-
198Précis of Responsibility and the Moral SentimentsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (3): 680-681. 2002.Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments offers an account of moral responsibility. It addresses the question: what are the forms of capacity or ability that render us morally accountable for the things we do? A traditional answer has it that the conditions of moral responsibility include freedom of the will, where this in turn involves the availability of robust alternative possibilities. I reject this answer, arguing that the conditions of moral responsibility do not include any condition of al…Read more
-
76RepliesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (3). 2002.My commentators have given me much to think about, and I am grateful to them for their serious engagement with my work. Their many objections coalesce primarily around the following issues, which I shall address in turn: the normative approach; praiseworthiness; practical reason and moral reasons; physical possibility; the exercise of general powers; nomic necessity and revisionism about blame; ultimate responsibility and control.
-
Normativity and the Will. Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Practical ReasonTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 68 (4): 820-822. 2006.
-
39I—R. Jay Wallace: Duties of LoveAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 86 (1): 175-198. 2012.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 …Read more
-
36Moral responsibility and the practical point of viewIn A. van den Beld (ed.), Moral Responsibility and Ontology, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 25--47. 2000.
-
348How to Argue about Practical ReasonMind 99 (395): 355-385. 1990.How to Argue about . Bibliographic Info. Citation. How to Argue about ; Author(s): R. Jay Wallace; Source: Mind , New Series, Vol.
-
1Practical Reason and the Claims of Morality: On the Idea of Rationalism in EthicsDissertation, Princeton University. 1988.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 norm…Read more
-
21The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and ReasonPhilosophical Books 29 (4): 225-227. 1988.
-
21Alasdair Macintyre, "after virtue: A study in moral theory", and "whose justice? Which rationality?" (review)History and Theory 28 (3): 326. 1989.
-
16T. L. S. Sprigge, "The Rational Foundations of Ethics" (review)Philosophical Quarterly 39 (57): 509. 1989.
-
2359Virtue, Reason, and PrincipleCanadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 469-495. 1991.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 e…Read more
-
549Responsibility and the Moral SentimentsHarvard University Press. 1994.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 subje…Read more
-
3Reason and responsibilityIn Garrett Cullity & Berys Nigel Gaut (eds.), Ethics and practical reason, Oxford University Press. pp. 321--345. 1997.
-
314Moral MotivationRoutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 1998.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 mora…Read more
-
9Reason, Emotion and WillDartmouth Publishing Company. 1999.The moral strands of psychology are explored in this collection of essays
-
43Autonomie, Charakter und praktische Vernunft: Überlegungen am Beispiel des UtilitarismusAnalyse & Kritik 21 (2): 213-230. 1999.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…Read more
-
315Three conceptions of rational agencyEthical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (3): 217-242. 1999.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 reason…Read more
-
374Addiction as defect of the will: Some philosophical reflections (review)Law and Philosophy 18 (6). 1999.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 con…Read more
-
17An Anti-Philosophy of the Emotions? (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (2): 469-477. 2000.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 guil…Read more
-
33Freedom and ResponsibilityPhilosophical Review 109 (4): 592. 2000.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…Read more
-
274Normativity, commitment and instrumental reasonPhilosophers' Imprint 1 1-26. 2001.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 rational…Read more
-
1Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental ReasonPhilosophers' Imprint 1. 2001.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 rational…Read more
-
374Scanlon’s ContractualismEthics 112 (3): 429-470. 2002.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…Read more
-
56Explanation, Deliberation, and ReasonsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2): 429-435. 2003.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 …Read more
-
235Promises and Practices RevisitedPhilosophy and Public Affairs 31 (2): 119-154. 2003.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 promis…Read more
Berkeley, CA, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |