Question

Compare and contrast Bernard Williams and Alisdair MacIyntre on the relation between personal identity and ethics

Answer 1

MacIntyre’s theory acquires the character of a conflict that revolves around conceptual pairs such as substantial/procedural ethics, ideal of good life/rules of fair coexistence, teleology/deontology, communitarianism/liberalism. The principal tendency of modern ethics argues that the claim of universality requires detachment of the contents associated with the ethos of specific communities. The questions about life are posed as a matter of responsibility of the socialized individuals, judged through the perspective of each one of them. MacIntyre’s updated account of the virtues works as a critique of the abstract character of modern ethics in favour of an orientation towards the communal ethos. First it is a critique of individualism, which conceives the individual, , as the basic ethical unit, ultimate source of value and bearer of justification. For MacIntyre, the human individual has an inherent complexity which the individualistic point of view is unable to conceive. MacIntyre argues that in terms of modern and contemporary ethics, moral judgments cannot be characterized as being true or false, as it is accepted that these express simply subjective feelings or attitudes of the speaker, contrary to the judgments over facts, which have an objective meaning, as they are empirically verifiable. Since moral judgments cannot be justified by rational criteria, they are faced as objects of an arbitrary choice. Thus, the relation of the self to his/her ends lies in a free act of will, like transportation from one moral point of view to another. MacIntyre’s view that life of human is subjective to medieval conception according to which human to be substantially in via. According to MacIntyre there is a specific narrative unity of human life which is based on conception of life as “quest” or “journey”. Therefore self is related to a character and its unity is defined as unity of the character which is explained by the narration. The very formation of personal identity is based on the question “what is a good life?”, assuming a structured narration as a basis for the formation of personal identity. But the recognition of the fact of pluralism prevents MacIntyre from defining positively what is good. But since we cannot escape the fact that possibility of understanding life is related with a specific time, place and civilization, the quest does not blindly move in a vacuum, but within traditions, since we are bearers of a specific story.

In view of Williams an individual is a material object. And with this view we can put a link between personal identity and ethics. According to him concern of moral philosophy is the only one who is historically placed in society. finite, living, and embodied. A moral individual is a particular person when in his writing of personal identity he says that important criteria for personal identity is bodily continuity. Williams’ conceived of the relation between philosophy and lived ethical experience. He firmly believed that philosophy should speak to that experience, on pain of being “empty and boring”.

He with two experiments shows show that one's psychological continuity is the criterion for personal identity, but in another approach, intuition is that it is one's bodily continuity that is the criterion for personal identity. To resolve this conflict Williams feels one's intuition in the second approach is stronger and if he was given the choice of distributing a punishment and a reward he would want his body-person to receive the reward and the other body-person to receive the punishment, even if that other body-person has his memories.

Williams believes that ethical thinking cannot be systematised without intolerable distortions and losses, because to systematise is, inevitably, to streamline our ethical thinking in a reductionist style: “Theory typically uses the assumption that we probably have too many ethical ideas, some of which may well turn out to be mere prejudices. Our major problem now is actually that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can”