Stephen Darwall

Stephen Darwall presents a series of essays that explore the Second-Person Standpoint (SPS)--an argument which advances an analysis of central moral concepts as irreducibly second personal in the sense of entailing mutual accountability and the authority to address demands. He illustrates the power of the second-personal framework to illuminate a wide variety of issues in moral, political, and legal philosophy. Section I concerns morality: for example, its distinctiveness among normative concepts, the relation between 'bipolar' obligations (owed to someone) and moral obligation period, and whether morality requires general principles. Section II focuses on autonomy, its relation to the will, and the sense in which we can give ourselves reasons for acting. And Section III concerns the nature of authority and the law. It argues that only a second-personal framework is able to explain these and the differences between criminal and civil law.

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 not to undermine one another's moral autonomy.

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) judgment concerning what one should do is necessarily connected to motivation (actual or dispositional).s This necessity may be conceptual, or perhaps metaphysical, the thought being..

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 concern with a specific ethical conception whose distinctness from eudaimonist prudential concerns is part of its very idea.

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

Dancy’s famous arguments for the position he calls _moral particularism_ proceed entirely on the basis of general features of normative reasons for acting rather than anything having to do with _morality_ more specifically. Dancy argues plausibly that there being normative reason for an agent to do something need not depend on the existence of valid general norms or principles from which these reasons derive. But Dancy simply does not consider whether there might be something about morality in particular that requires the existence of general _moral_ principles. This paper argues that this is indeed the case. What is distinctive about morality is the idea not just that there are good reasons favouring or supporting action, but that action is _required_ of us—that we are morally _obligated_ to act in the sense of being _accountable_ for doing so and of being warrantedly _held_ responsible and blamed if we do not and lack valid excuse.

George Terzis makes several objections to claims and arguments I advanced in Impartial Reason. I cannot take them all up, but I would like to respond to some, which I shall group into three: whether reasons depend on norms applying to all rational agents; how the unity of agency relates to such norms; and the self-support condition. Since the objections concerning cut most deeply against the central thesis of Impartial Reason, I shall begin with them. Before I do that, however, I should make some preliminary remarks.Impartial Reason offers an internalist theory of reasons, but one that is, I believe, more sensitive to the normative character of reasons than internalist theories usually are.1 A theory of reasons is internalist if it holds that something's being a reason depends somehow on its capacity to affect motivation. Unlike internalist theories that identify reasons with de facto motives, however, IR insists on the normative character of reasons as tending to justify conduct as rational. It does this by holding that a reason to act is something which motivates when appropriately considered. The normative or justificatory weight of reasons, then, is held to derive from a normative ideal of rational consideration. Reasons inherit as justificatory weight the motivational force they would come to have in an ideally rational process of practical reflection.