The Second Person Standpoint

Download or read book The Second-Person Standpoint written by Stephen Darwall and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why should we avoid doing moral wrong? The inability of philosophy to answer this question in a compelling manner—along with the moral skepticism and ethical confusion that ensue—result, Stephen Darwall argues, from our failure to appreciate the essentially interpersonal character of moral obligation. After showing how attempts to vindicate morality have tended to change the subject—falling back on non-moral values or practical, first-person considerations—Darwall elaborates the interpersonal nature of moral obligations: their inherent link to our responsibilities to one another as members of the moral community. As Darwall defines it, the concept of moral obligation has an irreducibly second-person aspect; it presupposes our authority to make claims and demands on one another. And so too do many other central notions, including those of rights, the dignity of and respect for persons, and the very concept of person itself. The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality’s supreme authority—an account that Darwall carries from the realm of theory to the practical world of second-person attitudes, emotions, and actions.

Download or read book The Second-Person Standpoint written by Stephen Darwall and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why should we avoid doing moral wrong? The inability of philosophy to answer this question in a compelling manner—along with the moral skepticism and ethical confusion that ensue—result, Stephen Darwall argues, from our failure to appreciate the essentially interpersonal character of moral obligation. After showing how attempts to vindicate morality have tended to change the subject—falling back on nonmoral values or practical, first-person considerations—Darwall elaborates the interpersonal nature of moral obligations: their inherent link to our responsibilities to one another as members of the moral community. As Darwall defines it, the concept of moral obligation has an irreducibly second-person aspect; it presupposes our authority to make claims and demands on one another. And so too do many other central notions, including those of rights, the dignity of and respect for persons, and the very concept of person itself. The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality's supreme authority—an account that Darwall carries from the realm of theory to the practical world of second-person attitudes, emotions, and actions.

Download or read book The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics written by Andrew Pinsent and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Aquinas devoted a substantial proportion of his greatest works to the virtues. Yet, despite the availability of these texts (and centuries of commentary), Aquinas’s virtue ethics remains mysterious, leaving readers with many unanswered questions. In this book, Pinsent argues that the key to understanding Aquinas’s approach is to be found in an association between: a) attributes he appends to the virtues, and b) interpersonal capacities investigated by the science of social cognition, especially in the context of autistic spectrum disorder. The book uses this research to argue that Aquinas’s approach to the virtues is radically non-Aristotelian and founded on the concept of second-person relatedness. To demonstrate the explanatory power of this principle, Pinsent shows how the second-person perspective gives interpretation to Aquinas’s descriptions of the virtues and offers a key to long-standing problems, such as the reconciliation of magnanimity and humility. The principle of second-person relatedness also interprets acts that Aquinas describes as the fruition of the virtues. Pinsent concludes by considering how this approach may shape future developments in virtue ethics.

Download or read book Reason, Value, and Respect written by Mark Timmons and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In thirteen specially written essays, leading philosophers explore Kantian themes in moral and political philosophy that are prominent in the work of Thomas E. Hill, Jr. The first three essays focus on respect and self-respect.; the second three on practical reason and public reason. The third section covers a set of topics in social and political philosophy, including Kantian perspectives on homicide and animals. The final set of essays discuss duty, volition, and complicity in ethics. In conclusion Hill offers an overview of his work and responses to the preceding essays.

Download or read book Levinas and Analytic Philosophy written by Michael Fagenblat and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas’s work to recent developments in analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophers working in metaethics, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysic of personal identity have argued for views similar to those espoused by Levinas. Often disparately pursued, Levinas’s account of "ethics as first philosophy" affords a way of connecting these respective enterprises and showing how moral normativity enters into the structure of rationality and personal identity. In metaethics, the volume shows how Levinas’s moral phenomenology relates to recent work on the normativity of rationality and intentionality, and how it can illuminate a wide range of moral concepts including accountability, moral intuition, respect, conscience, attention, blame, indignity, shame, hatred, dependence, gratitude and guilt. The volume also tests Levinas’s innovative claim that ethical relations provide a way of accounting for the irreducibility of personal identity to psychological identity. The essays here contribute to ongoing discussions about the metaphysical significance and sustainability of a naturalistic but nonreductive account of personhood. Finally, the volume connects Levinas’s second-person standpoint with analogous developments in moral philosophy.

Download or read book Contours of Dignity written by Suzy Killmister and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suzanne Killmister sets out an original approach to understanding dignity, not according to the dominant conception as an inherent feature of all human beings, but in terms of the norms to which we hold ourselves and others. She argues for a tripartite conception, comprised of personal dignity, social dignity, and status dignity.

Download or read book Kant's Defense of Common Moral Experience written by Jeanine Grenberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that everything important about Kant's moral philosophy emerges from common human experience of the conflict between happiness and morality.