This paper probes any possible relation between Bernard Williams
writings on personal identity and his positive views on morality. Williams is silent about such a relation. However, one can be established. Focussing mainly on his earlier writings, this paper reveals a thread weaving together Williams views on personal identity, projects, and morality. Moral philosophy may only concern itself with a finite, embodied, historically-placed, or empirically-compelled agent. This paper traces Williams journey into the world of morality from his reflec- tions on the self or personal identity, assuming that his positive views on moral- ity are ultimately traceable to his notion of personal identity. KEYWORDS. Bernard Williams, personal identity, bodily continuity, projects, morality, character, personal relations INTRODUCTION O ne constant in Bernard Williams writings is the idea of persons as material objects. This idea provides a vital link between his views on personal identity, projects, and morality. Williams insists that only the finite, embodied, and historically-placed agent could be the concern of moral philosophy. 1 A moral agent, to put it differently, is always some par- ticular person. Williams deploys this view in his writings on personal iden- tity, where he insists that bodily continuity is always a necessary criterion of personal identity. This is linked with his idea of projects. Williams emphasizes that projects cannot exist unless the agents occur in this ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ETHICS NETWORK 14, no. 1 (2007): 13-28. 2007 by European Centre for Ethics, K.U.Leuven. All rights reserved. doi: 10.2143/EP.14.1.2021810 Personal identity, projects, and morality in Bernard Williams earlier writings * Joseph Okumu K.U.Leuven * I am grateful to Arnold Burms, Bart Pattyn, and Thomas Nys for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 13 world. 2 Simply put, only material agents relative to the conatus of desire and personal interests can have projects. Williams maintains that, at any given time, what one is living is actually a life, 3 i.e., a singular life, relative to the conatus of desire and other forms of empirical compulsion. Hence, he disallows abstract or impartial conceptions of the self or person. 4 How can an I that has taken on a perspective of impartiality, asks Williams, be left with enough identity to live a life that respects its own interests? 5 Interpersonal relations, then, are possible only among embodied agents. Thus, he also eschews any abstract or impartial theories on morality, which misunderstand the self that enters into moral relations. This paper takes up personal identity and the notion of projects in turn to spur reflection on the implications they create for morality. 1. PERSONAL IDENTITY The problem of personal identity as a modern philosophical problem goes back to John Lockes memory claims. [A]s far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, wrote Locke, so far reaches the identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was then. 6 According to Locke, therefore, the criterion of personal identity is memory or mental states. This picture, the memory criterion, is the object of Williams writings on personal identity. Williams casts serious doubts on the memory crite- rion, insisting on bodily continuity as the criterion of personal identity. 7 Sameness of the body in turn is based on a one-one relation. Williams expresses that relation in Bodily Continuity and Personal Identity 8 as follows: The principle of my argument is, very roughly put, that identity is a one-one relation, and that no principle can be a criterion of identity for things of type T if it relies only on what is logically a one-many or many-many relation between things of type T. What is wrong with the ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES MARCH 2007 14 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 14 supposed criterion of identity for persons which relies only on mem- ory claims is just that being disposed to make sincere memory claims which exactly fit the life of is not a one-one, but a many-one, relation, and hence cannot possibly be adequate in logic to constitute a criterion of identity. Thus, logically, identity is a one-one relation. Any criterion of identity that does not appeal to the one-one relation fails the test of being such a cri- terion. This turns on sameness of the body as the criterion of personal iden- tity, and Williams emphasizes that bodily identity is always a necessary condition of personal identity, a criterion which he takes for granted, assuming that it includes the notion of spatio-temporal continuity. 9 However, Williams does not divorce bodily identity from other fea- tures, and points out that [i]dentity of body is at least not a sufficient con- dition of personal identity, and other considerations, of personal charac- teristics and, above all, memory, must be invoked. 10 He disallows, though, that these personal characteristics or features could be a suffi- cient ground for speaking about personal identity. This point might be put in terms of what matters in identity. This helps dispose of a notorious assumption that these features are of signif- icant weight in identity. Perhaps we can get around this confusion by con- sidering the following example. 