Stephen Darwall

Respect for the equal dignity of human persons is a distinctively deontic way of valuing humanity. This chapter explores two early attempts to develop this distinctively modern idea in the thought of Grotius and Pufendorf. Dignity is no form of good, which might be appreciated through desire or esteem, but a form of value that calls for, indeed demands, respect (what Pufendorf calls “esteem”). Respect is an attitude we manifest in the formation of our wills by governing our deliberations by the constraints of right (Pufendorf’s “rights of equality”), which the dignity of persons places on us, and by holding ourselves accountable to one another for compliance with these. What is especially remarkable in Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s developments of this idea is the way both tie it to “sociability,” our capacity to engage _with_ and relate _to_ one another from a second-person standpoint.

A striking contrast between _Reasons and Persons_ and _On What Matters_ is the vastly different attitude Parfit takes towards Act Consequentialism. Parfit’s defense of Act Consequentialism against a battery of criticisms in _Reasons and Persons_ was legendary. In _On What Matters_, however, Parfit remarks that Sidgwick’s act-consequentialist principle of rational benevolence is best regarded, like egoism, as an ‘external rival to morality’. What lies behind this remarkable change in attitude, if not in view, is Parfit’s focus in _On What Matters_ on deontic moral concepts, like wrongness, and their relation to accountability and reactive attitudes like moral blame. This essay explores the details of Parfit’s later views, arguing that he did not go far enough in pursuing this line of thought and that doing so is necessary to bring out the distinctive _normativity_ of deontic moral concepts. Parfit’s claim that the ‘ordinary’ concept of wrongness is indefinable threatens to rob the concept of normativity in the ‘reason-involving sense’. If, however, we understand wrongness in terms of there being reason to blame, lacking excuse, we can account for its distinctive _normative_ contours.

Moral accountability, as a form of moral responsibility, applies in the first instance to actions and their deontic evaluation, while moral attributability is concerned with assessment of character involving evaluative concepts of esteem and disesteem. One might thus suppose that accountability does not apply to character, but this chapter argues that because certain character traits can interfere with carrying out one’s obligation, as well as one’s moral perception of judgment, responsibility as accountability is properly extended to character. The author argues that we are also accountable for the trait of accountability itself—being disposed to hold ourselves accountable to one another by putting ourselves into second-personal relations of mutual answerability.

An important difference between trust and reliance is that trust can be violated, and the very idea of a violation seems to involve some second-personal relationship between truster and trusted. But trust cannot be a deontic second-personal attitude, since these presuppose authority and accountability. Trusting someone to do something involves laying oneself open; one doesn’t have any authority over the trusted and cannot hold them accountable for doing what one trusts them to do. So trust is non-deontic. But it is second-personal in that it is reciprocating: it invites the other to take the same view of the situation and respond in kind. Trust is a second-personal attitude of the heart.

In this essay, Stephen Darwall first develops a rich set of distinctions of different forms of respect that supplement the fundamental distinction of recognition and appraisal respect. He then applies it to Kant’s dictum from _The Critique of Practical Reason_ that “before a common humble man … my spirit bows.” Darwall is particularly interested in what Kant says about the _phenomenology_ of respect: how it occurs, how it feels, and the like. The framework Darwall developed earlier, allows him to show how respect as a moral feeling is not only a form of appraisal but also recognition respect, and how the moral feeling of respect relates to other forms, such as “social respect” and “honor respect.”

It is often assumed that the proposition that agents have (even) some reason to comply with moral obligations is more ambitious philosophically, or more difficult to establish or justify, than that they have reason to do what is in their interest or would fulfill their aims or desires. It is argued that this is not the case, indeed, that the opposite is true. Although it is a conceptually open question whether there is any reason whatsoever for agents to do what is for their good or will advance their aims or desires, an analogous question concerning moral right and wrong is not conceptually open. This is so, it is argued, owing to conceptual connections between obligation and accountability and to inescapable presuppositions of holding someone accountable through moral blame.

Joshua Greene argues that science can advance ethics and that, in particular, empirical evidence tends to support characteristically consequentialist over deontological judgments, because characteristically deontological judgments are frequently tied to, and perhaps the product of, automatic emotional responses, which should lead us to have less confidence in them than in consequentialist judgments. This chapter argues that Greene’s experimental results are compatible with a certain kind of rule consequentialism, acceptance rule consequentialism, and that since the dictates of this kind of rule consequentialism are “characteristically deontological,” this means that Greene’s analysis should not lead us to have more confidence in characteristically consequentialist judgments rather than characteristically deontological judgments.

