Collection: Problems of the Self

Overview

Problems of the Self gathers Bernard Williams' essays that wrestle with the philosophical puzzles surrounding what it is to be a self, how identity persists or changes, and what those facts imply for moral responsibility and practical reasoning. The collection resists a single systematic theory and instead pursues a cluster of related problems from the perspectives of metaphysics, moral psychology, and ordinary deliberative practice. The tone is analytic but literary, combining careful conceptual scrutiny with an eye to the moral stakes of how people understand themselves.

Central Themes

A recurring concern is the relationship between psychological continuity and personhood. Attention turns to memory, character, and agency as ingredients that make someone the same person over time, and to how disruptions in those ingredients, forgetting, radical change, or unusual thought experiments, test our ordinary attributions of responsibility and concern. Williams emphasizes that questions about persistence are not purely metaphysical curiosities: they shape how individuals reason about future obligations, regrets, and commitments.
Another major theme is the interplay between selfhood and moral theory. The essays press against moral frameworks that treat agents as interchangeable points of view, arguing that a realistic account of moral judgment must accommodate the first‑person perspective and the attachments that ground a person's projects. Practical reasons, intentions, and the sense of oneself as an agent are shown to constrain and inform judgments about blame, praise, and moral obligation.

Philosophical Method

Williams favors thought experiments and careful attention to ordinary psychological descriptions over grand metaphysical systems. Rather than offering a single criterion for personal identity, he examines a range of cases and draws out what they reveal about the limits of reductive accounts. The argumentative style is diagnostic: it exposes tensions between competing intuitions and then explores how those tensions bear on ethical concepts such as responsibility and integrity.
Philosophical psychology is central: Williams treats descriptions of human motivation, character, and the structure of practical deliberation as data that any adequate theory of the self must accommodate. He combines skeptical moves about neat theoretical reductions with a clear insistence that philosophical clarity matters for ethical practice.

Key Arguments and Consequences

Williams is skeptical of accounts that treat persons as mere continuations of physical or purely psychological states without regard to the normative features of agency. He shows how certain reductive strategies can erode important moral distinctions by failing to respect the standpoint from which people deliberate and bear responsibility. This leads to critical reflections on moral theories that ignore the agent's ties to projects and commitments, and it supports a more agent‑centered view of practical reason.
The essays also illuminate how the notion of selfhood influences backward‑looking attitudes such as regret and guilt. If identity is construed narrowly, many everyday moral reactions become puzzling; if construed too broadly, responsibility may be diffused. Williams navigates between these extremes by emphasizing the moral relevance of continuity in character and concern.

Legacy and Influence

Problems of the Self has shaped debates in personal identity, moral psychology, and ethics by insisting that technical metaphysical proposals connect with the lived realities of agency and moral practice. The collection's questions and methods anticipated later discussions about narrative identity, moral responsibility, and the limits of impartialist moral theories. Its appeal lies in combining clear analytic diagnosis with an insistence that philosophical accounts honor the complexity of the human point of view.