The ends and the means - stop justifying toxicity and start fighting it

In his essay ‘Moral Luck’ (1976), Williams discusses Paul Gauguin’s decision to leave Paris in order to move to Tahiti where he hoped he could become a great painter. Gauguin left behind – basically abandoned – his wife and children. This was on the face of it a very selfish thing to do, and you might think that Gauguin’s action was morally indefensible.

Not entirely from that information as it stands. If Gauguin genuinely didn't love his family it could be worse if he stayed. If the whole family are aware of this, they'd probably split up anyway. He'd be selfish if said he was leaving just because he thought his art was more important, but not necessarily if he was in an unhappy relationship. He might still have been an utter jerk, or he might be an unfortunate victim. The situation could be complex.

Williams, however, thinks that Gauguin’s eventual success as a painter constitutes a form of moral luck, in that his artistic achievement justifies what he did. It provides a justification that not everyone will accept, but one that can make sense to Gauguin himself, and perhaps to others. ‘Look,’ we can imagine Gauguin saying to himself, ‘I was right … I knew I had it in me.’

Williams imagines Gauguin to be conflicted. He also freely admits, however, that his ‘Gauguin’ is not necessarily true in all details to the historical French artist. Williams introduces Gauguin as a useful prop in a thought experiment designed to explore the role that authenticity, achievement and luck play in justification. Williams also just assumes, for the purposes of argument, that Gauguin did in fact succeed, which is to say that Gauguin did create valuable art, and that this art was a great expression of his gifts as a painter.

Hmm, if Hypothetical Gauguin loves his family but abandons them for the sake of art, he's a douchebag regardless of the art he creates.

Williams does not mention Gauguin’s wife and children but many readers at this point might immediately think: what about them? Or as Mette, Gauguin’s wife, might have asked: what about me? More pointedly: aren’t I and the children part of the meaning of your life? Indeed, the American moral philosopher Susan Wolf (a Williams admirer, and one of his most gifted interpreters) has wondered why Gauguin’s ‘ability to express himself as a painter requires Gauguin to leave France for Tahiti, abandoning his wife and children in the process’, and suggests that this construction of the choice should arouse suspicions of ‘inauthenticity or self-indulgence or both’.

And why can't he bring his family with him ? His supposed requirements for artistic freedom are pretty specific. Does he even try and be artistic somewhere more accessible ? Again, still sounding like a jerk.

But is his imagined Gauguin a good example of the phenomenon of moral luck? How does Gauguin’s artistic success change the moral status of his actions? Williams, in the first instance, suggests that ‘Gauguin’s project … can yield a good for the world’ and that this is something that moral assessment has to take into account. Second, Gauguin is moved by this good, and so Gauguin is not concerned with doing something entirely selfish, even if he is being self-centred. Finally, Gauguin’s success shows that he was right in his intuition that he was capable of achieving great things, which is also to say that he was right about himself. Williams thinks that this gives the successful Gauguin a justification for his actions, and in that sense he is morally lucky.

Williams is ultimately ambivalent over whether to call Gauguin’s justification a moral justification. Perhaps the Gauguin example, he suggests, shows the limits of morality. But Williams is right that certain kinds of success often transform moral perception. This is true in politics and sport and many other areas of life as well as art: achievement is foregrounded and moral failings, even grave moral wrongs, are pushed to the margins. Indeed, as in the Gauguin case, the moral wrongs can be interwoven into the story in such a way that the moral problems are made to seem a necessary element: he wouldn’t have been so brilliant if he hadn’t had his demons. And maybe you might think – at least in some cases – that’s right: the fine abilities and the horrible failings all seem inextricably tied up in the person’s character. And when character leads to great achievement, then moral wrongs are often forgiven or overlooked.

So much effort is expended into justifying people's jerkish behaviour rather than trying to prevent it. And some geniuses are jerks, it's true. We seem to have a pathological expectation that high achievers have to be awful human beings, schizophrenically demanding impossible stands, forgiving any sins, yet condemning them all at the same time. Perhaps, I'd hazard, the social system itself favours the jerk. Yet anecdotally it seems to me that most of the intelligent, creative, competent lot are not jerks at all. It's like society acts as a sort of crazy racist sieve that only lets the worst people succeed and then hates them for it. Oh, and also because of this, Gauguin can't really know if his "authentic" desires are really his own or just a societal construct.

