Bernard Williams: Encyclopedia II - Bernard Williams - His life

Bernard Williams - His life

Williams was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, the only son of a civil servant. He was educated at Chigwell School and read Greats (Classics) at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating in 1951 with the rare distinction of a congratulatory first-class honours degree, the highest award at this level in the British university system, he spent his year-long national service in the Royal Air Force (RAF), flying Spitfires in Canada.

He met his future wife, Shirley Brittain-Catlin, the daughter of political scientist and philosopher George Catlin and novelist Vera Brittain, while on leave in New York, where she was studying at Columbia University. At the age of 22, after winning a Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, Williams returned to England with Shirley to take up the post — though not before she'd had an affair with four-minute-miler Roger Bannister [5] — and they were married in 1955. Shirley Williams, as she became known, was elected as a Labour Member of Parliament, then crossed the floor as one of the "Gang of Four" to become a founding member of the SDP, a centrist breakaway party. She was later ennobled, becoming Baroness Williams of Crosby, and remains a prominent member of the Liberal Democrats.

Williams left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political ambitions, finding a post first at University College London and then at Bedford College, while his wife worked as a journalist for the Financial Times. For 17 years, the couple lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife. During this time, described by Williams as one of the happiest of his life, [6] the marriage produced a daughter, Rebecca, but the development of his wife's political career kept the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal values — Williams was a confirmed atheist, his wife a devout Catholic — placed a strain on their relationship, which reached breaking point when Williams had an affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian Quentin Skinner. The Williams' marriage was dissolved in 1974, and Williams and Skinner were able to wed, a marriage that produced two sons.

Williams became Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1967, then served as Provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1979 until 1987, when he moved to the University of California, Berkeley to take up the post of Sather Professor of Classics, because, he told a British newspaper, he could barely afford to buy a house in central London on his salary as an academic. His public outburst at the low salaries in British universities made his departure appear part of the brain drain, as the British media called it, which was his intention. He told The Guardian in November 2002:

I now regret my departure was so public. I was persuaded that there was a real problem about academic conditions and that if my departure was publicised this would bring these matters to public attention. It did a bit, but it made me seem narky, and when I came back again in three years it looked rather absurd. I came back for personal reasons — it's harder to live out there with a family than I supposed. [7]

He returned to England in 1990 to become White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, a post he held until 1996, when he was appointed Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at Berkeley, where he remained until his death.

In addition to academic life, Williams chaired and served on a number of Royal Commissions and government committees. In the 1970s, he chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, which reported in 1979 that:

Given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that one can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any hint at all that pornography was present in the background.

The Committee's report was influenced by the liberal thinking of John Stuart Mill, a philosopher greatly admired by Williams, who used Mill's principle of liberty to develop what Williams called the "harm condition," whereby "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone." [8] Williams concluded that, according to the harm condition, pornography could not be shown to be harmful and that "the role of pornography in influencing society is not very important ... to think anything else is to get the problem of pornography out of proportion with the many other problems that face our society today". The committee reported that, so long as children were protected from seeing it, adults should be free to read and watch pornography as they saw fit. However, Margaret Thatcher's first administration put an end to the liberal agenda on sex, and nearly put an end to Williams' political career too; he was not asked to chair another public committee for almost 15 years.

Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining drug abuse in 1971; gambling in 1976–78; the role of British private schools in 1965–70; and social justice in 1993–94.

"I did all the major vices," he said. [9]

Williams was famously sharp in discussion. Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle once said of him that "[h]e understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your sentence." [10]

He was knighted in 1999 and became a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He sat on the board of the English National Opera and wrote the entry for "opera" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Williams died on June 10, 2003, while on holiday in Rome. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. He is survived by his wife, Patricia, their two sons, Jacob and Jonathan, and Rebecca, his daughter from his first marriage.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "His life", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki