David Owens

Did Rousseau believe in the natural equality of all human beings? Rousseau certainly maintains that familiar political, social and economic inequalities are all artificial or conventional. Furthermore these artificial inequalities play an important role in Rousseau’s account of why civilisation as we have it is a scene of both misery and injustice. And Rousseau claims that the only way to escape the misery and injustice of our present situation is to institute an artificial form of equality among citizens. This paper examines the reasoning behind these claims, concluding that it does not depend on any hypothesis of natural human equality. In the absence of some more direct textual evidence that Rousseau believed all human beings were of equal ‘moral value’, we should hesitate to attribute this Kantian thought to him. A Rousseauian critique of social inequality which does not rely on this contentious assumption should be of great theoretical interest.

Raz observes that a command ‘removes the decision from one person to another’ and he seeks to explain that in terms of the special kind of reason it creates. The reason provided by a command is a ‘protected reason’ which involves not just a first order reason to conform but also second order exclusionary reasons not to act on first order reasons which count against conformity. I raise two problems for this account. First the apparatus of exclusion applies to any obligation, not just the products of binding commands. Second, focusing solely on obligation’s role on practical deliberation, Raz omits the reactive side of obligation (i.e. the aptness of blame reactions). Thus, he overlooks the fact that the ‘removal of decision’ also involves an assumption of responsibility for compliance, something missing from other cases of obligation created by an exercise of a normative power like a binding promise. Following Hobbes, I argue that the subordinate’s obedience to a binding command is imputable to the authority that issues it. The responsibility-depriving character of obedience explains two further facts about command. First people have a special objection to being ordered around, beyond any desire they may have to be free of obligation. Second, those with the power of command are usually entitled to enforce their commands should their subordinate be reluctant to comply. This makes sense if the right to use force is, in part, a right to deprive your subordinate of responsibility for compliance.

There are considerations – excuses – which reduce or eliminate responsibility for wrongdoing and so shield us from blame without casting doubt on the wrongfulness of our conduct. Many think that these excuses reflect the agent's incapacity to do the right thing in the face of duress, provocation, exhaustion etc. I shall suggest that the crucial thing is rather how much control one ought to exercise over one’s action, a requirement specified in a standard of culpability. This standard is distinct from the rules of conduct that determine what is right or wrong and it is often conventional. For example, social roles like that of soldier, engineer or parent have distinctive standards of culpability as well as rules of conduct associated with them and it is these standards which determine the range of excuses available to those who breach the rules of conduct.

The Roots of Normativity is the last work Joseph Raz published before his death in May 2022. Like many of his books it is a collection of papers. Some focus on issues that will likely be of most interest to philosophers of mind and ethics, topics such as the nature of intention, the binding force of a promise, the components of human well-being and the theoretical significance of the notion of a reason. Others consider topics in social philosophy, topics on which Raz made an enormous contribution. What most clearly distinguishes Raz’s social thought from its surroundings is the absence of justice. The agenda of Anglophone political philosophy of the last few decades was set by Rawls’s ‘A Theory of Justice’, which made justice the master value of political philosophy. By contrast, in the index of Raz’s most realised work of political and moral philosophy ‘justice’ merits no entry. What is at stake here? How does making justice your master value shape your thought about society and why would anyone take a different tack? The notion of justice has long been important to political theory and prevalent in political discourse but its current pre-eminence among Anglophone political philosophers is, at least in part, due to many of them conceiving of it as what I shall call a formal rather than a personal value. Raz’s theoretical motivations become clearer once we read him as denying the existence of formal values.

Employers exercise directive authority over their employees; they can issue binding orders and enforce those orders by way of various administrative sanctions. It is generally agreed that this authority is legitimate only when the employee has consented to employment but it turns that vindicating this idea requires a careful analysis both of the kind of authority employers claim over their employees and of the kind of agreement involved in a contract of employment. It also requires getting clear on the distinctive rationale that informs the employer-employee relationship. Once this has all been done, we can explain why some of us decline any employment because we wish to 'remain our own boss' whilst many others are happy to be employed provided this is something to which we have agreed.

Directive authorities such as police officers, judges and employers demand our obedience. Demands for obedience come in two forms. First authorities issue commands meant to bind us to obey. Second authorities frequently threaten to enforce their commands by coercion, to extract obedience by force. Liberals, anarchists and others have long regarded command and coercion as being especially problematic ways of getting someone to act, as raising a question about the legitimacy of such directive authorities but it remains unclear why being ordered about is any worse than being subject to social rules, rules that require us to behave in various ways. I argue that someone who demands your obedience seeks to assume responsibility for your compliance. That is why the claims of a ruler threaten our liberty as those of binding social rules do not.

