Moral Incapacity

Author(s): Bernard Williams

Source: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 93 (1993), pp. 59-70
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Aristotelian Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545165
Accessed: 24-08-2018 00:30 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Aristotelian Society, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 IV*-MORAL INCAPACITY

by Bernard Williams

J am not concerned with an incapacity to engage or be engaged in

moral life, but, on the contrary, with incapacities that are them-
selves an expression of the moral lifel: the kind of incapacity that
is in question when we say of someone, usually in commendation
of him, that he could not act or was not capable of acting in certain
ways.
There are first-personal and third-personal aspects of this
question, and one of my concerns will be to relate them to one
another. Just for that reason, it may be helpful to mention at the
beginning, chiefly to get it out of the way, a kind of case in which
the first-personal aspect cannot come up: the kind of case in which
A could not have done a certain (kind of) thing because he could
not have thought of it, that it would never enter his head. A remark
to this effect does not have to be a compliment, but it certainly can
be. However, the question whether it is a compliment or not is less
important than the question whether the incapacity is related to what
sort of person the agent is: as we may say, to his character. This will
be true of other, more central, examples as well. The difference
between an incapacity being a matter of character and its not being
so is in itself neutral between the favourable and the unfavourable.
Being incapable of a certain course of conduct, in the relevant sense,
and more particularly being incapable of thinking of it, may indeed
be a virtue, but it can also be a failing, for instance a kind of
feebleness.

*Meeting of the Aristotelian Society held in the Senior Common Room, Birkbeck College,
London on 23rd November 1992 at 8.15 p.m.

I I use the term 'moral' throughout, and the discussion applies to the characteristics that
people do, if vaguely, call 'moral'. There are, indeed, some familiar conceptions central
to morality which imply that there cannot be such a thing as a moral incapacity at all: I
have ignored those issues. I have also ignored the much more interesting consideration
that a lot of what is said applies to dispositions that are not in a narrow sense 'moral' at
all.

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
60 BERNARD WILLIAMS

In some cases where a certain course of action could not occur

to someone, the explanation may be historical or sociological. I do
not mean the obvious sense in which Alexander the Great could not
have thought of building a nuclear power station, but rather the
sense in which (as seems to me to be true) it was historically
impossible that Alexander the Great should think of cancelling the
expedition to the East in order to give the money to the poor. Such
a project was not, for cultural reasons, on his moral map. By contrast
with this, it may be a distinctive characteristic of a particular
individual that he could not think of a certain course of action, or,
if it crossed his mind or was mentioned to him, he would never for
a moment consider it. This is one form that moral incapacity can
take. However, having mentioned this quite significant sort of case,
I am not going to address it from now on. For the rest of this paper,
I am concerned with a more complex type of moral incapacity that
does not take this form.
I claim that remarks about moral incapacities, about what people
cannot or could not do in this sense, are what they seem. These are
indeed incapacities, and they are connected with prediction and
understanding in some of the same ways as physical, and other
psychological, incapadities are. In particular, they sustain
inferences of the form esse ad posse and, significantly, non posse
ad non esse. At the same time, they are of course special
incapacities, which differ from others. These differences are
particularly related to the idea, which I have already mentioned,
that the incapacities in question are expressive of, or grounded in,
the agent's character or personal dispositions.
I do not intend the notion of 'character' itself to be explanatory
in this discussion; it helps, if at all, in locating what has to be
explainied. It itself stretches beyond the matter of incapacities, of
course, and brings in ideas not just of what an agent can or can't
do, but of what he is typically eager or reluctant to do for certain
kinds of reason. Indeed, it might well be a mark of someone's
character that there was nothing that in this sense he was incapable
of doing. So 'character' does not contribute much to the explanation
of moral incapacity; perhaps, rather, if we can shed light on moral
incapacity we can shed some light on the idea of 'character'.
There is of course scepticism, some of it justified, about the idea
of character. It is a prime target of scepticism about a 'fixed' or

