R. Jay Wallace

A defence of the idea that there are sui generis duties of love: duties, that is, that we owe to people in virtue of standing in loving relationships with them. I contrast this non‐reductionist position with the widespread reductionist view that our duties to those we love all derive from more generic moral principles. The paper mounts a cumulative argument in favour of the non‐reductionist position, adducing a variety of considerations that together speak strongly in favour of adopting it. The concluding section connects this debate with larger issues in moral theory concerning the general idea of obligation.

This dissertation is a critical study of rationalism in ethics: the view that acting morally is a requirement of rationality, and that all agents consequently have reason to be moral. The study attempts first to reconstruct the essential elements of the rationalist approach in ethics, and then to identify the most critical obstacles in the way of that approach. By way of reconstruction, it is argued that the rationalist in ethics needs to construe rationality as a set of ideal principles or norms, and to affirm a connection between one's having a practical reason and the capacity of rationality to lead one to be motivated to act on the reason. This latter claim amounts to a version of internalism, and some time is devoted to the task--hitherto neglected by philosophers--of clarifying and defending the connection which it postulates between practical reasons and the motivation to act on them. Given internalism, the burden on the rationalist is to show that rational reflection can by itself lead to the motivation to act on moral reasons. Opponents of rationalism have characteristically challenged the very possibility of such purely rational motivations, and the dissertation considers next the arguments that have been offered for this broadly Humean position. The conclusion is reached that there are no plausible a priori arguments against the very possibility of a rationalist explanation of motivation. This does not however represent a vindication of the rationalist approach: there is room for a pragmatic argument against purely rational explanations of motivation, and the dissertation concludes by offering such an argument, focussing in particular on the case of prudence and prudential reasons.

A common strategy unites much that philosophers have written about the virtues. The strategy can be traced back at least to Aristotle, who suggested that human beings have a characteristic function or activity, and that the virtues are traits of character which enable humans to perform this kind of activity excellently or well. The defining feature of this approach is that it treats the virtues as functional concepts, to be both identified and justified by reference to some independent goal or end which they enable people to attain. Some recent philosophers seem to have hoped that by following this perfectionist strategy, we might attain a more convincing account of our moral practices than rule-based theories of ethics have been able to provide.

R. Jay Wallace argues in this book that moral accountability hinges on questions of fairness: When is it fair to hold people morally responsible for what they do? Would it be fair to do so even in a deterministic world? To answer these questions, we need to understand what we are doing when we hold people morally responsible, a stance that Wallace connects with a central class of moral sentiments, those of resentment, indignation, and guilt. To hold someone responsible, he argues, is to be subject to these reactive emotions in one's dealings with that person. Developing this theme with unusual sophistication, he offers a new interpretation of the reactive emotions and traces their role in our practices of blame and moral sanction. With this account in place, Wallace advances a powerful and sustained argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behavior accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibility. Rigorously argued, eminently readable, this book touches on issues of broad concern to philosophers, legal theorists, political scientists, and anyone with an interest in the nature and limits of responsibility.

Questions about the possibility and nature of moral motivation occupy a central place in the history of ethics. Philosophers disagree, however, about the role that motivational investigations should play within the larger subject of ethical theory. These disagreements surface in the dispute about whether moral thought is necessarily motivating – ‘internalists’ affirming that it is,‘externalists’ denying this. [...] There are also important questions about the content of moral motivations. A moral theory should help us to make sense of the fact that people are often moved to do the right thing, by identifying a basic motive to moral behaviour that is both widespread and intelligible, as a serious source of reasons.

This paper explores the question whether utilitarianism is compatible with the autonomy of the moral agent. The paper begins by considering Bernard Williams' famous complaint that utilitarianism cannot do justice to the personal projects and commitments constitutive of character. Recent work (by Peter Railton among others) has established that a utilitarian agent need not be free of such personal projects and commitments, and could even affirm them morally at the level of second"order reflection. But a different and more subtle problem confronts this approach: the use of utilitarian principles to justify the cultivation of personal projects and attachments undermines the autonomy to support this objection, according to which autonomy is a matter of acting in a way one can reflectively endorse.

Rational agency may be thought of as intentional activity that is guided by the agent's conception of what they have reason to do. The paper identifies and assesses three approaches to this phenomenon, which I call internalism, meta-internalism, and volitionalism. Internalism accounts for rational motivation by appeal to substantive desires of the agent's that are conceived as merely given; I argue that it fails to do full justice to the phenomenon of guidance by one's conception of one's reasons. Meta-internalism explains this phenomenon by postulating higher-order dispositions, consitutive of (rational) agency itself, which causally interact with the agent's normative beliefs to produce corresponding motivations to action. I show that meta-internalism comes to grief over cases of akrasia, insofar as it leaves no room for the capacity for rational guidance when agents voluntarily act at variance with their judgments about what they have reason to do. Volitionalism, I contend, improves on both internalism and meta-internalism. Its distinctive feature is the postulation of a kind of motivation that is directly subject to the agent's control, and independent of the dispositions and desires to which the agent is passively subject.

