Make sure that you understand the following points as you get to grips with this topic (and make sure your essay reflects that understanding!):

• The distinction between acting in accordance with and acting from duty.
• Kant’s moral psychology, which we can understand as casting desires as ‘proposers’ of acts aimed at desired ends, with the will choosing between these—taking up one or the other in the form of a maxim (e.g. ‘I will open the door in order achieve the end of enjoying some fresh air’) governing its action. The will selects its maxim, and therefore which of the proposals to ratify by acting, on the basis of some more fundamental principle that determines the character of the agent. For some complications that you can ignore for now, see here.
• Why Kant denies that the happy philanthropist’s actions exhibit genuine moral worth, saying that “it is just in the depressed philanthropist’s case] that the worth of character comes out.”
• The difference between the idea that being motivated by duty is sufficient for moral worth and the idea that it’s necessary for moral worth.
• The different ways in which the Kantian story about the necessity of motivation by duty to moral worth might inspire doubts. Some want to argue that motivation by duty is not necessary for moral worth—that’s how some people react to the philanthropist example. Others want to say that it’s not sufficient—that’s the point of Stocker’s example of the hospital visit. Some want to challenge Kant’s view that moral goodness is the only unconditional goodness—that’s part of what Wolf is up to. Williams is resistant to the idea that an act cannot be the right thing to do unless it is validated by an impersonal moral principle that applies independent of character. These are all slightly different points.
• The distinction between primary and secondary motivation.

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Not sure how to go about writing an essay in answer to this question?

• Well, a good way to start is by trying to figure out what Kant means when he says that only action from duty has moral worth, and then try to trace out the steps by which he arrives at this claim. Read the first chapter of the Groundwork, going back and forth as necessary between it and the Darwall or the Kleingeld or, if you like, a different academic commentary such as Allen Wood’s Kant’s Ethical Thought, chapter 1. (Commentaries walk you through the text bit by bit, so they can be helpful for understanding particlarly tricky passages.) Kant is difficult to read, at least to begin with, so don’t beat yourself up if you’re having trouble. Lean on those commentators! But also: embrace the challenge! There are competing interpretations of Kant, and trying to figure out what you think he’s up to is one valuable form of philosophical training (and a source of joy!). This is why you’re here.
• Try to locate the key argument, where Kant goes through some examples to try to identify cases in which a morally good will is exhibited in someone’s action. In all but the case of action from duty he gives a reason to think that this kind of relation to duty doesn’t guarantee moral worth, but in the case of action from duty he argues that it does.
• Ask yourself: what are the examples he uses to illustrate the cases in which moral worth isn’t present? Is he right about them? What is action from duty, and why does he think that action from duty is better? Does he really say that only action from duty has moral worth? (Try also to get a sense for the place of the view that only action from duty has moral worth has in the wider argument of the chapter—what is Kant going to do with that conclusion?)
• Then draft a quick summary (no more than two or three paragraphs) summarising Kant’s argument as you understand it. Your summary should effectively give your (current) answer to the question ‘Why does Kant think that only action from duty has moral worth?’ If you actually think that he doesn’t think that, don’t worry: give an account of the argument that Kant seems to be making to that effect, and preface it with something along the lines of “Kant is standardly read as arguing that only action from duty has moral worth. On this reading, his argument proceeds as follows.”
• OK! Now let’s think about why this question might be interesting, why there might be a puzzle here. As the reading list makes clear, some people very much disagree that acting from duty is necessary for moral worth. Bernard Williams and Susan Wolf are two important sceptics here, as is Michael Stocker (he’s on the further reading list). So you could read one of them. What complaints do they have about the Kantian picture of morality and the moral life that insists that motivation by duty is necessary? What examples do they use to bring out the problems they think Kant’s view gives rise to? If precisely what their worries are is not totally clear to you, it may be helpful to read replies to them to see how their objections are taken by Kantians. Marcia Baron’s article on the priority reading list is a good place to look.
• Now you can draft a few paragraphs setting out the doubts about the Kantian view that you’ve found most compelling (or at any rate comprehensible). It would be quite natural to start the first of these with a linking or signposting sentence—something like “Kant’s argument for the necessity of action from duty to moral worth seems vulnerable to objection. One doubt has to do with...” Then you can go on to outline and illustrate one of the objections you find in Williams, Wolf, or Stocker. Be sure to draw out the implication for Kant’s argument clearly in conclusion. For instance, you might say: “If Stocker is right, sometimes moral worth requires us not to be motivated by duty, and so Kant’s argument fails.” (And perhaps add a sentence about where Kant’s argument has or seems to have gone wrong—where is his misstep?)
• It may be that there’s more than one objection to the Kantian picture. By all means distinguish them, presenting each in a new paragraph (“A second objection is as follows. ...”; “A third objection to the Kantian view is due to Susan Wolf. Wolf argues...”). Distinguishing the objections clearly in this way helps your reader to understand the challenge for Kant and what will be needed to meet it.
• Next it’s time for a paragraph setting out possible replies to the objections. As we saw, Marcia Baron’s a great source of these. Read her paper and identify what she says or would say in response to each of the objections you’ve distinguished. Then write a paragraph for the first response. You can start the paragraph roughly as follows: “In response to the first objection, Marcia Baron argues...”. If you are going to endorse the response, you might prefer to write “In response to the first objection, we can argue, following Marcia Baron, that...”.
• Write a paragraph like that for each response. If you’re endorsing the response, make sure that’s clear— don’t just report what Baron says, but assert it. You can report what she says and then add a sentence adding your own endorsement, such as “Baron’s response here seems persuasive, since...”. Or you can just use formulations such as “As Baron argues” or “Following Baron, we can respond that...”.
• Feel free to place each paragraph that gives a response to one of the objections directly after the paragraph in which that objection is raised, or to gather objections together before giving all of the responses together. That’s mainly a matter of style, although there can be good dialectical reasons to do it one way or the other. For instance, if you regard two different objections as decisive it makes sense to collect them together before presenting (and rejecting) responses to them, since if by rejecting a response to the first you show that it’s decisive it’s going to be hard to motivate interest in the second. Who cares about further objections given that the first is fatal?! If two fatal objections do seem illuminating and so worth talking about, structure and formulations such as “Even if we set this problem aside, the second/third/fourth objection also presents insurmountable difficulties for Kant’s view” can really be your friend.
• Continue in the way you’ve now established. There are responses to the responses—for instance, Isserow’s argument against the appeal that Baron makes to the distinction between primary and secondary motives as a way to address objections to the Kantian view. If you’ve still time, write yourself a paragraph or two setting out Isserow’s case, and then place that paragraph in the appropriate place in the sequence you’ve been composing. Again, make sure you don’t merely report that case, but also assess it. Is Isserow right? What are the implications (which of the objections you began with does she vindicate if she is successful?).
• Once you’ve run out of time or feel happy with the state of your understanding as expressed in the paragraphs you’ve composed, you can top and tail your essay. Write the conclusion first. This doesn’t need to do anything more than summarise where you’ve got to and how you got there. For instance, you might write,

  As we have seen, Kant’s view that only action from duty has moral worth can seem excessively austere and alienating, since it appears to suggest that actions motivated by fellow-feeling or compassion lack the moral worth that we intuitively take them to have. I have argued that this impression is misleading. Once we understand what is involved in acting from duty, and in particular that it needn’t be...

  . Or you might write,

  As we have seen, Kant’s view that only action from duty has moral worth can seem excessively austere and alienating, since it appears to suggest that actions motivated by fellow-feeling or compassion lack the moral worth that we intuitively take them to have. I have argued that attempts to defend Kant from this kind of objection fail...”.

• You can write your introduction now too. It need only do the following: (1) summarise very briefly what the question is asking and what’s at stake; (2) clarify anything that needs clarifying right off the bat; (3) state the conclusion you’ll be drawing; and (4) summarise the reasons you’ll be giving. For instance, you might write:

  Kant seems to be arguing in the first chapter of the Groundwork that only acts motivated by duty exhibit genuine moral worth. Acts motivated by, say, compassion or love for others may be admirable but they aren’genuinely morally worthy. This seems very implausible. Surely the acts of someone who visits his friend in hospital out of love, or takes in a lost child out of compassion, do not lack genuine moral worth. I will argue that indeed they do not, and that Kant can in fact vindicate this intuitive judgment. There are different ways in which we can be motivated by duty, and objections to Kant on this score depend on a failure to appreciate this.

• And you’re done!

