Stephen Darwall

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 stringent. They may think, for instance, that morality gives no weight to the agent’s interests and concerns but argue that, since it would be irrational so to weight one’s concerns and interests in rational deliberation, moral requirements lack overriding reason-giving force. But this assumes without defense a conception of morality that is controversial. If morality is not stringent but moderate, agents’ interests and concerns will be relevant as such to determining their moral obligations, and it will be less clear that the best reasons can ever dictate violating them.

What kind of life best ensures human welfare? Since the ancient Greeks, this question has been as central to ethical philosophy as to ordinary reflection. But what exactly is welfare? This question has suffered from relative neglect. And, as Stephen Darwall shows, it has done so at a price. Presenting a provocative new "rational care theory of welfare," Darwall proves that a proper understanding of welfare fundamentally changes how we think about what is best for people.Most philosophers have assumed that a person's welfare is what is good from her point of view, namely, what she has a distinctive reason to pursue. In the now standard terminology, welfare is assumed to have an "agent-relative normativity." Darwall by contrast argues that someone's good is what one should want for that person insofar as one cares for her. Welfare, in other words, is normative, but not peculiarly for the person whose welfare is at stake. In addition, Darwall makes the radical proposal that something's contributing to someone's welfare is the same thing as its being something one ought to want for her own sake, insofar as one cares. Darwall defends this theory with clarity, precision, and elegance, and with a subtle understanding of the place of sympathetic concern in the rich psychology of sympathy and empathy. His forceful arguments will change how we understand a concept central to ethics and our understanding of human bonds and human choices

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, concluding that neither the fact nor the state of desire is ever a motivating reason for acting. I am in significant agreement with Dancy about these matters, but I want to register some reservations nonetheless. Dancy is certainly right to reject the DBR thesis that all normative reasons are grounded in desires. Desires, he points out, call for reasons no less than do actions. But I think he insufficiently appreciates a way in which facts about the agent’s desires and related practical psychic states can provide normative reasons. Not that this gives away anything to Dancy’s Humean opponents. What gives an agent’s desires, values, and moral convictions normative weight, I shall suggest, is her dignity and integrity as an individual person.

Beginning from Kant’s famous idea that “unsociable sociability” stimulates human progress and civilization, the essay investigates Kant’s categories of the “unsociable” and the “sociable,” and argues that the fundamental difference between them is that the former presuppose a social perspective that is third personal, whereas the latter is always a second-personal affair, instantiated when people relate to one another in various ways, or manifest the disposition to do so. Kant’s “unsociable” attitudes, like “competitive vanity,” are deeply social. They are the fruit of Rousseauean “amour propre,” presupposing a social “observer’s” perspective from which we can desire to be positively regarded or seen. Sociability, as the concept enters into the early modern natural law tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf that led up to Kant, is an irreducibly second-personal phenomenon, realized in our mutual relatings, and the social and legal institutions that govern these. This essay explores these conceptual differences and interactions and the historical background of Kant’s remark in Grotius, Pufendorf, and Rousseau.

At least since Descartes's Meditations philosophers in the West have been concerned to defend the rationality of our beliefs from the threat of epistemological skepticism. The idea that there might be nothing which we know, or more radically, which we have even the slightest reason to believe, is one that many philosophers have thought to be deserving of serious attention. It seems somewhat odd, therefore, that there has not been similar attention given to what one might call practical skepticism. Is it not also possible that there is nothing which we have even the slightest reason to do? Of course, there is a sense in which epistemological skepticism might be thought to be the more basic problem. If there is nothing which we have any reason to believe, then it will follow that there is nothing which we have any reason to do. If some proposition is a reason that we have for doing something it must at least be the case that we have some reason to believe that proposition. But is practical skepticism merely a species of epistemological skepticism? I doubt it.