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Notes
Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 91.
Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid., p. 65, emphasis original.
Ibid., pp. 27–28, emphasis mine.
Darwall, “III—Moral Obligation: Form and Substance,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2009), pp. 31–46.
Ibid. For Darwall’s notion of accountability, see ibid., p. 69.
Watson proposes that the notion of responsibility has two faces; an aretaic face and an accountability face. The aretaic face is concerned with whether an agent is responsible for an action in the sense that the agent freely adopts the action as an end. The accountability face is concerned with whether an agent is responsible for an action in the sense that the agent has control over the action is subject to reactive attitudes and the practice of praise and punishment. See Watson, “Two Faces of Responsibility,” in Philosophical Topics, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1996), pp. 227–248.
Darwall points out that he is referring to responsibility as accountability or substantive responsibility by ‘accountability.’ See Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 69, note 7. As far as I see, Darwall’s notion of accountability is different from Scanlon’s notion of substantive responsibility in that Scanlon does not consider praise or blame to be relevant to substantive responsibility, but Darwall considers praise or blame to be relevant to accountability. So, I think it is better to talk about Darwall’s notion without appealing to Scanlon’s. See Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 95–100. For different notions of accountability, see Eshleman, 2009, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/moral-responsibility/>.
A buck-passing theory analyzes a term by another term such that it “passes the buck” to another term. For example, Scanlon proposes a buck-passing theory of value, according to which value passes the buck to the value-making properties of valuable things. Put another way, value supervenes on value-making properties and those properties, rather than the property of being valuable, provide reasons or actions. Scanlon, op. cit.
“Morality involves a distinctive kind of accountability by its very nature. If I fail to act as I am morally required without adequate excuse, then…responses like blame and guilt are thereby warranted.” Darwall, op. cit. (2006), pp. 26–27.
Darwall, “Bipolar Obligation,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 333–357; personal correspondence.
Darwall, op. cit. (2006), pp. 66–68.
Darwall, op. cit. (2009), p. 31.
Some think that one can be morally responsible for an action even if one has an excuse. For instance, see McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The idea is that one can be morally responsible but blameless for an action. It seems to me that this view implies that sometimes one is accountable for one’s actions such that no blame or punishment is appropriate, which is not very plausible. Thanks to Crystal Allen-Gunasekera for pointing this out to me.
Darwall, op. cit. (2012), p. 350.
Ibid., p. 355, footnote 59.
In cases where one steps on another’s foot because it is the only way for one to avoid significant injury to oneself, Darwall holds that one has not morally wronged (in the conclusive sense of wrong) another because one has a justification. That suggests that the agent is not accountable for her action because of her justification. Darwall, op. cit. (2010), p. 155.
Sometimes Darwall talks about warranted reactive attitudes rather than fitting reactive attitudes. For instance, see Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 28. I use ‘fitting’ rather than ‘warranted’ to avoid any epistemological implication that might be involved.
Darwall, op. cit. (2012), p. 343, footnote 29.
Ibid., emphasis mine.
Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 67.
Ibid., p. 4.
This is Darwall's favorite case. He uses this case multiple times throughout his 2006 book and several articles. For example, see Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 5; Darwall, “Reply to Korsgaard, Wallace, and Watson,” in Ethics, 118 (2007), pp. 52–53.
Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 4.
Darwall maintains that the relationship between the addresser and the addressee is reciprocal, but as Watson points out, it seems that the relationship can be hierarchical. See Watson, “Morality as Equal Accountability: Comments on Stephen Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint,” in Ethics, 118 (2007), pp. 37–51. For example, a parent seems to have second-personal authority to demand that her kid go to bed at 11 pm, but the kid does not have the authority to make such demand on the parent. Darwall replies to Watson that the relationship will not be stable unless it is reciprocal, for the addressee can realize the force of the second-personal reason given by the addresser’s demand. But it seems to me that a hierarchical relationship can indeed be quite stable, for the addressee can accept the addresser’s demand without having the authority to make such demands.
Put this way, it seems that my demand is implicit rather than explicit. There are problems about the explicitness of second-personal demands, which I will address in this section.
Wallace and particularly Watson talk about this problem respectively in their comments on Darwall’s 2006 book. Wallace calls this interpretation of second-personal reasons a relational model. See Wallace, “Reasons, Relations, and Commands: Reflections on Darwall,” in Ethics, 118 (2007), pp. 24–36; Watson, op. cit.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer at Journal of Value Inquiry and Asia Ferrin for this suggestion.
Darwall might respond that despite the consent, it would be fitting for me to resent you for enslaving me, and so you have a second-personal reason not to enslave me. The problem of this response is that it presupposes the truth of P2, the conceptual connection between fitting negative reactive attitudes and second-personal reasons. Furthermore, this response does not escape the problem that a second-personal reason sometimes is not both the right kind of normative reason and based upon second-personal authority. Thanks to the editor, John Hacker-Wright, at Journal of Value Inquiry for this suggestion.
Darwall, op. cit. (2007), pp. 52–69.
Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid.
Johnson, in Maryanne Cline Horowitz (ed.), New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4 (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005), pp. 1658–1663.
Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 101.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 100.
In that sense, it seems that Darwall does better without reference to Scanlon’s notion of substantive responsibility.
Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 91, emphasis mine.
Personal correspondence.
Darwall, op. cit. (2012), p. 334.
Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 29.
Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Proceedings of the British Academy (1962), pp. 187–211.
Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 16. He also takes it to be Dewey’s point and Cudworth’s point.
As Darwall notices, his distinction between personal and impersonal reactive attitudes is different from Strawson’s. Darwall, op. cit. (2012).
Logically, a third possibility exists: we may hold a sort of reactive attitude when we represent the moral community in taking its perspective towards those committing personal wrongs. Darwall does not discuss this sort of reactive attitudes. In my view, such attitudes seem to be co-extensive with personal reactive attitudes.
The problem is not why people can have impersonal reactive attitudes, but on what grounds people have these attitudes. Specifically, we normally harbor impersonal attitudes when we hold the attitudes towards a situation as people in the situation. While in the case Darwall discusses, we harbor impersonal attitudes towards particular people as a member of the moral community.
Darwall, op. cit. (2006), p. 29.
“[T]o the extent that we find the thought that we owe obligations to nonrational beings a natural thing to think, it seems likely that we also impute to them a proto- or quasi-second-personality, for example, as when we see an animal’s or an infant’s cry as a form of complaint.” Ibid. I avoid talking about second-personality here because P1 doesn’t invoke the second-personal framework.
“This difference is also reflected in the difference between the criminal and civil law. Victims have a distinctive standing to bring, or not to bring, claims ‘civilly,’ as it were, but they may have no distinctive standing to punish those who violate their obligations to them that other members of the moral community do not; any standing they have to hold others responsible, ‘criminally,’ as it were, is simply as a representative member of the moral community.” Darwall, op. cit. (2007), p. 62.
Darwall, op. cit. (2007), pp. 64–65. Darwall, “But It Would Be Wrong,” in Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2010), pp. 135–157, p. 146, footnote 36.
Heuer and Lavin attack Darwall on the idea of the moral community. Heuer, “Rights and the Second-Person Standpoint: A Challenge to Darwall’s Account” (forthcoming). Lavin, “Review of Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability,” in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1 (2008).
Thanks to Peter Vallentyne for this suggestion.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Peter Vallentyne for helping me at all stages of this article. I am also grateful to the audiences at the University of Washing Philosophy Graduate Conference (2012) and the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (2012) for very helpful discussions. Last but not least, I would like to thank an anonymous referee at the Journal of Value Inquiry and the editor, John Hacker-Wright, for their helpful comments.
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Fan, W. Second-Personal Reasons and Moral Obligations. J Value Inquiry 48, 69–86 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9404-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9404-y