The real Gauguin was an abuser of young Polynesian girls whom he knowingly infected with syphilis. If they were alive now, and if they could, they too would say #MeToo. Gauguin led a morally ruinous life in pursuit of his art, and what he depicted in his most famous paintings are his victims. Can you admire his canvasses once you understand them? Perhaps we should revise Williams’s view of Gauguin’s achievements and say not just that his life was ruined by his pursuit of art but that his art was ruined by his life.

Well, someone who deliberately infects people with syphilis is definitely a complete douchebag, and if you disagree because you like his paintings, then you're what's wrong with the world. This firmly answers Gauguin's problem of whether to leave his family : of course he should, those people (presuming innocence) shouldn't have to live with this bastard. He should also be placed in pre-emptive therapy or failing that imprisoned. This is a man in need of punishment and correction, not moral philosophy.

I think you can both admire and despise the painting at the same time. You can, provisionally, admire it for its artistic value, if that's your thing. You can despise what it apparently took to create it. Though, if a painting is explicitly depicting someone the artist wilfully infected with syphilis - if that's its whole intent and purpose - any halfway decent human being ought to hate it.

How many people have, like Gauguin, used the call of authenticity to justify their selfish behaviour? Williams’s package of ideas is in danger of doing precisely what the journalist Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker described the typical midlife crisis as doing: it gives ‘irresponsible behaviour an existential sheen’. Many of us now live in cultures where desire is presumed to be the state that should give us direction in life, and where to express true desire is considered the hallmark of authenticity. We aren’t all equally free to live this ethic – that can’t be emphasised enough – but it’s the prevailing ethic and the ethic in ascendency nonetheless.

The problem, however, is not just that liberating desire can liberate jerks to be jerks: the problem is that an ideal of how to live based on desire and authenticity has a tendency to make everyone jerkier. Part of the reason for this is that the ideal of authenticity can make doing what you think you ought to do, rather than what you want to do, look like a vice (hypocrisy, being fake, not keeping it real) rather than a virtue (traditionally known as continence). Williams’s ideal of authenticity – desire-based individualism – risks undermining the very idea that we ought to reform our lives in the light of ethical reflection. This was the essence of the late British philosopher Derek Parfit’s complaint about Williams: that he had replaced the question: ‘How ought we to live?’ with the question: ‘What do I basically want?’

Indeed. Take a dash of Buddhist/Platonic thinking and see if your desires can be altered and your energies redirected into something that isn't going to treat other people like dirt. And again, "what do I basically want ?" is a very difficult question, as the Brexiteer's are discovering. Would you want a expensive pair of plain-looking shoes with a big tick on them if society hadn't told you they were trendy ? Would you want a Gauguin painting if they weren't popular ? I doubt it. Or, as the article continues :

We do, as Williams noted in the Guardian interview mentioned at the outset, tend to think that ‘some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren’t’. If you are going to live a life that is true to yourself, then you had better know yourself, and remember that ‘know thyself’ was one of the Delphic maxims that set Socrates on the road to philosophy.

Truth and Truthfulness, published one year before Williams’s death, has a more cautionary tone. A wiser, older Williams gave more emphatic expression to the fact that the pursuit of authenticity can lead to ‘ethical and social disaster’. He also moved away from the stark individualism of ‘Moral Luck’ and stressed the role that one’s community plays in preventing or enabling one to become whom one wants to become. We ‘need each other’, as he memorably put it in Truth and Truthfulness, ‘in order to be anybody’.

In his imagined scenario of a failed Gauguin, he does give a picture of what a dire state you can get into when you relentlessly try to achieve something only to find out that it’s not you. You might get to Tahiti, fail at your work, and discover that you are not a great artist after all. You are merely a shit. Your ground project in life, your art, might be based on an illusion, even if your deepest impulse is to pursue it. Think twice, then, before you head out to the South Seas.
https://aeon.co/essays/living-the-life-authentic-bernard-williams-on-paul-gauguin