[1][2] Described by Colin McGinn as an "analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist,"[3] he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy.

"[4] Williams was a strong supporter of women in academia; according to Nussbaum, he was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be.

[13] In his first book, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), he quoted with approval Lawrence's advice to "[f]ind your deepest impulse, and follow that.

"[14] Awarded a scholarship to Oxford, Williams read Greats (pure Classics followed by Ancient History and philosophy) at Balliol.

Among his influences at Oxford were W. S. Watt, Russell Meiggs, R. M. Hare, Elizabeth Anscombe, Eric Dodds, Eduard Fraenkel, David Pears and Gilbert Ryle.

[12][16] After Oxford, Williams spent his two-year national service flying Spitfires in Canada for the Royal Air Force.

[7] Williams returned to England to take up his fellowship at All Souls and in 1954 became a fellow at New College, Oxford, a position he held until 1959.

[18][15] Bernard Williams and Shirley Catlin were married in London in July 1955 at St James's, Spanish Place, near Marylebone High Street, followed by a honeymoon in Lesbos, Greece.

Andy Beckett wrote that they "entertained refugees from eastern Europe and politicians from Africa, and drank sherry in noteworthy quantities.

[17] According to Jane O'Grady, Williams was central to the decision by King's in 1972 to admit women, one of the first three all-male Oxbridge undergraduate colleges to do so.

"[27] Shirley Williams's political career (the House of Commons regularly sat until 10 pm) meant that the couple spent a lot of time apart.

Mary Warnock described Williams's report on pornography in 1979, as chair of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, as "agreeable, actually compulsive to read.

The report argued that both cases appeared to be "more consistent with pre-existing traits being reflected both in a choice of reading matter and in the acts committed against others.

[37] In an essay on Wagner, he described having been reduced to a "virtually uncontrollable state" during a performance by Jon Vickers as Tristan at Covent Garden.

[15][17] Williams died of heart failure on 10 June 2003 while on holiday in Rome; he had been diagnosed in 1999 with multiple myeloma, a form of cancer.

[42]Williams did not produce any ethical theory or system; several commentators noted, unfairly in the view of his supporters, that he was largely a critic.

Moore writes that Williams was unaffected by this criticism: "He simply refused to allow philosophical system-building to eclipse the subtlety and variety of human ethical experience.

"[15] He equated ethical theories with "a tidiness, a systematicity, and an economy of ideas," writes Moore, that were not up to describing human lives and motives.

One of Williams's famous examples of moral luck concerns the painter Paul Gauguin's decision to move to Tahiti.

Martha Nussbaum wrote that his work "denounced the trivial and evasive way in which moral philosophy was being practised in England under the aegis of those two dominant theories.

"[5] "Both theories simplified the moral life," she wrote, "neglecting emotions and personal attachments and how sheer luck shapes our choices.

")[13] Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) expounded a moral system based on the categorical imperative, one formulation of which is: "Act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.

One of the book's thought experiments involves Jim, a botanist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator.

[74] Jane O'Grady wrote in a Guardian obituary of Williams that the book is an examination of those who "sneer at any purported truth as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power, class bias and ideology.

Although part of Williams's intention was to attack those he felt denied the value of truth, the book cautions that, to understand it simply in that sense, would be to miss part of its purpose; rather, as Kenneth Baker wrote, it is "Williams' reflection on the moral cost of the intellectual vogue for dispensing with the concept of truth.

Alan Code wrote that Williams had never been "impressed by the display of mere dialectical cleverness, least of all in moral philosophy": On the contrary, one of the most notable features of his philosophical outlook was an unwavering insistence on a series of points that may seem obvious but which are nevertheless all-too-frequently neglected: that moral or ethical thought is part of human life; that in writing about it, philosophers are writing about something of genuine importance; that it is not easy to say anything worth saying about the subject; that what moral philosophers write is answerable to the realities of human history, psychology, and social affairs; and that mere cleverness is indeed not the relevant measure of value.

In 1996 Martin Hollis said that Williams had "a good claim to be the leading British philosopher of his day," but that, although he had a "lovely eye for the central questions," he had none of the answers.

[13] Alan Thomas identified Williams's contribution to ethics as an overarching scepticism about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy, explicitly articulated in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and Shame and Necessity (1993), in which he argued that moral theories can never reflect the complexities of life, particularly given the radical pluralism of modern societies.

[76] Learning to be yourself, to be authentic and to act with integrity, rather than conforming to any external moral system, is arguably the fundamental motif of Williams's work, according to Sophie Grace Chappell.