse. That would imply that he thinks breaking his promise was wrong, and he does not think this.

VII. Goals, Importance, and Living Out a Life

As I have noted, we must be careful to guard against making it appear that we are talking about Alex's decision now about how to live his life and not about his earlier decision. This can be brought out rather clearly in an example with a slightly different stress—a real case, though I have altered it quite a bit to disguise the people involved.

During the many years I lived in England, I became friendly with a man whose chosen career was that of a pianist. He had immense talent, a prodigious practice and training schedule, and contact with many of the world's great pianists. Over time, he did indeed turn himself into one of the world's great concert pianists, with performances in all the great musical centers of Europe, Asia, and the United States, with radio and television broadcasts all over the world, and with recordings that are distributed wherever classical music is loved. In the early years of our friendship, we would go on tours through Yorkshire, the Lake District, and the Cotswolds; in later years, of course, his concert schedule made this impossible. On these trips, he would describe the seriousness of his purpose, and I would occasionally get a glimpse of the massive drive that lay behind this purpose. He was aiming at the top, and he had been told by those in a position to know (and so was convinced) that he had the ability to turn himself into one of the world's great concert pianists. To speak of him eventually in the same breath as the great British pianist Alfred Brendel, to compare his virtuosity with that of the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould only seemed to inspire him further.

I remember one point early in his career, long before he became famous and took his place on the world stage, when it was deemed by him and his advisers that it was absolutely imperative that he should go study with one of the great master teachers of piano. His earlier instructors had helped him enormously, but he had now outstripped their accomplishments and what they could teach him. At an Indian restaurant in Whitfield Street in London, he talked over the two names that had risen to the top of his list. I still remember my astonishment when I heard how much these men would cost, and I counted up the pounds as I realized that he was contemplating spending three years with one of them. Soon the discussion came down to money. He had a little that his father had left him, but he needed much more. It turned out that his mother had been saving money over many years for her old age, specifically, in order to allow her to stay in her own home, without having to go into a nursing home or a home for the elderly, which she would not like at all. Coincidentally, the amount of money she had saved, together with the money that would come from the sale of her house, was more or less the same amount, when added to what he had, that he needed. Subsequently, he took his mother's money (I believe he asked for it, in a conversation in which he pointed out the kind of career that was before him), hired one of the master teachers, and did indeed go on to become a concert pianist of the highest order, of whom his mother was very proud. The demands of his concert schedule became very heavy, and he did not get to visit his mother in her home for the elderly as much as he would have liked before she died, though he always managed, I think, to visit twice a year. I do not know whether he could have reached the level he did without having studied with a master teacher, though other friends doubt it. Nor do I know if there were other sums of money he could have drawn on or how feasible it was to defer his career and earn money in some other way, in order to afford the teacher. I have not been privy to all of the family's financial details and thus cannot say how much money this man subsequently gave his mother or whether he had repaid her by the time of her death. (Any full consideration of the case, one might think, would arguably require that we know these and other things.)

Could this man justify what was done in his mother's case? Could he justify setting aside this most intimate obligation he had with respect to the care of his aged mother? I shall not bother to mount the case in his favor, as it parallels that in Alex's case, except that in this case the brilliance of the performances, the broadcasts, and the recordings are there for people all over the world to see and hear. In Alex's case, failure in his life led him to rearrange it; in the pianist's case, success in living out the conception of the good life he had chosen for himself, and living it out in a dedicated and hardworking manner, led him to the production of musical performances that are there for all of us to study, learn from, and enjoy.

We are not compartmentalizing this man's life but asking a question about his decision to take his mother's money: Could the brilliant performances and the extraordinary career have made his taking the money right? No, someone says, because his taking the money involves a violation of a moral obligation to his mother. But then we begin to mount after-the-fact rational justifications of his setting aside this obligation, thereby moving to meet the point that his taking the money was wrong in the first place because it involved the violation of a moral obligation to his mother. Here, too, the pianist feels regret, as, indeed, anyone would who saw what befell the mother as a result of the decision to take the money; but he does not feel remorse, since he does not believe that the setting aside of the obligation to his mother cannot be justified. When asked what he appeals to, the pianist cites what is important in his life; the conception of the good life that he has chosen for himself and has tried in a dedicated and hardworking manner to live out; the numerous performances, broadcasts, and recordings that are there for all now and in the future to enjoy; and the presence in him of regret for what befell his mother. But, importantly, to say that he can appeal to none of this because it is not essentially moral in character, or because it cannot be known or guessed at in advance, or because it does not take the form of countervailing moral obligations that outweigh the obligation at issue, just seems to emphasize this more limited notion of morality that does not capture the full panoply of considerations that go to make up how we shall live. Williams rightly, I think, sees these broader considerations of how we shall live as important to a life, whether they take a narrow utilitarian or Kantian or Rossian form (or some other form altogether).

