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.

Only in the last twenty-five years have scholars begun to appreciate Samuel Pufendorf’s importance for the history of ethics. The signal element of Pufendorf’s ethics for recent commentators is his idea that morality arises when God imposes his superior will on a world that can contain no moral value of or on its own. But how, exactly, is “imposition” accomplished? According to Pufendorf, human beings do not simply defer to God in the way elephant seals do to a dominant male. Rather, imposition is realized through recognition of God’s authority to direct and hold us answerable. This brings a whole battery of concepts into play—recognition, accountability, imputation, and authority—along with the capacities to operate with them in practical thought. What is brilliantly original in Pufendorf is his appreciation of these conceptual connections and his awareness of their implications for moral psychology. Authority is a kind of “moral power,” as Pufendorf calls it, which agents can exercise only within a social, moral space that is constituted by their respective obligations to and rights against one another, and whose exercise directly affects those rights and obligations. Only “sociable” beings with the capacity for mutual recognition are thus capable of moral obligation. Recent commentary has generally missed these important aspects and so, in my view, what is most fascinating and original in Pufendorf’s thought. Pufendorf was far from the first thinker to hold some version of a divine command theory of morality. But he may have been the first to attempt to work out what such a view must look like if it is to take seriously the conceptual links between authority, recognition, and accountability, as well as the psychology necessary for these to be realized in the moral life. In the end, however, this introduces an instability into Pufendorf.s view. I argue that whereas Pufendorf seeks to derive human moral powers, equal dignity, and sociability from God’s superior moral power, the very idea of moral powers, including God’s, seems already to presuppose a more basic moral power or dignity that is shared by any being who is capable of sociable relations.

At the time of her death in 1996, Jean Hampton was working on a book on practical reason she had tentatively titled, A Theory of Reasons. The above volume consists of the materials she left, together with useful editorial clues to the state of their relative completeness. Computer file dates make it clear that Hampton was engaged in a significant revision of the text and had gotten as far as Chapter 3 of a nine-chapter book. Revisions of two-thirds of the text lay before her, and, as Richard Healey adds, it is “very likely” that even this draft would not have been final.

A perennial problem in interpreting Hobbes’s moral and political thought in Leviathan has been to square the apparently irreducible normativity of central Hobbesian concepts and premises with his materialism and empiricism. Thus, Hobbes defines a “law of nature” as a “precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life” and the “right of nature” as “the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature”. Both are plainly normative. A law of nature is a precept that tells us what we ought not, or must not, do. And the right of nature tells us what we may do.

In what follows I consider whether the idea of a person's interest or good might be better understood through that of care or concern for that person for her sake, rather than conversely, as is ordinarily assumed. Contrary to desire-satisfaction theories of interest, such an account can explain why not everything a person rationally desires is part of her good, since what a person sensibly wants is not necessarily what we would sensibly want, insofar as we care about her. First, however, a tale: There was no other explanation which seemed reasonable. … [W]as it not reasonable to assume that he meant never to claim his birth-right? If this were so, what right had he, William Cecil Clayton, to thwart the wishes, to balk the self-sacrifice of this strange man? If Tarzan of the Apes could do this thing to save Jane Porter from unhappiness, why should he, to whose care she was intrusting her whole future, do aught to jeopardize her interests?

I am honored that Jim Griffin, Joseph Raz, and Susan Wolf, all of whose work I greatly admire, have thought my ideas on welfare and care worth engaging, and I am very grateful to them for doing so. Each has raised searching and difficult questions. Rather than attempting to respond to them seriatim, I propose to discuss the issues under three broad headings: questions about the concept of welfare, questions about care or sympathetic concern, and the question of whether welfare claims have agent-relative or agent-neutral normative force. These issues are, of course, interconnected, but it may nonetheless be helpful to divide them up in these ways

Ethics is frequently divided into three parts: metaethics, normative ethical theory, and the more specific normative ethics. However, only metaethics is explicitly philosophical insofar as it is concerned with fundamental questions about the content, objects, and status of ethical thought and discourse. During the heyday of conceptual analysis, philosophers were admonished to restrict themselves entirely to metaethics. Since, it was said, they lacked any special expertise as philosophers on normative questions, their pronouncements could be no more than hortatory. I will argue that there is no satisfactory alternative to conducting normative ethical inquiry in conjunction with metaethics. Only by investigating normative and metaethical questions together in an integrated philosophical ethics can we hope to make real progress with either. Ethics should remain part of philosophy.

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. Naturalist moral realism, once devastated by the charge of "naturalistic fallacy," has been reinvigorated, as have versions of moral realism that insist on the discontinuity between ethics and science. Irrealist, expressivist programs have also developed with great subtlety, encouraging the thought that a noncognivist account may actually be able to explain ethical judgments' aspirations to objectivity. Neo-Kantian constructivist theories have flourished as well, offering hope that morality can be grounded in a plausible conception of reasonable conduct. Together, the positions advanced in the essays collected here address these recent developments, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics.