Authority and reasons: Exclusionary and second-personal

Ethics

Volumn 120, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 257-278

  Darwall, Stephen ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77952484384     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/651427     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (55)

1. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
2. I take 'accountability' and 'answerability' to be synonyms that refer to a distinctive kind of responsibility to someone. There are of course other forms of (ethical) responsibility. Compare Gary Watson's distinction between "responsibility as accountability" and "responsibility as attributability" in "Two Faces of Responsibility," Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 227-248
3. Stephen Darwall, "Authority and Second-Personal Reasons for Acting," in Reasons for Action, ed. David Sobel and StevenWall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 134-154
4. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 53.
5. For ease of exposition, I will sometimes use "better comply with reasons" as synonymous with "better comply with reasons that apply to the agent already, that is, independently of the putatively authoritative directive."
6. This is necessary to satisfy what Raz has recently called the "independence condition"
7. (see Joseph Raz, "The Problem of Authority: Revisiting the Service Conception," Minnesota Law Review 90 [2006]: 1003-44).
8. According to the NJT it is accepting "the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding," that must produce the improvement in reason compliance. Compare Hobbes's distinction between law or command and counsel (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994], xxv).
9. P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 71-96.
10. I discuss the relation between second-personal authority and contractualism in chap. 12 of The Second-Person Standpoint.
11. As I point out in "Authority and Second-Personal Reasons for Acting."
12. Raz, "The Problem of Authority: Revisiting the Service Conception," 1022.
13. Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 191.
14. For discussion on exclusionary reasons and their relation to preemptive reasons, I am indebted to Scott Hershovitz, David Enoch, Steven Wall, and Scott Shapiro.
15. Joel Feinberg, "The Nature and Value of Rights," in Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 155.
16. Though it is not distinctively up to the victim whether to have the attitude of blame, the victim may have a distinctive standing to blame the wrongdoer overtly. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for prompting me to clarify this point.
17. I argue for this claim in Stephen Darwall, "But It Would Be Wrong," Social Philosophy and Policy, forthcoming.
18. And argue in The Second-Person Standpoint.
19. Of course, the fact that it would cause gratuitous pain is a reason why it would be wrong to step on your foot. I believe, however, that the fact that causing pain in this way amounts to doing wrong is a further, second-personal, and conclusive reason for not stepping on your foot that is additional to this wrong-making reason. On this point, see Darwall, "But It Would Be Wrong."
20. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," 74.
21. Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson, "The Moralistic Fallacy: On the 'Appropriateness' of Emotions," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000): 65-90.
22. D'Arms and Jacobson argue that this poses a problem for response-dependent or, as they call them, neo-sentimentalist" accounts of various evaluative and normative notions, since it shows that, say, the funny can't be understood in terms of amusement's making sense or being warranted by just any reasons. There is a distinction between an emotion or attitude's being "the right way to feel" and it's "getting [the relevant value] right." For an excellent discussion of how what they call "fitting-attitude" (or "FA") analyses can deal with the problem of distinguishing reasons of the right from reasons of the wrong kind
23. see Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Ronnøw-Rasmussen, "The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value," Ethics 114 (2004): 391-423.
24. Rabinowicz and Ronnøw-Rasmussen put essentially the same point by saying reasons of the right kind also appear in the content of the attitude for which they are reasons: the attitude is toward something "on account of" these reasons ("The Strike of theDemon," 414).
25. More accurately, it entails that reasons of the right kind for desiring to believe the proposition exist.
26. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," 85 (emphasis added).
27. GaryWatson stresses this point in Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme," in Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. F. D. Schoeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 256-86, 263, 264.
28. Note also R. Jay Wallace: "there is an essential connection between the reactive attitudes and a distinctive form of evaluation that I refer to as holding a person to an expectation (or demand)" (Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994],19).
29. And it explains their distinctive connection to the problem of freedom of the will in a way that other critical attitudes are not.
30. There are of course exceptions, e.g., blaming the dead. I am indebted here to an anonymous referee.
31. I have been helped here by discussion with Jules Coleman.
32. Raz, Morality and Freedom, 53.
33. Of course, she might acquire this standing if I put myself in her care, depending on how she and I understand the terms of the relationship into which we voluntarily enter.
34. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 25, sec. 1.
35. Alternatively, Raz might hold that though our concept entails accountability, this is not an entailment we can adequately support or vindicate, and offer an NJT based account in terms of preemptive reasons as a "reforming definition" in the spirit of Richard Brandt or Charles Stevenson.
36. For convenience, from here on when I say "if he treats A's directives as giving him exclusionary means," I will mean, "if he treats A's directives as giving him an additional reason for acting as she directs and as giving him exclusionary reasons not to act on reasons that might otherwise recommend against the action she prescribes."
37. For the record, I doubt that this is true.
38. D'Arms and Jacobson, "The Moralistic Fallacy."
39. This, of course, is just the "wrong kind of reasons" problem.
40. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
41. Of course, it might be argued that there is no actual directive in this case, but only the illusion of one, so that the letter of the NJT is not satisfied. While this seems a fair point, it also seems clear that the psychic mechanism leading to B's "compliance" is the same as might be involved in many cases of genuine compliance with actual directives, for example, in the Milgram experiments themselves, or in the case to be described presently. I am indebted to David Owens for this objection.
42. I am indebted here to Scott Hershovitz and David Enoch.
43. See Raz, Practical Reason and Norms, 48. I am indebted here to Scott Shapiro.
44. Practical Reason and Norms, Ibid., 193.
45. And so, as I would analyze it, about the second-personal character of authoritybased exclusionary reasons.
46. I am indebted here to Scott Hershovitz and David Enoch.
47. See Raz, Practical Reason and Norms, 48. I am indebted here to Scott Shapiro.
48. Practical Reason and Norms, Ibid., 193.
49. And so, as I would analyze it, about the second-personal character of authoritybased exclusionary reasons.
50. It might be objected that Raz intends the Normal Justification Thesis only to concern the justification of claims to authority made by those who already have de facto
51. Raz, "The Problem of Authority," 1014-1015
52. Raz might, of course, modify the NJT to require that the putative authority's directive be based on expertise and/or that it be believed by those putatively subject to it to be based on expertise as a separate condition. But this would raise the question of the relation of this new condition to the (unmodified) NJT, since it would seem to have a substantially different rationale from the NJT as Raz has proposed it.
53. I discuss promising as a second-personal relation in "Demystifying Promises," in Promises and Agreements: Philosophical Essays, ed. Hanoch Sheinman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
54. Raz, Practical Reason and Norms, 61.
55. John Rawls, "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 515-72, 546.