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 MORAL INCAPACITY 61

'substantial' self or subject, when that is not merely scepticism

directed at Cartesianism. But that point need not undermine the
present discussion. The sceptic about character should consider the
status of these incapacities; considerations about the incapacities
can focus questions about the reality of character.
In the third-person cases, there are connections between 'he
can't' and 'he won't', and between 'he couldn't have' and 'he
didn't'. Primafacie these function as with other kinds of incapacit
as I suggested when I mentioned the esse ad posse inferences. Ther
is also a first-personal 'I can't', which is concerned with the same
kind of subject matter as third-person ascriptions of moral
incapacity, and is related to deliberation. The 'I can't' may express
the conclusion of a deliberation: my practical question has been
whether to 0, and after rehearsing the moral and other reasons I
come to the conclusion that I cannot 4-as I may equally say, it is
not something I can do, it is ruled out, it is impossible. When I am
considering more broadly what to do in a given situation, and not
just whether to o, 'I can't' may express a sub-conclusion of my
deliberation; ruling out one line of action, it leads me to the
conclusion that I will or must do something else.
When the conclusion is 'I must', this may simply be a con-
sequence of 'I can't'-I had only two alternatives, and the other is
ruled out. In other cases, slightly differently, 'I must' is the primary
thought, and 'I can't' represents the ruling out of all the alternatives
to what (I have concluded) I must do. When Luther famously said
'hier steh' ich, ich kann nicht anders', he meant that having reached
this position, there were indefinitely many things he could now not
do. I shall ignore from now on these various refinements, and for
the most part just refer to 'I can't' in the deliberative context as
expressing conclusions.
When 'I can't' expresses a deliberative conclusion, it is tempting
to think that it (and the other related modal expressions) have some
different, normative sense; that they are particularly emphatic
members of the family of 'should' and 'ought', and indeed do not
represent incapacities at all. This suggestion is fortified by a number
of assumptions, which focus on such points as that 'can't' and
'must' as deliberative conclusions are alternatives to 'should not'
and 'should'; since these latter are not predictive, the argument may
go, neither are the former. Again, it may be argued that a

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 62 BERNARD WILLIAMS

deliberative conclusion is a decision and a decision is not a

discovery. The deliberative conclusion is based, as decisions indeed
are, on considerations of the good, the useful, the obligatory and so
on, and not on psychological information about myself, which is
presumably what I would need in order to have a basis for ascribing
an incapacity to myself.
Some real questions are raised by these considerations, and I
shall come to some of them later, but I am going to suggest that
their conclusion is basically a mistake. 'Can't' is, once again,
'can't', and it has the same sort of implications as it does in third
person cases for the question whether the world will contain my
doing the thing in question. It is indeed true, and important, that as
expressing a deliberative conclusion, it rests on considerations of
the good and the useful and so on, and not just (if at all) on
psychological information that the deliberator has about himself. I
am going to suggest that, when we understand better what kind of
incapacity is in question here, we shall see that this is what we
should expect.
A moral incapacity belongs to the species: incapacity to do a
certain thing knowingly. With a straightforward physical
incapacity, by contrast, if I cannot 0, then there is no event that
world will contain that will be a 0-ing by me.2 If Rambo cannot li
a 500 lb weight, then he will not lift it, period. If it turns out that
does lift it when hypnotised, or when excited by the presence of th
enemy, then it is not true he cannot lift it; he can lift it, under tho
conditions. This absoluteness applies to many psychological
incapacities as well. If I cannot in my head work out in 10 seconds
the product of two numbers each of which consists of five different
digits, then that is something I shall not be doing, however the task
is represented to me and whatever the conditions under which I am
invited to do it.
Other incapacities, however, take the form of one's being unable
to 0 if one knows that one is 0-ing. These might include such things
as walking a narrow plank over the Avon gorge; having a relaxed
and friendly conversation with one's spouse's lover; and eating
roast rat. (This phenomenon must be distinguished from another,

2 So long as I retain the incapacity, of course: see below.

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 MORAL INCAPACITY 63

that of being unable to 4 if one is thinking about one's 4-ing. In

many cases of which that is true, it may still be the case that I need
to know that I am 4-ing. The trick is to combine knowing what I
am doing with not thinking about it, and the kinds of techniques
discussed in Zen and the Art of Archery, for instance, are directed
to just that end.) Where my incapacity to 4 is the incapacity to 4
knowingly, it does not follow, of course, from my having the
incapacity that the world will not contain any instance of my 4-ing,
but only that it will not contain any instance of my 4-ing while
knowing that this is what I am doing.
None of the examples of this sort I have mentioned so far is yet
a moral incapacity. The incapacity to have a friendly and relaxed
conversation with one's spouse's lover could be a moral incapacity,
if, very roughly, it were grounded in the agent's thinking that such
a thing would be a shaming, dishonest, lax or grotty thing to do. But
it is not a moral incapacity if, thinking no such thing, the agent finds,
or knows that s/he would find, that s/he would be too angry or
embarrassed to carry it off.
This suggests a basis of the difference. In this last kind of
case-and the same is manifestly true of the Avon gorge and the
roast rat-if I have this incapacity, then if I were to try to do the
thing in question, I would fail. But in the pure case of moral
incapacity-I say 'pure', because there are certainly, and
importantly, mixed cases-it is not necessarily true that if I tried I
would fail. If I tried, I might well succeed. The moral incapacity is
revealed in the fact that for the appropriate kinds of reasons, I will
never try.
This point might lead, in turn, to a suggestion: that moral
incapacity consists in the agent's not being able (even) to try. Or,
again, it might be suggested that what such an agent cannot do is
choose to do the things in question. But this does not offer any
account of the distinction between moral incapacities and other
incapacities to 4 knowingly. A preliminary point is that in the
following kind of formulation:
A cannot choose/try to o

