Free Will and the Tragic Predicament

Abstract This chapter presents an interpretation of Bernard Williams’s significant and substantial contributions on the topic of free will and moral responsibility. Williams’s fundamental objective, it is argued, is to vindicate moral responsibility by way of freeing it from distortions and misrepresentations imposed on it by “the morality system.” Although his earlier work is primarily concerned with the critique of “morality” and its associated understanding of responsibility and blame, Williams nevertheless rejects any extreme or unqualified skepticism. On the contrary, in Shame and Necessity he advances a vindicatory genealogy—one that unmasks the “illusions” and “fantasies” of our current ethical ideas as they relate to agency and responsibility. Any truthful understanding of free and responsible agency, he argues, must acknowledge the ways in which luck and fate are infused into human ethical life. This is the fundamental (“pessimistic”) lesson that we can learn from the ancient Greeks and that Williams seeks to “recover” for us.