One way of discerning what sort of control we have over our mental lives is to look at cases where that control is not exercised. This is one reason why philosophers have taken an interest in the phenomenon of akrasia, in an agent's ability to do, freely and deliberately, something that they judge they ought not to do. Akrasia constitutes a failure of control but not an absence of control. The akratic agent is not a compulsive; an akratic agent has the ability to control their action, to make it conform to their judgement, but they fail to exercise that ability. They freely and deliberately give in to temptation

Worries about the possibility of consent recall a more familiar problem about promising raised by Hume. To see the parallel here we must distinguish the power of consent from the normative significance of choice. I'll argue that we have normative interests, interests in being able to control the rights and obligations of ourselves and those around us, interests distinct from our interest in controlling the non-normative situation. Choice gets its normative significance from our non-normative control interests. By contrast, the possibility of consent depends on a species of normative interest that I'll call a permissive interest, an interest in its being the case that certain acts wrong us unless we declare otherwise. In the final section, I'll show how our permissive interests underwrite the possibility of consent.

[Brian P. McLaughlin] In recent years, some philosophers have claimed that we can know a priori that certain external world skeptical hypotheses are false on the basis of a priori knowledge that we are in certain kinds of mental states, and a priori knowledge that those mental states are individuated by contingent environmental factors. Appealing to a distinction between weak and strong a priority, I argue that weakly a priori arguments of this sort would beg the question of whether the skeptical hypothesis under assessment is true, and that the prospect of a sound strongly a priori argument of this sort seems dim. \\\ [David Owens] Contemporary discussion of scepticism focuses on the possibility that most or all of our beliefs might be false. I argue that the hypothesis of massive falsity and the associated 'problem of the external world' are inessential to the scepticisms of Descartes and Hume. What drives Cartesian and Humean scepticism is the demand for certainty: any possibility of error, however local, must be ruled out before we can claim either justified belief or knowledge. Contemporary philosophers have ignored this form of scepticism because they doubt that the demand for certainty can be motivated. But Descartes provides a sound motivation for this demand in the Meditations

In our thinking about what to do, we consider reasons which count for or against various courses of action. That having a glass of wine with dinner would be pleasant and make me sociable recommends the wine. That it will disturb my sleep and inhibit this evening’s work counts against it. I determine what I ought to do by weighing these considerations and deciding what would be best all things considered. A practical reason makes sense of a course of action by recommending it, by highlighting some good or desirable feature of it which could move a reasonable agent to perform it. When thinking about what to do, we also attend to our obligations. Perhaps I have promised to remain clearheaded this evening. Given this I am obliged not to drink. How should this consideration affect my deliberations? According to Davidson, the fact that an action would be a breach of a promise ‘is a count against the action, to be weighed along with other reasons for the action’ (Davidson 2004: 177). This suggests that obligations are a sub-set of our reasons, they are one input into the process of determining what action would be reasonable or justified all things considered. One can see why Davidson might say this. After all, having carefully considered the matter, I may decide not to keep my promise. Furthermore this may be the right thing to do, the most reasonable course of action available to me in the light of all the relevant factors. Nevertheless this description seems to miss something important about a promise. The fact that I promised not to drink does not merely recommend not drinking as does the prospect of a restless night; it places a demand on me. Drinking would not be just inadvisable; it would now be a wrong. And even if such a wrong might on the whole be justified, even if committing this wrong is the right thing to do, in drinking I refuse a demand, I don’t just reject a recommendation. It is widely held that a promise provides you with a moral reason to fulfill it, whereas the fact that drinking would make you lose sleep does not, typically, constitute such a reason..

Unlike many other animals, human beings enjoy freedom of action. They are capable of acting freely because they have certain psychological capacities which other animals lack. In this paper, I argue that the crucial capacity here is our ability to make practical judgements; to make judgements about what we ought to do. A number of other writers share this view but they treat practical judgement as a form of belief. Since, as I argue, we don't control our beliefs, that undermines this model of human freedom. I suggest a different account of practical judgement, according to which they are cognitive states but not beliefs and I show how this provides us with a better model of practical freedom.

How should we assess the social structures that govern human conduct and settle whether we are bound by their rules? One approach is to ask whether those social arrangements reflect pre-conventional facts about our nature. If they do, compliance will serve our interests because these rules are not just conventions. Another approach is to ask whether following a convention has desirable consequences. For example, the rule which makes the dollar bill legal tender is a convention and the great usefulness of having a medium of exchange ensures that we should follow that convention by accepting paper money in return for things of real value. This work argues that being bound by a convention can also be valuable for its own sake. People need meaning in their lives and conventions infuse acts and attitudes with normative significance, rendering them right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, required or forbidden. Such rules bind us not just in virtue of their usefulness but also because their absence would impoverish our social world. Appreciating this point is essential to a proper understanding of our cultures of neighbourliness and hospitality, family structures, systems of property rights, conventions around speech, the norms governing how we deport ourselves in public, and even the rules of a game.