11 Why would I be interested in an old friend whom I have not seen for many years? The natural assumption is that my interest in him is relative to the personal characteristics, features in virtue of which I liked him in the past. This belies the idea that iden- tity in bodily terms is in fact what matters. But that is to confuse things. Imagine that I am going to meet this old friend. A man turns up and I assume that he is the one. At the end of the conversation, I feel that thats exactly what I expected. But then he informs me that he is not my old friend and was only pulling my leg. He assures me, however, that he is a much better continuation of my friend who has since become a dread- ful bore and therefore I would not have enjoyed the conversation had he 15 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 J. OKUMUPERSONAL IDENTITY, PROJECTS, AND MORALITY 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 15 been the one. Naturally I find myself disappointed at this revelation. But what is the explanation of this disappointment? I was not only interested in the persistence of certain features but also in the identity. That is, bod- ily identity. So, it is somewhat paradoxical that, even though the charac- teristic features that attracted me to him are no longer there, I am still interested in him, not because of what he is but what he was. What is the relevance of this example and the puzzle it creates? It undermines the objection that bodily continuity is the basis of personal identity. However, this objection seems to have some force. The point is that if we are to speak of identity in terms of what matters, and not what could matter, and we connect the notion of personal identity to what mat- ters to us in general in our relation with other people, bodily continuity does not seem able to provide an answer, because we cannot imagine that we would care about bodily continuation itself. We care rather about some unique meaning that could not be without a unique body. That does not imply that we are really speaking about the body as such we are speak- ing about meaning but a meaning which is embodied and not one that is identical with content. Importantly, the relevant features are always in connection with bod- ily continuity, i.e., as part of something larger in which they are incorpo- rated. 12 According to Williams, personal characteristics, significant as they may be, cannot be prized apart from the body, and require its corroboration. In thus objecting to the memory criterion, Williams invites us to imag- ine a situation in which one persons memory claims 13 are continuous with the dead Guy Fawkes. That is, his memory claims point unanimously to the life-history of Guy Fawkes. Does this mean that he is Guy Fawkes? Williams indicates that at most it points to the similarity of characteristics. That is to say that this person has the same character and the same sup- posed past as Fawkes, i.e., they are exactly similar but not identical. Simi- larity and sameness are two different things. Williams further asks us to imagine a similar situation but now one in which two people are mentally ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES MARCH 2007 16 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 16 or psychologically continuous with Guy Fawkes, and to suppose psycho- logical or mental continuity as a sufficient ground for personal identity. He probes the possibility of logically identifying them with Fawkes. Appealing to the principle that an important judgment should be asserted and denied only on importantly different grounds, he argues that to admit psycholog- ical continuity is to identify either of the two with Guy Fawkes, yet we should have the same ground to identify both of them with him. Accord- ing to Williams, therefore, similarity of memory claims and other personal characteristics cannot be a sufficient condition of personal identity. He thus reinstates the sameness of the body, insisting that the omission of the body takes away all content from the idea of personal identity. 14 Williams is profoundly right in that we cannot make sense of iden- tity without the possibility of the body. The body can be identified in ways in which personal characteristics cannot. If one tries to describe my personality, he or she will quite quickly come to the conclusion that per- haps many people fit that sort of description; if identity is based on the body, then there is guaranteed unicity because nobody can take my spa- tio-temporal location. It is, of course, an empty unicity but it creates other forms of unicity, as it were, the container of relevant features. Central to the notion of bodily continuity is the spatio-temporal con- dition, which the logical principle is meant to satisfy. But the criterion of identity in terms of spatio-temporal continuity is itself open to objection. 