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Priority reading (Hide)

• Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1997), Preface (but you can skim this) and section I
  Kant aims to work out the supreme principle that underlies moral thinking, and eventually to vindicate it. He starts by analysing the notion of a good will, which is, he argues, the only thing of unconditional moral value. The idea is to identify what a good will consists in, and thence arrive at its fundamental principle. As it will turn out in sections II–III, this principle coincides with the only possible “categorical imperative”.
• Stephen Darwall, Philosophical Ethics (Westview, 1998), pp. 144–154
  Darwall offers helpful, clear exegesis of the Preface and section I of the Groundwork.
• Pauline Kleingeld, ‘Kant’s Analytic Method and the Argument of Groundwork I’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 125 (2025)
  Kleingeld offers an interpretation of Groundwork I that, she claims, resolves several puzzles about what’s supposed to be going on in it.
• Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, 1996), chapter 2
  After a brief account of the history of a debate between rationalist and sentimentalist moral philosophers (don't worry too much about which view is whose as you read), Korsgaard offers a careful reading of key passages in Groundwork I, defending Kant from some common objections and elaborating on some key notions. She then situates Kant's argument with respect to the historical debate.
• Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge, 1981)
  Williams makes a case for the importance of character and personal relations and their independence from morality as understood in the Kantian frame, and accordingly charges Kantian ethics with a deeply impoverished account of individual agency that produces a misrepresentation of the moral life.
• Marcia Baron, ‘The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 81, no. 4 (1984)
  Baron analyses the objection, sometimes levelled against Kantian ethics, that being motivated by duty is not essential to morally good conduct—indeed, that it is morally repugnant or alienating. (Williams is one proponent of this objection.) She considers several versions of the objection and rejects them all.
• Susan Wolf, ‘Moral Saints’, in The Variety of Values (Oxford, 2015)
  In this influential discussion, Wolf argues against Kantian and other moral theories that the maximising ideal of moral sainthood she takes to be implicit in them should be rejected on the grounds that there are important values other than those of morality and self-interest.
• Jessica Isserow, ‘Doubts about Duty as a Secondary Motive’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 105, no. 2 (2021)
  Isserow discusses the idea of duty as a ‘secondary motive’ that is appealed to by Baron, Herman, and others as a means of avoiding objections that Kant’'s conception of moral worth is too austere or involves a ‘thought too many’. Via an analysis of different interpretations of the idea, she argues that it is not capable of serving the purpose for which it is invoked, and concludes that a pluralistic approach to moral worth is to be preferred.

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Further reading (Hide)

• Michael Stocker, ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 73, no. 14 (1976)
  In this influential article, often cited alongside Williams’s and Wolf’s as the source of a deep challenge to Kantian accounts of acting well, Stocker argues that something important is missing in accounts of moral goodness that make the motive of duty central, as Kant's does: the accounts present a stunted version of the moral life.
• Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Harvard ,1993), chapter 1. (An earlier version is available here, but the book is preferable.)
  Herman argues that acting from an interest in the rightness of one’s action is necessary to ensure that the action is nonaccidentally right and has moral worth as such, and then argues against some proposals as to the nature of the moral motive necessary for moral worth so understood. The difficulties with these proposals are solved, she argues, by distinguishing incentives from motives and recognition that the motive of duty can be a secondary motive.
• Jens Timmermann, ‘Acting from duty: inclination, reason and moral worth’, in Jens Timmermann (ed.), Kant's ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2009)
  Emphasising that the task of Groundwork I is to identify and analyse a case in which a person’s action is determined by the moral law rather than merely accidentally conforming with it (ultimately in order to reveal the supreme principle of morality as a principle of maxims rather than acts), Timmermann argues that the problem with acts motivated by endorsement of a principle of following inclination, for Kant, is that they lack the necessary connection with morality. He goes on to reject a ‘backup motive’ conception of the motive of duty necessary for moral worth, arguing that this conception is inconsistent with Kant’s insistence that morality is concerned with willing rather than effects.
• Christine Korsgaard, ‘From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble’, in her The Constitution of Agency (Oxford, 2008)
  Korsgaard offers helpful explanation of Kantian moral psychology and exegesis of Groundwork I, emphasising in particular that for Kant moral value supervenes on an agent’s choice, before arguing that Aristotle shares much the same moral psychology and analysis of good action—and even uses an example like that of the philanthropist in the Groundwork to illustrate his. The biggest difference between Kant and Aristotle, Korsgaard suggests, lies in their different understandings of inclinations, which Aristotle sees as quasi-perceptual, aimed at presenting things as good, unlike Kant. But their basic ethical outlooks, she argues, are the same.
• Julia Annas, ‘Why Virtue Ethics Does Not Have a Problem with Right Action’, in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 4 (Oxford, 2014)
  Annas asks how virtue ethics can make sense of the demanding character of rightness that Kantian ethics interprets as a matter of categoricity and necessity. After pointing out that virtue ethics avoids certain problems with Kantian views focused on this aspect of morality, she argues that virtue ethics can at the same time in fact make good sense of the demanding character of rightness, partly by distinguishing duties as a sub-class of right acts involving prespecification associated with roles and institutions from virtuous acts in which the agent’s virtues play a part in the specification, and partly by resisting the suggestion that the demands of virtue are somehow less strong.
• Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency, chapter 3
  Arpaly defends a ‘quality of will’ account of the moral worth of right actions that makes it a function of motivation by the features that make the acts right and depth of concern with those features. This conflicts with Kant’s view insofar as it allows that Kant’s philanthropist’s sympathetically motivated actions can have moral worth and insofar as Kant has no analogue of the ‘depth’ clause.
• James Grant, ‘Moral Worth and Moral Belief’, Ethics vol. 133, no. 2 (2023)
  Grant argues against the view that it is sufficient for your act to exhibit moral worth that you do the right thing for the reasons that make it right, which some (such as Arpaly) have defended in response to Kant’s claim that for your act to exhibit moral worth you must do the right thing because it’s right. The mainspring of his argument are examples of people who do the right thing for the reasons that make it morally required, but under the mistaken view that it is not morally required.

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Make sure that you understand the following points as you get to grips with this topic (and make sure your essay reflects that understanding!):

• The canonical formulation of contractualism! (“An act is wrong iff it is disallowed by principles for the general regulation of behaviour that could reasonably be rejected as a basis for free, informed agreement by people motivated to find such principles.”)
• The contractualist theoretical mechanism whose operation tells us which acts are wrong. This mechanism takes a candidate principle for the general regulation of behaviour and asks what the strongest admissible reason is a person might have to reject it. (To know that you need to know what sort of reasons are admissible [see below].) Then it compares that strongest reason with the strongest reason to reject any alternative principle. The principle that attracts the weakest strongest admissible reasons for rejection (!) is the one that determines which acts are wrong and which permissible.
• The individualist restriction, the impersonalist restriction, and the restriction to generic reasons. Each of these blocks certain reasons to reject principles from doing any work in determining the moral status of acts. The individualist restriction blocks reasons that do not all belong to the perspective of a single individual. The impersonalist restriction blocks appeals to impersonal values. The generic reasons restriction blocks reasons that are too specific to the situation at hand. (You also need to understand Scanlon’s reasons for imposing these restrictions.)
• The way that contractualism characterises the reason that (Scanlon takes it as given that) we have to be moral in terms of the idea of a relationship of mutual recognition, and the attractions of this characterisation.
• The distinction between ex ante and ex post evaluations of a risk of bearing a given burden, and the way in which this distinction bears upon the reasons with which the contractualist theoretical mechanism operates.

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Not sure how to go about writing an essay in answer to this question?

• The first thing to do is, of course, to try to understand just what the contractualist account of wrongness is. Scanlon’s introduction to What We Owe to Each Other offers a fairly succinct statement of the central contractualist idea, that an act is wrong if it would be disallowed by principles for the general regulation of behaviour that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for free, informed agreement and who was motivated to find such principles; and he gives a brief summary of his reasons for accepting this account. Chapters 4–5 give more of the detail, presenting both the main questions to which Scanlon thinks an acceptable theory must provide an answer and clarifying some of the details about how the contractualist theoretical mechanism determines which acts are wrong.
• All of this is part of contractualism’s account of wrongness, so you’ll need to write a few paragraphs summarising the main lines. Focus on: (1) the flagship statement of contractualism (“An act is wrong iff...”); (2) the details of how this formula is to be applied (e.g. what determines whether a principle can reasonably be rejected—which reasons, and from whose points of view, count against principles, and how do they bear on which principles ultimately determine wrongness?); (3) the main reasons Scanlon gives for accepting the contractualist account (for example, he thinks it offers a compelling characterisation or elaboration of the reason we [take ourselves to] have to be moral, avoiding what he calls ‘Prichard’s dilemma’).
• Just as with the essay on Kant, it’s helpful to read commentators and critics to get a sense of what’s going on—don’t try to figure it all out just on the basis of what Scanlon himself says. Wallace, Hieronymi, and Kumar are all particularly helpful here. And be ready to come back to these paragraphs and revise them in light of the way your understanding develops as you go on to read Scanlon’s critics, of course.
• Now, in order for this question to be of philosophical interest, there are going to have to be some doubts about whether contractualism does offer a compelling account of wrongness. So turn your attention to some of those offering objections! Ashford argues that contractualism is subject to demandingness objections, like consequentialism; Otsuka that it cannot vindicate intuitive judgments about rescue; Hosein that it treats its subject too much as if it’s political morality; De Kenessey that it leaves us clueless about what we owe to each other; and Frick that it can’t handle cases of social risk adequately. Write yourself a paragraph for each of these that you read (choose whichever sound most interesting), describing the objection and the features of contractualism that it targets. For example, Otsuka’s objection targets contractualism’s ‘ban’ on aggregation, which flows from its restriction on the reasons (to individual, personal reasons) that can count against candidate principles in the theoretical mechanism.
• Once you’ve written a paragraph about an objection, you can think about what resources are available to Scanlon (or Scanlonian contractualists) as ways to respond. The main places to look are in the work of the critics themselves (a critic will often anticipate important lines of response and try to address them, but their efforts may not always be persuasive); in the work of Scanlon himself (What We Owe anticipates many of the objections that might be levelled at it, and Scanlon’s subsequent work responds to some of the main lines of objection—see e.g. ‘Contractualism and Justification’ in the further reading list); and in the work of other philosophers defending Scanlon (such as Kumar’s response to demandingness worries in his paper on the priority reading list).
• For each objection, write a paragraph or two setting out a possible response to it and assessing that response. For example, you might write a paragraph on the Saving the Greater Number objection that starts as follows:

