University of Pittsburgh
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1972
CV
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
  •  1691
    Moral psychology as accountability
    In Justin D'Arms & Daniel Jacobson (eds.), Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 40-83. 2014.
    Recent work in moral philosophy has emphasized the foundational role played by interpersonal accountability in the analysis of moral concepts such as moral right and wrong, moral obligation and duty, blameworthiness, and moral responsibility (Darwall 2006; 2013a; 2013b). Extending this framework to the field of moral psychology, we hypothesize that our moral attitudes, emotions, and motives are also best understood as based in accountability. Drawing on a large body of empirical evidence, we arg…Read more
  •  1065
    Two kinds of respect
    Ethics 88 (1): 36-49. 1977.
    S. 39: "My project in this paper is to develop the initial distinction which I have drawn between recognition and appraisal respect into a more detailed and specific account of each. These accounts will not merely be of intrinsic interest. Ultimately I will use them to illuminate the puzzles with which this paper began and to understand the idea of self-respect." 42 " Thus, insofar as respect within such a pursuit will depend on an appraisal of the participant from the perspective of whatever st…Read more
  •  669
    Consequentialism (edited book)
    Blackwell. 2002.
    Consequentialism collects, for the first time, both the main classical sources and the central contemporary expressions of this important position. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative ethics.
  •  450
    Empathy, sympathy, care
    Philosophical Studies 89 (2-3). 1998.
    In what follows, I wish to discuss empathy and sympathy’s relevance to ethics, taking recent findings into account. In particular, I want to consider sympathy’s relation to the idea of a person’s good or well-being. It is obvious and uncontroversial that sympathetic concern for a person involves some concern for her good and some desire to promote it. What I want to suggest is that the concept of a person’s good or well-being is one we have because we are capable of care and sympathetic concern.…Read more
  •  449
    The value of autonomy and autonomy of the will
    Ethics 116 (2): 263-284. 2006.
    It is a commonplace that ‘autonomy’ has several different senses in contemporary moral and political discussion. The term’s original meaning was political: a right assumed by states to administer their own affairs. It was not until the nineteenth century that ‘autonomy’ came (in English) to refer also to the conduct of individuals, and even then there were, as now, different meanings.1 Odd as it may seem from our perspective, one that was in play from the beginning was Kant’s notion of “autonomy…Read more
  •  422
    Desires, reasons, and causes (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2). 2003.
    Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality makes a significant contribution to clarifying the relationship between desire and reasons for acting, both the normative reasons we seek in deliberation and the motivating reasons we cite in explanation. About the former, Dancy argues that, not only are normative reasons not all grounded in desires, but, more radically, the fact that one desires something is never itself a normative reason. And he argues that desires fail to figure in motivating reasons also, …Read more
  •  387
    Reparations for American Chattel Slavery
    The Philosopher 111. 2014.
    An analysis of the case for reparations for American chattel slavery.
  •  370
    The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality's supreme authority--an account that ...
  •  341
    Moral obligation: Form and substance
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (1pt1): 31-46. 2010.
    Beginning from an analysis of moral obligation's form that I defend in The Second-Person Standpoint as what we are answerable for as beings with the necessary capacities to enter into relations of mutual accountability, I argue that this analysis has implications for moral obligation's substance. Given what it is to take responsibility for oneself and hold oneself answerable, I argue, it follows that if there are any moral obligations at all, then there must exist a basic pro tanto obligation no…Read more
  •  330
    Why is ethics part of philosophy? Stephen Darwall's Philosophical Ethics introduces students to ethics from a distinctively philosophical perspective, one that weaves together central ethical questions such as "What has value?" and "What are our moral obligations?" with fundamental philosophical issues such as "What is value?" and "What can a moral obligation consist in?"With one eye on contemporary discussions and another on classical texts,Philosophical Ethics shows how Hobbes, Mill, Kant, Ari…Read more
  •  327
    Virtue Ethics (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2002.
    _ 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. Inc…Read more
  •  308
    Precis: The second-person standpoint (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1): 216-228. 2010.
  •  299
    Contractarianism, contractualism (edited book)
    Blackwell. 2002.
    Contractualism/Contractarianism collects, for the first time, both major classical sources and central contemporary discussions of these important approaches to philosophical ethics. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative ethics.
  •  251
    Respect and the Second-Person Standpoint
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78 (2). 2004.
  •  250
    PLACE: PRESENCE AS SECOND-PERSONAL SPACE
    Journal of Ethical Reflections 1 (4): 7-16. 2019.
