Bernard Arthur Owen Williams, an English philosopher, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and received his BA in 1951. He was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and went on to teach at New College, Oxford, University College London, and Bedford College, London, before moving in 1967 to Cambridge as Knightbridge Professor and Fellow of King's College; he was Provost of King's from 1979 to 1987. In 1988 he became a professor at Berkeley, then in 1990 was appointed White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. An English public figure as well as a distinguished thinker, he was chairperson of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship and served on the Royal Commission on Gambling, the Labour Party's Commission on Social Justice, and the Independent Inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act, as well as on the Board of the English National Opera. He was knighted in 1999.

Williams was...