  One way for Scanlon to avoid the Saving the Greater Number (SGN) objection would be to abandon the individualist restriction, which, as we’ve seen, blocks aggregation of individuals’ reasons so that they cannot combine to outweigh a single individual’s like reason. But this would be a heavy price to pay, since the individualist restriction is also what allows contractualism to avoid unpalatable verdicts in cases such as that of Jones in the transmitter room. In ‘Contractualism and Justification’, Scanlon himself offers an alternative proposal...

  Make sure that you include a sentence towards the end of the paragraph making it clear whether you’re accepting the response or rejecting it. If you’re rejecting it, then give an indication of how serious the problem is for contractualism. (Is it a fatal objection if contractualism can’t vindicate the judgment that one must save the many, for instance? Or is it merely counterintuitive but not so bad that contractualism’s other merits don’t outweigh it?)
• Once you’ve done this for each objection you want (or at least have time) to consider, organise the paragraphs setting out objections and the paragraphs setting out responses to the objections so that they form a natural dialectic. Objections you regard it as easy for contractualism to deal with should come first; objections you regard as most difficult for contractualism to deal with (including any that you think are fatal) should come last. You can interpolate the paragraphs responding to the objections or you can group them all together.
• If there are replies to the objections to which you can think of or have read counter-replies (that you didn’t discuss in the paragraphs setting out the original replies), then draft paragraphs setting these out and assessing them, and add them to the sequence of paragraphs.
• Now you have a sequence of argument. Where does it leave you? Were any of the objections fatal to contractualism—that is, does it seem to you that any of the objections highlight a problem with contractualism that justifies rejecting it as a theory of what we owe to each other? You might think, for instance, that the dilemma that de Kenessey poses is fatal, since if he’s right contractualism either leaves us in an epistemically hopeless position or else it forces a deeply unpalatable moral relativism on us. (You don’t have to think this—it’s just an example!) Or you might think that contractualism can deal with all of the objections, but it has to be amended in ways that cost it its fundamental appeal to do so. Or you might think that it’s just fine, and that all of the objections straightforwardly fail.
• This puts you in a position to top and tail your essay. Write the conclusion first. As ever, this doesn’t need to do anything more than summarise where you’ve got to and how you got there. For instance, you might write,

  As we’ve seen, contractualism can fend off objections to the effect that it is too demanding, that it cannot vindicate the requirement to save the greater number, and that it treats interpersonal morality too much like politics. Contractualism is not too demanding, it can vindicate the SGN requirement, and it does not treat interpersonal morality too much like politics. But because contractualism makes the truth of a moral principle dependent on facts about how things would be if behaviour were generally regulated by that principle, it imposes extraordinarily demanding epistemic burdens upon us that we cannot hope to meet. It therefore leaves us completely clueless about what we owe to each other, and this, I have argued, is a fatal objection.

• You can write your introduction now too. It need only do the following: (1) summarise very briefly what the question is asking and what’s at stake; (2) clarify anything that needs clarifying right off the bat; (3) state the conclusion you’ll be drawing; and (4) summarise the reasons you’ll be giving. For instance, you might write:

  Scanlon’s contractualism says that an act is wrong if and only if it is disallowed by principles that no one could reasonably reject. A principle can reasonably be rejected by someone iff she has reasons (subject to certain restrictions that I will elucidate below) to reject it that are stronger than any other individual’s reasons for rejecting alternatives to the principle. Scanlon’s view avoids major objections to rival views such as consequentialism, and its foundation in an ideal of mutual recognition gives it powerful appeal. However, I will argue that it does not offer a compelling account of wrongness, because it makes the truth of a moral principle dependent on facts about how things would be if behaviour were generally regulated by that principle, and that imposes extraordinarily demanding epistemic burdens upon us that we cannot hope to meet. Although, as I will argue, contractualism can successfully address other objections that have been levelled against it, this one is fatal.

• And you’re done!

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Priority reading (Hide)

• T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard, 1998), Introduction and chapters 4–5
  In chapter 4, Scanlon sets out some challenges for a satisfactory moral theory, including the challenges of explaining the reason-giving and motivating force of moral judgment, and explaining morality's importance and priority in practical deliberation. He sets out the contractualist answer to these challenges. In chapter 5, Scanlon contrasts his contractualism with that of others such as Kant and Rawls, clarifies some of the terms employed in its master principle, and explains how it generates its verdicts of wrongness. In the process, Scanlon anticipates many of the main lines of objection to his view and tries to respond to them.
• T. M. Scanlon, ‘How I Am Not a Kantian’, in Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volume Two (Oxford: Oxford, 2011)
  In this comment on Parfit's On What Matters, in which Parfit claims that Kantianism, rule consequentialism, and contractualism converge, Scanlon describes some of the ways in which his contractualism departs from Kantian views.
• R. Jay Wallace, ‘Scanlon's Contractualism’, Ethics 112, no. 3 (2002), introduction and sections 3–4
  Wallace provides helpful exposition of Scanlon's arguments and raises some illuminating doubts about them (many of which are further pursued in the other readings), although he remains very sympathetic to the contractualist project. Sections 1–2 are also highly illuminating and worth reading if you have the time.
• Pamela Hieronymi, ‘On Metaethics and Motivation: The Appeal of Contractualism’, in Wallace et al. (eds), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford, 2011)
  Hieronymi anatomises Scanlon's contractualist account of moral motivation, arguing that the ultimate appeal of contractualism lies in an ideal of respect for each person, and that it is surprisingly difficult to combine this ideal with any theory of theory of what it is for an act to be wrong other than contractualism, despite some appearances.
• Elizabeth Ashford, ‘The Demandingness of Scanlon's Contractualism’, Ethics 113, no. 2 (2003)
  Ashford argues that contractualism is just as vulnerable to charges of demandingness as its rival, utilitarianism. Indeed, she argues, it is more demanding, because it disallows any collective activity such as air travel that imposes even a remote risk of great harm to very few others, so long as the cost of forgoing that activity to any one individual is not greater than the harm in question.
• Rahul Kumar, ‘Defending the Moral Moderate: Contractualism and Common Sense’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 28, no. 4 (1999)
  Kumar sets out contractualism’s advantages in making sense of commonsense morality’s commitment to options and constraints, contrasting its resources with those of consequentialism in this matter. In the course of doing this, he offers a clear account of the structure of contractualist moral reasoning and useful illustrations.
• Michael Otsuka, ‘Saving Lives, Moral Theory, and the Claims of Individuals’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 34, no. 2 (2006)
  Otsuka criticises Scanlon's approach to ‘Saving the Greater Number’ cases, alongside some other similarly anti-aggregationist approaches. He then argues that the core ideas and attractions of contractualism cannot be preserved while rejecting the ‘individualist restriction’ that blocks aggregation in Scanlon's theory.
• Adam Hosein, ‘Contractualism, Politics, and Morality’, Acta Analytica 28 (2013)
  Hosein argues that Scanlon’s contractualism shares with its Rawlsian inspiration a broadly political focus on rules for the general regulation of a cooperative scheme, and that this focus is inappropriate for a theory of ordinary interpersonal morality (as opposed to political morality).
• Brendan de Kenessey, ‘Ethics and the limits of armchair sociology’, The Journal of Philosophy 122 (2025)
  De Kenessey argues that since according to contractualism (and rule consequentialism) the truth of a moral principle depends on the empirical effects of its adoption by a population, it is an empirical question what we are morally required to do according to these theories—and, furthermore, one about which we are basically clueless. He argues that the only alternative to cluelessness is an “implausibly fine-grained moral relativism”.
• Johann Frick, ‘Contractualism and Social Risk’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 43, no. 3 (2015)
  Frick focuses on a problem for contractualism relating to the way it handles cases of risk. He asks: does it assess the justifiability of risky acts and policies by asking about people’s reasons for rejecting a principle permitting a risky act when the act is in prospect (‘ex ante’)? Or does it ask about those reasons after the outcome is clear (‘ex post’)? Scanlon explicitly favours ex post assessment in What We Owe To Each Other, but Frick argues that this rules out intuitively permissible acts and policies. Although he thinks it comes with significant costs, he favours ex ante assessment, and defends this view against objections from Scanlon and others.

