Stephen Darwall

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.

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.

Only in the last twenty-five years have scholars begun to appreciate Samuel Pufendorf’s importance for the history of ethics. The signal element of Pufendorf’s ethics for recent commentators is his idea that morality arises when God imposes his superior will on a world that can contain no moral value of or on its own. But how, exactly, is “imposition” accomplished? According to Pufendorf, human beings do not simply defer to God in the way elephant seals do to a dominant male. Rather, imposition is realized through recognition of God’s authority to direct and hold us answerable. This brings a whole battery of concepts into play—recognition, accountability, imputation, and authority—along with the capacities to operate with them in practical thought. What is brilliantly original in Pufendorf is his appreciation of these conceptual connections and his awareness of their implications for moral psychology. Authority is a kind of “moral power,” as Pufendorf calls it, which agents can exercise only within a social, moral space that is constituted by their respective obligations to and rights against one another, and whose exercise directly affects those rights and obligations. Only “sociable” beings with the capacity for mutual recognition are thus capable of moral obligation. Recent commentary has generally missed these important aspects and so, in my view, what is most fascinating and original in Pufendorf’s thought. Pufendorf was far from the first thinker to hold some version of a divine command theory of morality. But he may have been the first to attempt to work out what such a view must look like if it is to take seriously the conceptual links between authority, recognition, and accountability, as well as the psychology necessary for these to be realized in the moral life. In the end, however, this introduces an instability into Pufendorf.s view. I argue that whereas Pufendorf seeks to derive human moral powers, equal dignity, and sociability from God’s superior moral power, the very idea of moral powers, including God’s, seems already to presuppose a more basic moral power or dignity that is shared by any being who is capable of sociable relations.

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.

_ Virtue Ethics_ collects, for the first time, the main classical sources and the central contemporary expressions of virtue ethics approach to normative ethical theory. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative theory. Introduced by Stephen Darwall, this collection brings together classic and contemporary readings which define and advance the literature on virtue ethics. Includes six essays which respond to the classic sources. Includes a contemporary discussion on character and virtue by Gary Watson. Includes classic essays by Aristotle, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, and recent reactions to this work by philosophers including Philippa Foot, John McDowell, Alasdair MacIntyre, Annette Baier, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Slote.

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.

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, but then hold that their respective reasons always outweigh. Against this, I argue that egoists would most plausibly deny that non-self-regarding considerations have even pro tanto weight. I argue, also, that even if both sides grant the pro tanto weight of their opponent’s reasons, Sterba is mistaken in holding that only Morality as Compromise provides a “non-question-begging resolution” of what it is rational to do when self-regarding and other-regarding reasons conflict, since it might be that it is rational to act on either. It might be that the weightiest self-regarding and the weightiest other-regarding reasons in the case are both sufficient reasons for acting without either being conclusive. The essay ends with a sketch of arguments against egoism that I take to be more plausible than Sterba’s. As I have argued elsewhere, what makes an agent’s own welfare or her own concerns or interests normative for her simultaneously makes them normative for others as well.

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 the latter is a matter of second-personal standing or authority, as in the divine presence or in the king's presence. To be with someone is, therefore, to give the other second-personal standing, implicitly, to claim it for oneself and, thus, to enter into a relation of mutual accountability. Second-personal relating, I argue, requires a distinctive form of empathy, projective empathy, through which we imaginatively occupy others' perspectives and view ourselves as if from their point of view. Projective empathy is thus an essential constituent of “being with.” But it is not the only form of empathy that being with typically involves. Further, I discuss ways in which emotional contagion, affect attunement, as well as projective empathy typically enter into the complex psychological (and ethical) phenomenon of being with another person.