15 We can imagine a man splitting, amoeba-like, into two simulacra of him- self and it would not make sense to identify either of the resultant men with the original one. At the same time, it would not make sense to iden- tify both of them with the original man unless they were identical with each other. Hence, the spatio-temporal condition is called into question. It is important in dealing with this objection to bear in mind a one-one cri- terion vis--vis a one-many. Our man may well divide in time and space but that does not mean that the resultant bodies will satisfy the require- ment of continuity in the strict sense of the term. In such cases of fission, the resultant entities cannot be strictly spatio-temporally continuous with 17 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 J. OKUMUPERSONAL IDENTITY, PROJECTS, AND MORALITY 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 17 the original thing as they remain susceptible to the logical possibility of reduplication. So, whereas a one-many criterion of identity might appar- ently fulfil the spatio-temporal condition, it fails to enable us to identify uniquely the thing that is identical with the thing in question. 16 To do that, we need certain features identified with this criterion: for instance, histor- ical reasons. Williams insists that the logical condition goes hand in hand with empirical compulsion, and that is the idea of the self (moral self) that he has in mind. In a number of problem cases in The self and the future, Williams lays stress on the first-personal side, which he identifies with considera- tions of bodily continuity as opposed to the third-personal side, which he identifies with mentalistic considerations. Thus, he presents a case in which someone under whose authority I am confronts me with the prediction: You are going to be physically tortured in the future. This person refers to me directly (as you) and not in neutral terms, i.e., it is I, this particu- lar self who is going to undergo torture. He also informs me that my tor- ture will be preceded by mental derangements and loss of memory. This fact that torture is represented as going to happen to me makes me look to the future with fear irrespective of any psychological changes or loss of memory that will precede it. 17 This example supplies a number of significant points. The first, against the mental criterion, can be expressed as follows. Despite the fact that I am going to undergo extreme mental transformation, I still think that it is going to be me. There is no clear point when I could say I do not care any longer because that is not me. I seem to care all the time in spite of the radical character of the changes. So it seems that we care because we iden- tify ourselves not with the mental content but with one unique meaning which can only be singled out by pointing to ones body: There he is again, our old patient comes in! So, even if one undergoes a mental oper- ation, still ones body functions as the locus of identification. Thus, we should not say too quickly that identity is in our minds. Over and above that, the idea of physical torture points towards a concrete individual. ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES MARCH 2007 18 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 18 Williams also disallows Lockes idea that one can use memory as a cri- terion for oneself, i.e., as what makes a man be himself to himself. 18 Suppose a man to have had previously some set of memories S, and now a different set S1. This should presumably be the situation in which he should set about using the criterion to decide the question of his identity. But this cannot be so, for when he has memories S, and again when he has memories S1, he is in no doubt about his identity, and so the question does not even occur to him. For it to occur to him, he would have to have S and S1 at the same time, and so S would be included in S1, which is contrary to the hypothesis that they are, in the relevant, sense different. 19 According to Williams, this case just demonstrates that [t]here is no way in which memory could be used by a man as a criterion of his own iden- tity. 20 Relative to that, Williams decries that many theorists of personal iden- tity have, (surprisingly), not only ignored that a criterion must be used by someone else, but some have written in terms that similarly require an externalized view of the contents of a mans mind, a view obtainable from no conceivable vantage-point. Theorizing which is in this sense abstract must be vacuous, because this privileged but positionless point of view can mean nothing to us. 21 As he recommends, this view should be abandoned and instead a more realistic approach, one relative to pub- lic criteria, adopted. So ultimately, we cannot omit the body in deciding the criterion of personal identity. At the same time, we should be wary of the external or abstract view in matters pertaining to personal identity. 2. PROJECTS The notion of projects recurs in Bernard Williams earlier writings 22 as do his attempts to identify it morality. 23 As he indicates in the preface to the 1972 edition of Morality, the considerations of the moral kind make 19 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 J. OKUMUPERSONAL IDENTITY, PROJECTS, AND MORALITY 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 19 sense only if they are related to other reasons for action that human beings use, and generally to their desires, needs, and projects. One can claim that these sentiments can be heard in the first preface of Morality. Williams complains that writing about moral philosophy should be a hazardous business, because one runs the risks both of revealing the limitations and inadequacies of ones own perceptions more directly, and misleading people about matters of importance. 