[O]ne good testimony to one’s existence having a point is that the question of its point does not arise, and the propelling concerns may be of a relatively everyday kind such as certainly provide the grounds of many sorts of happiness.
Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, in Moral Luck, Cambridge, 1981, p. 12
In one, and the most obvious, way, direct utilitarianism is the paradigm of utilitarianism—it seems, in its blunt insistence on maximizing utility and its refusal to fall back on rules and so forth, of all utilitarian doctrines the most faithful to the spirit of utilitarianism, and to its demand for rational, decidable, empirically based, and unmysterious set of values.
Bernard Williams, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 19