R. Jay Wallace

Reason and Value collects fifteen brand-new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics - including especially his explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value - make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. The volume honours Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and will contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of his work for the subject.

The topic of Chapter 3 is the idea that there are discretionary moral duties, i.e., duties that cede to the agent who stands under them wide latitude in determining the actions that count as satisfying them. The chapter offers a general framework for thinking about moral obligations, which construes such obligations in essentially relational terms. It then draws on this conception of moral obligation to understand two classes of obligations that are intuitively understood to exhibit wide agential discretion: duties of gratitude and of mutual aid. It argues that the wide agential discretion apparent in these cases makes sense against the background of an understanding of morality as a set of directed obligations that we owe to each other, as individuals. A further important theme is the standing of morality as a source of requirements that make it possible for agents to relate to each other on a basis of autonomy and equality.

P. F. Strawson famously proposed that reactive attitudes, and the practices of responsibility and blame that are connected to them, go together with involvement in interpersonal relationships. These claims are suggestive, but also notoriously problematic as Strawson presents and develops them. This chapter offers a new and improved account of the relational element in the reactive attitudes (and, by extension, in the practice of holding people morally accountable). The key, it is suggested, is to acknowledge that the moral requirements that fix the content of the reactive sentiments are constitutively connected to the claims of other parties. The chapter defends this idea, and then brings it to bear on Strawson’s larger contentions about the connection between reactivity and interpersonal involvement.

The theory on how people evaluate valuable things in life as it is influenced by social conditions is explained in this book, which presents a revised text from the Tanner Lectures on Human Values delivered by the author in March 2001 at the University of California in Berkeley. Philosophers including Christine Korsgaard, Robert Pippin, and Bernard Williams contribute their commentaries on divergent approaches to moral and social philosophy issues. Raz expounds on the social dependence of value by focusing on pluralism, change, and understanding. He also takes critical responses from his commentators, one of which is from Korsgaard, challenging views based on Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, while Pippin scrutinises social dependence in its ironic form as Williams agrees with Pippin’s arguments. Reflecting on responses from Raz, this introduction examines the holistic method that Raz himself deploys in reaching his conclusion about social dependence.

A significant theme in the work of Gary Watson is the idea that responsibility relations involve the addressing of moral demands to other agents. But both the nature of moral address, and its bearing on other moral debates, remain somewhat obscure. This chapter offers an interpretation of moral address in terms of the Strawson-style reactive attitudes. On the basis of this interpretation, it goes on to explore the significance of moral address for questions about the conditions of moral responsibility and about the ultimate nature of moral requirements. In the process, some particular Watsonian themes are discussed: the nature of the moral demands commonly associated with moral address; the fact that moral address frequently turns on interpersonal accountability; and the limits of moral address, seen in the requirement that it be directed to individuals who have the capacity to understand and respond to such demands.

The chapter offers a reconstruction of Blackburn’s expressivist account of normative discourse, in terms of attitudes of commendation or disapproval that are directed to potential movements of the mind. It then develops two objections to the approach, focusing on the case of reasons for action. First, Blackburn’s account cannot, as stated, make sense of the connection between reasons and the agent’s deliberative situation; and second, it cannot explain the distinctive role of normative thought in the agent’s own deliberations about what to do.

Internalism in ethical theory is usually understood as the view that there is a noncontingent connection between moral rightness and motivation. The chapter develops the analogous suggestion that there is a noncontingent connection between moral rightness and responsibility. Externalists about motivation hold that it might be an open question whether people have reason to comply with moral principles. Externalists about responsibility similarly hold that it might be an open question whether there is reason to blame people for failing to comply with moral principles. From the fact that an action would be wrong, for instance, it doesn’t follow that our social relations should be structured in a way that blames people when they perform actions of that type. That an action is wrong is not itself a reason for holding people accountable on the externalist view. The chapter argues against this approach, exploiting the analogy with internalism about motivation in support of an internalist account of responsibility. In particular the chapter suggests that moral principles have it as part of their function to ground responsibility relations between people and that an interpretation of those principles that was ill-suited to this function would be deficient on that account. Morality, on the modern conception of it that this chapter is sketching, is an essentially relational or social phenomenon, and internalism about responsibility is one aspect of its relational character.

This paper engages critically with the new account of blame that is presented in T. M. Scanlon’s recent work. On Scanlon’s account, blame involves the justified adjustment of an agent’s attitudes in response to actions that impair the agent’s relationship with another party. I argue that this approach fails to capture the distinctive force of moral blame, and also that its emphasis on the impairment of relationships leads to a distorted account of the relational dimension of morality. I develop an alternative account of blame in terms of the reactive sentiments (such as resentment, indignation, and guilt), and show why blame, on the account of it I favor, is an important form of response to actions that offend against moral values. The tendency to blame people for moral wrongs is a way of caring about moral ends that is peculiarly appropriate to the relational character of those ends.

This paper explores the connections between relational moral standards and the criminal law. I begin by sketching the relational approach to the moral domain that I have defended and developed in The Moral Nexus. This approach goes together with a conception of moral accountability that differs in important respects from the system of public accountability enshrined in criminal law. Despite these differences, I argue that the law can be understood to attach sanctions to the violation of relational moral requirements. Two features of criminal law are appealed to in order to explain its distinctive features: the fiduciary relationship in which the state stands to the private individuals whose moral claims it enforces; and the duties it owes to all individuals in its jurisdiction to protect their basic moral claims.