University of Pittsburgh
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1972
CV
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
  •  196
    Internalism and agency
    Philosophical Perspectives 6 155-174. 1992.
    have come in for increasing attention and controversy. A good example would be recent debates about moral realism where question of the relation between ethics (or ethical judgment) and the will has come to loom large.' Unfortunately, however, the range of positions labelled internalist in ethical writing is bewilderingly large, and only infrequently are important distinctions kept clear.2 Sometimes writers have in mind the view that sincere assent to a moral (or, more generally, an ethical) jud…Read more
  •  291
    Precis: The second-person standpoint (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1): 216-228. 2010.
  •  146
    Agreement Matters: Critical Notice of Derek Parfit, On What Matters
    Philosophical Review 123 (1): 79-105. 2014.
    Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) mounted a striking defense of Act Consequentialism against a Rawls-inspired Kantian orthodoxy in moral philosophy. On What Matters (2011) is notable for its serious engagement with Kant's ethics and for its arguments in support of the “Triple Theory,” which allies Rule Consequentialism with Kantian and Scanlonian Contractualism against Act Consequentialism as a theory of moral right. This critical notice argues that what underlies this change is a view o…Read more
  •  16
    Stephen Darwall expands upon his argument for a second-personal framework for morality, in which morality entails mutual accountability and the authority to address demands. He explores the role of the framework in relation to cultural ideas of respect and honor; the development of "modern" moral philosophy; and interpersonal relations
  •  50
    Under Moore's Spell
    Utilitas 10 (3): 286. 1998.
    As David Wiggins points out, although Ross is best known for opposing Moore's consequentialism, Ross comes very close to capitulation to Moore when he accepts, as required by beneficence, a prima facie duty to maximize the good. I argue that what lies behind this is Ross's acceptance of Moore's doctrine of agent-neutral intrinsic value, a notion that is not required by, but is indeed is in tension with, beneficence as doing good to or for others
  •  4
    Ought, Reasons, and Morality by W. D. Falk (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 86 (4): 208-214. 1989.
  •  14
    Book reviews and critical studies (review)
    with Virginia Black and L. Baronovitch
    Philosophia 9 (3-4): 339-373. 1981.
  •  401
    Empathy, sympathy, care
    Philosophical Studies 89 (2-3). 1998.
    In what follows, I wish to discuss empathy and sympathy’s relevance to ethics, taking recent findings into account. In particular, I want to consider sympathy’s relation to the idea of a person’s good or well-being. It is obvious and uncontroversial that sympathetic concern for a person involves some concern for her good and some desire to promote it. What I want to suggest is that the concept of a person’s good or well-being is one we have because we are capable of care and sympathetic concern.…Read more
  •  1292
    Moral psychology as accountability
    In Justin D'Arms & Daniel Jacobson (eds.), Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 40-83. 2014.
    Recent work in moral philosophy has emphasized the foundational role played by interpersonal accountability in the analysis of moral concepts such as moral right and wrong, moral obligation and duty, blameworthiness, and moral responsibility (Darwall 2006; 2013a; 2013b). Extending this framework to the field of moral psychology, we hypothesize that our moral attitudes, emotions, and motives are also best understood as based in accountability. Drawing on a large body of empirical evidence, we arg…Read more
  •  324
    Moral obligation: Form and substance
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (1pt1): 31-46. 2010.
    Beginning from an analysis of moral obligation's form that I defend in The Second-Person Standpoint as what we are answerable for as beings with the necessary capacities to enter into relations of mutual accountability, I argue that this analysis has implications for moral obligation's substance. Given what it is to take responsibility for oneself and hold oneself answerable, I argue, it follows that if there are any moral obligations at all, then there must exist a basic pro tanto obligation no…Read more
  •  25
    Reply to Scheffler
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (2). 1982.
  •  638
    Deontology (edited book)
    Blackwell. 2003.
    Deontology brings together some of the most significant philosophical work on ethics, presenting canonical essays on core questions in moral philosophy. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative theory.
  •  60
    Valuing Activity
    Social Philosophy and Policy 16 (1): 176. 1999.
    Call the proposition that the good life consists of excellent, distinctively human activity the Aristotelian Thesis. I think of a photograph I clipped from the New York Times as vividly depicting this claim. It shows a pianist, David Golub, accompanying two vocalists, Victoria Livengood and Erie Mills, at a tribute for Marilyn Home. All three artists are in fine form, exercising themselves at the height of their powers. The reason I saved the photo, however, is Mr. Golub's face. He is positively…Read more
  •  35
    Motive and Obligation in the British Moralists*: STEPHEN L. DARWALL
    Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1): 133-150. 1989.
    My aim in what follows is to sketch with a broad brush fundamental changes involving the concept of obligation in British ethics of the early modern period, as it developed in the direction of the view that obligatory force is a species of motivational force – an idea that deeply informs present thought. I shall also suggest, although I can hardly demonstrate it conclusively here, that one important source for this view was a doctrine which we associate with Kant, and which it may seem surprisin…Read more
  •  24
    The Inference to the Best Means
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 6 (1). 1976.
    Some recent writers on practical reasoning have had it that reasoning about what to do differs in logical structure from theoretical reasoning. In particular, Anthony Kenny and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that there are permissible inferences in practical reasoning which lack analogues in theoretical reasoning. Such discussions seem inevitably to draw their impetus from what Aristotle had to say on the topic, both in the Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere.
  •  228
    Respect and the Second-Person Standpoint
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78 (2). 2004.
  •  68
    Bi-polar obligation
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 7 333. 2012.
  •  20
    The Authority of Reason
    Philosophical Review 109 (4): 583. 2000.
    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 Hea…Read more
  •  51
    How should ethics relate to (the rest of) philosophy? : Moore's legacy
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1): 1-20. 2003.
  •  104
    Pufendorf on Morality, Sociability, and Moral Powers
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (2): 213-238. 2012.
    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 …Read more
  •  92
    Grotius at the Creation of Modern Moral Philosophy
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 94 (3): 296-325. 2012.
  •  9
    Normativity and Projection in Hobbes’s Leviathan
    Philosophical 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
  •  122
    Self-Interest and Self-Concern
    Social 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
  •  59
    Equal Freedom: selected Tanner lectures on human values
    University of Michigan Press. 1995.
    Issues at the major fault-line of political beliefs and debates.
  •  109
    Why Ethics is Part of Philosophy
    The 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