SOURCE: Low, Andrew. “Bernard Williams, Moral Law, and Kafka's Der Prozess.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal of Modern Foreign Literatures 52, no. 3 (fall 1998): 142-54.

In the following essay, Low focuses on Kafka's depiction of justice and morality in The Trial, suggesting that his notion of it is a complex, nuanced one not easily summarized by modern critics.

It would be inaccurate to label as “postmodern” Bernard Williams's criticisms, written in the last several decades, of the major Western traditions of philosophical ethics—inaccurate, but not altogether misleading. Without rejecting as necessarily ideological any competence claims of reason, and without forswearing all attempts to ground a view of ethics in a rational (for him, this will ultimately mean scientific) study of human beings and their social worlds, he nevertheless provides a highly solvent critique of the most familiar attempts of Western reason to establish a unified discipline of ethics. In its...