The contemporary notion of human dignity is taken to ground the idea of human rights. This chapter investigates how dignity must be understood if it is to be capable of doing that. Beginning with earlier conceptions of dignity, both hierarchical conceptions of status and the Ciceronian idea of human beings in the “great chain of being,” the chapter argues that to be capable of grounding rights, dignity must include a fundamental second-personal authority for human beings to make claims and demands of one another. More specifically, it contests the idea, advanced by Jeremy Waldron and Anthony Appiah, that human dignity is best theorized within a conception of honor and status as elevating all persons to the same high status. Any such honored status fails to ground the fundamental authority to hold one another accountable that is necessary for a conception of human dignity that is capable of grounding human rights.

One dominant theme in Tom Hill’s work is his interpretation of Kantian respect for persons, which he contrasts with an aristocratic view according to which individuals merit differential treatment owing to heredity and social rank. This chapter explores this contrast, arguing that the sort of respect characteristic of the Kantian notion grounded in one’s dignity and the sort of respect characteristic of honor codes involve different conceptions of personhood and, correspondingly, different conceptions of moral and social order. In particular, it is argued that on the Kantian notion, respect for persons essentially involves calls second-personal address and acknowledgment, while the notion of honor respect involves conceiving of persons as having a particular hierarchical status that is socially constituted. One significant point of contrast between second-personal respect and honor respect, developed in this chapter, concerns differences in appropriate responses to violations of these forms of respect.

Derek Parfit’s critical engagement with internalism is mainly motivated by his opposition to ethical naturalism and to Kantian proceduralist accounts of practical reason in general. I argue that Parfit neglects an important source of support for internalism about morality in particular, namely moral obligation’s conceptual connection to accountability. What is morally obligatory, what it would be morally wrong not to do, is, as a conceptual matter, what we are warrantedly held accountable for doing through Strawsonian reactive attitudes like moral blame, if we do wrong without excuse. When we hold one another and ourselves responsible through blame, we take up a second-person standpoint and implicitly address moral demands. This standpoint requires us to presuppose, not just that there were decisive normative reasons to have acted otherwise, but that these reasons were available to the agent, and that he could have acted on them.

We speak both of moral obligations we owe to specific individuals (or groups) and moral obligations simpliciter or period. When we violate the latter, we do wrong; when we violate the former, we wrong the individuals (or group) to whom we owe the obligation. _The Second-Person Standpoint_ offers a metaethics of moral obligation period in terms of warranted impersonal reactive attitudes and argue that the latter are irreducibly second personal because, following Strawson, they implicitly hold another answerable for complying with a putatively legitimate demand. Here, this chapter extends the account to provide a metaethics of bipolar obligations that links them in the right way to moral obligation period. At the bottom is a fundamental distinction between two distinct, but nonetheless linked, authorities we have as mutually accountable persons: a representative authority as a representative person or member of the moral community, on the one hand, and an individual authority we each have as the individual person we are.

In the first chapter of _Principia Ethica_, ‘The Subject-Matter of Ethics’, Moore spends the first four sections explaining his conception of the field of ethics. In these passages, he refers to an ‘ideal of ethical science’ (56) which he divides into two main parts. First, there are semantic and related metaphysical questions about the meanings of moral terms (and the concepts they express) and, second, there are questions about what sorts of items possess the properties which moral terms denote. Two theses emerge from Moore's discussion of the subject matter of ethics. First is the _independence thesis_, according to which semantic and related metaphysical questions — questions of metaethics — can be pursued independently of and are properly prior to enquiry into substantive matters about the kinds of items that are good or bad, right or wrong, virtuous or vicious. Second, Moore holds a certain _primacy thesis_, according to which the concept of goodness (and badness) is more fundamental than and can be used to define the concepts of rightness (and wrongness) and virtue (and vice). Thus, for Moore, the study of ethics, properly conducted, should begin with an enquiry focused on the concept of goodness. This chapter challenges both the claims of independence and priority. It argues that although metaethics and normative ethics are properly focused on different issues, they need to be brought into dynamic relation with one another in order to produce a systematic and defensible philosophical ethics. This mutual dependence is owing to the fact that issues of normativity are at the center of the concerns of both metaethics and normative ethics.

The traditional problem of promising is to explain how it is possible to place oneself under obligation by expressing one's will to do so. A second problem is how it is possible to become obligated _to another person_ by so expressing one's will. The major attempts to explain promissory obligations consequentialist, Rawls's, and Scanlon's all fail to account for this “directed” or “bipolar” obligation, whether or not they can explain promissory obligations _simpliciter_. By appreciating bipolar obligations' second-personal character and promising as a second-personal phenomenon, however, it is possible to account for promising is a species of a genus, _transactions_, in which parties acquire new obligations to and rights against one another through interactions that presupposes their mutual accountability and their sharing a common basic second-personal authority. Other examples are consent, agreement, accepting an invitation, and acceding to a request.

In this article I respond to the criticisms of Flavio Williges and Rafael Vogelmann regarding my book The Heart and its Attitudes. I clarify that the notion of presence and heartfelt second-personal connection should not be confined to agents with deontic competence: we can also be mutually present and emotionally connected with children and animals. I further defend my distinction between deontic and heartfelt forgiveness, maintaining that the absence of affective content in the former does not undermine its second-personal character. Finally, I argue that what I describe as “personal anger”—even if not universally categorized as anger—is a genuine form of emotional appeal for recognition within intimate relationships, and should be understood as belonging to the domain of attitudes of the heart.

In the past, I have argued that both relational and non-relational moral obligations are fundamentally second personal notions that imply different forms of accountability (Darwall 2006, 2013). Relational obligations, which are owed by an obligor to an obligee, involve personal accountability of the obligor to the obligee and that the obligee has an individual authority over the obligee. The latter gives the obligee the standing to insist on performance and to seek compensation if the obligation is violated. Non-relational obligations are not owed to anyone in particular. They imply accountability but not to anyone in particular, rather to the moral community or to any person as its representative; anyone has the representative authority to hold the obligor accountable on the moral community’s behalf. R. Jay Wallace has argued that morality is relational through and through and that there is no such thing as non-relational obligation. I argue here that although private law can be grounded in relational moral obligations, the criminal law cannot be. Criminal law can be justified only if there is such a thing as non-relational morality.

_Virtue Ethics_ collects, for the first time, the main classical sources and the central contemporary expressions of virtue ethics approach to normative ethical theory. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative theory. Introduced by Stephen Darwall, this collection brings together classic and contemporary readings which define and advance the literature on virtue ethics. Includes six essays which respond to the classic sources. Includes a contemporary discussion on character and virtue by Gary Watson. Includes classic essays by Aristotle, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, and recent reactions to this work by philosophers including Philippa Foot, John McDowell, Alasdair MacIntyre, Annette Baier, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Slote.

Henry Sidgwick and G. E. Moore’s claims about the irreducibility of ethical concepts to non-ethical ideas began analytical metaethics and the search for fundamental ethical concepts. Moore famously held that the basic ethical notion was that of intrinsic goodness. Subsequent research has revealed, however, that William Frankena was right when he pointed out that what drove Moore’s ‘open question argument’ was the idea of normativity and that this vindicated Sidgwick’s claim that ought rather than good is the fundamental ethical notion. This essay discusses the history of this and related debates between reasons, ought, and fittingness fundamentalists and how these figure in accounting for the difference between deontic moral concepts of right and wrong, on the one hand, and various ethical notions of goodness, on the other.

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. Naturalist moral realism, once devastated by the charge of "naturalistic fallacy," has been reinvigorated, as have versions of moral realism that insist on the discontinuity between ethics and science. Irrealist, expressivist programs have also developed with great subtlety, encouraging the thought that a noncognivist account may actually be able to explain ethical judgments' aspirations to objectivity. Neo-Kantian constructivist theories have flourished as well, offering hope that morality can be grounded in a plausible conception of reasonable conduct. Together, the positions advanced in the essays collected here address these recent developments, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics.

A central theme of Kant’s approach to moral philosophy is that moral obligations are categorical, by which he means that they provide supremely authoritative reasons for acting independently of an agent’s ends or interests. Kant argues that this is a reflection of our distinctive freedom or autonomy, as he calls it, as moral agents. A less, well- appreciated aspect of the Kantian picture of morality and respect for the dignity of each individual person is the idea of reciprocal accountability, that moral agents are mutually responsible for their treatment of one another. Viewing Kant’s ethics from this second-person standpoint opens up a line of thought that promises to vindicate the Kantian idea that moral obligations are categorical imperatives.

_Virtue Ethics_ collects, for the first time, the main classical sources and the central contemporary expressions of virtue ethics approach to normative ethical theory. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative theory. Introduced by Stephen Darwall, this collection brings together classic and contemporary readings which define and advance the literature on virtue ethics. Includes six essays which respond to the classic sources. Includes a contemporary discussion on character and virtue by Gary Watson. Includes classic essays by Aristotle, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, and recent reactions to this work by philosophers including Philippa Foot, John McDowell, Alasdair MacIntyre, Annette Baier, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Slote.