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60The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought': 1640–1740Cambridge University Press. 1995.This book is a major work in the history of ethics, and provides the first study of early modern British philosophy in several decades. Professor Darwall discerns two distinct traditions feeding into the moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the empirical, naturalist tradition, comprising Hobbes, Locke, Cumberland, Hutcheson, and Hume, which argues that obligation is the practical force that empirical discoveries acquire in the process of deliber…Read more
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52How Should Ethics Relate to (the Rest of) Philosophy?: Moore's LegacySouthern Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1): 1-20. 2003.
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74Sympathetic Liberalism: Recent Work on Adam SmithPhilosophy and Public Affairs 28 (2): 139-164. 1999.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http: //www.jstor.org/about/terms. html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use
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97Sidgwick, Concern, and the GoodUtilitas 12 (3): 291. 2000.Sidgwick maintains, plausibly, that the concept of a person's good is a normative one and takes for granted that it is normative for the agent's own choice and action. I argue that the normativity of a person's good must be understood in relation to concern for someone for that person's own sake. A person's good, I suggest, is what one should want for that person in so far as one cares about him, or what one should want for him for his sake. I examine Sidgwick's defence of the axioms of rational…Read more
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4Ethical Intuitionism and the Motivation Problem,”In Philip Stratton-Lake (ed.), Ethical Intuitionism: Re-Evaluations, Oxford University Press Uk. 2002.
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12Why Kant needs the second-person standpointIn Thomas E. Hill (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Kant's Ethics, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.This chapter contains sections titled: Kantian Practical Presupposition Arguments The Second‐Personal Aspect of Moral Obligation and Equal Dignity Kant's Argument for the Moral Law in Groundwork III Bibliography.
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209Moore, normativity, and intrinsic valueEthics 113 (3): 468-489. 2003.Principia Ethica set the agenda for analytical metaethics. Moore’s unrelenting focus on fundamentals both brought metaethics into view as a potentially separate area of philosophical inquiry and provided a model of the analytical techniques necessary to pursue it.1 Moore acknowledged that he wasn’t the first to insist on a basic irreducible core of all ethical concepts. Although he seems not to have appreciated the roots of this thought in eighteenth-century intuitionists like Clarke, Balguy, and…Read more
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424The value of autonomy and autonomy of the willEthics 116 (2): 263-284. 2006.It is a commonplace that ‘autonomy’ has several different senses in contemporary moral and political discussion. The term’s original meaning was political: a right assumed by states to administer their own affairs. It was not until the nineteenth century that ‘autonomy’ came (in English) to refer also to the conduct of individuals, and even then there were, as now, different meanings.1 Odd as it may seem from our perspective, one that was in play from the beginning was Kant’s notion of “autonomy…Read more
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Morality and its criticsIn John Skorupski (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Routledge. 2010.
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189“But it would be wrong”Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2): 135-157. 2010.Is the fact that an action would be wrong itself a reason not to perform it? Warranted attitude accounts of value suggest about value, that being valuable is not itself a reason but to the reasons for valuing something in which its value consists. Would a warranted attitude account of moral obligation and wrongness, not entail, therefore, that being morally obligatory or wrong gives no reason for action itself? I argue that this is not true. Although warranted attitude theories of normative conc…Read more
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49The inventions of autonomyEuropean Journal of Philosophy 7 (3). 1999.Book reviewed in this article:J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy
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230Because I Want ItSocial Philosophy and Policy 18 (2): 129-153. 2001.How can an agent's desire or will give him reasons for acting? Not long ago, this might have seemed a silly question, since it was widely believed that all reasons for acting are based in the agent's desires. The interesting question, it seemed, was not how what an agent wants could give him reasons, but how anything else could. In recent years, however, this earlier orthodoxy has increasingly appeared wrongheaded as a growing number of philosophers have come to stress the action-guiding role of…Read more
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28Human Morality’s AuthorityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (4). 1995.A central theme of Samuel Scheffler’s impressive Human Morality is that “a considered view of the relation between morality and the individual” requires distinguishing frequently confused issues concerning morality’s content, scope, authority, and deliberative role, and appreciating interrelations among these. He suggests a nice example of the latter. Some are inclined to believe morality lacks the overriding authority others claim it to have because they assume that morality’s content is string…Read more
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63Pleasure as Ultimate Good in Sidgwick’s EthicsThe Monist 58 (3): 475-489. 1974.The notion of pleasure lies at the very heart of Sidgwick’s moral philosophy. For Sidgwick holds not merely that pleasure is a good, but that ultimately it is the only good. And hence it is the good of pleasure which grounds his utilitarianism.
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5Responsibility within RelationsIn Brian Feltham & John Cottingham (eds.), Partiality and impartiality: morality, special relationships, and the wider world, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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31From Morality to Virtue and Back? (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (3): 695-701. 1994.
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40Book Review:Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality. William L. Rowe (review)Ethics 103 (2): 389-. 1993.
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35Desires, Reasons, and CausesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2): 436-443. 2003.Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality makes a significant contribution to clarifying the relationship between desire and reasons for acting, both the normative reasons we seek in deliberation and the motivating reasons we cite in explanation. About the former, Dancy argues that, not only are normative reasons not all grounded in desires, but, more radically, the fact that one desires something is never itself a normative reason. And he argues that desires fail to figure in motivating reasons also, …Read more
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