Cavell, Williams and the Question of Style in Philosophy by Paolo Babbiotti

Author:Paolo Babbiotti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031651199
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

Here Williams is prodding the idea of moral impartiality. This is one of the many examples of anglophone moral philosophy which imply ‘one thought too many’. Williams’s answer to those moralists is simple and straightforward: I will save my wife because she is my wife. Is this an offense to moral impartiality? Without these attachments we would not be able to live a life that would make sense to us. The final rhetorical question, inserted after the em dash, is meant to express concisely the absurdity of such line of thought—a line of thought that, after that rhetorical question, is abruptly interrupted by Williams. Pushing reflections further would be absurd.

However, let us take the reaction of Williams’s teacher in Oxford, Richard Hare, who in the same period of Moral Luck published his Moral Thinking (1981). In the middle of the book, Hare talks about Williams having challenged him on television on a similar example:

To take a pasteboard example with which I was once confronted by Professor Bernard Williams on television: you are in an air crash and the aircraft catches fire, but you have managed to get out; in the burning plane are, among others, your son and a distinguished surgeon who could, if rescued, save many injured passengers’ lives; to say nothing of those whose lives he would save in his subsequent career. You have time to rescue only one person.

It is hard to make Williams’s example realistic. How do you know he is so distinguished a surgeon—perhaps he was only shooting a line when you struck up an acquaintance in the departure lounge? Has he got his tools with him, and can he do any more for the injured people than the first aid which the crew are trained to give (which probably prescribes keeping them warm and immobile and giving some common drugs which, we hope, they managed to extract from the aircraft)? How promising is your son’s future (he can probably look forward to a greater span of it than the surgeon)?46

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