Abstract
In The Second-Person Standpoint and subsequent essays, Stephen Darwall develops an account of morality that is “second-personal” in virtue of holding that what we are morally obligated to do is what others can legitimately demand that we do, i.e., what they can hold us accountable for doing through moral reactive attitudes like blame. Similarly, what it would be wrong for us to do is what others can legitimately demand that we abstain from doing. As part of this account, Darwall argues for the proposition that we have a distinctive “second-personal reason” to fulfill all of our obligations and to avoid all wrong-actions, an “authority-regarding” reason that derives from the legitimate demands the “moral community” makes of us. I show that Darwall offers an insufficient case for this proposition. My criticism of this aspect of Darwall’s account turns in part on the fact that we have compunction-based or “compunctive” reasons to fulfill all of our obligations and to avoid all wrong actions, a type of reason that Darwall seemingly overlooks.
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Notes
Darwall’s assumption that adding reasons for a response necessarily increases the overall strength of our reasons for the response is contestable (e.g., Schroeder 2009, 343–4).
So while Darwall’s extra measure argument may appear to violate Olson’s dictum about the logical independence of the positive and negative aspects of buck-passing, he does not suggest that the positive aspect implies the negative aspect per se, but rather only that this is true in some cases when the concept and response in question are related in a particular way.
Skorupski offers some criticism of Darwall on this point (2010, 374–5).
In earlier work, Skorupski calls Bridge the “Feeling-Disposition Principle” (1997, 38–9).
This may appear to conflate attitudes and feelings. However, Strawson frequently refers to our “reactive attitudes and feelings,” drawing no distinction between them.
While the same facts that ground compunction ground blame as well, compunction seems if anything to be appropriate in a wider range of cases. Darwall, for instance, says that wrong actions are sometimes not blameworthy since the agent had an adequate excuse. In some of these cases, though, compunction would presumably still have been warranted. (I give an example of this in section 7.) So while the same facts serve as evaluative reasons for compunction and blame, more considerations can defeat these reasons where blame is concerned. I am grateful to a reviewer for pointing out the need for me to clarify this point.
Citing Nye’s influence, in more recent work Gibbard gestures toward incorporating compunction into his analysis (2008, 16).
Cases in which one would be warranted in having some feeling without being warranted in acting as it prompts are not counterexamples to the principle as long as they can be accounted for in terms of Bridge-derived reasons being outweighed.
Note that compunctive reasons are quite different from the reasons that a person might have to avoid anticipated guilt. The latter are merely prudential reasons to avoid an unpleasant feeling, and we might believe that a person genuinely has a prudential reason to avoid an action for which she is likely to feel guilty even if we believe that her guilt would be unwarranted. Again, I am grateful to a reviewer for pointing out the need for me to clarify this point.
Emphasis changed.
While I cannot elaborate on this point here, it seems to me that even when moral obligations are embodied, putative second-personal reasons have little if any weight except where they function as compunctive reasons (as one does in my “No Trespassing” sign example). Suppose for the sake of argument that we have an obligation to give to charity and that the urgent need of others is a compunctive reason for us not to spend all of our money on ourselves. If flesh-and-blood individuals should demand that we give to charity, at least by blaming those who fail to do so, their demand appears to give us no further reason for compunction—hence it is not a compunctive reason. And neither does it appear to make an appreciable difference to the force of our moral reasons to give (although the desire to avoid being blamed by others might be a prudential reason).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ben Eggleston, Chris Macleod, David McNaughton, an audience at the 2016 Eastern APA, and two reviewers for helpful comments.
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Miller, D.E. Compunction, Second-Personal Morality, and Moral Reasons. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 719–733 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9918-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9918-2