Bernard Williams Said Whether Gauguin Was Right Depends on Whether He Was Good

In 1976, Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel each delivered a paper to the Aristotelian Society titled "Moral Luck." Williams's lead example was a fictionalized Paul Gauguin: a painter who walks out on his wife and children to chase the suspicion that he is a great artist. The decision is irreversible. The wife and children suffer. The question Williams puts to the morality system is whether the man's decision was justified.

The traditional answer treats this as an intentions question, settled at the moment of choice. Williams refuses. He says the justification cannot be evaluated yet. If the painter ends up producing nothing, having abandoned his family for a delusion, the choice is condemned. If he ends up producing the actual Tahitian canvases — work that vindicates the suspicion that drove the choice — then the choice is, on his terms, retrospectively justified. Same act, same intention, different verdict, decided by what happens after.

The disturbing part is that the deciding factor isn't fully under the painter's control. Whether he turns out to be a great artist depends on his talent, his health, the market, the war. Williams calls this constitutive moral luck — luck about what kind of person you turn out to be. The morality system, the Kantian apparatus that wants ethics to depend only on the will, has nowhere to put it.

Nagel, in his companion paper, sharpened the puzzle by extending it: the very capacities that make us moral agents — temperament, formation, the situations we face — are also matters of luck, all the way down. There is, on his view, less of the will left untouched than the system pretends.

Williams was not endorsing what Gauguin did. He was pointing out that we can't tell if it was a mistake until the paintings either exist or don't. That delay is what the morality system is built to deny.