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306Philosophical Ethics: An Historical And Contemporary IntroductionWestview Press. 1997.Why is ethics part of philosophy? Stephen Darwall's Philosophical Ethics introduces students to ethics from a distinctively philosophical perspective, one that weaves together central ethical questions such as "What has value?" and "What are our moral obligations?" with fundamental philosophical issues such as "What is value?" and "What can a moral obligation consist in?"With one eye on contemporary discussions and another on classical texts,Philosophical Ethics shows how Hobbes, Mill, Kant, Ari…Read more
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4Authority and second personal reasons for actingIn David Sobel & Steven Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
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34The authority of reasonPhilosophical Review 109 (4): 583-586. 2000.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 Hea…Read more
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66How Nowhere Can You Get (and do Ethics)?:The View from Nowhere. Thomas NagelEthics 98 (1): 137-. 1987.
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152Normativity and Projection in Hobbes’s LeviathanPhilosophical Review 109 (3): 313-347. 2000.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 preser…Read more
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11019. Self-Deception, Autonomy, and Moral ConstitutionIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception, University of California Press. pp. 407-430. 1988.
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111Why Ethics is Part of PhilosophyThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 1 19-28. 1999.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 norm…Read more
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97Moral discourse and practice: some philosophical approaches (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1997.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, …Read more
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81Egoism and MoralityIn Desmond M. Clarke & Catherine Wilson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, Oxford University Press. 2011.This article examines changes in the conception of morality and egoism in early modern Europe. It explains that the postulate that human beings were fractious, covetous, and endowed with a strong drive towards self-aggrandizement was associated with Thomas Hobbes, and his writings produced a strong counterflow in the form of assertions and demonstrations of altruism and benevolence as natural endowments of human beings. It suggests that the modern ethical thought has defined itself by its concer…Read more
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347The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and AccountabilityHarvard University Press. 1996.The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality's supreme authority--an account that ...
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294Contractarianism, contractualism (edited book)Blackwell. 2003.Contractualism/Contractarianism collects, for the first time, both major classical sources and central contemporary discussions of these important approaches to philosophical ethics. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative ethics.
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206Internalism and agencyPhilosophical Perspectives 6 155-174. 1992.have come in for increasing attention and controversy. A good example would be recent debates about moral realism where question of the relation between ethics (or ethical judgment) and the will has come to loom large.' Unfortunately, however, the range of positions labelled internalist in ethical writing is bewilderingly large, and only infrequently are important distinctions kept clear.2 Sometimes writers have in mind the view that sincere assent to a moral (or, more generally, an ethical) jud…Read more
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295Precis: The second-person standpoint (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1): 216-228. 2010.
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151Agreement Matters: Critical Notice of Derek Parfit, On What MattersPhilosophical Review 123 (1): 79-105. 2014.Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) mounted a striking defense of Act Consequentialism against a Rawls-inspired Kantian orthodoxy in moral philosophy. On What Matters (2011) is notable for its serious engagement with Kant's ethics and for its arguments in support of the “Triple Theory,” which allies Rule Consequentialism with Kantian and Scanlonian Contractualism against Act Consequentialism as a theory of moral right. This critical notice argues that what underlies this change is a view o…Read more
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19Honor, History, and Relationship: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics IiOxford University Press. 2013.Stephen Darwall expands upon his argument for a second-personal framework for morality, in which morality entails mutual accountability and the authority to address demands. He explores the role of the framework in relation to cultural ideas of respect and honor; the development of "modern" moral philosophy; and interpersonal relations
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89Symposia papers: Autonomist internalism and the justification of moralsNoûs 24 (2): 257-267. 1990.
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331Moral obligation: Form and substanceProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (1pt1): 31-46. 2010.Beginning from an analysis of moral obligation's form that I defend in The Second-Person Standpoint as what we are answerable for as beings with the necessary capacities to enter into relations of mutual accountability, I argue that this analysis has implications for moral obligation's substance. Given what it is to take responsibility for oneself and hold oneself answerable, I argue, it follows that if there are any moral obligations at all, then there must exist a basic pro tanto obligation no…Read more
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412Empathy, sympathy, carePhilosophical Studies 89 (2-3). 1998.In what follows, I wish to discuss empathy and sympathy’s relevance to ethics, taking recent findings into account. In particular, I want to consider sympathy’s relation to the idea of a person’s good or well-being. It is obvious and uncontroversial that sympathetic concern for a person involves some concern for her good and some desire to promote it. What I want to suggest is that the concept of a person’s good or well-being is one we have because we are capable of care and sympathetic concern.…Read more
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44Motive and Obligation in the British Moralists*: STEPHEN L. DARWALLSocial Philosophy and Policy 7 (1): 133-150. 1989.My aim in what follows is to sketch with a broad brush fundamental changes involving the concept of obligation in British ethics of the early modern period, as it developed in the direction of the view that obligatory force is a species of motivational force – an idea that deeply informs present thought. I shall also suggest, although I can hardly demonstrate it conclusively here, that one important source for this view was a doctrine which we associate with Kant, and which it may seem surprisin…Read more
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26Reasons, motives, and the demands of morality: An introductionIn Stephen L. Darwall (ed.), Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches, Oxford University Press. pp. 305--312. 1997.
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Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
History of Western Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
History of Western Philosophy |