One may, of course, argue that this picture of rational justification is self-serving, that all it does is to license one in doing something immoral in the guise of, so to speak, fulfilling one's goals or projects. In a sense, the picture is self-serving: in determining how I shall live, the things to be considered are not restricted to those things that fall out on, say, Rossian lines as moral. Nor are those things that fall out as moral arguably the crucial ones or the most important. To our concert pianist, living out the life of a concert pianist appears to be something of immense importance to him, and this living out comes to play a role in his life and thinking that no mere list of prohibited intentions or prima facie duties captures. This is not, as such, to denigrate such lists, but it is a mistake to think that they exhaust or even centrally capture ethical experience, let alone what is important to a life. And this, most importantly, is what is being put into the balance against moral obligation.

VIII. Goals That Are More Questionable

In the foregoing discussion, I have focused upon goals or projects—living out the life of a philosopher, becoming a concert pianist—that one may think favorably of, before starting out upon rational justifications of what is done in their name. But what of more questionable projects?

In all the biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer,Footnote ²³ much is made of his massive importance to the Manhattan Project, to the success of Los Alamos, and so to the effort to develop an atomic bomb by which to end World War II. When General Leslie Groves, overall head of the Manhattan Project, appointed Oppenheimer as scientific director of the project, Groves did not know Oppenheimer very well, had had limited contact with him, and so had no basis upon which to determine that Oppenheimer possessed the skills needed to make a success of the project (though he knew that Oppenheimer was regarded as brilliant). Certainly, Groves had no firm reason to think that Oppenheimer could recruit to Los Alamos a mighty pantheon of the world's physicists. In all these respects, Oppenheimer succeeded.

There occurs early on in his tenure at Los Alamos an incident that is much discussed: Oppenheimer is asked by an intelligence officer for the Army a question to which he responds with a lie. He had associated himself with left-wing causes in the past, had contributed money to left-wing organizations, and had a number of left-wing associates and graduate students. He lies to Army intelligence about who it is that has approached him about his work for the Army. (Eventually, this lie will play a central part in the removal of Oppenheimer's security clearance in 1953, and this removal will put an end to Oppenheimer's role as a scientific adviser to the government.) In fact, Oppenheimer had been told by a friend that if he, Oppenheimer, ever wished to pass along information about the project of which he was in charge to the Soviets, there was an individual nearby who could do so. In response to a question about the episode, Oppenheimer lies to Army intelligence. (The tale gets enormously complicated after this, so I shall just leave it here.)

Now I can imagine several things that might have gone through Oppenheimer's mind. To come forward with the truth would require him to betray a friend, for something which, since nothing came of the business, could seem minor. Again, to say anything that might indicate that he had been approached by the Soviets might cost him the support of Groves and thus his directorship. What's more, while he is just beginning to get his legs under him in his post, he has already realized that he is crucial to the success of the Manhattan Project. And the project does succeed: Oppenheimer turns out to have been a brilliant choice on Groves's part; and he and Groves, together with the many illustrious physicists around them, combine to bring success to the project. Groves thinks of himself as lucky to have chosen Oppenheimer, and says so in public.

In many of the histories of the Manhattan Project and World War II, Oppenheimer's success as director of Los Alamos colors the lie he told to Army intelligence. Even his political enemies, such as physicist Edward Teller, concede Oppenheimer's crucial role at Los Alamos, and the lie to Army intelligence is seen as incidental to the general war effort. But the project on which Oppenheimer was engaged, of course, was the designing and engineering of the atomic bomb. True, Harry Truman made the ultimate decision to use the bomb, and Anscombe holds him firmly to account for this;Footnote ²⁴ but Oppenheimer was the enabler, providing the completed bombs, both uranium and plutonium, for use by Truman. Oppenheimer brought the scientific project to a successful close, but that close was not simply the winning of the war but the winning of the war by the dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities. (Serving on the targeting committee for use of the bombs, Oppenheimer did not denounce the selection of cities as targets but acquiesced in that selection, and acquiesced as well in the first use of the bomb without warning.)

Subsequently, Oppenheimer opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and he later appeared to be highly ambivalent about the use of atomic weapons in war altogether. At one point, he yelled out, in Truman's presence, “I have blood on my hands.” (Truman was scornful; after all, he, Truman, decided to use the bombs.) Returning to our question, then, can appeal to a deadly project and his role in it provide Oppenheimer with a rational justification of his breaking of his obligation to tell the truth to Army intelligence? Or does the deadly nature of the affair remove any possibility of this kind of thing? It is not accidental, I think, that nearly all writers portray Oppenheimer favorably, where his success as the wartime director of Los Alamos colors any lie that may have been told along the way to immense scientific achievement. The claim here is not that this is the case, but only that it arguably could be, which makes the point about what considerations can weigh in a life other than a view of one's moral obligations.

IX. Extrinsic and Intrinsic Luck

As for Williams's distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic luck, I do not think it works the way he thinks it does, as if we get different judgments about luck depending upon whether the luck is extrinsic or intrinsic. Suppose a soccer player loses a leg: this piece of extrinsic luck is pretty devastating. We speak of him as having undergone a tragedy or as having suffered a grave misfortune. But consider Alex: no such “out of the blue” incident has befallen him, yet what happens to him is also a tragedy and a grave misfortune. The temptation, I think, is to treat what befalls the soccer player as fate and what befalls Alex as his fault, and, indeed, his fault in two senses. First, one might be tempted to say that Alex should have known in advance that he had no talent for philosophy and thus should not have chosen for himself as he did. Alas, people do not usually know this sort of thing in advance; what happens is that they go along, studying philosophy, and slowly discover over time that they are making little headway in the subject. Second, and more importantly, it is tempting to think that people who work hard at a subject and who come to immerse themselves in it “make their own breaks” and thus enjoy an earned form of intrinsic luck. Alex must not be immersing himself in his subject and must not be devoting himself seriously to being a philosopher, else he would be “making his own breaks” and thus “getting ahead” in philosophy. But making your own breaks is not given to everyone, and it does not follow simply from hard work. True, you may have a good memory and may learn ideas and arguments in philosophy, but there is no certainty that you will be able to come up with ideas and arguments on your own, or in any event ones that survive scrutiny. Thus, Alex seems to me to be someone who is down on his extrinsic luck and has little or no intrinsic luck, as a philosopher. I do not see that one form of luck is more meritorious than the other. They just occur.

X. Goals and Achievement Versus Obligation

Accomplishment in the pursuit of one's projects and goals is an important part of life, one that partly explains why we strive so mightily to live out lives of our own choosing. For while it is true that others may share our projects and goals, it is more often true that they do not; and if our lives are molded and shaped by these others, it is more likely than not that our lives will not be molded and shaped in such a way as to pursue rigorously our projects and to seek strenuously our goals. But to recognize the importance of our projects and goals to ourselves is not yet to tell us exactly how (or how much) to weigh them or how far we may go in pursuing them. Localized moralities, as Williams calls them, or what we may think of as general views of morality such as Kantianism or Rossianism, will often demand that all projects and goals must be scrutinized through them, so that they must be approved by the dominant Kantianism or Rossianism in question and must be pursued in ways that the dominant morality approves and to the extent that the dominant morality allows. In this way, the localized or dominant morality asserts itself as the fundamental vantage point from which projects and goals are to be assessed, since they are the fundamental vantage point from which the projects and goals that make up those lives must be viewed. But why must these projects and goals be seen from a Kantian perspective (or, for that matter, from a Rossian, egoistic, or utilitarian perspective)? Why must we take, say, obligation in the way that Kant and Ross imagine? Why can we not allow other things that are important to our lives, and which are not themselves obligations, to weigh against those things which are?

A case that brings out these strands of thought is that of the English alpinist George Mallory.Footnote ²⁵ In the early 1920s, Britain mounted two expeditions to Mount Everest. The first had ended in failure, and the second—this time undertaken with portable oxygen tanks—was heading in the same direction. On June 6, 1924, George Mallory and Andrew (“Sandy”) Irvine departed camp on the North Col, and if we are to believe photographic evidence of one of their party several days later, they were seen moving forward high up on the mountain above 28,000 feet. They never returned. From this point onward, it is hard to separate fact from fiction, for their tale has been romanticized and their deaths mythologized—brave young souls going forward into the unknown and coming to a tragic end.

Mallory's case is very interesting for our purposes. He was on his second expedition to Everest; he knew it would almost certainly be his last. He was older now and, while he was in peak condition, the aging process was taking a toll on his climbing skills. He was now married with a young family. If he failed this time, it was not certain that he would be asked on another expedition, or that the British would even undertake another expedition. He had set heart and soul upon climbing Everest and was determined not to come down the mountain this time without having reached the summit. He had trained rigorously and had made himself into arguably the leading high-altitude climber in Europe (and, indeed, the world).Footnote ²⁶ On this latest expedition, he now had oxygen, of which Irvine had been put in charge. Mallory's last chance to climb the mountain and achieve his goal thus came to him on June 6, 1924. At dawn, he set out accompanied by Irvine; he took a camera in the hope of recording their reaching the summit. Nothing was heard from them again.