'4' has to occur intensionally (the action is not specified as in

'Hobbes spent years trying to do something mathematically im-
possible'.) But the states reported in such formulations need no

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
64 BERNARD WILLIAMS

more be moral incapacities than those introduced originally in 'A

cannot 4'. The dizzy, squeamish, or embarrassed agents who were
the subjects of the last examples might equally be incapable of
trying to do the acts which, for these reasons, they cannot perform,
and since they may know this, they may not be able to choose them
either. Of course, it is true that the way in which vertigo or
embarrassment excludes trying is different from the way in which
the reasons associated with moral incapacity rule it out. But that is
simply the difference we have noticed already and which we are
trying to explain; it is not explained by shifting the incapacity from
doing to trying.
To understand moral incapacity, we have to consider more
closely the way in which reasons are connected with the incapacity.
The distinctions we need are not caught simply by the idea that in
the different cases different considerations are present to the agent
We have explanations, or elucidations, of the following kinds
He cannot eat rat because he finds it disgusting

He cannot walk the plank across the gorge because he is subject to

vertigo
and these are not merely extended by examples such as
He could not gossip to reporters about his wife's problems (would
be incapable of doing so) because he would find it disloyal, shabby
etc.

In a general way, of course, they are all alike. In all the examples,
the explanation connects the incapacity to a mode in which the
action, or an attempt at the action, or the mere idea of the action,
presents itself to the agent. Equally, in all these cases, it may be
through imagining 4-ing, or trying to imagine 4-ing, or imagining
trying to 4, that the agent discovers that he cannot 4. Again, the
similarities between them enable them all to be used in similar ways
in third-personal explanations and inferences. But there is a
difference between moral incapacity and the others, which is to be
found in the way in which the agent's incapacity is connected to the
mode in which the action presents itself to him; there is a
corresponding difference in the way in which he discovers that
cannot 4 'through' imagining 4-ing.
In the cases of vertigo or disgust the incapacity presents itself to
the agent through an imagined encounter. It may do so also in the

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 MORAL INCAPACITY 65

case of moral incapacity, but if it does so, it is as part of a more

complex process. I imagine the act as I might in deliberating
whether to do it. It is the process of deliberation that actually bears
the weight here, and it is at the centre of the moral incapacity. For
the same reason, the fact that an act would be (in my view) disloyal
or shabby is a considerationfor me in deciding not to do it. The fact
that an act would disgust me can be such a consideration. But where
the act is so disgusting that I cannot do it, then the fact that it is
disgusting does not function in that way: the question of deciding
not to do it does not come up, or is cut off; or, if I do decide to try,
the incapacity will make me fail. (This is the difference that we
noticed earlier, in discussing the relations between incapacity and
trying.) In the case of moral incapacity, my deliberative conclusion
not to do the act, reached on the basis of these totally decisive
considerations, just is the conclusion that I cannot do it.
Another way of putting the difference is that other kinds of
incapacity, if known to me, are inputs into decision. They constitute
the limits within which I decide: if I know I cannot 0, then 0-ing is
not one of the courses that can enter my deliberative field of choice.
For a given deliberation, a particular moral incapacity can function
in that way: as I remarked earlier 'I cannot do that' can function as
an excluder, on the way to the conclusion of what I should do. But
wherever this is so, it introduces the idea of a deliberation upstream
from that one, of which the 'I can't' corresponding to that moral
incapacity would itself be the conclusion. So far from the
deliberative 'I can't' representing something different from an
incapacity, its role as a conclusion provides the best understanding
of the distinctiveness of moral incapacity.
Of course this does not mean that for every such incapacity that
we can rightly ascribe to an agent, he must have deliberated in such
terms; indeed, in the case of incapacity through the silence of certain
courses of action, which I mentioned at the beginning, it could not
be so. But, beyond those cases, the idea of a possible deliberation
by the agent in such terms gives us the best picture of what the
incapacity is. Indeed, it may even give us knowledge or well-
grounded belief; if we want to know what exactly an agent can and
cannot do in this sense, we need to know how that agent would
deliberate in given circumstances. It is a summary of the differences
between moral and other kinds of incapacity that it should be this

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
66 BERNARD WILLIAMS

way round. We understand the agent's moral incapacity just

because we understand how 'I can't' could be the conclusion of his
deliberation; in the other cases, it is the other way round, and we
conclude from our knowledge of his incapacities how he will
deliberate. This explains, too, how moral incapacity can be to an
indefinite degree fine-grained. If we know an agent well, we may
be more certain that he could not do this very specific thing, than
that he could not do anything of a certain general character; or, even
if we are clear that he could not do anything that he saw as having
that character-that it was disloyal, for instance-we may be
clearer that he will see this particular act as having that character,
and will deliberate accordingly, than we are about any more general
class of acts that he could not do for this reason.
All this comes about because the dispositions that are the ground
of the agent's incapacities are focussed on to a particular case
through the ways in which the features of the case impress them-
selves on the agent-ways that are best represented by a
deliberation, even though the deliberation need not consciously
occur. It is because of this, too, that when there is a conscious
deliberation, which issues in 'I can't', that conclusion can present
itself to the agent at once as a decision, and as a discovery. It is a
decision, as being indeed the conclusion of a deliberation whether
to do that thing. But it presents itself to the agent also as a discovery,
because the underlying dispositions have not before been focussed
through and on to that very conjunction of features. The incapacity
to do this thing is an expression of those dispositions as applied to
this situation through this very deliberation. In one sense, the highly
specific incapacity comes about through the deliberation: indeed,
in some cases, it might not be true that the agent could not 0, if he
had not deliberated. But this is not always so, and even when it is,
it is not unequivocally true that the incapacity comes about through
the deliberation: if the deliberation is sound and convincing, it is so
because it is the best expression of dispositions that were there
already. In creating an application, the deliberation reveals a
potentiality.
Of course there is also room here for scepticism. On a more
sceptical reading, we may say, rather, that in seeming convincing,
a deliberation of this kind seems to yield a discovery. There is no
doubt that, sometimes, this is what we should say; it also explains

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 MORAL INCAPACITY 67

the first-personal facts. But there are limits to that kind of

scepticism, because it does not explain our correctness, so far as it
exists, in the third-personal mode. If we can know that this is how
this agent will decide (and it may not be a case of a mechanical or
simple application of a disposition), then there was something to
be discovered by the agent in concluding that (as we knew) he could
not do the thing in question.
We have been tracking correspondences between the agent's
deliberative conclusion, 'I can't', and the ascription to that agent
by someone else of a moral incapacity. The correspondences are
based on the point that the other person recognizes the incapacity
because he or she understands the agent's dispositions and the way
in which they might be focussed on such an action, for instance
through just such a deliberation. In this sense, 'he can't' is the
third-personal analogue of the deliberative conclusion 'I can't'.
However, perhaps we should not say without qualification that
this use of 'he can't' is the third-personal analogue of the first-
personal deliberative conclusion. There is another claimant for that
role, a normative 'he can't' that is something like a stronger version
of 'he shouldn't'. The construction is familiar, too, in the second
person, as when we say 'you can't do that', meaning that the
relevant reasons tell overwhelmingly against the action. The mark
of these uses will be that non posse ad non esse does not apply:
from 'he can't 4', in the sense that there are overwhelming reasons
against his 0-ing, it does not follow that he will not 4. He may not
share the speaker's conception of what reasons are overwhelming;
or he may share that conception, but not see that the reasons are so
in this case.
The normative sense of 'he can't' or 'you can't' certainly exists.
As a matter of linguistic fact-or so it seems to me-the form is
resisted in a context in which it is also being said that the agent will
not actually so act, the preference being for 'he (or you) must not'.
If that is true, it may show something about the strength of the
connections between 'can't' and factual impossibility. The
important point, however, is that in the second and third persons
there is room for a split between the normative and the predictive
that cannot occur in the first person. My account is that the agent's
'I can't' has the force of both a deliberative conclusion drawn from
reasons, and a statement about what the world will contain in the