24 Although Williams neither mentions directly what counts as important in moral philosophizing nor what adequate perception entails here, 25 he seems to put his finger on the notion of desire as a prime candidate for selection, as one without which moral considerations would lack their sense. On that interpretation, serious moral philosophizing would have to include peoples deepest desires or projects things that count as impor- tant or meaningful in their lives. In other words, matters of importance intimate the human problems that animate philosophy in the first place. These include questions of deep concern, questions with which one iden- tifies. In sum: personal interests or projects. The Makropulos Case 26 goes back to the same question of desires or projects that marked Morality. It advances the thesis that desire is the needlepoint at which life finds its bearing. Ones life, it suggests, can only be truly meaningful if it is propelled into the future by the conatus of desire. Put differently, desire has an inner force which orients one towards what is truly meaningful, or important (to one). For desire to perform this pivotal role in ones life, two conditions must be fulfilled, namely that it should be clearly me and that the state in which I survive should be one which, to me looking forward, will be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims which I now have in wanting to survive at all. 27 The first condition means that the person whose life is in question must occur in this world. As Williams also puts it, if there is no X in a given world then a fortiori there are no [desires]. 28 Williams discusses the first condition via the Lucretian view on death, which takes death as annihilation and hence not as a ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES MARCH 2007 20 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 20 misfortune. According to Williams, however, death can be a misfortune depending on what desires one has. Williams makes a distinction between the desires that an individual can have, namely, categorical and condi- tional desires. He claims that the former have more leverage than the lat- ter as they form the condition of ones existence, while conditional desires hang on the assumption of existence. But the point for Williams is that to view death as misfortune is to point towards ones occurrence in the world. The type of misfortune we are con- cerned with in thinking about Xs death is Xs misfortune and whatever sort of misfortune it may be in a given possible world that X does not occur in it, it is not Xs misfortune then X must occur in the world. 30 The second condition emphasizes the importance of categorical desires or projects in ones life, ones conception of oneself, and relatively ones future. In Persons, Character and Morality projects do not only provide the reason for what happens within the horizon of ones future, but also constitute the condition of there being such a future at all. 31 Moreover, and importantly, they constitute an individuals character, an indispensa- ble element in Williams conception of morality. 31 3. CHARACTER AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS Williams is concerned with the importance of individual character and personal relations in moral experience. As is the case in general, these positive aspects of his moral thought come out more forcefully in his objections to morality as a peculiar institution. 32 They both involve the idea that [a]n individual person has a set of desires, concerns or ... proj- ects which help constitute a character. 33 Individual character concerns the connection between ones projects and ones reason for living at all and Williams aims to emphasize the primacy of the ordinary self, 34 i.e., the idea of an empirically-conditioned self or embodied self. 21 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 J. OKUMUPERSONAL IDENTITY, PROJECTS, AND MORALITY 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 21 Williams constructs his argument for character and personal relations against Kantianism and, in a particular way, Aristotle. He attacks the Kant- ian abstract and impoverished notion of the individual as a moral agent. He writes: Among Kantian elements are, in particular, these: that the moral point of view is specially characterized by its impartiality and its indifference to any particular persons, and that moral thought requires abstraction from particular circumstances and particular characteristics of the parties, including the agent, except in so far as these can be treated as universal features of any morally similar situation; and that the moti- vations of the moral agent, correspondingly, involve a rational application of impartial principle and thus different in kind from the sorts of moti- vations [relative to personal interest]. 