Bernard Williams, who will be played by Michael Caine when they make Philosophy: The Movie

Class 4.1 Williams - The Makropulos Case

In Unit 1 we got started thinking about mortality and immortality, tried to understand what if anything is bad for us about death, and tried to think about how that might bear on the choice between mortal and immortal lives. Now in Unit 2, we are going to focus on a challenge to immortality that has received a lot of attention in philosophy in the last fifty years - raised by the philosopher Bernard Williams, who was in turn inspired by his reading of the play ‘The Makropulos Case’.

Bernard Williams

Bernard Williams was an influential moral philosopher who taught at Oxford and then UC-Berkeley for most of his career. His work is important enough that it comes up in almost every undergraduate class that I teach at USC. Sophie-Grace Chappell, who wrote one of he responses to Williams that we will read next week, has also written an entry about Williams and his work for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which gives a broader picture of his contributions. Reading his article will give you a little bit of a taste of the intellectual style of Oxford in the 1960s and 1970s - I think that you will find it less formal than our last reading and our next few weeks of readings, but also and probably for that same reason a little bit harder to keep track of what is going on.

The Challenge of Boredom

The central claim of Williams’ article is that it is no coincidence that Emilia Marty is bored and disengaged with her own life and cares so little about her lovers, children, and their descendants. According to Williams, this is an inevitable consequence of the fact that we can prove that immortality would be boring. His central argument for this claim relies on the claims that for life to be meaningful we have to have projects or goals that we hope will be accomplished whether or not we ever know about it, and that in an infinite life we would have to eventually run out of these goals. If we did, we would then have nothing else to live for or look forward to - and that is the condition that Williams calls ‘boredom’.

Reading

As you read Williams’ article ‘The Makropulos Case’, ask yourself, “What does he mean by a ‘categorical desire’?” “Why does he think that the objects of categorical desires must ultimately be exhausted in an infinite life?” “Which things that he says resonate with me, and which sound off?” and “How would I respond to his argument?”