Stephen Darwall

Call the proposition that the good life consists of excellent, distinctively human activity the Aristotelian Thesis. I think of a photograph I clipped from the New York Times as vividly depicting this claim. It shows a pianist, David Golub, accompanying two vocalists, Victoria Livengood and Erie Mills, at a tribute for Marilyn Home. All three artists are in fine form, exercising themselves at the height of their powers. The reason I saved the photo, however, is Mr. Golub's face. He is positively grinning, as if saying to himself, “And they pay me to do this?”

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.

_ Deontology_ brings together some of the most significant philosophical work on ethics, presenting canonical essays on core questions in moral philosophy. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative theory. With a helpful introduction by Stephen Darwall, examines key topics in deontological moral theory. Includes seven essays which respond to the classic sources. Includes classic excerpts by key figures such Kant, Richard Price and W. D. Ross; and recent reactions to this work by philosophers, including Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, Stephen Darwall, Judith Thomson, Frances Kamm, Warren Quinn, and Christine Korsgaard

Scheffler's paper divides into two parts. In the first, he argues that Parfit's argument from the complex view of personal identity neither can, nor is intended to, establish any moral theory; in particular, it cannot establish utilitarianism. Rather, Parfit's aim must have been simply to weaken our attachment to non-utilitarian theories. In discovering that the only philosophically respectable view of personal identity holds it to consist simply in bodily or psychological continuities and connections, we come to see that the distinctness of persons is a less deep fact than we naively supposed that it was. And this weakens the attraction of moral theories which take the distinctness of persons as fundamental and reject utilitarianism on that account. Scheffler points out that Parfit's argument cannot establish, nor can it be extended to establish, anything stronger than this. For the complex view can only rule out nonutilitarian theories if it simply denies that in any sense persons exist over time. But this view rules out not only non-utilitarian moral theories, but every moral theory.

James Sterba argues for morality as a principled compromise between self-regarding and other-regarding reasons and that either egoists or altruists, who always give overriding weight to self-regarding and other-reasons, respectively, can be shown to beg the question against morality. He concludes that moral conduct is “rationally required.” Sterba’s dialectic assumes that both egoists and altruists accept that both self-regarding and other-regarding considerations are genuine pro tanto reasons, but then hold that their respective reasons always outweigh. Against this, I argue that egoists would most plausibly deny that non-self-regarding considerations have even pro tanto weight. I argue, also, that even if both sides grant the pro tanto weight of their opponent’s reasons, Sterba is mistaken in holding that only Morality as Compromise provides a “non-question-begging resolution” of what it is rational to do when self-regarding and other-regarding reasons conflict, since it might be that it is rational to act on either. It might be that the weightiest self-regarding and the weightiest other-regarding reasons in the case are both sufficient reasons for acting without either being conclusive. The essay ends with a sketch of arguments against egoism that I take to be more plausible than Sterba’s. As I have argued elsewhere, what makes an agent’s own welfare or her own concerns or interests normative for her simultaneously makes them normative for others as well

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.