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202Morality and practical reason: A Kantian approachIn David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 282--320. 2006.A central theme of Kant’s approach to moral philosophy is that moral obligations are categorical, by which he means that they provide supremely authoritative reasons for acting independently of an agent’s ends or interests. Kant argues that this is a reflection of our distinctive freedom or autonomy, as he calls it, as moral agents. A less, well- appreciated aspect of the Kantian picture of morality and respect for the dignity of each individual person is the idea of reciprocal accountability, t…Read more
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134Being WithSouthern Journal of Philosophy 49 (s1). 2011.What is it for two or more people to be with one another or together? And what role do empathic psychological processes play, either as essential constituents or as typical elements? As I define it, to be genuinely with each other, persons must be jointly aware of their mutual openness to mutual relating. This means, I argue, that being with is a second-personal phenomenon in the sense I discuss in The Second-Person Standpoint. People who are with each other are in one another's presence, where …Read more
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943Two kinds of respectEthics 88 (1): 36-49. 1977.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 st…Read more
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212Kantian practical reason defendedEthics 96 (1): 89-99. 1985.There are two ways in which philosophical controversialists can approach a classical opponent of their views. They can attempt to refute him, or they can try to show that, while generally assumed to be an opponent, the philosopher really was not, at least when he was thinking clearly. Of these two strategies, the latter, if it can be pulled off, is dialectically..
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107The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought': 1640–1740Cambridge University Press. 1995.This book is a major work in the history of ethics, and provides the first study of early modern British philosophy in several decades. Professor Darwall discerns two distinct traditions feeding into the moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the empirical, naturalist tradition, comprising Hobbes, Locke, Cumberland, Hutcheson, and Hume, which argues that obligation is the practical force that empirical discoveries acquire in the process of deliber…Read more
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51How Should Ethics Relate to (the Rest of) Philosophy?: Moore's LegacySouthern Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1): 1-20. 2003.
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134Sympathetic Liberalism: Recent Work on Adam SmithPhilosophy and Public Affairs 28 (2): 139-164. 1999.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http: //www.jstor.org/about/terms. html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use
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4Ethical Intuitionism and the Motivation Problem,”In Phillip Stratton-Lake (ed.), Ethical Intuitionism: Re-Evaluations, Oxford University Press. 1972.
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15William Klaas Frankena 1908-1994Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 68 (5). 1995.
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205Moore, normativity, and intrinsic valueEthics 113 (3): 468-489. 2003.Principia Ethica set the agenda for analytical metaethics. Moore’s unrelenting focus on fundamentals both brought metaethics into view as a potentially separate area of philosophical inquiry and provided a model of the analytical techniques necessary to pursue it.1 Moore acknowledged that he wasn’t the first to insist on a basic irreducible core of all ethical concepts. Although he seems not to have appreciated the roots of this thought in eighteenth-century intuitionists like Clarke, Balguy, and…Read more
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148The Second-Person Standpoint An Interview with Stephen DarwallThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 16 (1): 118-138. 2009.
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Morality and its criticsIn John Skorupski (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Routledge. 2010.
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228Because I Want ItSocial Philosophy and Policy 18 (2): 129-153. 2001.How can an agent's desire or will give him reasons for acting? Not long ago, this might have seemed a silly question, since it was widely believed that all reasons for acting are based in the agent's desires. The interesting question, it seemed, was not how what an agent wants could give him reasons, but how anything else could. In recent years, however, this earlier orthodoxy has increasingly appeared wrongheaded as a growing number of philosophers have come to stress the action-guiding role of…Read more
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186“But it would be wrong”Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2): 135-157. 2010.Is the fact that an action would be wrong itself a reason not to perform it? Warranted attitude accounts of value suggest about value, that being valuable is not itself a reason but to the reasons for valuing something in which its value consists. Would a warranted attitude account of moral obligation and wrongness, not entail, therefore, that being morally obligatory or wrong gives no reason for action itself? I argue that this is not true. Although warranted attitude theories of normative conc…Read more
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49The inventions of autonomyEuropean Journal of Philosophy 7 (3). 1999.Book reviewed in this article:J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy
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23Human Morality’s AuthorityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (4). 1995.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 string…Read more
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59Pleasure as Ultimate Good in Sidgwick’s EthicsThe Monist 58 (3): 475-489. 1974.The notion of pleasure lies at the very heart of Sidgwick’s moral philosophy. For Sidgwick holds not merely that pleasure is a good, but that ultimately it is the only good. And hence it is the good of pleasure which grounds his utilitarianism.
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