ABSTRACT
One of our most important recent moral philosophers, the late Bernard Williams, devoted a good deal of his career to distinguishing between the terms “morality” and “ethics,” arguing that the second identifies a much larger domain than the first, and that the first identifies a very limited and peculiar realm indeed. Williams denied that there is a single standard against which all human activities can or should be measured; he denied that the things that we value can be arranged into a coherent system and shown to be compatible with one another; and he specifically faulted “morality” for its commitment to the ubiquity and priority of its own relevance.2 This might all seem distinctively “modern” or “post-modern,” and certainly seems to us distinctively post-Nietzschean. But Bernard Williams drew his inspiration more from Homer than from Nietzsche (though Williams was increasingly interested in Nietzsche), and Nietzsche drew his inspiration from Aristotle and from Homer.3 Williams’s “Nietzschean” perspective, therefore, might not have been unavailable to an early modern person like Shakespeare. The argument of this essay is that Shakespeare shared Bernard Williams’s sense of the irrelevance of the moral to much of what we value, and that as Shakespeare’s career proceeded, Shakespeare developed more and more fully and explicitly his sense of the limitation of the moral perspective.
