Compunction,Second-Personal Morality,and Moral Reasons

In The Second-Person Standpoint and subsequent essays, Stephen Darwall develops an account of morality that is “second-personal” in virtue of holding that what we are morally obligated to do is what others can legitimately demand that we do, i.e., what they can hold us accountable for doing through moral reactive attitudes like blame. Similarly, what it would be wrong for us to do is what others can legitimately demand that we abstain from doing. As part of this account, Darwall argues for the proposition that we have a distinctive “second-personal reason” to fulfill all of our obligations and to avoid all wrong-actions, an “authority-regarding” reason that derives from the legitimate demands the “moral community” makes of us. I show that Darwall offers an insufficient case for this proposition. My criticism of this aspect of Darwall’s account turns in part on the fact that we have compunction-based or “compunctive” reasons to fulfill all of our obligations and to avoid all wrong actions, a type of reason that Darwall seemingly overlooks.     

Reactive Attitudes,Forgiveness, and the Second-Person Standpoint

Philosophers discussing forgiveness have usually been split between those who think that forgiveness is typically virtuous, even when the wrongdoer doesn’t repent, and those who think that, for forgiveness to be virtuous, certain pre-conditions must be satisfied. I argue that Darwall’s second-personal account of morality offers significant theoretical support for the latter view. I argue that if, as Darwall claims, reactive attitudes issue a demand, this demand needs to be adequately answered for forgiveness to be warranted. It follows that we should reject the thesis that unconditional forgiveness is appropriate in the absence of repentance.     

How to Overcome Strawson’s Point: Defending a Value-Oriented Foundation for Contractualism

In The Second Person Standpoint, Darwall charges that all value-oriented foundations for ethics make a category mistake. Calling it Strawson’s point, he argues these foundations explain moral authority, which concerns whether someone has standing to hold another accountable, in terms of a value, which essentially concerns what makes the world go best. However, whether it would be good for me to blame you simply asks a different question than whether I have standing to blame you. I defend a valueoriented foundation for contractualism by identifying one way to overcome Strawson’s point. At bottom, Darwall’s objection relies on the assumption that all values are worldregarding. I argue that another class of values exists: second-personal values. Grounding morality in one of these values does not make the category mistake at the heart of Strawson’s point. In particular, I argue that grounding morality on one secondpersonal value, the ideal of acting justifiably towards others, better captures traditional contractualist ideals than Darwall’s formal foundation.     

Empathy,Respect, and Vulnerability

ABSTRACT

This paper reconsiders Heather Battaly’s argument that empathy is not a virtue. Like Battaly, I argue that empathy is a disposition that includes elements of virtue acquisition, but is not in itself a virtue in the Aristotelian sense. Unlike Battaly, however, I propose a distinction between care and respect. Drawing on Darwall’s view of recognition respect as well as on phenomenologically inspired views of empathy, I argue that respect can be regarded as the moral feeling that is distinctive of empathy. In my view, the feeling of respect towards another’s situated experience grants epistemic dignity, which is the recognition of the intrinsic significance of subjective experience. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the relation between empathy and respect can be relevant for an account of vulnerability that is not opposed to autonomy.     

Authority in Relationships

Abstract

Authority consists in having standing to make a claim on another person’s actions. Authority comes in degrees: persons have the authority to make moral demands on each other, but if they participate in close relationships, such as friendships or love relationships, their authority over each other is greater, compared to the authority of strangers to make demands, as participants in personal relationships can demand more from each other than can strangers. This paper discusses the phenomenon of a relationship-dependent greater authority on a conceptual level. It thereby fills a gap in the literature on the proper theory of authority: while being a common part of our moral practice, relationship-dependent authority has mostly been neglected in this context. It is even doubtful whether the most influential contemporary accounts of authority can accommodate it. As will be argued, neither Joseph Raz’s service conception nor Stephen Darwall’s second-personal conception of authority are able to. The triggering-reasons account of authority, as recently developed by David Enoch, is better suited in this regard: according to this conception, relationship-dependent authority stems from special conditional reasons that are implied by relationships and that can be triggered by the authoritative demands of their participants.     

