Bernard Williams and the One Thought Too Many

A man stands on a pier. Two people are drowning. One of them is his wife. He has time to save one. He saves his wife.

Bernard Williams, in his 1976 essay "Persons, Character, and Morality," said the trouble starts when the man explains himself. If his thought, fully spelled out, is that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is morally permissible to save one's wife, the man has had, in Williams's phrase, "one thought too many." The wife should have been hoped for as the whole answer. The principle is the extra thought, and it ruins the moment.

The target is impartialist ethics. Kantian and utilitarian views both push the agent to step back from his own life and ask what any rational person, or what the greatest-good calculation, would license here. Williams thinks that move is corrosive. A life made of the projects and people you actually love can't survive the demand to justify each act of love by reference to a rule that would equally justify a stranger's.

The scenario itself comes from Charles Fried's 1970 book An Anatomy of Values, which Williams cites in passing. Fried used the case to probe the limits of impartial concern; Williams turned it against the impartialists. The husband who saves his wife because she is his wife is not failing morality. He is showing what morality, properly understood, leaves room for.

It is a small example with a long shadow. Susan Wolf and a generation of virtue ethicists have circled back to it. The phrase has outlasted the essay it came from.