35 Williams concedes to the Kantian that these demands need not exclude other more intimate types of relations nor prevent one from act- ing in ways demanded by and appropriate to them, but points out just how difficult they make it to assign to those other relations their signifi- cance and importance in life. The moral point of view demands detach- ment from any particular relations to particular persons. My relationship with my wife and the spontaneous acts arising out of such a relationship which ordinarily have no explanation suddenly require a moral justifica- tion. My attachment to her just because of who she is to me suddenly becomes a moral issue. Williams observes that the Kantian outlook with its impoverished and abstract character of persons as moral agents cannot allow for the importance of individual character and personal relations in moral expe- rience. As he writes: moral philosophys habit, particularly in its Kant- ian forms of treating persons in abstraction from character is not so much a legitimate device for dealing with one aspect of thought, but is rather a misrepresentation, since it leaves out what both limits and helps to define that aspect of thought. Nor can it be judged solely as a theoretical device: this is one of the areas in which ones conception of the self, and one- self, most importantly meet. 36 ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES MARCH 2007 22 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 22 In short, the Kantian perspective fails to attach importance to indi- vidual projects. According to Williams, my projects both condition my existence and interest in the world. The Kantian notion that the world is a kingdom of moral agents would otherwise have no particular claim on my presence or, indeed, interest in it. 37 Thus Williams goes back to the earlier condition that it should be me as an embodied person rather than some neutral self. For as it seems to him, only then can my current projects provide the ground for my inter- est in the world. Impartial selves, on the other hand, lack that specific character constituted by the conatus of desire and other forms of empir- ical compulsion, which are essential ingredients of moral agency and hence personal relations. According to Williams, to insist on impartiality is to ignore the significant role projects play in constituting a character. Once one thinks of what is involved in character, one can see that the Kantians omission of character is the condition of their ultimate insistence on demands of impartial morality, just as it is a reason for finding inadequate their account of the individual. 38 Kantians ignore the role projects play in constituting a character and personal identity. As Williams reiterates, they ignore the idea of one per- sons having a character, in the sense of having projects and categorical desires with which the person is identified. 39 The notion of projects allows Williams to emphasize the importance of personal attachments in moral relations. He insists that such projects can- not be applications of impartial morality as they will express themselves in the world in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartial view, while they also run the risk of offending against it. 40 Accordingly, submits Williams, unless there are deep attachments, there will not be enough sub- stance or conviction in ones life to compel allegiance to life itself. If Kantians rightly invite criticism for their abstractive conception of individuals, why should Aristotle, who, like Williams, conceives of indi- viduals in material terms? Aristotle comes in for his view on friendship. But first Williams point is worth stressing. Williams indicates that the 23 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 J. OKUMUPERSONAL IDENTITY, PROJECTS, AND MORALITY 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 23 significance given to individuality in our own and others lives, would cer- tainly change if there were not between persons indefinitely many differ- ences which are important to us. 41 The many differences Williams has in mind are the differences in character. Difference in character directly plays a role in the concept of moral individuality, particularly in the area of personal relations, as it gives substance to the idea that individuals are not inter-substitutable. 42 Personal relations such as love, friendship, and others, which constitute the very fabric of our daily life, cannot thrive in situations where the uniqueness of the partners is not recognized and respected. Williams chides Aristotle for what he takes to be Aristotles view that a good mans friend was a duplication of himself. This, as Williams points out, is con- nected with another feature of Aristotles view which makes friendship somewhat risky. It has to do with Aristotles inability to reconcile the role of friendship with his ideal of self-sufficiency. 43 However, as Papaluk has pointed out, in Aristotles view, friendship is a relationship in which the love for the other is for his own sake, the kind of love we have for another because of him; love him in his own right. 