It is both common and natural to think of addiction as a kind of defect of the will. Addicts, we tend to suppose, are subject to impulses or cravings that are peculiarly unresponsive to their evaluative reflection about what there is reason for them to do. As a result of this unresponsiveness, we further suppose, addicts are typically impaired in their ability to act in accordance with their own deliberative conclusions. My question in this paper is whether we can make adequate sense of this conception of addiction as a volitional defect. In particular, I want to focus on some philosophical assumptions, from the theory of action, that bear directly on the very idea that addiction might impair the agent’s volitional capacities. Understanding this idea, I shall argue, requires that we start out with an adequate conception of the human will. Only if we appreciate the kinds of volitional capacities characteristic of normal agents can we conceptualize properly the impairment of those capacities represented by addiction, and assess the implications of such impairment for questions of responsibility.

Philosophical work on the emotions can take a variety of forms, among which the following three are perhaps most common. There are, first, studies that attempt to analyse the nature of emotions in general, identifying the features that distinguish them from psychological states of other kinds, and their connections with such phenomena as rationality, perception, experience, memory, action, and the like. Second, there are works that focus on particular emotions or classes of emotion, such as guilt, pride, love, and friendship; these works attempt to identify the features that set the selected emotions apart from other emotional states, tracing their links with cognition and affect and their characteristic expression in action. There are, finally, studies of the significance of the emotions for the philosophical understanding of morality. These typically address questions concerning the importance of emotions for character, action, and moral education, and explore the implications of such questions for traditional conceptions of practical reason and moral principle.

It is not a new thought that an adequate understanding of freedom and responsibility might require us to distinguish between the theoretical and practical points of view. This distinction is at the heart of the Kantian approach to moral philosophy. But while the Kantian strategy is deeply suggestive, it has proved difficult to work out the idea that freedom and responsibility are artifacts of the practical standpoint. Hilary Bok’s book Freedom and Responsibility provides a new interpretation and defense of the broadly Kantian approach. It offers an illuminating account of the distinction between the practical and the theoretical points of view, and develops in an original way the thesis that freedom and responsibility need to be situated in the context of practical rather than theoretical reasoning. The book is a sophisticated statement of an important and underappreciated position; it is also pleasantly written and vigorously argued. I recommend it strongly to anyone with an interest in the issues it addresses.

This paper addresses some connections between conceptions of the will and the theory of practical reason. The first two sections argue against the idea that volitional commitments should be understood along the lines of endorsement of normative principles. A normative account of volition cannot make sense of akrasia, and it obscures an important difference between belief and intention. Sections three and four draw on the non-normative conception of the will in an account of instrumental rationality. The central problem is to explain the grip of instrumental requirements even in cases in which agents do not fully endorse the ends they are pursuing. The solution I propose appeals to coherence constraints on the beliefs that condition the distinctive volitional stance of intention.

This paper addresses some connections between conceptions of the will and the theory of practical reason. The first two sections argue against the idea that volitional commitments should be understood along the lines of endorsement of normative principles. A normative account of volition cannot make sense of akrasia, and it obscures an important difference between belief and intention. Sections three and four draw on the non-normative conception of the will in an account of instrumental rationality. The central problem is to explain the grip of instrumental requirements even in cases in which agents do not fully endorse the ends they are pursuing. The solution I propose appeals to coherence constraints on the beliefs that condition the distinctive volitional stance of intention.

T. M. Scanlon's magisterial book What We Owe to Each Other is surely one of the most sophisticated and important works of moral philosophy to have appeared for many years. It raises fundamental questions about all the main aspects of the subject, and I hope and expect that it will have a decisive influence on the shape and direction of moral philosophy in the years to come. In this essay I shall focus on four sets of issues raised by Scanlon's systematic argument, with the aim of clarifying some of Scanlon's central assumptions and presenting alternatives at several key points. The perspective from which I offer these comments is that of a reader who is sympathetic to Scanlon's general approach but not yet convinced on various points of detail.

Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality defends a strikingly nonpsychologistic account of motivating reasons for action. When we explain what people do by citing their reasons, we are trying to isolate the considerations that were actually effective in moving them to act. But it is crucial, Dancy contends, that these considerations be understood in a way that preserves their connection to the normative contexts in which the concept of a reason also has a place. The considerations that move agents to act are considerations that agents take to cast a favorable light on the actions they perform, and it is at least sometimes the case that peoples’ motivating reasons are also good reasons for action, considerations that really do recommend or speak in favor of the action that was undertaken. If we make the plausible further assumption that these normative reasons are typically not psychological states of the agents to whom they apply, it follows that motivating reasons equally cannot be understood in essentially psychological terms. The reasons for which people act are rarely if ever psychological states to which they are subject, but facts or states of the world of the sort that are capable of counting in favor of actions, and that in successful cases render sensible or reasonable the very actions that agents in fact perform.

Promising is clearly a social practice or convention. By uttering the formula, “I hereby promise to do X,” we can raise in others the expectation that we will in fact do X. But this succeeds only because there is a social practice that consists (inter alia) in a disposition on the part of promisers to do what they promise, and an expectation on the part of promisees that promisers will so behave. It is equally clear that, barring special circumstances of some kind, it is morally wrong for promisers to fail to do what they have promised to do. What is perhaps less clear is how the moral wrongness that is involved when promises are broken is related to the social practice that makes promising possible in the first place

This book is an impressive and stimulating treatment of central issues in metaethics. It is extremely well-written, combining clarity and precision with an individual style that is engaging and very often witty. It presents a general commentary on the contemporary metaethical debate, on the way to defending a position in that debate—moral fictionalism—that is distinctive and worthy of reaching a wider audience. The book is full of arguments, presenting a wealth of stimulating ideas, objections, and suggestions on all the topics addressed.