Garrath Williams

This paper argues that those critics of Hannah Arendt's thought who have protested at her disavowal of ‘moral standards’ as being appropriate in the judgment of political action have, in fact, misjudged the structure of her thought. My argument is, however, a constructive one: the paper seeks to demonstrate how Arendt arrives at her sweeping rejection of conventional standards of moral judgment, and what solution she proposes. I do this in three stages. First, I address Arendt's understanding of self as opposed to world: especially how the moral absolutes which may be claimed by the former may threaten the very structure of the latter. Second, I draw upon her model of action to discover the idea of a worldly ethics, one of principle. And third, I consider the fate of our goals when we act into the world, paying particular attention to the idea of responsibility and the on-going responsiveness to the world that belongs to action under a principle.

Who, in particular, may hold us responsible for our moral failings? Most discussions of moral responsibility bracket this question, despite its obvious practical importance. In this article, I investigate the moral authority involved and how it arises in the context of personal relationships, such as friendship or family relations. My account is based on the idea that parties to a personal relationship not only share responsibility for their relationship, but also — to some degree that is negotiated between them — for one another's lives. In sharing these responsibilities, we grant people a particular authority to respond to us. By highlighting the responsibility that we assume when we hold someone responsible, I also suggest that this analysis contains important lessons for thinking about responsibility in other contexts

This paper explores an internal relation between wrong-doing and the ability to think in moral terms, through Hobbes ’ thought. I use his neglected retelling of our ‘original sin’ as a springboard, seeing how we then discover a need to vindicate our own projects in terms shared by others. We become normatively demanding creatures: greedy for normative vindication, eager to judge others amid the difficulties of our world. However there is, of course, no choice for us but to choose our own principles of judgment, or at least some authority to provide these. Unconvinced by Hobbes ’ remedies, I conclude with one implication for moral philosophy@ a need to look rather differently at agency and responsibility

This paper interprets facts about actions and responsibility in terms of Kant’s category of the ‘intelligible,’ but is also broadly naturalistic in its approach. It analyses intelligible facts in terms of two elements, the institutional and the normative. First, I draw on John Searle’s account of institutional facts. Searle emphasises that neither the meaning of a word nor my possession of something is a matter of empirical facts concerning the entity itself. Instead, to understand the nature of such facts, we must take account of people’s shared beliefs. Kant’s account of property relations can, in part, be understood as an institution in Searle’s sense. Drawing on the work of Tamar Schapiro and Arthur Ripstein, I extend this idea to illuminate our ‘ownership’ of our deeds. Second, and more briefly, I present a normative element. Institutional facts need not, in themselves, be morally compelling. Under conditions of relative freedom and equality, however, I argue that practices of responsibility can be seen as a practical manifestation of critique. This generates a critical self-reflexivity that, I suggest, provides normative warrant to the practices of action and responsibility that we institute among ourselves.