Morality as equal accountability: Comments on Stephen Darwall's the second-person standpoint

Ethics

Volumn 118, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 37-51

  Watson, Gary ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 38949211403     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/522017     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. "The concepts of obligation, and duty - moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say - and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of 'ought', ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it" (G. E. M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy," in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, vol. 3, Ethics, Religion, and Politics [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981], 26).
2. It is a good question whether or not all demands are waivable in this way. Do all general prohibitions have an implicit "unless you consent" clause - my obligation is to refrain from cutting off your legs unless you consent? That seems to me implausible. By contrast, if you generally lack the power to release me from this obligation, in what way does my obligation to you reflect your authority, as Darwall's theory has it? This question deserves more discussion. One response would be to deny the competence of anyone who would consent to this sort of treatment. That might seem ad hoc. Another would be to insist that one can do something wrong in mistreating an individual without wronging him For I might still be acting in ways that members of the moral community could reasonably condemn. Some such obligations (similar to those we understand ourselves to have with respect to the environment) might be defensible within a contractualist framework, Darwall suggests. But these obligations must eventually ground out in second-personal authority, on his account. Otherwise, obligation would not entail accountability to anyone.
3. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 108. Further references to this work are cited in parentheses in the text.
4. This is a point Darwall attributes to Pufendorf: "In holding people responsible, we are committed to the assumption that they can hold themselves responsible by self-addressed demands from, a perspective that we and they share" (112). As Darwall had put it earlier: "Genuine obligations can result only from an address that presupposes an addressee's second-personal competence. To generally hold someone responsible, we must assume that she can hold herself responsible in her own reasoning and thought" (23).
5. "This picture links accountability centrally to the reasons free and rational beings have for living by the moral law. On this picture, recognizing moral reasons is itself part of moral agent's active participation in a scheme of accountability, part of their holding themselves accountable for guidance by the relevant norms" (Darwall, 113).
6. In chap. 9, Darwall puts the core of his own position in this way: "People can sensibly be held accountable for complying with norms only if they can themselves accept and determine themselves by them (Pufendorf's Point). But that can be guaranteed to be so only if what makes the demand-warranting norms valid is their issuing from a process that people can, at least in principle, go through in their own reasoning and thereby make the relevant demands of themselves" (242).
7. I would call this weak "recognition respect" because, I maintain, it falls short of what, in the following passage and elsewhere, Darwall calls recognition respect: "Recognition respect of someone as a person is ... an acknowledgment of someone's standing to address and be addressed [sic] second-personal reasons rooted in the dignity of persons" (126).
8. "One demand that anyone has the authority to make is that he not be subject to demanding (coercive) conduct that cannot be justified by second-personal reasons" (Darwall, 272).
9. There are of course special problems in Interpreting such a counterfactual in the case of God. (If the concept of an illegitimate demand makes no sense, neither does that of a legitimate demand.) But these needn't detain us.
10. Stephen Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
11. Ibid., 75.
12. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 150.
13. Ibid., 162. According to Scanlon, the sense of loss "occasioned by charges of injustice and immorality" against us and institutions in which we are involved reflects "out-awareness of the importance for us of being 'in unity with our fellow creatures'" (163).
14. At the end of chap. 9, Darwall identifies dignity "conceived as second-personal authority" as "the fundamental notion."