Fichte's Voluntarism

Abstract: In recent work Stephen Darwall has attacked what he calls J. G. Fichte's ‘voluntarist’ thesis, the idea—on Darwall's reading—that I am bound by obligations of respect to another person by virtue of my choice to interact with him. Darwall argues that voluntary choice is incompatible with the normative force behind the concept of a person, which demands my respect non‐voluntarily. He in turn defends a ‘presuppositional’ thesis which claims that I am bound by obligations of respect simply by recognizing the other as a person. In this paper I argue Darwall has misidentified the voluntary element in Fichte's account (sections 4–5). This requires me first to explain what Fichte's voluntarism really consists in (sections 1–3), and I suggest an apparent ambiguity in Fichte's position is responsible for Darwall's misreading. Clarifying this ambiguity, however, exposes some limitations to Darwall's thesis, and I end by discussing what those limitations are and what we can learn from them (sections 6–8).     

Autonomy,Reciprocity, and Responsibility: Darwall and Levinas on the Second Person

Abstract

Stephen Darwall’s The Second‐Person Standpoint converges with Emmanuel Levinas’s concern about the role of the second‐person relationship in ethics. This paper contrasts their methodologies (regressive analysis of presuppositions versus phenomenology) to explain Darwall’s narrower view of ethical experience in terms of expressed reactive attitudes. It delineates Darwall’s overall justificatory strategy and the centrality of autonomy and reciprocity within it, in contrast to Levinas’s emphasis on the experience of responsibility. Asymmetrical responsibility plays a more foundational role as a critical counterpoint to ‘mean‐spirited’ reciprocity than Darwall’s laudable distinction between accountability and revenge, and responsibility even founds this distinction. The experience of being summoned to asymmetrical responsibility amplifies the meaning of ‘authority’, which is a presupposition for Darwall. Finally, asymmetrical responsibility helps develop decentred reasoning, invites risk beyond the boundaries of reciprocity at moments when autonomy appears endangered, reconciles respect and care at the experiential level, and presses to extend the scope of moral obligation.     

Trust,Belief, and the Second-Personal

Cognitivism about trust says that it requires belief that the trusted is trustworthy; non-cognitivism denies this. At stake is how to make sense of the strong but competing intuitions that trust is an attitude that is evaluable both morally and rationally. In proposing that one's respect for another's agency may ground one's trusting beliefs, second-personal accounts provide a way to endorse both intuitions. They focus attention on the way that, in normal situations, it is the person whom I trust. My task is to develop an account of the latter insight without the controversial theoretical commitments of the former. I propose a functional account for why the second and third-personal ‘systems’ operate not just in parallel, but in tandem, in support of a cognitivist account of trust.     

The history,origin, and meaning of Nietzsche’s slave revolt in morality

Abstract

While it is uncontroversial that the slave revolt in morality consists in a denial of the nobles as objects of value, Nietzsche’s account in the Genealogy’s first essay invites ambiguities concerning its origin, ressentiment’s relationship to value creation, and its meaning. In this paper, I address these ambiguities by analyzing the morality of good and evil as an historical artifact of Judeo-Christian tradition, and I argue for a two-stage, non-strategic interpretation of the slave revolt, according to which Judaism and Christianity each made essential and different contributions. The inversion of values began with the Jewish prophets, who claimed the poor were holy and ‘good’ and the rich ‘evil’ (BGE 195), and it was sustained throughout the Second Temple period by the Jewish priests in relation to a ‘priestly-noble’ (GM I 7) conception of the virtuous person as holy and pure. Christ, through his espousal of egalitarianism (A 27), negated the pathos of distance essential to noble values, thus beginning the second phase of the slave revolt where goodness became associated with a distinctly slavish conception of virtue.     

From Normative Spheres to Normative Practices: New Prospects for Normative Theory after Habermas

Abstract

In this paper I argue against Jürgen Habermas’s theoretical dualism between ethics and morality. I do this by showing how his account of normativity is vitiated by an unnecessary superposition of a social-evolutionary and a theoretical-linguistic account of normativity, and that this brings about theoretical problems that in the end cannot be overcome. I also show that Rainer Forst’s attempt at salvaging Habermas’s distinction is equally doomed to failure, but that his attempt nevertheless invites new and more fruitful avenues for normative theory that are worth exploring. The conclusion of this paper is that traditional notions of ethics and morality can be preserved provided we heavily redefine their meanings and release them from some of the theoretical work they have been expected to accomplish, but that to complete this transition we also need to supersede Forst’s pluralization of normative contexts toward a theory of normative practices that in the end makes the distinction between ethics and morality workable but useless. I begin by first locating the debate about ethics and morality within the context of recent normative theory (§1), and proceed to examine the two main strategies through which Habermas has elaborated his idea of a sharp dualism between ethics and morality (§2). I then introduce a theoretical distinction between what I call a horizontal and a vertical integration of ethics and morality (§3) and contend that whilst only the horizontal is viable, Habermas decidedly prefers the idea of a vertical integration (§4). With this work done, I proceed to complete my critique of Habermas’s argument and show how, by recovering the pragmatist roots of his thought, an alternative solution based on a functionalist understanding of morality could be envisaged (§5). I then conclude by examining Rainer Forst’s attempt at salvaging Habermas’s account, and show that the failure of Forst’s attempts opens the way for new and more fruitful approaches to normative theory which are more likely to recover the pragmatist roots of Habermas’s thought (§6).     

The Rationality of Happiness

Abstract

In his recent book, Happiness: personhood, community, purpose, Pedro Tabensky answers the question of what happiness is. He develops an Aristotelian account of happiness that, he claims, is everyone’s maximally rational ideal. Much of the support for this claim rests on what Tabensky calls the method of critical introspection. This method involves introspecting on the kind of beings that we are and the kind of lives we can thus lead. If properly carried out, Tabensky claims, critical introspection will reveal to any individual that the active life of virtue is in fact the maximally rational ideal. I argue that two features of Tabensky’s account undermine this claim. The first is his account of the method of critical introspection itself. The second is his account of the nature and acquisition of virtue developed in his analogy between living and painting, and in his discussion of the eudaimon community. Tabensky’s account of critical introspection carried out at the general level of persons shows only that it works negatively to identify the kind of lives we could not lead as persons. It does not function positively to reveal that the maximally rational life for any person is the active exercise of virtue. Tabensky does suggest that the method carried out by particular individuals will reveal the kind of life they should be leading. However, it follows from Tabensky’s account of the nature and acquisition of virtue, I argue, that critical introspection can only reveal the active life of virtue to be the maximally rational ideal for those individuals who have had the right sort of upbringing in the right sort of community.     

Is open-mindedness truth-conducive?

What makes an intellectual virtue a virtue? A straightforward and influential answer to this question has been given by virtue-reliabilists: a trait is a virtue only insofar as it is truth-conducive. In this paper I shall contend that recent arguments advanced by Jack Kwong in defence of the reliabilist view are good as far as they go, in that they advance the debate by usefully clarifying ways in how best to understand the nature of open-mindedness. But I shall argue that these considerations do not establish the desired conclusions that open-mindedness is truth-conducive. To establish these much stronger conclusions we would need an adequate reply to what I shall call Montmarquet’s objection. I argue that Linda Zagzebski’s reply to Montmarquet’s objection, to which Kwong defers, is inadequate. I conclude that it is contingent if open-mindedness is truth-conducive, and if a necessary tie to truth is what makes an intellectual virtue a virtue, then the status of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue is jeopardised. We either need an adequate reliabilist response to Montmarquet’s objection, or else seek alternative accounts of what it is that makes a virtue a virtue. I conclude by briefly outlining some alternatives.

     

Love: self-propagation,self-preservation,or ekstasis?

My title refers to three accounts of interpersonal love: the rationalist (and ultimately rational egoist) account that Terence Irwin ascribes to Plato; the anti-rationalist but strikingly similar account that Harry Frankfurt endorses in his own voice; and the ‘ekstatic’ account that I – following the lead of Martha Nussbaum – find in Plato's Phaedrus. My claim is that the ekstatic account points to important features of interpersonal love to which the other accounts fail to do justice, especially reciprocity and a regulative ideal of equality.     