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
68 BERNARD WILLIAMS

way of actions intentionally done by him. In this respect 'I can't'

contrasts with 'I should not'. If the agent concludes 'I should not
4' and nevertheless does 4, that does not show his conclusion to
have been a mistake; if his conclusion was 'I can't 4', then he must
recognize this as a mistake if he in fact knowingly 4's.
'I can't' recognizes an incapacity in the light of deliberative
reasons. 'He can't', in the sense in which it has predictive force,
ascribes the same thing, and in this sense it is the third-personal
analogue. At the same time, it is clear why there should be in the
third and second persons a sense for which there is no room in the
first person, one in which the other person conducts the agent's
deliberation for him and possibly arrives at a different conclusion.
Moral incapacities have relations to impossibility, but those
relations are limited. In this they are like all other capacities and
incapacities. If A cannot lift 100 lb weights, this does not mean that
it is impossible that he should have been able to, or that it is
impossible that he will ever be able to. There are many incapacities,
of various kinds, for which it need not be true that there is no
possible world in which the agent does the thing in question; indeed,
the actual world may some time include the agent's doing the thing
in question-if, that is to say, he loses his incapacity. The same is
true for moral incapacity. The agent cannot of course lose the
incapacity at will: but that is not because it is peculiarly moral
incapacity, but just because nothing one can lose at will is an
incapacity. Moral incapacity is explained through the will, as I have
tried to show, but it is not subject to the will.
In these respects, there is a difference between moral and other
incapacities, but it follows simply from their character as it has
already been described. With other incapacities, while the agent
cannot remove them at will, he may coherently set about trying to
remove or overcome them, but with a moral incapacity he cannot
do this, because a fundamental way in which a moral incapacity
expresses itself is in the refusal to undertake any such project. A
moral incapacity in the sense under discussion is one with which
the agent is identified. Of course an agent may come to see a moral
incapacity of his as something with which he is no longer identified,
and try to overcome it. But so soon as this is really his state of
mind-as opposed to the familiar phenomenon of merely occurrent
resentment at one's moral identity-then he has already lost the

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 MORAL INCAPACITY 69

moral incapacity: not necessarily in the sense that he can now do

the thing in question, but in the sense that if he cannot, it is no longer
a moral incapacity, but rather one that is merely psychological.
These might be called questions of the endurance of a moral
incapacity. They are not easy to answer, but the problems are for
the most part no different from those that arise with other kinds of
incapacity. A different question concerns a moral incapacity's
scope. What I have in mind are the limits of the agent's endurance
that may be met by any of his moral characteristics under threat or
other extreme circumstances. It is plausible to say, with the
pessimist, that if having a moral incapacity implies that there are
no circumstances at all in which the agent would knowingly do the
thing in question, then there are no moral incapacities. Ingenious
coercion or brutal extremity can almost always produce such
circumstances. We do not have to say with the cynic that the same
holds for rewards. The truth seems to be that moral incapacities are
meant to be proof against rewards; and if an agent is not proof
against rewards, then we may not be amazed, but we do say that,
after all, we were wrong to ascribe the incapacity to him. He is one
who, after all, could act in that way, because, faced with that reward,
he did do so. If, however, an agent does under coercion what we
said he could not do, this does not necessarily show that we were
wrong in ascribing the incapacity to him: esse ad posse does not
apply without qualification.
If this is a reasonable view of the way things are, the explanation
will lie, once more, in the basic connections between moral
incapacity and deliberation. All the considerations to which agents
attach importance, which matter to them, and which figure in their
deliberations, have their limits under extreme coercion: there comes
a point at which the agents' normal deliberative priorities are
suspended. This is not because they become incapable of
deliberation. That may be true, but if it is true, their action
have a different character, and there will be another kind of re
why those actions do not count, for instance in relation to moral
incapacities. The point is rather that no-one, familiarly enough, is
expected to resist, or expects to resist, certain ultimate kinds of
coercion, though what degree of resistance should be shown to what
kinds of coercion of course varies, and that point itself applies to
the assessment of moral incapacity. If I say of a certain secret agent,

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
70 BERNARD WILLIAMS

for instance, that he is incapable o

count against what I say if he were to go over to the enemy as soon
as they threatened him. The moral incapacities of secret agents have
to apply, up to a point, in situations in which they are threatened; if
that were not so, those incapacities would not determine as much
as they have to determine. In more domesticated cases, however, if
a threat (in itself, perhaps, similar to that applied to the secret agent)
elicits the actions that the agent was supposed to be incapable of
doing, that may not falsify the claim of his incapacity. The scope
of moral incapacity, as with all considerations of deliberative
priority and of character, is limited by a sense of the boundaries of
terror beyond which human beings cannot be expected to lead their
moral lives at all.

Corpus Christi College

Oxford OX] 4JF

This content downloaded from 103.231.241.233 on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:30:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms