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92Grotius at the Creation of Modern Moral PhilosophyArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 94 (3): 296-325. 2012.
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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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9Normativity 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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129Self-Interest and Self-ConcernSocial Philosophy and Policy 14 (1): 158. 1997.In what follows I consider whether the idea of a person's interest or good might be better understood through that of care or concern for that person for her sake, rather than conversely, as is ordinarily assumed. Contrary to desire-satisfaction theories of interest, such an account can explain why not everything a person rationally desires is part of her good, since what a person sensibly wants is not necessarily what we would sensibly want, insofar as we care about her. First, however, a tale:…Read more
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61Equal Freedom: selected Tanner lectures on human valuesUniversity of Michigan Press. 1995.Issues at the major fault-line of political beliefs and debates.
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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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9Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 1996.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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126Reply to Griffin, Raz, and wolfUtilitas 18 (4): 434-444. 2006.I am honored that Jim Griffin, Joseph Raz, and Susan Wolf, all of whose work I greatly admire, have thought my ideas on welfare and care worth engaging, and I am very grateful to them for doing so. Each has raised searching and difficult questions. Rather than attempting to respond to them seriatim, I propose to discuss the issues under three broad headings: questions about the concept of welfare, questions about care or sympathetic concern, and the question of whether welfare claims have agent-…Read more
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343The 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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28Morality, Authority, and Law: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics IOxford University Press. 2013.Stephen Darwall presents a series of essays that explore the view that morality is second-personal, 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
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20Review: From Morality to Virtue and Back? (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (3). 1994.
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11Conrad Johnson 1943-1992Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66 (5). 1993.
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Intuitionism and the Motivation ProblemIn Philip Stratton-Lake (ed.), Ethical Intuitionism: Re-Evaluations, Clarendon Press. 2002.
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39Comment on Stephen Darwall's The Second Person StandpointPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1): 246-252. 2010.
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143Agent-centered restrictions from the inside outPhilosophical Studies 50 (3). 1986.Peer Reviewed.
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6Susan S. Lipschutz 1942-1997Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 72 (2). 1998.
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1How is Moorean Value Related to Reasons for Action?In Susana Nuccetelli & Gary Seay (eds.), Themes From G. E. Moore: New Essays in Epistemology and Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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46On Sterba’s Argument from Rationality to MoralityThe Journal of Ethics 18 (3): 243-252. 2014.James Sterba argues for morality as a principled compromise between self-regarding and other-regarding reasons and that either egoists or altruists, who always give overriding weight to self-regarding and other-reasons, respectively, can be shown to beg the question against morality. He concludes that moral conduct is “rationally required.” Sterba’s dialectic assumes that both egoists and altruists accept that both self-regarding and other-regarding considerations are genuine pro tanto reasons, …Read more
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204Authority, Accountability, and PreemptionJurisprudence 2 (1): 103-119. 2011.Joseph Raz's 'normal justification thesis' is that the normal way of justifying someone's claim to authority over another person is that the latter would comply better with the reasons that apply to him anyway were he to treat the former's directives as authoritative. Darwall argues that this provides 'reasons of the wrong kind' for authority. He turns then to Raz's claim that the fact that treating someone as an authority would enable one to comply better with reasons that apply to him anyway c…Read more
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83Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy (review)Legal Theory 19 (1): 89-99. 2013.
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Moore to StevensonIn Robert J. Cavalier, James Gouinlock & James P. Sterba (eds.), Ethics in the history of western philosophy, St. Martin's Press. pp. 366--397. 1989.
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33Reply to TerzisCanadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (1). 1988.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 som…Read more
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355Desires, reasons, and causes (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2). 2003.Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality makes a significant contribution to clarifying the relationship between desire and reasons for acting, both the normative reasons we seek in deliberation and the motivating reasons we cite in explanation. About the former, Dancy argues that, not only are normative reasons not all grounded in desires, but, more radically, the fact that one desires something is never itself a normative reason. And he argues that desires fail to figure in motivating reasons also, …Read more
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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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952Two 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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Value Theory |
History of Western Philosophy |