Two Accounts of Moral Objectivity: from Attitude-Independence to Standpoint-Invariance

How should we understand the notion of moral objectivity? Metaethical positions that vindicate morality’s objective appearance are often associated with moral realism. On a realist construal, moral objectivity is understood in terms of mind-, stance-, or attitude-independence. But realism is not the only game in town for moral objectivists. On an antirealist construal, morality’s objective features are understood in virtue of our attitudes. In this paper I aim to develop this antirealist construal of moral objectivity in further detail, and to make its metaphysical commitments explicit. I do so by building on Sharon Street’s version of “Humean Constructivism”. Instead of the realist notion of attitude-independence, the antirealist account of moral objectivity that I articulate centres on the notion of standpoint-invariance. While constructivists have been criticized for compromising on the issue of moral objectivity, I make a preliminary case for the thesis that, armed with the notion of standpoint-invariance, constructivists have resources to vindicate an account of objectivity with just the right strength, given the commitments of ordinary moral thought and practice. In support of this thesis I highlight recent experimental findings about folk moral objectivism. Empirical observations about the nature of moral discourse have traditionally been taken to give prima facie support to moral realism. I argue, by contrast, that from what we can tell from our current experimental understanding, antirealists can capture the commitments of ordinary discourse at least as well as realists can.     

How to Think About Virtue and Right

Abstract

Robert Johnson argues that virtue ethical accounts of right action fail because they cannot take account of the fact that there are things we ought to do precisely because we do not possess virtuous character traits. Self-improving actions are his paradigm case and it would indeed be a problem if virtue ethics could not make sense of the propriety of self-improvement. To solve this serious problem, I propose that virtue ethics ought to define right action in terms of the virtuous agent's reasons for action instead of defining right action in terms of the actions that the virtuous agent performs. I argue that this revised definition of right action makes sense of the Tightness of self-improving actions and that it can be given a genuinely virtue ethical interpretation.     

Am I You?

It has been suggested that a rational being stands in what is called a “second-personal relation” to herself. According to philosophers like S. Darwall and Ch. Korsgaard, being a rational agent is to interact with oneself, to make demands on oneself. The thesis of the paper is that this view rests on a logical confusion. Transitive verbs like “asking”, “making a demand” or “obligating” can occur with the reflexive pronoun, but it is a mistake to assume that the reflexive and the non-reflexive use exhibit the same logical grammar. The thesis that they do is in part motivated by the assumption that to show that my relation to you bears the same form as my practical self-relation is to show that, fundamentally, you are not an object for me to think about and act on, but a subject with whom to think and act together. I argue, to the contrary, that if my addressing you exhibited the same form as a relation I could literally be said to stand in to myself, then the nexus between us would be such that I am irretrievably alienated from you. To allow the possibility of addressing oneself is to assume one of the following accounts of the second-person pronoun. Either one has to follow R. Heck and conceive it as a merely linguistic phenomenon whose content can be analyzed in terms of “the person to whom I'm now speaking”; or one has to internalize the second person and follow Ch. Korsgaard in taking its prior use to be entirely within and independent of its linguistic expression. But to account for the idea of mutual recognition requires a third view according to which address is an act of mind sui generis for which linguistic expression is essential.     

What is Enshrined in Morality? Understanding the Grounds for Nietzsche’s Critique

Abstract

It is a truism that Nietzsche is a critic of morality. But what does Nietzsche have against this institution of morality? I consider the prominent interpretation of Brian Leiter’s that Nietzsche takes morality to task for its bad effects in hampering the flourishing of great individuals and cultures. There are good reasons, I argue, to resist this reading as the best, and certainly as the exclusive, account of the grounds for Nietzsche’s criticism of morality. I go on to propose an alternative construal that sees Nietzsche as objecting to the expressive character of moral values themselves (an under-explored notion in anglophone ethics and social philosophy that I seek to elucidate in the paper). My project, in the first instance, is the exegetical one of understanding what is going on in Nietzsche’s texts when he criticizes morality. Nonetheless, there are important philosophical lessons to be learned here from Nietzsche’s work, if not necessarily about the actual failings of morality itself, then about the kinds of ethical and ideological objections that philosophers and cultural critics can sensibly raise. One of the central styles of critique that we see in Nietzsche’s work, exemplified especially in his criticism of morality, involves interpreting social and cultural phenomena, as one might interpret texts or works of art, with an eye toward extracting the meaning or significance they have in light of the ideals they enshrine, and then attacking them, on broadly ethical grounds, on account of this. It thereby creates the space for criticizing institutions not just for what pernicious effects they have, but for the intrinsically objectionable character of what they express.