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.

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.

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 prudence and argue that it is powerless to convince anyone who lacks self-concern or thinks he has no reason to care for himself. To the extent that Sidgwick is persuasive, I argue, it is because he insinuates an assumption of self-concern. Similarly, Sidgwick's defence of the axiom of rational benevolence tacitly assumes, not just impersonality, but equal concern

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 of the will,”2 as Kant defined it, “the property of the will by which it is a law to itself independently of any property of the objects of volition” (4:440).3That’s a mouthful, to say the least. And interpreting..

:Hume distinguishes natural obligation, the motive of self-interest, from moral obligation, the sentiment of approbation and disapprobation. I argue that his discussion of justice makes use of a third notion, in addition to the other two: rule-obligation. For Hume, the just person regulates her conduct by mutually advantageous rules of justice. Rule-obligation is the notion she requires to express her acceptance of these rules in so regulating herself. I place these ideas in relation to Hume's official theory of the will and to early modern thinking about obligation and the will more generally

Punishment and Reparations are sometimes held to express retaliatory emotions whose object is to strike back against a victimizer. I begin by examining a version of this idea in Mill's writings about natural resentment and the sense of justice in Chapter V of Utilitarianism. Mill's view is that the ?natural? sentiment of resentment or ?vengeance? that is at the heart of the concept of justice is essentially retaliatory, therefore has ?nothing moral in it,? and so must be disciplined or moralized from without by the desire to promote the general welfare. I argue to the contrary that if ?reactive attitudes? like resentment and moral blame are understood as Strawson analyzed them, as essentially ?interpersonal? or ?second personal?, they have a different content and function. They implicitly demand respect in a way that also expresses respect for the victimizer as a member of mutually accountable community of moral equals. Some implications of this idea are discussed for the ?expressive theory of punishment? and ?civil recourse? theories of torts

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, Aristotle, and Nietzsche all did ethical philosophy how, for example, they sought to gain insight into what has value through understanding what value itself is. After an introductory section, and one on main approaches to metaethics, chapters discuss "modern" philosophical moralists Hobbes, Mill, and Kant and pre- and postmodern philosophical approaches to ethics in Aristotle, Nietzsche, and the ethics of care. Throughout, the reader is invited to do rather than just read about philosophical ethics and, in doing so, to think through questions that face all thoughtful human beings. Themes include the nature of value and moral obligation, freedom and choice, human flourishing, excellence and merit, radical critiques of morality, and the importance of relationships for human life.

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.