We call beliefs reasonable or unreasonable, justified or unjustified. What does this imply about belief? Does this imply that we are responsible for our beliefs and that we should be blamed for our unreasonable convictions? Or does it imply that we are in control of our beliefs and that what we believe is up to us? Reason Without Freedom argues that the major problems of epistemology have their roots in concerns about our control over and responsibility for belief. David Owens focuses on the arguments of Descartes, Locke and Hume - the founders of epistemology - and presents a critical discussion of the current trends in contemporary epistemology. He proposes that the problems we confront today - scepticism, the analysis of knowlege, and debates on epistemic justification - can be tackled only once we have understood the moral psychology of belief. This can be resolved when we realise that our responsibility for beliefs is profoundly different from our rationality and agency, and that memory and testimony can preserve justified belief without preserving the evidence which might be used to justify it. Reason Without Freedom should be of value to those interested in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind and action, ethics, and the history of 17th and 18th century.

The obligations we owe to those with whom we share a valuable relationship (like friendship) cannot be reduced to the obligations we owe to others simply as fellow persons (e.g. the duty to reciprocate benefits received). Wallace suggests that this is because such valuable relationships are loving relationships. I instead propose that it is because, unlike general moral obligations, such valuable relationships (and their constitutive obligations) serve our normative interests. Part of what makes friendship good for us is that it involves bonds of loyalty. Our lives go better if we are bound to others in this way.

What is it to “know your own mind”? In ordinary English, this phrase connotes clear headed decisiveness and a firm resolve but in the language of contemporary philosophy, the indecisive and the susceptible can know their own minds just as well as anybody else. In the philosopher’s usage, “knowing your own mind” is just a matter of being able to produce a knowledgeable description of your mental state, whether it be a state of indecision, susceptibility or even confusion. What exercises philosophers is the fact that people seem to produce these descriptions of their own mental lives without any pretence of considering evidence or reasons of any kind and yet these descriptions are treated by the rest of us as authoritative, at least in a wide range of cases. How can this be?

It is often maintained that practical freedom is a capacity to act on our view of what we ought to do and in particular on our view of what it would be best to do. Here, I discuss an important exception to that claim, namely habitual agency. Acting out of habit is widely regarded as a form of reflex or even as compulsive behaviour but much habitual agency is both intentional and free. Still it is true that, in so far as we act out of habit, we have no capacity to determine what we do by making a judgement about whether we ought to be doing it. Habitual agency is nonetheless free because we have the capacity to determine whether we act out of habit by making a judgement about whether or not the habit is a virtue. I develop this view of habit by contrasting habitual agency with action on policy and I argue that much virtuous agency is best understood as a form of habitual agency rather than as a form of action on policy.

Some acts (mala in se) are wrong prior to any social prohibition (e.g., murder). Other acts (mala prohibita) are wrong only once socially prohibited (e.g., traffic violations). This article considers certain obligations of care that parents owe to their children and children to their parents. Violations of these familial obligations are like paradigm mala prohibita in that they are wrongs created by social convention. But, it is argued, they are unlike paradigm mala prohibita in that their prohibition is not justified merely by the desirable consequences of prohibiting them but also by the value of the prohibition itself.

An invalid promise is one whose breach does not wrong the promisee. I describe two different accounts of why duress and deception invalidate promises. According to the fault account duress and deception invalidate a promise just when it was wrong for the promisee to induce the promisor to promise in that way. According to the injury account, duress and deception invalidate a promise just when by inducing the promise in that way the promisee wrongs the promisor. I demonstrate that the injury account is superior. I then argue that in this respect promising is like any exercise of a normative power. I conclude by distinguishing two theories of promissory obligation, a widely held view which I call the information interest theory and an alternative which I call the authority interest theory. I argue that the points established earlier support the authority interest theory over its rival.

It is widely held that one who sincerely promises to do something must at least intend to do that thing: a promise communicates the intention to perform. In this paper, I argue that a promise need only communicate the intention to undertake an obligation to perform. I consider examples of sincere promisors who have no intention of performing. I argue that this fits well with what we want to say about other performatives - giving, commanding etc. Furthermore, it supports a theory of promissory obligation which I have advocated elsewhere - the authority interest theory - against the orthodox information interest theory.