Practical Deliberation as Radically First-Personal

The starting point of Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) is Socrates’s question: How should one live? As Williams remarks, the ‘should’ in this question relates to reasons for acting: ‘Should draws attention to the reasons I have for acting one way rather than another’ (1985, 18). Living, of course, isn’t a kind of action, but a general reflective deliberation on how to act (on what sorts of action to go in for) is at least an essential component of deliberation on how to live, and it is because of this that ‘How should one live?’ is a question asking after reasons. In Williams’s words, ‘Socrates’ question, then, means “how has one most reason to live?” ‘ (1985, 19).

In the chapters that follow, Williams spells out a variety of ways in which he thinks philosophers’ attempts to answer Socrates’s question come unstuck. And some, though by no means all, of his arguments rely for their force on Williams’s own conception of practical reasons. On Williams’s conception of a reason for acting, there are special difficulties faced by anyone who tries to give reasons to another person for acting in a certain way. Insofar as moral philosophers are attempting to justify certain ways of giving people reasons for acting, their task will appear daunting or even hopeless to the extent that people are free simply to rebut any practical reasons offered them. Or so it can appear on Williams’s account.

Two crucial and interrelated features of Williams’s conception of a practical reason are: first, his idea of practical deliberation as radically first-personal, and second, the role he assigns to the agent’s desires. Let us consider these in turn.

In his criticism of Kant’s argument for the impartiality of both theoretical and practical deliberation, Williams claims that the argument only works for theoretical deliberation, writing, ‘It fails to apply to practical deliberation, and to impose a necessary impartiality on it, because practical deliberation is first-personal, radically so, and involves an I that must be more intimately the I of my desires than this account allows’ (1985, 67). Why is practical deliberation radically first-personal?