Part of the fascination of Mallory's case is that it permits us to speculate on two matters. While we do not know that a decisive point was reached in the climb, a point at which Mallory had to decide whether to continue or not, speculation on whether such a point was reached has been rife. If it was reached, two matters loom large. First, while Mallory was a leading alpinist of the day, Irvine was not. He was relatively inexperienced (judged by levels attained by Mallory). If Mallory decided to go forward, he placed Irvine's life at considerably increased risk. The upper reaches of the north face of Everest, especially above 28,500 feet, are treacherous indeed, and even if Mallory could get up them, it was by no means certain that Irvine could. And even if he could get up the mountain, could Irvine have gotten back down? Now, at some point, a decision to go ahead puts Irvine's life at a substantially increased risk. Every indication we have of Mallory's characterFootnote ²⁷ is that he was a good, decent man, so many climbers have speculated that he would not have put Irvine's life at such a risk. Yet we know that Mallory was determined to succeed this time and to put everything he had into the effort. How could he not go forward? Yet if he did go forward, he would do so in the face of his obligation to his friend Irvine not to take substantial chances with his life.

Second, Mallory was a family man, with obligations to his wife and children. To go forward beyond a certain point placed these obligations at substantial risk, well beyond the risk endured through attempting a dangerous climb in the first place. No one believes that Mallory would have said to himself that he was now prepared to die in the attempt to climb Everest; he valued his own life and those of his wife and family. But no one is prepared to believe either that he would have given up the struggle, even in the face of terrific odds against him. Again, no one believes that, if it turned out there was not enough oxygen for both men to climb the mountain and to get down, Mallory would have asserted his seniority and taken what oxygen there was. He was not that sort of man. Moreover, no one is prepared to believe that Mallory would have reasoned that climbing the mountain was what mattered, not getting back down; this would have cost him his own life as well as Irvine's, and he does not appear to have been this sort of man either. Nor was he neglectful or reckless with respect to life; after all, he had turned back on the mountain before.

As I have said, part of the fascination of Mallory's case is that, had a decisive point of the sort I have imagined come to pass, Mallory would have had to decide between his obligations to his family and friend and the pursuit of his goal to climb the mountain. The interest for us lies not in how he would have made this decision (though that is interesting) but in its parameters: his obligations, or his goal. Everything we know of the man (which can be separated from the myths surrounding him) leads one to believe that he would not have taken his obligations lightly; yet everything we know of the man who had made climbing Everest a major and abiding goal of his life leads one to believe that he did not take accomplishment of this goal lightly. For us, the interest lies in his choosing between his obligations and his project or goal, and in whether, if he chose the latter, he could rationally justify his breaking the obligations in question. His project or goal represents a contending force against his obligations, and a picture of the moral life that fails to capture this contending force fails to give an account of (nonmoral) things important to a life.

I do not believe we can treat the case as one of a choice between an obligation to himself and his obligations to others. Despite Kant, I do not think there are any obligations to oneself. Besides, inserting such talk is merely a way of trying to make the case conform to the Kantian/Rossian rubric according to which the only thing that can outweigh a moral obligation is another moral obligation.

Nor do I think one can dismiss the case because one thinks that mountain climbing is not in itself important enough to warrant breaking obligations to family and friends. What makes something important in this discussion is whether one adopts it as a goal and the part that the goal plays in one's life; in Mallory's case, one cannot explain his life—indeed, one cannot explain in some sense who he is—while ignoring his goal of climbing Everest. This is partly the point: who Mallory is is in part determined by this goal of his. For he has shaped and molded his life to achieve it, and he lives out the life so molded and shaped.

One final point. All the best evidence today suggests that Mallory did not succeed in climbing Everest; it suggests that he fell on the way up (and not on the way down). He did not achieve his goal. His body was found by the American climber Conrad Anker in 1999, mummified on the north slope of Everest at 27,000 feet. Mallory had fallen from a height above, though not from the summit, and Anker and others tried to reconstruct what happened to him based on his body's position, the evidence of fractured limbs, and so on. Anker sets all this out in his book The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mount Everest, and sets out as well why he believes Mallory would have been unable to climb the north face very far above 28,000 feet.Footnote ²⁸ Does Mallory's failure to achieve his goal (unlike, say, my friend the concert pianist, or Oppenheimer) affect our ability to offer rational justifications in his life for his setting aside certain obligations in order to pursue his goal? I do not see why success, as opposed to the effort to succeed, matters here. For suppose that today we were to discover the camera that Mallory took with him and in it a negative that the cold had preserved of a scene from the top of Everest: would this fact in any way alter how we try to assess the choice between his obligations and his goal?