Bernhard Williams dead

Philosophers, Williams said, "repeatedly urge us to view the world sub specie aeternitatis, but for most human purposes that is not a good species to view it under". His honesty, subtlety and scepticism compelled him to eschew monolithic system-building, eluding labels and being labelled.

This has led some to query what exactly his contribution consists of, but they have simply missed the point. Wanting to find a new way of doing philosophy, Williams simultaneously exploited and undermined established philosophical boundaries. He deconstructed, as Derrida would do if he were cleverer and more pledged to truth. Exhuming moral philosophy from a no-man's-land of logical, ahistorical analysis, into a sort of moral anthropology, he saw moral codes and writings as essentially embedded in history and culture, and questioned the whole "peculiar institution" of morality, which he considered a particular (modern western) development of the ethical.

So nuanced is his treatment of moral relativism as to incur speculation over how far he himself was a relativist. But he also infuriated philosophers by applauding the Enlightenment aspiration to scientific objectivity and "the absolute conception of reality".

Urging the neglected claims of emotion, motivation and sheer luck in morality, the importance of "internal" as well as "external" reasons, Williams extended moral philosophy from an over-theorised obsession with moral obligation into the Hellenic latitude of ethics - living a whole life well. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism, usually seen as opposite moral theories, were equally his target, for each similarly claiming objective universality and a single calculable principle for morality. (Utilitarianism ceased to be the paradigm moral theory after his critique.)