Luck, Value, and Commitment―Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams

Luck, Value, and Commitment comprises eleven new essays which engage with, or take their point of departure from, the influential work in moral and political philosophy of Bernard Williams (1929-2003). Various themes of Williams's work are explored and taken in new directions.

In their essays, Brad Hooker, Philip Pettit, and Susan Wolf are all concerned with Williams's work on the viability or wisdom of systematic moral theory, and his criticism, in particular, of moral theory's preoccupation with impartiality. David Enoch, Joseph Raz, and R. Jay Wallace address Williams's work on moral luck, and his insistence that moral appraisals bear a disquieting sensitivity to various kinds of luck. Wallace makes further connections between moral luck and the 'non-identity problem' in reproductive ethics.

Michael Smith and Ulrike Heuer investigate Williams's defence of 'internalism' about reasons for action, which makes our reasons for action a function of our desires, projects, and psychological dispositions. Smith attempts to plug a gap in Williams's theory which is created by Williams's deference to imagination, while Heuer connects these issues to Williams's accommodation of 'thick' ethical concepts as a source of knowledge and action-guidingness. John Broome examines Williams's less-known work on the other central normative concept, 'ought'.
Jonathan Dancy takes a look at Williams's work on moral epistemology and intuitionism, comparing and contrasting his work with that of John McDowell, and Gerald Lang explores Williams's work on equality, discrimination, and interspecies relations in order to reach the conclusion, similar to Williams's, that 'speciesism' is very unlike racism or sexism.

Ulrike Heuer is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Leeds University. Before coming to Leeds, she was an Assistant Professor in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and held visiting positions at the philosophy departments of Columbia University and Barnard College. In 2008-9, she was a faculty fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard; and in 2003-4 at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University. Her main interests are in theories of practical reasons and values, and in normative ethics.


Gerald Lang was born and raised in London, and spent his student years in Bristol and Oxford. He held teaching appointments in Reading and Oxford before arriving in Leeds in 2005. He has wide-ranging interests in moral and political philosophy.