This essay challenges widespread talk about morality's ‘normativity’. My principal target is not any specific claim or thesis in the burgeoning literature on ‘normativity’, however. Rather, I aim to discourage the use of the word among moral philosophers altogether and to reject a claim to intradisciplinary authority that is both reflected in and reinforced by the role the word has come to play in the discipline. My hope is to persuade other philosophers who, like me, persist in being interested in (...) long-standing questions about our morals to be considerably more suspicious about the word's actual value for us and to see those studying ‘normativity’ itself as having little to offer us when it comes to posing our questions about morals and debating the answers to them. (shrink)

Promising ourselves is familiar, yet some find it philosophically troubling. Though most of us take the promises we make ourselves seriously, it can seem mysterious how a promise made only to oneself could genuinely bind. Moreover, the desire to be bound by a promise to oneself may seem to expose an unflattering lack of trust in oneself. In this paper I aim to vindicate self-promising from these broadly skeptical concerns. Borrowing Nietzsche’s idea of a memory of the will, I suggest (...) that self-promising involves an activity of the will, aimed at the preservation and protection of one’s values. I explain how, understood in this way, these promises can indeed bind, and show that the motivation for making them need not involve mistrust or other alienated attitudes. I then turn to interpersonal promising, arguing that this same activity of the will is required for sincerely promising others: in effect, making a sincere promise to another requires making a promise to oneself. Attention to this under-appreciated aspect of interpersonal promising enriches our understanding of all promises, and helps to correct a narrow and distorted picture of what it means to be bound. (shrink)

Following in the footsteps of Bernard Williams, I aim to delineate and advance a more realistic, less moralistic approach to thinking about morals and politics in a liberal culture. To do so, I push back against one framing of what Williams meant in urging greater realism, and in criticizing what he saw as political theory's excessive moralism, which has recently gained traction. According to a number of recent authors, the important issue Williams raised should be understood in terms of whether (...) there are two “kinds” or “sources” of “normativity” found in liberal politics and morality, respectively: Realists are said to accuse their Moralist opponents of countenancing only one normativity, which is moral, when in fact there are two, one of which is “distinctively political.” I show how this now popular framing leads to a number of distortions, particularly insofar as our aim is to understand Williams' moral and political thought. I go on to argue that, once these are sorted out, the term ‘normativity’ itself contributes to the problem—current usages of the term are inextricably bound up with a recognizably moralistic style of thought, of the sort that Williams encouraged us to oppose. (shrink)

When you offer your promise you expect to be taken at your word. In this paper I shift focus away from more familiar questions about the ground of promissory obligation, concentrating instead on the familiar way that making a promise involves claiming another’s trust. Borrowing an idea from Nietzsche, I suggest that we understand this in terms of a “right to make promises” – that is, a right to “stand security for ourselves,” held and exercised by those who possess the (...) foresight and self-control to make only promises they can keep, and the strength of will required to keep the promises they make. Others recognize a person's right to promise precisely by taking her at her word i.e. by treating her promise itself as a sound and sufficient basis for the belief that she will do as promised. The main aim of the paper is to explicate and defend these ideas. At the end of the paper, I suggest how focusing on this aspect of promising brings to the fore some neglected problems of social justice, concerning the actual distribution of the right to give one’s word in our society. (shrink)

I present a novel way to think about promising: Promising as Doxastic Entrustment. The main idea is that promising is inviting another to entrust her belief to you, and that taking a promiser’s word is freely choosing to accept this invitation. I explicate this through considering the special kind of reason for belief issued by a promiser: a reason whose rational status depends both on the will of the promiser to provide it, and on the will of the promisee to (...) accept it. Though this may seem to raise worries about believing at will, I show how such concerns can be navigated. I then argue that the view provides a rich, attractive understanding of the interpersonal bond forged through promising. According to the Doxastic Entrustment view, that bond results from freely given trust, in exchange for freely assumed responsibility for what is entrusted: namely, a bit of the promisee’s own mind. (shrink)

Word-taking has both an epistemic and an ethical dimension. I argue that we have no good way of understanding how both ethical and epistemic considerations can be brought to bear when someone makes up her mind to take another at her word, even as we recognize that they must. This difficulty runs deep, and takes the familiar form of a sceptical problem. It originates in an otherwise powerful and compelling way of thinking about what distinguishes theoretical from practical reason. But (...) that picture breaks down, especially in hard cases, where we find ourselves pulled in opposed directions by our ethical and epistemic responsibilities. My primary interest is in diagnosing the problem, to which I do not see any easy solution. However, at the end of the paper, I suggest three issues that deserve more attention in thinking about how the problem might be solved. (shrink)

However strongly one feels about the wrong of lying in general, being lied to by certain people in particular tends to touch a distinct and more sensitive nerve. It affects us more deeply, and in a different way, when we learn that a friend, loved one, or other intimate¹ has told us a lie. Even if, as most moralists maintain, everyone should always tell the truth, we think friends and other intimates have special reason to be honest with one another. (...) Why should we think this? Why is honesty among friends so important, dishonesty among friends a distinctive and serious vice? The answer, I believe, is that cultivating and maintaining friendship requires treating our friends as entitled to claim our trust—in particular, our trust in what they tell us. We are thus especially vulnerable to our friends’ lies. Indeed, this is so in at least two ways. Because we are obligated to our friends to show them considerably more trust in what they say than we may choose to show others, we are more prone to being taken in by them should they prove dishonest. And because the matters about which we are bound to trust them are likely to be of greater significance, we can be more deeply wounded by them should they betray us. The central idea of this chapter, then, is that lying among friends is especially vicious because it exploits a significant and distinctive form of vulnerability to our friends that we must incur, insofar as we are close. (shrink)

Agency and the Foundations of Ethics is an ambitious, engaging, and challenging book.1 The foundational problem of ethics, Paul Katsafanas tells us at the outset, is providing a justification of morality’s authority, one that can fend off skepticism. Constitutivism undertakes to do just that, by giving an account of the nature of action in terms of some constitutive aim, which will at once vindicate the authority and illuminate the substance of practical normativity. Such a strategy is, Katsafanas argues, uniquely poised (...) to succeed in providing a foundation for ethics, but it has so far failed to deliver. We thus need a new and improved version, and that is precisely what Katsafanas offers: a... (shrink)

Contribution to a symposium on David Owens' Shaping The Normative Landscape.

I advance an approach to thinking about moral obligation and how it moves us that runs counter to mainstream thought in ethics. Many assume, with Kant, that bona fide moral obligation must involve some truly unconditional, categorical, or inescapable constraint. Following in Hume’s footsteps, I advocate for viewing our paradigmatic obligations as instead deriving from rules of important social practices, followed out of a felt sense of reverence or regard. I do not offer a complete defense of this more Humean (...) approach here; instead, I respond to a familiar kind of objection. Some allege that seeing our obligations this way can lead to a troubling kind of conflict between an agent’s motive to fulfill her obligations and the very values that, for her, make a given practice and its rules worthy of her devotion. In such circumstances, the objector alleges, any motive to fulfill her obligations will amount to little more than an agent’s “worshiping” of the rules. I disarm this charge of “rule-worship” as it has been levied against the Humean approach, though not by denying that this sort of motivational conflict can arise. Instead, I argue that once the source and nature of conflict are better understood, its possibility is no threat. Indeed, far from a strike against it, the way that the Humean approach to obligation helps us to make good sense of this kind of conflict is ethically attractive, and thus a selling point. (shrink)