Stephen Darwall

Elsewhere, Stephen Darwall has argued for a mutual accountability framework of law and gestured toward a mutual accountability framework of punishment. Little was said, however, regarding what the latter conception of punishment would require, structurally and functionally. Here Stephen and William Darwall address these matters in the specific context of contemporary American policing and penal institutions. From historical and empirical work on the American carceral regime, they argue, first, that its institutions fail to meet accountability conditions necessary for their legitimacy. Second, they argue that these institutions are responsible for producing social dynamics that undermine the possibility of mutual accountability in general. They conclude that American carceral institutions lack the authority they purport to have to make and enforce the criminal law, and thus that any effort, theoretical or practical, to realize justice in the domain of criminal process, requires an abolitionist framework.

The book provides the first systematic treatment of attitudes that mediate heartfelt connection: second-personal attitudes of the heart. These are instances of what P. F. Strawson called “reactive attitudes,” but they are much less studied than those—guilt, resentment, and blame—that mediate mutual accountability: second-personal attitudes of the will. Both sets of attitudes are held from a “participant” or second-person standpoint, imply address, and call for reciprocation. But whereas the attitudes that mediate accountability, and therefore deontic morality, implicitly demand respect, second-personal attitudes of the heart invite, and hope for, rather than demand or expect, heartfelt connection. Examples include love, gratitude, trust, faith, hope, and a host of others. Although attitudes of both kinds are inevitably involved in human relationship, deontic attitudes of the will mediate our relations to other persons considered simply as one person among others, which is the fundamental relationship of deontic morality. Attitudes of the heart, by contrast, mediate personal relationship in which we share heartfelt connection. By studying both attitudes of the will and attitudes of the heart, the book is able to provide the first general characterization of reactive attitudes. A reactive attitude is any attitude felt from a second-person stance that implicitly calls for the person who is its object to have a reciprocal attitude in return—whether an attitude of the will or an attitude of the heart.

S. 39: "My project in this paper is to develop the initial distinction which I have drawn between recognition and appraisal respect into a more detailed and specific account of each. These accounts will not merely be of intrinsic interest. Ultimately I will use them to illuminate the puzzles with which this paper began and to understand the idea of self-respect." 42 " Thus, insofar as respect within such a pursuit will depend on an appraisal of the participant from the perspective of whatever standards are held to be appropriate to the pursuit, such respect will depend on a judgement to which excellences of character are thought relevant. Note that exactly what aspect of the person's character is thought to be relevant in this instance is his recognition respect (or lack of it) for the standards of the pursuit." 44 "This attitude fails of being appraisal respect in that my having it toward the person is conditional on those traits being such as to make him server a particular purpose that I happen to have" 44 - 45 "To sum up: Appraisal respect is an attitude of positibe appraisal of a person either judged as a person or as engaged in some more specific pursuit. In the first case, the appropriate grounds are features of the person's character: dispositions to act for particular reasons or a higher-level disposition to act for the best reasons. In the second case, though features of character do not exhaust the appropriate grounds for appraisal respect, some such character traits will be relevant (recognition respect for the standards of a particular pursuit). Also, the other features which constitute the appoprate excellences of the pursuit must be related to traits of character in the way specified. In both cases, the positive appraisal of the person, and of his traits, must be categorical. It cannot depend on the fact that the person, because of his traits, serves an interest or purpose of one's own." 45 "To have recognition respect for someone as a person is to give appropriate weight to the fact that he or she is a person by being willing to constrain one's behaviour in ways required by that fact." 45 "This is rather different from having an attitude of appraisal respect for someone as a person. The latter is a positive appraisal oif an individual made with regard ti those features which are excellences of persons. As such, it is not owed to everone, for it may or may not be merited. When it is, what is merited is just the positive appraisal itself." 47 "Second, the only beings who are approriate objects of appraisal respect are those who are capable of acting for reasons and hence capable of conceiving of various facts as meriting more or less consideration in deliberation."

Francis Hutcheson's An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, published in 1725, arguably contains the first broadly utilitarian theory of rights ever formulated. In this essay, I argue that, despite its subtlety, there are crucial lacunae in Hutcheson's theory. One of the most important, which Mill seeks to repair, is that his theory of rights lacks a conceptually necessary companion, namely, a corollary account of obligation. Hutcheson has no theory of fully deontic obligations, much less an account of the relational obligations that, as Hohfeld famously argued, are the conceptually necessary correlates of claim rights of the kind Hutcheson wishes to theorise. Like Hume, Hutcheson subversively redefines ‘obligation’ as a motive of self-interest or the approval of morally good motives by moral sense (Hume's ‘natural obligation’ and ‘moral obligation’, respectively). This leaves Hutcheson without any account of the obligations that are the necessary correlates of claim rights. Mill does significantly better on this score but ends up giving a pragmatic ‘reason of the wrong kind’ for rights and obligations. Hutcheson thus begins a line of thought shown by him to have been powerless to ground rights without independent deontic premises from the start.

The concept of place is ultimately a matter of ethical significance—of where something fits in a nexus or structure of meaning. Often this meaning is quite personal, involving a sense of presence we associate with a place. This essay investigates this connection through a study of Wordsworth’s poem, “Tintern Abbey.” It argues that the notion of a presence-infused place is ultimately that of a second-personal space. Presence is a matter of second-personal openness. Therefore, when presence infuses place, it makes its space second-personal also.