Psychoanalysis and the Idea of a Moral Psychology: Memorial to Bernard Williams’ Philosophy*

I met Bernard Williams when I went to Cambridge over three decades ago: he was my teacher – indeed, he remains my teacher – but we then became colleagues and friends. It is a friendship that spanned – and transformed – my adult life. There is no one I know who more enjoyed gossiping about others, trading anecdotes, offering shrewd insights about what makes people tick; but even more than that Bernard loved philosophical conversation. He delighted in talking philosophy – any time, with anyone – and philosophy came alive in those conversations. It is thus a fitting tribute to the man to have a session of the APA devoted to his philosophy. I shall thus pass over reminiscences, important as they are to the mourning process. Instead, I should like to talk about how Williams’ distinctive approach to ethics leads inevitably and essentially to an engagement with psychoanalytic ideas. This is an unfamiliar claim – both in terms of the general understanding of Williams’ work and in terms of the approach to ethics in the analytic tradition of philosophy. And yet, as I hope to show, Williams’ approach to ethical life requires that we turn to human psychology; and the form of psychology required will have to be of a broadly psychoanalytic bent. We can see Williams working towards this conclusion. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) he raises the possibility that a psychological theory, ‘particularly of a psychoanalytical kind ... will support some ethical conceptions as necessary to human happiness’. But because in that book Williams was primarily concerned to argue against the possibility or aspiration of providing a foundation for morality or ethical life, he confined himself to arguing that psychoanalysis could not provide the sought-after foundation. But what if we abandon the aspiration to provide a foundation? What would a non-foundationalist approach to ethical life look like? This was a question which preoccupied Williams over the last two decades of his life.