Kant’s Commitment to Metaphysics of Morals

(2016). “Kant's Commitment to Metaphysics of Morals,”
European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 24, Iss. 1, pp. 103-128. Pdf.

A definitive feature of Kant’s moral philosophy is its rationalism. Kant insists that moral theory, at least at its foundation, cannot take account of empirical facts about human beings and their circumstances in the world. This is the core of Kant’s commitment to “metaphysics of morals,” and it is what he sees as his greatest contribution to moral philosophy. This article clarifies what it means to be committed to metaphysics of morals, why Kant is committed to it, and where he thinks empirical considerations may enter moral theory. The paper examines recent work of contemporary Kantians (Barbara Herman, Allen Wood and Christine Korsgaard) who argue that there is a central role for empirical considerations in Kant’s moral theory. Either these theorists interpret Kant himself as permitting empirical considerations to enter, or they propose to extend Kant’s theory so as to allow them to enter. I argue that these interpretive trends are not supported by the texts, and that the proposed extensions are not plausibly Kantian. Kant’s insistence on the exclusion of empirical considerations from the foundations of moral theory is not an incidental feature of his thought which might be modified while the rest remains unchanged. Rather, it is the very center of his endeavors in moral philosophy. If we disagree with it, I argue, we have grounds for moving to a distinctly different theoretical framework.

Must We Be Just Plain Good? On Regress Arguments for the Value of Humanity

(January 2018). "Must We Be Just Plain Good? On Regress Arguments for the Value of Humanity," Ethics (128): 346-372. Pdf.

There is a powerful argument for the special value of humanity that turns on the nature of relational value. For anything to be relationally valuable, something must be non-relationally valuable, and people meet the criteria. Relational value borrows its normativity—its reason-giving force—from the value of people whose value is not borrowed from it, or anything else. The argument emerges from broadly Kantian discussions of human value, but it is patterned on a schema that has wide currency, and is often taken to be something of a truism. I examine the argument schema in this article, and my conclusion is in a clear sense negative. Non-relational value is not required to make sense of the existence of relational value, so the special value of humanity will not come from this kind of argument about the structure of value. Fortunately there is a positive lesson. While the value of people is not of necessity non-relational, we can capture the value of people, and what is owed to them, in fully relational terms.

Explaining the Value of Human Beings

Jan 2023. Rethinking the Value of Humanity, edited by Sarah Buss and Nandi Theunissen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pdf

This essay develops a relational account of the value of humanity that makes essential reference to the value of a well-lived life. It begins with a widely shared assumption that the value of human beings in some way depends on our capacity for valuing other things. But it makes the distinctive proposal that the capacity for valuing makes people of value because it makes them capable of leading a good life, a notion that is explicated in broadly Aristotelian terms. People are of value because they can be “good for themselves” in the sense that they bear a special relation to their own flourishing. The proposal draws from but goes beyond the account of the value of humanity that I develop elsewhere. I expound the thesis that value is the ground of practical reason, offer a new objection to regress arguments for the value of humanity, and provide a conditional argument for the normative significance of relational value.

Realism about the Good For Human Beings

September 2023 in the Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism, edited by Paul Bloomfield and David Copp. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pdf

Against those who contend that there is a basic duality between the moral and the non-moral good, or the right and the good, I articulate a form of realism that works with a unified conception of the good in which virtue and benefit are key concepts, and in which the “moral good” is not foundationally distinctive, but explicable in terms of the good for human beings. I argue: (a) that virtuous actions are such because and insofar as they (actually or potentially) protect, preserve, secure, or promote the good for human beings, and (b) that being appropriately responsive to the good for human beings is (at least part of) what it is to be a virtuous person, where this form of responsiveness can itself be shown to be good for the one who is so. My proposal is one way of developing a schema for the relationship between virtue and the beneficial that is variously developed by Philippa Foot and Judy Thomson. The schema is that virtues are ways of doing and being that are necessary because and insofar as some human good hangs on them.

Activity, Consciousness, and Well-Being

January 2023. Analysis as part of a book symposium on Richard Kraut’s The Quality of Life with Peter Railton and Valerie Tiberius. pdf.

In this article I critically engage with the form of experientialism about well-being that Richard Kraut lately defends. Kraut has long investigated questions about well-being. He remains committed to the view that exercising our powers, or in other words, being active, is essential to the good for human beings. But Kraut is now inclined to emphasize activity only insofar as it bears on conscious experience. He works to close the gap Robert Nozick had insisted upon between doing something and having the experience of doing it. And where the gap remains, he urges that activity matters only insofar as it conduces to valuable states of consciousness. I probe the envisaged relationship between activity and consciousness. I argue that there can be a robust and relevant difference between doing something and having the experience of doing it—that much depends on what the activity is, and a closely related point, what counts as successfully doing it. I also resist the claim that the value of engaging in an activity, whatever it is, is the state of experience yielded thereby.

The New Mooreans

Under review (email me for a copy!)

‘Unselfing’ and its Discontents: A Reply to Iris Murdoch

In progress

Iris Murdoch is well-known for taking a dim view of human motivation. We human beings are basically self-absorbed, and our view of others is obscured by our self-serving fantasies about them. The task of ethics is to overcome this tendency through the process of “unselfing” in which we silence the self through loving attention to others. In this essay, I uncover what is distinctive about Murdoch’s view of motivation and the task of ethics and offer a (qualified) critique. I enlarge upon Murdoch’s own passing references to psychoanalysis to offer a fuller account of, and set of terms for, her moral psychology. In doing so, I bring out what is distinctive about her conception of motivation in comparison with traditions that foreground the problem, not of narcissism, but of self-interest. This work is important, I argue, because philosophical moral psychology has tended to lack the vocabulary for Murdoch’s style of proposal and so has not seen it clearly. Against Murdoch’s ethics of self-abnegation, however, I argue that our relationship to ourselves is actually paramount for ethical life, and that it is precisely through the work of attending to the self that we overcome the kind of pathology that Murdoch rightly diagnoses as problematic and pervasive.

The Value of Intellectual and Aesthetic Activity: A Critique of Ross

In progress

In his Foundations of Ethics, W. D. Ross defends the view that the ground of the value of intellectual and aesthetic activities is distinctly different from the ground of the value of something like pleasure. The value of intellectual and aesthetic activities is a quality intrinsic to them (they are good in themselves), while the value of pleasure depends on a relation to an agent who properly takes an interest or finds satisfaction in it. The intrinsic or non-relational value of intellectual and aesthetic activities is taken to follow from the fact that they are worthy objects of admiration, where being fit to admire is thought to be a self-evident mark of intrinsic or non-relational value. According to Ross, we do not need to postulate intrinsic value to explain the value of what is properly in our interest or to our satisfaction (these are not proper objects of admiration), so the value of pleasure is by contrast extrinsic or relational. Ross’s treatment is roundly influential, and whether they cite Ross or not, it finds supporters in contemporary discussions of perfectionist values. We cannot do justice to our attitudes towards and practices involving perfectionist goods without taking them to be intrinsically valuable. But how strong is Ross’s argument? Is it true that worthiness of admiration is a self-evident mark of intrinsic value? In this chapter, I argue that we can do justice to our attitudes towards exemplary intellectual and aesthetic activities while treating the ground of value as relational: such that they are properly of interest to, or as I prefer, good for, agents.