44 This is the standard case of friendship for Aristotle, and it involves a relationship of affection between two equal and similar adults who have affection because each recognizes and enjoys the virtues of the other. The idea is that a friend is an other self, because according to Aristotle a good person is related to his friend as he is to himself. This notion of other self , which for Aristotle constitutes the fundamental ideal of friendship, finds its best expression in spending time together or in sharing in thinking, i.e., where friends enjoy the company of one another. It amounts to a kind of mutual sharing in perception and thought. Friendship finds its greatest fulfilment when friends are think- ing about the same truths and each recognizes that the other thinks the same as he, and each recognizes that each recognizes this. 45 Though it appears Aristotle does not lay weight on sameness as Williams thinks, Williams is on to something very important when he ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES MARCH 2007 24 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 24 insists on the separateness of persons. Like John Findlay, Williams thinks that the separateness of persons is a basic fact of morals, and he could- nt be more right in that. 4. CONCLUSION I have been probing a possible relation between Williams writings on personal identity and his positive views on morality. Although Williams is silent about such a relation, I have shown that there is thread that weaves together his views on personal identity, projects, and morality. Williams insists that moral philosophy may only concern itself with a finite, embodied, historically-placed, or empirically-compelled agent. I have shown that this idea, which is ultimately traceable to his reflections on the personal identity, resonates with his positive views on morality. One thing that such views do is to rightly point to the idea that moral- ity is about concrete individuals, living all sorts of lives. It does more than that, for it proves the claim that Williams positive views on morality his views of character and personal relations, for instance are intimately con- nected with his view on personal identity. Williams thinks that persons are material objects, hence the idea that only an embodied agent can step into the world of morality. To enter the moral world such an agent, by virtue of being empirically compelled or historically placed, needs projects relative to which she makes sense of her life, the world around her, and morality. WORKS CITED Papaluk, Michael. 2005. Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics: an Introduction. Cambridge: Univer- sity Press. Williams, Bernard. [1972] 1993. Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. With a new preface. Cambridge: University Press. . 1973. Personal Identity and Individuation. Reprinted in Problems of the Self: Philo- sophical Papers 1956-1972. Cambridge: University Press. 25 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 J. OKUMUPERSONAL IDENTITY, PROJECTS, AND MORALITY 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 25 . 1973b. Personal Identity and Bodily Continuity. Reprinted in Problems of the Self. . 1973c. The Self and the Future. Reprinted in Problems of the Self. . 1973d. The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality. In Problems of the Self. . 1973e. Utilitarianism: For and Against. New York: Cambridge University Press. . 1981. Persons, character and morality. Reprinted in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980. Cambridge: University Press. . 1993. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. 3 rd impression with amendments. London: Fontana Press. NOTES 1. 1993, 58. 2. 1973d, 89. 3. 1973d, 94. 4. 1973a, 14. 5. 1993, 69. 6. Locke, J. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P. H. Nidditch (ed.) (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1975) 335. 7. See 1973a; 1973b; 1973c. 8. 1973b, 21. 9. 1973a, 2-3. 10. 1973a, 1. 11. I owe this example and the thought that follows from it to Arnold Burms and Roland Breeur. In their forthcoming article, Persons and Relics (Ratio 2008), Burms and Breeur have developed a line of thought that comes very close to what Williams has in mind. The authors try to show that there is a tension between bodily continuity and mental or psychological continuity for the simple reason that bodily continuity does not guarantee the transmission of relevant fea- tures. 12. See Burms and Breeur. 13. 1973a, 5-10. 14. 1973a, 10. 15. 1973b, 23. 16. 1973b, 24; cf. 1973c, 46ff, seq. 17. 1973c, 63; 1973d, 96. 18. Locke, J. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 10, quoted by Williams, 13. 19. 1973a, 13. 20. 1973a, 13. 21. 1973a, 14. 22. See for instance 1972, 1973d, 1973e, 1981. ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES MARCH 2007 26 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 26 23. That is Williams positive view of morality (what moral philosophy should be) as opposed to what he dismissively refers to as the peculiar institution, especially in the final chapter of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. 24. xvii. 25. He takes up that question in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy in terms of the Socratic question of how one should live, and importance comes up in the closing chapter of that text. 26. 1973d. 27. 1973d, 91. 28. 1973d, 89. 29. 1973d, 88-89. 30. 1981, 11. 31. That is, Williams conception of morality as against the modern conceptions. 32. That is, a particular style of ethical thought which emphasizes the notions of obligation and the purely voluntary. As against that there is what Williams calls ethics which is just moral philosophy by another name. 33. 1981, 5. 34. 1981, 5. 35. 1981, 2. 36. 1981, 19. 37. 1981, 12. 38. 1981, 14. 39. 1981, 14. 40. 1981, 18. 41. 1981, 15. 42. 1981, 15. 43. 1981, 15-16. 44. Papaluk, 264. 45. Papaluk, 259-260. 27 Ethical Perspectives 14 (2007) 1 J. OKUMUPERSONAL IDENTITY, PROJECTS, AND MORALITY 0194 07_Eth_Persp_03_Okumu 11 07 2007 14:11 Pagina 27