Stephen Darwall

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 reasons in deliberation from the agent's point of view. What a deliberating agent has in view is rarely his own will or desires as such, even if taking something as a reason is intimately tied to desire. Someone who wants to escape a burning building does not evaluate her options by considering which is likeliest to realize what she wants or wills. She is focused, rather, on her desire's object: getting out alive. The fact that a successful route would realize something she wants is apt to strike her as beside the point or, at best, as a trivial bonus.

Beginning from Kant’s famous idea that “unsociable sociability” stimulates human progress and civilization, the essay investigates Kant’s categories of the “unsociable” and the “sociable,” and argues that the fundamental difference between them is that the former presuppose a social perspective that is third personal, whereas the latter is always a second-personal affair, instantiated when people relate to one another in various ways, or manifest the disposition to do so. Kant’s “unsociable” attitudes, like “competitive vanity,” are deeply social. They are the fruit of Rousseauean “amour propre,” presupposing a social “observer’s” perspective from which we can desire to be positively regarded or seen. Sociability, as the concept enters into the early modern natural law tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf that led up to Kant, is an irreducibly second-personal phenomenon, realized in our mutual relatings, and the social and legal institutions that govern these. This essay explores these conceptual differences and interactions and the historical background of Kant’s remark in Grotius, Pufendorf, and Rousseau.