•  2
    The practice of moral judgment
    Harvard Univsrsity Press. 1993.
    Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned goodness. This book both clarifies Kant's o…Read more
  •  112
    Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 1997.
    The essays in this volume offer an approach to the history of moral and political philosophy that takes its inspiration from John Rawls. All the contributors are philosophers who have studied with Rawls and they offer this collection in his honour. The distinctive feature of this approach is to address substantive normative questions in moral and political philosophy through an analysis of the texts and theories of major figures in the history of the subject: Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, K…Read more
  •  21
    This volume collects ten essays investigating some fundamental aspects of Kant's ethics, drawing wider conclusions for moral philosophy. Herman aims to undermine some received ideas about how Kantian ethics works and what it means in practice.
  •  17
    The Moral Habitat
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    The Moral Habitat offers a new and systematic interpretation of Kant's moral and political philosophy. Herman introduces the idea of a moral habitat to examines the dynamic system of duties that exists between individuals and civic institutions.
  •  10
    1 Contingency in Obligation
    In Melissa S. Williams (ed.), Moral Universalism and Pluralism: Nomos Xlix, New York University Press. pp. 17-53. 2022.
  •  5
    4 Contingency at Ground Level: A Reply
    In Melissa S. Williams (ed.), Moral Universalism and Pluralism: Nomos Xlix, New York University Press. pp. 81-94. 2022.
  •  9
    Making Exceptions
    In Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca & Margit Ruffing (eds.), Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht. Akten des XI. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 245-262. 2013.
  •  292
    Could it be Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and Marriage?
    In Louise M. Antony & Charlotte Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, Westview Press. pp. 49-68. 1993.
  • Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy
    with John Rawls
    Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1): 178-179. 2002.
  •  61
    The Practice of Moral Judgment
    Journal of Philosophy 82 (8): 414. 1985.
  •  255
    Murder and Mayhem
    The Monist 72 (3): 411-431. 1989.
    This paper began in the startled realization that little if anything is said in Kant’s ethics about the more violent forms of immoral action. There are discussions of lying, deception, self-neglect, nonbeneficence—but apart from suicide, a great silence about the darker actions. At the least, this should be an occasion for curiosity. Although the degree of concern with acts of violence in contemporary ethics may be in its own way curious, it does not seem unreasonable to expect a moral theory to…Read more
  •  94
  •  75
    Rules, motives, and helping actions
    Philosophical Studies 45 (3). 1984.
  •  182
    Mutual aid and respect for persons
    Ethics 94 (4): 577-602. 1984.
  •  107
    Doing Too Much
    The Journal of Ethics 22 (2): 147-162. 2018.
    It is common to find moral fault for doing less than one should, but not for doing more. A detailed investigation of some examples of “doing too much” reveals an important sphere of wrong-doing related to abuses of authority and discretion.
  •  29
    The Value of Agency (review)
    Ethics 106 (2): 404-423. 1993.
  •  81
    Morality and Moral Theory
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 83 (2). 2009.
  •  3
    A cosmopolitan kingdom of ends
    In Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, Christine M. Korsgaard & John Rawls (eds.), Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, Cambridge University Press. pp. 187--213. 1997.
  •  208
    Reasoning to obligation
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 49 (1). 2006.
    If, as Kant says, "the will is practical reason", we should think of willing as a mode of reasoning, and its activity represented in movement from evaluative premises to intention by way of a validity-securing principle of inference. Such a view of willing takes motive and rational choice out of empirical psychology, thereby eliminating grounds for many familiar objections to Kant's account of morally good action. The categorical imperative provides the fundamental principle of valid practical i…Read more
  •  59
    Kant and the Duty of Mutual Aid
    Journal of Philosophy 79 (11): 720-721. 1982.
  •  197
    Morality unbounded
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (4): 323-358. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  609
    The practice of moral judgment
    Journal of Philosophy 82 (8): 414-436. 1985.
  •  35
    First published in 1990. The aim of this thesis is to show that the way to understand the central claims of Kant’s ethics is to accept the idea that morality is a distinctive form of rationality; that the moral "ought" belongs to a system of imperatives based in practical reason; and that moral judgment, therefore, is a species of rational assessment of agents’ actions. It argues, in effect, that you cannot understand Kant’s views about morality if you read him with Humean assumptions about rati…Read more
  •  872
    On the value of acting from the motive of duty
    Philosophical Review 90 (3): 359-382. 1981.
    Richard Henson attempts to take the sting out of this view of Kant on moral worth by arguing (i) that attending to the phenomenon of the overdetermination of actions leads one to see that Kant might have had two distinct views of moral worth, only one of which requires the absence of cooperating inclinations, and (ii) that when Kant insists that there is moral worth only when an action is done from the motive of duty alone, he need not also hold that such a state of affairs is morally better, al…Read more
  •  98
    Embracing Kant's Formalism
    Kantian Review 16 (1): 49-66. 2011.
    In response to critical discussions of my book, Moral Literacy, by Stephen Engstrom, Sally Sedgwick and Andrews Reath, I offer a defence of Kant's formalism that is not only friendly to my claims for the moral theory's sensitivity to a wide range of moral phenomena and practices at the ground level, but also consistent with Kant's high rationalist ambitions
  •  64
    Making Exceptions
    In Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca & Margit Ruffing (eds.), Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht. Akten des XI. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 245-262. 2013.