    The concept of place is ultimately a matter of ethical significance—of where something fits in a nexus or structure of meaning. Often this meaning is quite personal, involving a sense of presence we associate with a place. This essay investigates this connection through a study of Wordsworth’s poem, “Tintern Abbey.” It argues that the notion of a presence-infused place is ultimately that of a second-personal space. Presence is a matter of second-personal openness. Therefore, when presence i…Read more
  •  239
    Because I Want It
    Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (2): 129-153. 2001.
    How can an agent's desire or will give him reasons for acting? Not long ago, this might have seemed a silly question, since it was widely believed that all reasons for acting are based in the agent's desires. The interesting question, it seemed, was not how what an agent wants could give him reasons, but how anything else could. In recent years, however, this earlier orthodoxy has increasingly appeared wrongheaded as a growing number of philosophers have come to stress the action-guiding role of…Read more
  •  231
    Kantian practical reason defended
    Ethics 96 (1): 89-99. 1985.
    There are two ways in which philosophical controversialists can approach a classical opponent of their views. They can attempt to refute him, or they can try to show that, while generally assumed to be an opponent, the philosopher really was not, at least when he was thinking clearly. Of these two strategies, the latter, if it can be pulled off, is dialectically..
  •  228
    Internalism and agency
    Philosophical Perspectives 6 155-174. 1992.
    have come in for increasing attention and controversy. A good example would be recent debates about moral realism where question of the relation between ethics (or ethical judgment) and the will has come to loom large.' Unfortunately, however, the range of positions labelled internalist in ethical writing is bewilderingly large, and only infrequently are important distinctions kept clear.2 Sometimes writers have in mind the view that sincere assent to a moral (or, more generally, an ethical) jud…Read more
  •  220
    Moore, normativity, and intrinsic value
    Ethics 113 (3): 468-489. 2003.
    Principia Ethica set the agenda for analytical metaethics. Moore’s unrelenting focus on fundamentals both brought metaethics into view as a potentially separate area of philosophical inquiry and provided a model of the analytical techniques necessary to pursue it.1 Moore acknowledged that he wasn’t the first to insist on a basic irreducible core of all ethical concepts. Although he seems not to have appreciated the roots of this thought in eighteenth-century intuitionists like Clarke, Balguy, and…Read more
  •  216
    Morality and practical reason: A Kantian approach
    In David Copp (ed.), The Oxford handbook of ethical theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 282--320. 2006.
    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, t…Read more
  •  209
    Authority, Accountability, and Preemption
    Jurisprudence 2 (1): 103-119. 2011.
    Joseph Raz's 'normal justification thesis' is that the normal way of justifying someone's claim to authority over another person is that the latter would comply better with the reasons that apply to him anyway were he to treat the former's directives as authoritative. Darwall argues that this provides 'reasons of the wrong kind' for authority. He turns then to Raz's claim that the fact that treating someone as an authority would enable one to comply better with reasons that apply to him anyway c…Read more
  •  204
    Abolishing morality
    Synthese 72 (1). 1987.
    Peer Reviewed.
  •  204
    “But it would be wrong”
    Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2): 135-157. 2010.
    Is the fact that an action would be wrong itself a reason not to perform it? Warranted attitude accounts of value suggest about value, that being valuable is not itself a reason but to the reasons for valuing something in which its value consists. Would a warranted attitude account of moral obligation and wrongness, not entail, therefore, that being morally obligatory or wrong gives no reason for action itself? I argue that this is not true. Although warranted attitude theories of normative conc…Read more
  •  191
    Normativity and Projection in Hobbes’s Leviathan
    Philosophical Review 109 (3): 313-347. 2000.
    A perennial problem in interpreting Hobbes’s moral and political thought in Leviathan has been to square the apparently irreducible normativity of central Hobbesian concepts and premises with his materialism and empiricism. Thus, Hobbes defines a “law of nature” as a “precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life” and the “right of nature” as “the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preser…Read more
  •  167
    Moral Obligation and Accountability
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Oxford University Press. 2010.
  •  166
    Agreement Matters: Critical Notice of Derek Parfit, On What Matters
    Philosophical Review 123 (1): 79-105. 2014.
    Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) mounted a striking defense of Act Consequentialism against a Rawls-inspired Kantian orthodoxy in moral philosophy. On What Matters (2011) is notable for its serious engagement with Kant's ethics and for its arguments in support of the “Triple Theory,” which allies Rule Consequentialism with Kantian and Scanlonian Contractualism against Act Consequentialism as a theory of moral right. This critical notice argues that what underlies this change is a view o…Read more