Oded Na'aman

A morality of recognition maintains that moral norms have their authority in virtue of the ways in which those norms enact an ideal moral relationship. T.M. Scanlon argues that this approach can yield an account of the distinctive force of morality and an attractive account of moral motivation. We find this approach to theorizing about morals extremely promising. However, we argue that Scanlon's own account of it — recognition as justifiability, conceptualized as adherence to principles no one could reasonably reject — cannot deliver what he claims for it. Such justifiability is compatible with indifference to actual people, cannot explain what it is to wrong someone, and cannot accommodate the specific reasons that recognizing another person requires. Developing Scanlon's own analogy between morality and friendship, we argue that mutual recognition instead consists in living in caring solidarity with others as human. This more positive alternative retains the advantages of a morality of recognition while avoiding these concerns with justifiability. We close by addressing three outstanding questions, concerning moral responsibilities towards strangers, the boundaries of moral community, and the relationship between these two moralities of recognition.

The paper argues against a widely held synchronic view of emotional rationality. I begin by considering recent philosophical literature on various backward‐looking emotions, such as regret, grief, resentment, and anger. I articulate the general problem these accounts grapple with: a certain diminution in backward‐looking emotions seems fitting while the reasons for these emotions seem to persist. The problem, I argue, rests on the assumption that if the facts that give reason for an emotion remain unchanged, the emotion remains fitting. However, I argue there are rationally self‐consuming attitudes: affective attitudes that become less fitting the longer they endure while the facts that give reason for them persist. A widely held synchronic view of fitting affective attitudes denies that fittingness at a time depends on the agent's attitudes at different times and therefore denies that the fittingness of an affective attitude can depend on its duration. Once we reject the synchronic view, we may see that affective attitudes are often fitting due to the fitting processes of which they are part. These fitting processes explain the fitting diminution of backward‐looking emotions as well as other diachronic aspects of the fittingness of emotions.