J. David Velleman

Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge recounts the wartime career of Georg Konrad Morgen (1909–1982), a judge who prosecuted crimes committed by members of the SS in Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. In 1943, Morgen discovered the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He tried to throw sand in the works by prosecuting concentration camp officials for lesser crimes. He charged the chief of the Auschwitz Gestapo with for 2,000 murders, and even sought an arrest warrant for Adolf Eichmann. Yet he worked within the ethos of the SS and continued to defend its reputation after the war. The book is a moral biography of Morgen, focusing on how he felt, thought, and deliberated about the moral challenges of his unique position. It explores Morgen’s moral and legal reasoning by drawing on his wartime papers as well as his postwar interrogations and testimonies at war-crimes trials. What emerges is a case study in moral complexity.

I offer an account of how ideals motivate us. My account suggests that although emulating an ideal is often rational, it can lead us to do irrational things. * This is the third in a series of four papers on narrative self-conceptions and their role in moral motivation. In the first paper, “The Self as Narrator” (to appear in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, ed. Joel Anderson and John Christman), I explore the motivational role of narrative self-conceptions, drawing on Daniel Dennett’s notion of the self as a “center of narrative gravity”. In the second paper, “Willing the Law” (in Practical Conflicts, ed. Monika Betzler and Peter Baumann [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming]), I explore the role of selfconceptions in Kantian “conflicts in the will”, drawing on Christine Korsgaard’s notion of “practical identities”. In a fourth paper, “A Sense of Self” (ms), I explore the role of narrative self-con-ceptions in Kantian “conflicts in conception”, drawing on the work of Thomas Nagel and John Perry on the self.

Believing that p, assuming that p, and imagining that p involve regarding p as true—or, as we shall call it, accepting p. What distinguishes belief from the other modes of acceptance? We claim that conceiving of an attitude as a belief, rather than an assumption or an instance of imagining, entails conceiving of it as an acceptance that is regulated for truth, while also applying to it the standard of being correct if and only if it is true. We argue that the second half of this claim, according to which the concept of belief includes a standard of correctness, is required to explain the fact that the deliberative question whether to believe that p is transparent to the question whether p. This argument raises various questions. Is there such a thing as deliberating whether to believe? Is the transparency of the deliberative question whether to believe that p the same as the transparency of the factual question whether I do believe that p? We will begin by answering these questions and then turn to a series of possible objections to our argument.

Self to Self brings together essays on personal identity, autonomy, and moral emotions by the distinguished philosopher J. David Velleman. Although each of the essays was written as an independent piece, they are unified by an overarching thesis, that there is no single entity denoted by 'the self', as well as by themes from Kantian ethics, psychoanalytic theory, social psychology, and Velleman's work in the philosophy of action. Two of the essays were selected by the editors of Philosophers' Annual as being among the ten best papers in their year of publication. Aimed primarily at professional philosophers and advanced students, Self to Self will also be of interest to psychologists and others who theorize about the self.

In How We Get Along, philosopher David Velleman compares our social interactions to the interactions among improvisational actors on stage. He argues that we play ourselves - not artificially but authentically, by doing what would make sense coming from us as we really are. And, like improvisational actors, we deal with one another in dual capacities: both as characters within the social drama and as players contributing to the shared performance. In this conception of social intercourse, Velleman finds rational grounds for morality, though not a rational guarantee. He maps a middle course between skepticism and rationalism, arguing that practical reasoning is 'pro-moral' without requiring moral action. The result is what he calls a 'Kinda Kantian metaethics'. How We Get Along is the summation of Velleman's thinking to date, incorporating and unifying previous work on agency, the self, the emotions, narrative and Kantian moral theory.

The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is actually a dispute about the nature of color properties. The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like. Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts about material objects--their powers to cause visual experiences, their dispositions to reflect incident light, their atomic makeup, and so on--amount to their having colors. The disagreement is thus about which properties colors are and, in particular, whether colors are any of the properties in a particular set that is acknowledged on both sides to exhaust the properties of material objects. In a previous paper we discussed at length one attempt to identify colors with particular properties of material objects--namely, with their dispositions to cause visual experiences. Here we shall discuss a different and perhaps more influential version of realism, which says that the colors of material objects are microphysical properties of their surfaces. We shall call this theory physicalism about color (physicalism, for short). In order to evaluate this theory, however, we shall first have to clarify some methodological issues. Our hope is that we can bring some further clarity to the question of color realism, whether or not we succeed in our critique of the physicalists' answer.

I have therefore decided to venture out of the philosophical armchair in order to examine the empirical evidence, as gathered by psychologists aiming to prove or disprove motivational conjectures like mine. By and large, this evidence is indirect in relation to my account of agency, since it is drawn from cases in which the relevant motive has been forced into the open by the manipulations of an experimenter. The resulting evidence doesn’t tend to show the mechanism of agency humming along in accordance with my specifications; it tends to show the knocks and shudders that such a mechanism emits when put under stress. But we often learn about the normal workings of things by subjecting them to abnormal conditions; and viewed in this light, various programs of psychological research offer indirect support to my account of agency. I’ll begin by reviewing the relevant research, leaving its relevance to my account of agency for the final section of the paper.

The agent portrayed in much philosophy of action is, let's face it, a square. He does nothing intentionally unless he regards it or its consequences as desirable. The reason is that he acts intentionally only when he acts out of a desire for some anticipated outcome; and in desiring that outcome, he must regard it as having some value. All of his intentional actions are therefore directed at outcomes regarded sub specie boni: under the guise of the good. This agent is conceived as being capable of intentional action—and hence as being an agent—only by virtue of being a pursuer of value. I want to question whether this conception of agency can be correct. Surely, so general a capacity as agency cannot entail so narrow a cast of mind. Our moral psychology has characterized, not the generic agent, but a particular species of agent, and a particularly bland species of agent, at that. It has characterized the earnest agent while ignoring those agents who are disaffected, refractory, silly, satanic, or punk. I hope for a moral psychology that has room for the whole motley crew. I shall begin by examining why some philosophers have thought that the attitudes motivating intentional actions involve judgments of value. I shall then argue that their conception of these attitudes is incorrect. Finally, I shall argue that practical reason should not be conceived as a faculty for pursuing value.

In her excellent critique of my book Self to Self (2006), Catriona Mackenzie highlights three gaps in my view of the self. First, my effort to distinguish among different applications of the concept 'self' is not matched by any attempt to explain the interactions among the selves so distinguished. Second, in analyzing practical reasoning as aimed at self-understanding, I speak sometimes of causal-psychological understanding (e.g. in the paper titled 'The Centered Self') and sometimes of narrative self-understanding (e.g. in 'The Self as Narrator'), but I never explain how these two modes of self-understanding are related. Third, I never explain how my account of autonomous agency can be reconciled with my interpretation of Kant's (e.g., in 'A Brief Introduction to Kantian Ethics'). In this reply to Mackenzie, I agree with her about all three of these gaps, and I offer some (admittedly incomplete) ideas about how they might be filled.

One can feel guilty without thinking that one actually is guilty of moral wrongdoing. For example, one can feel guilty about eating an ice cream or skipping aerobics, even if one doesn't take a moralistic view of self-indulgence. And one can feel guilty about things that aren't one's doing at all, as in the case of survivor's guilt about being spared some catastrophe suffered by others. Guilt without perceived wrongdoing may of course be irrational, but I think it is sometimes rational, and I want to explore how it can be.