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9The practice of moral judgmentHarvard 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
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11Justification and Objectivity: Comments on Rawls and AllisonIn Eckart Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions: The Three ‘Critiques’ and the ‘Opus Postumum’, Stanford University Press. pp. 131-142. 1988.
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40Reclaiming 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
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34Kantian Commitments: Essays on Moral Theory and PracticeOxford University Press. 2022.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.
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31The Moral HabitatOxford 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.
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141 Contingency in ObligationIn Melissa S. Williams (ed.), Moral Universalism and Pluralism: Nomos Xlix, New York University Press. pp. 17-53. 2022.
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104 Contingency at Ground Level: A ReplyIn Melissa S. Williams (ed.), Moral Universalism and Pluralism: Nomos Xlix, New York University Press. pp. 81-94. 2022.
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12Making ExceptionsIn 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.
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331Could 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.
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111Murder and MayhemThe 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
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99Doing Too MuchThe 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.
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87Morality and Moral TheoryProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 83 (2). 2009.
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199Moral literacyHarvard University Press. 2007.Making room for character -- Pluralism and the community of moral judgment -- A cosmopolitan kingdom of ends --Responsibility and moral competence --Can virtue be taught?: the problem of new moral facts -- Training to autonomy: Kant and the question of moral education -- Bootstrapping -- Rethinking Kant's hedonism -- The scope of moral requirement -- The will and its objects -- Obligatory ends -- Moral improvisation -- Contingency in obligation.
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3A cosmopolitan kingdom of endsIn Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman & Christine M. Korsgaard (eds.), Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, Cambridge University Press. pp. 187--213. 1997.
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218Reasoning to obligationInquiry: 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
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185Being Helped and Being Grateful: Imperfect Duties, the Ethics of Possession, and the Unity of MoralityJournal of Philosophy 109 (5-6): 391-411. 2012.
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40Morality as Rationality: A Study of Kant's EthicsRoutledge. 1990.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
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917On the value of acting from the motive of dutyPhilosophical 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
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112Embracing Kant's FormalismKantian 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
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75Making ExceptionsIn 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.
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Value Theory |