Index Errans

person in Moral injury

1929 2003

Bernard Williams

Moral injuryAgent-regret

in Moral injury

British moral philosopher (Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, 1967–79; Provost of King's College Cambridge, 1979–87; Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at Berkeley, 1988–2003; White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, 1990–96). The most significant English-language moral philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, central to the late-twentieth-century recovery of virtue ethics and to the critique of post-Kantian universalist moral theory.

Stake§

Williams's work is openly anti-systematic moral philosophy and particularist — committed to the irreducibility of particular moral relations, to the moral significance of the emotions, and to the inadequacy of contemporary Anglo-American moral theory's insistence that morality is finally a matter of universal obligation. The stake is philosophical and pedagogical: a long argument that the moral life is what we live and that philosophy's job is to understand it rather than to legislate for it from outside. The position is consonant with Aristotelian and Stoic ethics and is the principal philosophical inheritance of Nancy Sherman's work.

Williams is not a writer on combat, veterans, or trauma; his relevance to the moral-injury corpus is via the technical concepts in Shame and Necessity (UC Press, 1993) that have done structural work in making the construct philosophically intelligible. Three of those concepts — agent-regret, moral luck, and the rehabilitation of shame as a moral emotion proper rather than a mere social-pressure response — are the philosophical machinery that the moral-injury literature operates with whether or not it cites the source.

The closest contemporary application of his work to moral injury is Nancy Sherman's Afterwar, which cites him explicitly. Wiinikka-Lydon's philosophical critique of the clinical moral-injury literature is also broadly Williams-derived, even where the more proximate philosophical interlocutor is Iris Murdoch. For the corpus, Williams is the philosophical precursor worth reading first.

Works in this corpus§

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excerpts

Even Oedipus, who was unaware that the people who got in his way were his father and mother and so could not be blamed, had reason for what could be called agent-regret — the regret one experiences as the agent who caused harm, even when one is not strictly to blame.
— Shame and Necessity (1993)

[[entity:bernard-williams|Williams]]'s technical concept of [[concept:agent-regret|agent-regret]] — distinct from ordinary regret in that it is keyed to one's agency rather than one's culpability. The construct is the philosophical precursor to several moves in the moral-injury literature: the way [[entity:jonathan-shay|Shay]] takes seriously the rage of soldiers whose betrayal was not strictly their fault, the way [[entity:brett-litz|Litz]] counts witnessing alongside perpetration, the way [[entity:nancy-sherman|Sherman]] argues that moral emotions register the moral facts rather than reflect on the agent's character.

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