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Further reading (Hide)

• Derek Parfit, ‘Justifiability to Each Person’, Ratio vol. 16, no. 4 (2003)
  Parfit argues against Scanlon's ‘individualist restriction’ and some other anti-utilitarian views by appeal to some ‘Saving the Greater Number’ cases. He goes on to suggest that the core idea and appeal of Scanlonian contractualism is the idea of justifiability to each person, which survives the rejection of the individualist restriction. (Note that the numbers in Case 2, at p. 381, are misprinted. They should read: 100, 100; 100, 0; 0, 100.)
• T.M. Scanlon, ‘Replies’, Ratio vol. 16, no. 4 (2003)
  In the course of replying to critics including Parfit, Scanlon clarifies aspects of the contractualist view.
• T.M. Scanlon, ‘Contractualism and Justification’, in Stepanians and Frauchiger (eds.), Reason, Justification, and Contractualism: Themes from Scanlon (De Gruyter, 2021)
  Scanlon talks through the reasoning that led him to his contractualist view and suggests some clarifications and responses to many of the objections presented in the papers on the priority reading list, including a clarification on the idea of the strength of a reason and an amendment in light of the worries about its capacity to vindicate judgments about saving the greater number.
• Véronique Munoz-Dardé, ‘The Distribution of Numbers and the Comprehensiveness of Reasons’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (2005)
  Munoz-Dardé defends Elizabeth Anscombe’s judgment that we are not morally required to save the many rather than the few, dissecting Scanlon’s argument to the effect that we are before offering a sophisticated critique of widespread assumptions in moral theory that she takes to drive the assumption that we must be.
• Rahul Kumar, ‘Who Can Be Wronged?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 31, no. 2 (2003)
  Kumar argues for a contractualist approach to the famous ‘non-identity problem’, which he thinks avoids the counter-intuitive implications that the non-identity problem is standardly supposed to have. In the process of doing so, he provides useful clarification of some aspects of contractualism.
• Philip Stratton-Lake, ‘Scanlon's contractualism and the redundancy objection’, Analysis vol. 63, no. 277 (2003)
  Stratton-Lake explores the objection that Scanlon's contractualist principle adds nothing to the concrete considerations that ground reasonable rejection in explaining wrongness. He argues that the principle should be regarded as an account, not of the grounds of wrongness, but of its nature. He then suggests that in order to accept this reply to the objection, Scanlon must abandon the claim that wrongness is reason-giving.
• Michael Ridge, ‘Contractualism and the new and improved redundancy objection’, Analysis, vol. 63, no. 280 (2003)
  Ridge suggests that, contrary to the arguments of Stratton-Lake (see the further reading below), Scanlon needs to hold on to the claim that wrongness is reason-giving, but that he can avoid the objections that Stratton-Lake takes this to generate once the relation and nature of the reasons for rejection and the reason that wrongness provides are clarified.
• Alex Voorhoeve, ‘How Should We Aggregate Competing Claims?’, Ethics vol. 125, no. 1 (2014)
  Voohoeve defends a partially aggregative moral theory according to which claims (such as claims to avoid harm) may be multiplied by the number of people facing them so as to outweigh competing claims that are individually stronger if and only if the competing claims are individually sufficiently close in strength to one another. This represents a middle way between fully aggregative theories such as utilitarianism and anti-aggregative theories such as Scanlon's contractualism. Voorhoeve offers a rationale for the view by appeal to independent judgments about when it is permissible to decline to suffer a harm to oneself for the sake of saving someone else from a bigger harm.
• Joe Horton, ‘Aggregation, Complaints, and Risk’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 45, no. 1 (2017)
  Horton argues that neither ‘ex ante’ nor an ‘ex post’ accounts of the reasons within contractualism for rejecting principles covering risky acts are satisfactory. He goes on to argue that his objections also apply to variants of contractualism that allow restricted aggregation, such as the one defended by Alex Voorhoeve, before concluding in favour of an approach that allows unrestricted aggregation—but of complaints, not (as in utilitarianism) benefits and burdens.
• R. Jay Wallace, The Moral Nexus (Princeton, 2019)
  Wallace defends contractualism as the theory appropriate to morality on a ‘relational conception’, according to which all moral requirements are owed to someone, so that failure to conform to them wrongs that person. Wallace defends the relational conception in the first half of the book, and then argues for contractualism as the correct theory of morality so conceived in the second half.

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Make sure that you understand the following points as you get to grips with this topic (and make sure your essay reflects that understanding!):

• Hursthouse’s famous formulation according to which an act is right iff it is what a virtuous person would characteristically do in the circumstances is not a definition or characterisation of virtue ethics! It’s a formula (reluctantly) provided as a response to those who object that virtue ethics doesn’t offer adequate action-guidance.
• What a virtue is. The following mnemonic may be helpful: virtues are CRAP dispositions to choose in accordance with reason. That is, they are Characteristic, Reliable, Active, Persistent dispositions to choose in accordance with reason. You might add that on most virtue ethicists’s views, they incorporate affective, motivational, and perceptual aspects: a person who has the virtue of kindness, for instance, sees and is emotionally affected and moved by certain kinds of facts about the suffering of others.
• The sense in which virtue ethics makes the virtuous person fundamental. On some views the fact that the virtuous person would characteristically do something in given circumstances makes that the right thing to do. On others it doesn’t, but what the right thing to do is can’t be grasped without the kind of sensitivity that virtue bestows.
• The source of the normativity of morality that virtue ethics implies—that is, what ultimately supplies the reason to do what is virtuous. Is it the eudaimonia or flourishing of the virtuous person herself? Is it (e.g.) the suffering of others that is the target of the virtue of compassion, and likewise for the target of each other virtue? (Different varieties of virtue ethics may give different answers.)
• The main doubts that virtue ethicists have about competing views, such as consequentialism or Kantianism. At the heart of these is a scepticism that the right thing to do could be determined algorithmically, as it were. (A key question: do those views cast morality as problematically algorithmic?)
• The distinction between the idea that a moral theory might be egoistic in the sense that it prescribes self-interested motives and acts, and the idea that a view might be egoistic in the sense that the ultimate reason it cites in favour of acting well is the agent’s own interest. (A key question: is virtue ethics egoistic in either sense?)
• The distinction between the right act in given circumstances in the sense of the thing to do in those circumstances and the right act in given circumstances as what it’s morally wrong not to do in those circumstances. (A key question: does virtue ethics have anything to say about the latter?)

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Priority reading (Hide)

• Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 2002), pp. 8–16 and chapter 1
  In the Introduction, Hursthouse clarifies some of the core ideas of the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics that she defends in the rest of the book. Chapter 1 addresses the objection that virtue ethics lacks an adequate account of right action. Hursthouse replies by arguing that it does have an account of right action, and that the suggestion that the account is inadequate relies on unreasonable ambitions for ethics as well as excessive charity to rival theories. In the course of her reply, Hursthouse sets out the structure of her favoured form of virtue ethics, which is widely treated as paradigmatic.
• John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist vol. 62, no. 3 (1979)
  McDowell defends an Aristotelian account of virtue as a kind of motivationally sufficient perceptual capacity whose deliverances are not codifiable in the way that much moral theory supposes that morality must be. In the course of his defence he identifies and attacks (drawing on Wittgenstein and Murdoch, among others) obstacles to the view’s acceptance in the form of philosophical doctrines about motivation and about rationality.
• Robert Johnson, ‘Virtue and Right’, Ethics vol. 113, no. 4 (2003)
  After outlining the main features of virtue ethics as he understands it, Johnson argues that virtue ethicists are unable to explain why the right thing to do in cases of less than perfect virtue is not what the virtuous person would do.
• Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford, 2001), chapter 8
  Hurka distinguishes various forms of virtue ethics and deploys a battery of objections against them. Against the neo-Aristotelian form endorsed by Hursthouse and others, Hurka's most challenging charges are of redundancy, motivational inadequacy, an inability to distinguish the moral or explain its priority, and fundamental egoism.
• Roger Crisp, ‘A Third Method of Ethics?’, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research vol. 90, no. 2 (2015)
  Crisp argues that virtue ethics isn’t really a novel and distinctive type of moral theory, but rather a version of deontology akin to W. D. Ross’s non-principle-based view. He ends by suggesting that what is distinctive about virtue ethics is best captured by interpreting it as endorsing virtue as intrinsically valuable.
• Julia Annas, ‘Virtue Ethics and the Charge of Egoism’, in Paul Bloomfield (ed.), Morality and Self-Interest (Oxford, 2007)
  Annas offers perhaps the best developed contemporary virtue ethical view. In this chapter, she explores the ‘egoism’ objection to virtue ethics, focusing in particular on Hurka's articulation of it. Annas argues that the objection fails, clarifying as she does so some aspects of the structure of a plausible virtue ethics—in particular, the place of an independent account of human flourishing as a ground for the virtues.
• Bridget Clarke, ‘Virtue and disagreement’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2010)
  Clarke addresses the objection that the esotericism (the restriction in accessibility to a privileged few) of virtue ethics (particularly in its McDowellian form) gives rise to an objectionable complacency and justification for writing off those who disagree. Her response brings out the sophistication of McDowell’s Aristotelian picture and the centrality of a Murdochian striving for moral-perceptual clarity within it.
• Mark LeBar, ‘Virtue Ethics and Deontic Constraints’, Ethics vol. 119 (2009)
  LeBar considers the objection that virtue ethics gives the wrong explanation of the wrongness of harms to others by explaining by appeal to features of the agent rather than of the victim. He suggests that virtue ethicists can respond by appealing to the idea that taking up the ‘second-person standpoint’, which involves viewing others as sources of constraints on our actions, is both constitutive of virtue and indispensable for human flourishing.

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Further reading (Hide)

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books I–II; Book VI, chapters 1, 5–13; Book VII, chapters 1–10; and Book X, chapters 6–9
• Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford, 2011); and ‘Why Virtue Ethics Does Not Have a Problem with Right Action’, in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 4 (Oxford, 2014)
  In the book, Annas develops and defends a virtue ethical view, arguing for a conception of virtue as analogous to skill. In the paper, Annas asks how virtue ethics can make sense of the demanding character of rightness that Kantian ethics interprets as a matter of categoricity and necessity. After pointing out that virtue ethics avoids certain problems with Kantian views focused on this aspect of morality, she argues that virtue ethics can at the same time in fact make good sense of the demanding character of rightness, partly by distinguishing duties as a sub-class of right acts involving prespecification associated with roles and institutions from virtuous acts in which the agent’s virtues play a part in the specification, and partly by resisting the suggestion that the demands of virtue are somehow less strong.
• Jason Kawall, ‘In Defense of the Primacy of the Virtues’, Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy vol. 3, no. 2 (2009)
  Kawall defends what he takes to be the paradigmatic form of virtue ethics from objections to the way it makes virtue fundamental—in particular, to the way it gives it priority over deontic properties. At the centre of Kawall's defence is a distinction between various senses of the question ‘what makes X wrong?’ that evokes some of the discussions of Scanlon's theory.
• Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge, 2001), chapters 2–3
  In the first of these two chapters, Driver presents several examples of what she calls ‘virtues of ignorance’, which require their possessors to believe something against the evidence. She argues that Aristotelian virtue ethics cannot make sense of these, because of its emphasis on virtue as involving accurate perception. She goes on in the next chapter to argue that virtue does not require good intentions or good motives or any of a range of other internal conditions. Driver’s aim in making these arguments is to motivate a consequentialist account of virtue.
• Alison Hills, ‘The Intellectuals and the Virtues’, Ethics vol. 126, no. 1 (2015)
  Hills defends intellectualism, the thesis that the virtuous person understands the reasons why her act is right and can articulate them, against the opposing ‘naivety’ view, which she associates with Julia Driver, Nomy Arpaly, and John McDowell, among others, and often takes the example of Huckleberry Finn as an illustration. Hills rejects Annas’s defence of intellectualism, according to which virtue is a kind of skill and skills enable the skilful to articulate their reasons (by contrast with mere knacks). She also rejects defences that appeal to tendencies to unreliability or non-robustness associated with naive virtue. Instead, she argues that an intellectual grasp of morality is needed for justice and beneficence, because of the essential role that justifying oneself plays in these, and more generally for the moral understanding that is essential to all virtue understood as full responsiveness to morality.
• Gilbert Harman, ‘Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society vol. 99, no. 1 (1999)
  Harman adduces evidence from social psychology to the effect that there is no such thing as a character trait, and argues that this undermines character-based virtue ethics.
• Rachana Kamtekar, ‘Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character’, Ethics vol. 114, no. 3 (2004)
  Kamtekar argues that the situationist critique of virtue ethics misfires, because the conception of a character trait that it debunks is not the conception that features in virtue ethics—namely, “an isolable and nonrational disposition to manifest a given stereotypical behavior that differs from the behavior of others and is fairly situation insensitive”. She offers alternative interpretations of the experiments motivating the critique and an account of virtue as it features in virtue ethics that stresses the involvement of practical wisdom.
• Edward Slingerland, ‘The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics’, Ethics vol. 121, no. 2 (2011)
  Slingerland argues that the situationist critique relies on an mistaken understanding of the findings of empirical psychology, for there are indeed stable personality traits and these have significant predictive power (as much as the situations that situationists take to be explanatory, indeed). It also relies on conceptual misunderstandings about the implications of a trait’s or virtue’s being ‘local’ or ‘global’ that Slingerland details. Although Slingerland concedes that situationist findings still represent a challenge to virtue ethics, he argues that Confucian virtue ethics, with its emphasis on moral education and environmental manipulation, shows how to meet the challenge.
• Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford, 2003)
  Swanton defends a non-eudaimonistic account of virtue ethics, according to which a virtue is a disposition to respond in appropriate modes to items in the virtue’s ‘field’, and the ultimate value of which may differ from virtue to virtue. Swanton’s is a detailed, dense book, but it offers a counterpoint to and helpful critiques of contemporary Aristotelian views.

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• The distinction between normative reasons and motivating reasons. A normative practical reason is a reason to act in some way. Normative practical reasons are generally facts—e.g. the fact that kicking me will hurt me, which is a (normative) reason not to kick me. A motivating practical reason is a reason that explains why a person does in fact do something. Motivating reasons are generally facts or beliefs about facts—e.g. the belief that kicking me will bring me pleasure, which may be the (motivational) reason that you kicked me.
• Internalism about reasons says that a fact F doesn’t constitute a normative reason R for a person to φ unless something in the person’s motivational set (her desires, character, dispositions, concerns) would somehow make sense of her φ-ing in light of her recognition of F. So it’s merely a negative condition. You might very roughly gloss it by saying: normative reasons must be capable of serving as motivating reasons (given the agent’s current motivational set).
• Externalism about reasons is just the denial of that condition—that is, it says a fact F can constitute a reason R for a person to do something even if nothing in her current motivational set would make sense of her doing that thing in light of F.
• Internalism is motivated in general by the sense that whether or not fact F is a reason for a person to φ must depend on who she is or what she cares about. One reason for thinking this is that it must be intelligible that someone should act on a reason we take her to have, and if she doesn’t have the motivations that would make sense of her taking the relevant fact as a reason, it wouldn’t be intelligible.
• The distinction between practical reasons in general and moral reasons more specifically. (It might be that internalism is a plausible condition on what moral reasons a person has, taken as justifying blame and ‘reactive attitudes’, but not on what reasons she has more generally.)
• The threat that internalism about practical reasons seems to pose to morality or at least morality’s binding character. For internalism seems to imply that if a person just doesn’t care about morality or whatever morality directs us to care about, then she has no reason to act morally.

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• Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and external reasons’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
  Williams argues that there are no external reasons, appealing to ideas about motivation and the explanation of action. According to Williams, if performing an action is not appropriately favoured by elements in a person's “motivational set”, then she has no reason to perform it.'
• Kieran Setiya, ‘Introduction: Internal Reasons’, in Setiya and Paakkunainen (eds.), Internal Reasons: Contemporary Readings (MIT Press, 2011)
  Setiya offers an introduction to and exposition of Williams‘s essay together with an analysis of options for responding to Williams’s arguments and a guide to some of the most important published responses.
• Christine Korsgaard, ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
  This is one of the classic responses to Williams, in which Korsgaard accepts the premiss (on which she takes Williams’s argument to be based) that practical reasons must be capable of moving us, but argues that it does not limit what reasons people have in the way that Williams thinks.
• John McDowell, ‘Might there be external reasons?’, in Altham and Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
  In another classic response, McDowell puts pressure on the notion of a “sound deliberative route” from an agent’s present motivational set, which Williams employs as a way to avoid an excessively narrow means-end conception of reasons for action. McDowell’s argument is in effect that it is only by unjustifiably restricting what counts as a sound deliberative route that Williams can sustain his resistance to the possibility of external reasons.
• Stephen Finlay, ‘The Obscurity of Internal Reasons’, Philosophers’ Imprint vol. 9, no. 7 (2009)
  Finlay distinguishes what he regards as the orthodox reading of Williams’s essay, appealing to what Setiya calls ‘internalism about reasons’, from an alternative reading that he goes on to endorse and defend. According to this alternative reading, the foundation of Williams’s argument is the concept of a reason as an explanation of why the agent would be motivated if she deliberated soundly.
• Julia Markovits, Moral Reason (Oxford University Press, 2014), chapters 2–3
  Markovits offers analysis of Williams’s argument before raising doubts about it. She then defends an revised internal reasons thesis that understands reasons as counting in favour of actions not in virtue of counterfactual motivation but in virtue of justificatory connections with the agent’s ends.
• T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 363–73
  Scanlon argues that the universality of reasons judgments and the seeming categoricity of many of our practical reasons tell against reasons internalism. He also suggests that the most plausible version of Williams’s internalism is not going to differ in very significant ways from externalism anyway.
• Bernard Williams, ‘Replies’, in Altham and Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
  Williams responds to McDowell’s argument in the first part of this set of replies. (Note the overlap with Johnson’s critique of virtue ethics.)

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• Bernard Williams, ‘Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame’, in Making sense of humanity and other philosophical papers (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
  After a pithy summary of his internalist view and elaboration of the notion of a ‘sound deliberative route’, Williams sets out what he sees as the two main arguments for internalism. He then discusses the apparent problem for internalism, in light of the assumption that a person justifiably blamed must have had reason to do what she is blamed for not doing, that a person can be blamed despite not having an internal reason to do what she is blamed for not doing. Williams’s response is to highlight the variety of ways in which a relevant internal reason might turn out in fact to be present, and the ways in which blame may be, as he calls it, ‘proleptic’.
• Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton University Press, 1970), chapters V–VI
  In the first of these two chapters, Nagel argues that from the fact that a person must in some sense desire to do whatever she does, it does not follow that all acts must effectively be means to the satisfaction of prior desires which therefore supply the reason for acting. In fact, the agent’s apprehension of reasons for acting may be what prompts the desires. In the second of the two chapters, Nagel analyses the rational-motivational mechanisms underpinning this, using prudence as his case study.
• Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 5, especially pp. 164–75
  Smith effectively accepts the internal reasons thesis, but argues that it does not deliver a relativistic account of reasons.
• Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volume Two, sections 8–13, 83–4, and 106–8
  These sections are the core of Parfit’s defence of external reasons, which consists partly of examples designed to show the intuitive plausibility of external reasons, partly of diagnoses of the attractions of Williams-style views that admit of internal reasons only, and partly of attacks on internal reasons and their importance.
• Kate Manne, ‘Internalism about reasons: sad but true?’, Philosophical Studies 167 (2014)
  Manne argues from the ‘practice-based’ view of reasons that a consideration is a reason to do something only if it is apt to be offered to someone in reasoning with them. She then and that since there are limits to reasoning with someone that are set by their motivations, internalism turns out to be true.
• Neil Sinclair, ‘On the Connection between Normative Reasons and the Possibility of Acting for those Reasons’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (2016)
  Sinclair argues that apparent counterexamples (of the sort employed by Julia Markovits, for instance—see priority reading) to the motivational condition on normative reasons imposed by internalism are not counterexamples after all. Sinclair’s argument relies on the possibility of acting on the basis of some consideration without recognising the reason-giving aspect of that consideration. He sets out some accounts of acting for a reason that make room for this possibility before arguing that these answer, despite appearances to the contrary, to key motivations for internalist accounts of reasons.
• Benjamin Bagley, ‘Properly Proleptic Blame’, Ethics 127 (2017)
  Bagley identifies a dilemma for proponents of the attractive idea that blame is addressed to and seeks acknowledgment by its targets. On the one hand, if the target did not have a Williams-style sound deliberative route to the considerations they are blamed for neglecting, the addressive character of blame seems misplaced. On the other hand, if they did, then the hostility of blame seems misplaced. Drawing on Williams’s work, Bagley then appeals to the indeterminacy of a person's values and the role of deliberation in specifying them as a way to navigate between the two horns of the dilemma. He ends by drawing out some implications for thinking about blame, reasons, and free will.

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• Attempts to vindicate the authority or normativity of morality typically involve identifying a type of reason that is alreadly acknowledged to bind agents, such as reasons of logical consistency or reasons of prudence or self-interest, and showing that this kind of reason (reliably, universally) supports moral action. This is what philosophers arguing that moral commitment is ultimately in one’s self-interest or necessary for flourishing, are doing. But you might also try to show that we have no better grounds for doubting the reality of moral reasons than we do for doubting the reality of less controversial reasons, such as those of prudence. Or you might merely try to characterise morality in terms of ideals that seem to provide compelling (external) reasons. (This is broadly Scanlon’s approach, as you may remember from week III; some Kantians also see Kant’s approach this way.) Or, more ambitiously, you might see moral commitment as a condition of free agency, as Kant and Korsgaard do. How compelling any of these approaches is depends in part on wider questions about the nature of reasons, including those broached last week, and metaethics more generally.
• A categorical requirement binds you regardless of your contingent ends or desires. A categorical reason is a reason that contributes to determining what you ought to do regardless of your contingent ends or desires. Hypothetical requirements and reasons contribute to determining what you ought to do in virtue of and conditionally upon your having some contingent end (which conforming to the requirement or reason will serve). Accordingly, a hypothetical requirement stops requiring anything of you if you drop the end, whereas you can’t escape a categorical requirement that way.
• Categorical imperatives and a categorical principles both bind the agent regardless of contingent ends or desires (that’s what categoricity amounts to—see above). Categorical principles are as it were the basic form that categoricity takes; they are principles that bind regardless of contingent ends or desires. Categorical imperatives are categorical principles as they are cognised (understood or experienced) by imperfectly rational beings such as ourselves. Imperfectly rational beings in the relevant sense are beings for whom the rationality of a course of action is not sufficient for us to choose that course of action, e.g. because our desires do not always conform to our reason. Categorical principles as cognised by imperfectly rational beings are experienced as having ‘necessitating’ force that must overcome countervailing desires, which is to say as imperatives rather than merely as principles. (The idea is that a perfectly rational being wouldn’t feel this, but would as it were automatically be compliant with anything categorically required, so wouldn’t experience categorical principles as categorical imperatives).
• A principle may apply to you in the sense that it prescribes something to or for you and yet it may not bind you. For it to bind you is for it to be the case that you will be rationally at fault if you don’t do what it prescribes.
• ‘Rational’ is used in a range of different senses. Sometimes it means something like coherence or consistency. Sometimes it is used in the narrow sense of self-interested or instrumental rationality—roughly, a person is rational in this sense if she takes necessary means to her ends. Sometimes ‘rational’ means something more general: roughly, a rational person in thise sense recognises and is motivationally sensitive to the reasons that she has (which need not be reasons of self-interest).

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• Plato, Republic, Book II, 357a–367e
  Plato has Glaucon and Adeimantus set out a fundamental challenge: to show that justice is worth pursuing for its own sake, and not merely for the sake of the consequences of being seen to have been just. Glaucon tells a story about the origins of justice (anticipating the social contract theorists) which suggests that the contrary is true, and that what's good in itself for a person is limited rather than served by justice.
• Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1997), sections II–III
  In the second section of the Groundwork, Kant argues that we can derive the content of binding moral principles, if there are any, just from the fact that they are categorically binding laws for all rational beings, which means (a) that they are universally applicable and (b) that their bindingness can’t be conditional upon any end that a rational merely contingently adopts. He then argues that the ‘Categorical Imperative’ thus derived can be presented in several different formulations, including as the imperative to treat humanity as an end in itself and as the imperative to act in such a way that one can be viewed as self-legislating (i.e. autonomous). In the final section of the Groundwork, Kant goes on to argue that acting under the moral law and acting freely are the same thing, since autonomy amounts to freedom, and that insofar as we are rational, we cannot avoid acting under the assumption of our own freedom. Since, as he goes on to argue, we are bound to view ourselves as fundamentally identified with our rational selves, he concludes that the moral law is binding for us. As ever, Kant’s arguments are complex and ambitious and it can take a while to get used to the language, so do draw on commentaries (see topic I above for suggestions). But it’s well worth the effort!
• Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, 1996), chapters 1–2
  Korsgaard sets out, clarifies, and motivates what she calls “the normative question”: the question what the authority of moral principles or claims is. She distinguishes four approaches to answering it and relates them to one another. In these two chapters she criticises the first three approaches; she defends the Kantian fourth approach in the rest of the book.
• Philippa Foot, ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, The Philosophical Review vol. 81, no. 3 (1972)
  Observing that the categorical form of moral imperatives doesn't distinguish them from imperatives of etiquette or grammar, Foot raises doubts about the binding force of morality for someone who doesn't care about it. But, she argues, that should not trouble us as much as it sometimes does: many people do care about it, after all.
• John McDowell, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes, vol. 52 (1978)
  McDowell argues in response to Foot’s paper that an independently intelligible desire (e.g. for the well-being of others) is not needed to make sense of the rationality of moral behaviour any more than an independently intelligible desire for one’s own well-being is needed to make sense of the rationality of prudence. Instead, we can simply appeal to the light in which a virtuous agent would see the situation.
• Joseph Raz, ‘The Central Conflict: Morality and Self-Interest’, in his Engaging Reason (Oxford, 2002)
  Raz argues against a conception of reasons of morality and self-interest that takes them to be at odds, attempting to debunk examples supposed to show that they are categorically or typically opposed. He then attempts to solve a puzzle about how, on the alternative view he favours, it is ever possible that doing the right thing should conflict with my self-interest (as surely it can), or that I can make self-sacrifices. His solution appeals to the idea that in paradigmatic cases of conflict, well being is not itself a source of reasons for the agent, and that acting rightly doesn't contribute to well-being in proportion to the stringency of the reasons so to act. Like much of Raz's writing, this is deep but dense and difficult reading.
• R. Jay Wallace, The Moral Nexus (Princeton, 2019), chapter 1, especially section 2.2
  Wallace describes features of moral obligation that, in his view, any plausible philosophical account must make sense of. His argument will be that a ‘relational’ account is best placed to make sense of them. In section 2.2, he critiques some familiar alternative approaches, including the utilitarian, voluntarist, and Kantian constitutivist.

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• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford, 1975) sections 3, 5, 9, and Appendices II and III
  Sections 3 and 5 of Hume’s Enquiry argue that morality’s standards are erected on the foundation of natural benevolence under various pressures that explain their universality and in some cases apparent tensions with that benevolence. Section 9 elaborates on some of this view’s merits. It also includes Hume’s response to the difficult case of the ‘sensible knave’ (who is akin to the possessor of Glaucon’s ring). Appenxdix II argues for the benevolence-based account over accounts that found morality on self-interest, and Appendix III expands upon Hume’s ingenious account of justice as an ‘artificial virtue’ founded ultimately on utility.
• Brad Hooker, ‘Does Moral Virtue Constitute a Benefit to the Agent?’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live? (Oxford, 1998)
  Focusing on ‘objective list’ theories of well being, Hooker identifies a number of arguments that might be made in support of the claim that moral virtue constitutes a benefit to the agent. He argues that the fail, and that, furthermore, one of them powerfully suggests that moral virtue does not constitute such a benefit.
• Bernard Williams, ‘The Amoralist’, in his Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge, 1993)
  Williams considers the challenge posed to morality by the amoralist, who doesn’t recognise moral reasons as bearing on what he should do. William’s central strategy is to raise doubts about the attractiveness of the amoralist’s position. If the position is deeply unattractive, and some of the things that look as if it can be said for it can’t really be said for it, as Williams suggests, then the amoralist may be something like a psychopath, and not as such much of a challenge for morality’s adherents (compare Foot’s comments at the end of ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’). On the other hand, if the amoralist is even a short step nearer to us than the psychopath, then arguably the genuine challenge he presents is not so deep.
• Alison Hills, The Beloved Self: Morality and the Challenge from Egoism (Oxford, 2010), Parts I–II
  In Part I of the book, Hills anatomises different forms of egoism that correspond to utilitarian, Kantian, and Aristotelian forms of morality. In Part II, she argues against ambitious attempts to vindicate morality that show egoism to be irrational. Instead, she defends, drawing on resources from epistemology, a modest approach that begins from premisses that egoists wouold reject. However, as she points out at the end of Part II, there is an important problem with modest defences of morality, the ‘Problem of Disagreement’. In Part III, Hills offers arguments from moral epistemology in support of modest vindications of morality.
• J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin, 1977), pp. 107–20, 189–92
  Following Hobbes and Hume, Mackie represents morality in the first of these two extracts as a solution to conflict engendered by limited resources and limited sympathies, an account he illuminates with game theoretic analysis. In the second extract, he ponders the upshot of this analysis for the question of morality’s authority, conceding that it cannot support the view that acting morally is always prudentially rational.
• Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), sections 1–9, 23–24
  In sections 1–9, Parfit considers the ways in which ‘S’, the ‘Self-Interest Theory’ of practical rationality, may be self-defeating, and argues that being self-defeating in these ways does not make a theory unacceptable. In sections 23–24, Parfit considers other ways in which it may be self-defeating, focusing on situations with prisoner’s dilemma-like structures. He presents the internalisation of moral dispositions as a solution motivated by S. But the arguments in sections 1–9 tell against thinking that this makes the beliefs involved in those moral dispositions true.

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• The question asks how we should understand blame. That means understanding (at least) what it involves (judgments? with what content? dispositions? felt power or entitlement?), what it targets (behaviour? attitudes?) what its point might be for the blamer (improved behaviour? remorse? apology? recognition?), what rationalises it (in individual instances or as a practice), and in what ways it can go wrong.
• The difference between considerations that might justify a practice as a whole and considerations that justify acts within that practice. (This is a point familiar from discussions of rule-consequentialism and of the practice of punishment.) What justifies the practice of blaming as a whole may nevertheless not constitute adequate reason for engaging in it oneself.
• The distinction between blaming someone and judging her blameworthy without actually blaming her, and the distinction between expressed and unexpressed blame. Keeping these distinctions in mind can help you to situate and criticise an account of blame, e.g. by arguing that a given account doesn’t have room for the distinction.
• What’s meant by ‘reactive attitudes’. This term is due to P. F. Strawson, who included resentment, indignation, and hurt feelings among the negative reactive attitudes. In Strawson’s celebrated discussion of free will (see the further reading), he argues that to be ready to feel the reactive attitudes in response to another person is essential to taking the ‘participant stance’ towards her, as contrasted with the ‘objective stances’ (as we might to an animal or someone incapable of responsibility).

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• Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room, New Edition (MIT Press, 2015), chapter 7
  Dennett proposes a forward-looking defence of our practices of holding responsible by appeal to their good effects.
• R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Harvard University Press, 1994), chapter 3
  Wallace argues that forward-looking defences of blame are false to the phenomenology and practice of blame. He goes on to present an account of blame that understands it in terms of the ‘reactive attitudes’ of resentment and indignation, among others, and of holding people responsible in terms of disposition to feel those attitudes.
• T. M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Meaning, Permissibility, Blame (Harvard University Press, 2008), chapter 4
  Scanlon argues that to be blameworthy is for one’s action to have shown something about one’s attitudes to others that impairs the relations they can have with one, and to blame someone is to judge her blameworthy and to take one’s relationship (and so appropriate conduct with respect to her) with her to be modified in light of the impairment. Focusing on reactive attitudes alone, he suggests, makes for “too thin” an account of blame.
• Susan Wolf, ‘Blame, Italian Style’, in Wallace, Kumar, and Freeman (eds.), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford University Press, 2011)
  Wolf argues that Scanlon’s account of blame neglects a fundamental connection between blame and anger or anger-like attitudes that go beyond mere withdrawal of good will, and suggests that blame characterised in part by the involvement of such attitudes (“angry blame”) is bound up with valuable relationships, and tends to raise questions of freedom more than Scanlonian blame.
• Angela Smith, ‘Moral Blame and Moral Protest’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
  Smith summarises doubts about sanction, reactive-attitude, and mere-moral-assessment accounts of blame before criticising Sher’s and Scanlon’s (as she sees it) more promising accounts in more detail. She argues that what is missing from these accounts is an appreciation of the sense in which blame involves protest against the attitudes implicit in wrongdoing.
• Miranda Fricker, ‘What’s the Point of Blame? A Paradigm Based Explanation’, Noûs 50 (2016)
  Fricker argues that we understand blame best by analysing its paradigm form and regarding other cases as pathologies, rather than searching for necessary and sufficient conditions. After describing some of the conditions on appropriate blame, she defends an account of the paradigm form as a communicative act whose point is to inspire remorse in the wrongdoer and which is essential to shared moral consciousness, but which may in virtue of its social constructive power be politically dubious. Fricker’s paper is valuable for its remarks on method as well as for its analysis of blame.
• Hanna Pickard, ‘Irrational blame’, Analysis 73 (2013)
  Pickard argues that blame’s potential for irrationality and its propensity to ‘sting’ tell against some prevailing accounts of it, and favours an account according to which blame is a “punishing mental state in that it is connected to feelings of entitlement and desert, and so too justice and retribution, in response to the actions of others.”
• Benjamin Bagley, ‘Properly Proleptic Blame’, Ethics 127 (2017)
  Bagley identifies a dilemma for proponents of the attractive idea that blame is addressed to and seeks acknowledgment by its targets. On the one hand, if the target did not have a Williams-style sound deliberative route to the considerations they are blamed for neglecting, the addressive character of blame seems misplaced. On the other hand, if they did, then the hostility of blame seems misplaced. Drawing on Williams’s work, Bagley then appeals to the indeterminacy of a person's values and the role of deliberation in specifying them as a way to navigate between the two horns of the dilemma. He ends by drawing out some implications for thinking about blame, reasons, and free will.

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• George Sher, In Praise of Blame (Oxford University Press, 2005)
  Sher argues that to blame someone is to believe that she acted badly or has bad character and to desire that she should not have so acted or have such character, where this belief-desire pair explains various other attitudes and behaviours characteristic of blame. Being susceptible to blame is, moreover, a necessary concomitant of a commitment to morality.
• Victoria McGeer, ‘Civilizing Blame’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
  McGeer argues that too many accounts of blame ‘sanitize’ it in the hope of presenting blaming practices acceptable (e.g. not unfair to the blamed). She presents a warts-and-all evolutionary theoretical account of blame as an angry, punitive attitude that has both backwards-looking appraising and forward-looking regulative elements, and argues that it does not need sanitising; in particular, that its regulative element need not be disrespectful and that its emotional element is not superfluous.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2006), first and second essays
  
• P. F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in Freedom and Resentment and other essays (Routledge, 2008)
  One of the most influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century, Strawson’s essay distinguishes the ‘reactive attitudes’ of resentment, indignation, and hurt feelings (among others) in our practices of holding people responsible, arguing that doubts about free will could be answered by appeal to the value of such practices as constitutive elements in indispensable human relationships.
• Bernard Williams, ‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame’ and ‘Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology’, in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
  In the first of these papers, Williams distinguishes ‘proleptic’ operations of blame from cases of blame as a blunter “instrument of correction and disapproval”, and argues that the obscurity in any individual instance of what blame is doing is an advantage of the internal reasons view with which he associates his account of blame. In the second paper, Williams raises suspicions about blame in the course of a discussion of Nietzchean doubts about the notion of willing.
• Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Routledge, 1986), chapter 10
  This is the locus classicus of Williams’s famous critique of the “morality system”. At pp. 192–6, he discusses blame in particular, linking the morality system’s account of blame to ideals of purity and justice and raising doubts about their expression in it.
• Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1993), chapter 4 and endnote 1
  In chapter 4, Williams gives an account of what is standardly understood to be shame as it appears in ancient Greek literature as bound up with the judgment of a generalised, internalised other who belongs to a community of shared ethical attitudes. He goes on to that elements in the ancient Greek notion had significant overlap with guilt, but were not separated off as belonging to something distinct in Homeric culture as they are taken to be now. Williams argues that recognising this sheds light on the nature of guilt and shame and some pathologies of contemporary moral thinking. In the endnote, Williams gives a kind of genealogical account of guilt as developed from a more primitive fear at the anger of an enforcer or victim and shame as at root a sense of exposure as loss of power, and suggests that development of guilt into more sophisticated forms (or philosophical constructions) costs some of what makes it valuable.
• R. Jay Wallace, ‘Dispassionate Opprobrium’, in Wallace, Kumar, and Freeman (eds.), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford University Press, 2011)
  Making similar points to those made by Susan Wolf (see the priority reading), Wallace criticises Scanlon’s account of blame for “leaving the blame out of blame”.
• Christopher Evan Franklin, ‘Valuing Blame’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
  Franklin argues that blame is an essential way of protecting moral values that we are required to protect by the requirement to commit to them, criticising Sher’s and Wallace’s accounts for failing, by contrast, to explain why the angry emotional character of blame is justified.
• Pamela Hieronymi, ‘The Force and Fairness of Blame’, Philosophical Perspectives vol. 18 (2004)
  Hieronymi begins by describing a puzzle about the fairness of blaming a person whose wrongful acts are an understandable product of an upbringing that makes them seem almost inevitable. She then offers a careful analysis of blame, seeking the source of the ‘force’ that seems to threaten unfairness and finding it in the way in which the judgments of ill will internal to blame change the target’s relationship with the blamer. She then argues that this kind of judgment cannot be unfair, and goes on to extend the basic form of the argument to ‘reactive attitudes’ in general.
• Coleen Macnamara, ‘Taking the demands out of blame’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
  Macnamara argues against a widespread conception of blaming and other practices of holding responsible as expressing demands.

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• In order to be able to give a full answer to the essay question, you need to say:
  • what hypocrisy is or consists in (how is it different from mere weakness of will, for example?);
  • what the source of the objection there might be to hypocrisy in general or to hypocritical blame in particular—e.g. does it lie in the hypocrite’s deception, or in her manipulativeness, or in her failure to treat others equally, or elsewhere?);
  • what standing is (is it a kind of authority, for instance?) and what we genereally have standing to do;
  • how standing can be gained or lost in general;
  • and why hypocrisy might cost a person her standing (to blame, to criticise, to judge, perhaps even to praise?).
• And of course in order to make sense of objections to hypocritical blame you’ll need an account of blame itself (which you should be able to come up with based on last week’s work).
• Philosophers have come to distinguish commitment accounts and egalitarian accounts of the objection to hypocrisy and of the hypocrite’s loss of standing. The former say that what’s wrong with hypocrisy is to be found in the hypocrite’s lack of commitment to the norm for the violation of which she criticises others. The latter say that what’s wrong with hypocrisy is to be found in the hypocrite’s failure to blame like violations alike (since she makes an exception for her own case). Snedegar distinguishes a third kind of account, the relative moral status account, which focuses on the misplaced attitude or position of superiority that the hypocrite affects by criticising others for conduct she herself engages in (Lippert-Rasmussen categorises this as another kind of egalitarian account). You need to recognise the advantages and disadvantages of each type of account.
• Philosophers typically model the standing to blame as a normative power, that is, the power to create duties or reasons that apply to other people via a speech act. (For more on the metaphysics of giving reasons in this way, see David Enoch’s ‘Giving Practical Reasons’.). But some (e.g. Macalaster Bell, Y. Sandy Berkovski) reject this picture of the standing to blame, and if they’re right, some accounts of the hypocrite’s loss of standing that depend on it look less plausible.
• Some accounts focus on hypocritical blame in particular, and it’s not clear that they make any sense of objections to hypocritical praise. It’s worth thinking about how much of a problem this is for them.

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• Roger Crisp and Christopher Cowton, ‘Hypocrisy and Moral Seriousness’, American Philosophical Quarterly vol. 31 no. 4 (1994)
  Crisp and Cowton argue that the many different forms that hypocrisy can take undermines any attempt to give it a unified analysis. Instead, they claim, there are several different vices of hypocrisy, different in nature but all united by the failure to take morality seriously; and this is what is bad about hypocrisy.
• Eva Kittay, ‘On Hypocrisy’, Metaphilosophy vol. 13, nos. 3–4 (1983)
  Kittay argues that hypocrisy is objectionable because the hypocrite “plays a part in just those spheres of life which others take most seriously, [deceiving] about herself in just those matters where one’s sincerity, the genuineness of one’s attitudes, beliefs and actions really matters.” She identifies several such matters, including friendship, piety, and good will.
• R. Jay Wallace, Hypocrisy, Moral Address, and the Equal Standing of Persons, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 38 no. 4 (2010)
  Wallace argues that hypocrites lose their standing by taking their own interests in avoiding blame to justify shielding themselves from it even as they take the very same interests in others not to justify shielding them from it, because this violates a fundamental commitment to equality that is internal to the very business of blaming.
• Jessica Isserow and Colin Klein, ‘Hypocrisy and Moral Authority’, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy vol. 12 (2017)
  Isserow and Klein argue for an account of the way in which hypocrites lack standing to criticise others that conceives moral discourse as involving claims to moral authority—on analogy with political authority—that the hypocrite forfeits.
• Daniela Dover, ‘The Walk and the Talk’, The Philosophical Review vol. 128, no. 4 (2019)
  Dover defends hypocritical criticism and the hypocrite’s standing to blame others, arguing for dialogical conception of moral interaction (and blame’s place in it) as against a view of blame as a kind of sanction that one needs special standing to impose, which she associates with Wallace and others.
• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, The Beam and the Mote: On Blame, Standing, and Normativity (Oxford, 2023), chapters 2–3
  Like Wallace, Roadevin, and Fritz and Miller, Lippert-Rasmussen explains the wrongfulness of hypocritical blame by appeal to a moral equality account. However, he argues that this is not what explains hypocrites’ loss of standing: what does that is the hypocrite’s lack of commitment to the norm she appeals to in blaming others.
• Justin Snedegar, ‘Explaining Loss of Standing to Blame’, Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (2024)
  Snedegar defends a ‘moral superiority account’ of the hypocrite’s loss of standing to blame, according to which hypocrites try to exercise the power to issue reasons (to apologise and make amends) to wrongdoers and to determine whether the wrongdoers are to be readmitted to the moral community, but lack the power to do that in virtue of having done a comparable wrong themselves.
• Macalaster Bell, ‘The Standing to Blame: A Critique’, in Coates and Tognazzini (eds.), Blame: its Nature and Contours (Oxford University Press, 2013)
  Bell argues against four conditions for standing to blame that she takes to be widely accepted: that the blamer has a stake the wrongdoing, inhabits the same moral community, is not hypocritical, and is not complicit. She sets out an account of the ‘positionality’ of blame that partly explains the appearance that these conditions hold, and rebuts the concern that if the standing conditions are rejected then “ourlies will be overrun with blame.”

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• Christine McKinnon, ‘Hypocrisy, with a Note on Integrity’, American Philosophical Quarterly vol. 28, no. 4 (1991)
  McKinnon argues that hypocrisy is distinguished from mere weak will by the hypocrite’s characteristic preoccupation with reputation rather than acting from deep moral concerns, which makes it a matter of integrity and its lack. Correspondingly, she argues, it subverts morality insofar as to lack integrity is to lack a strong link between the values one professes and one’s deeper motivations.
• Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, second edition (Oxford, 2007), pp. 109–129
  Urban Walker defends a conception of integrity as reliable accountability, which she relates to a conception of morality as a dynamic medium through which we define and adjust our identities, our relationships, and our responsibilities in order to construct and maintain a shared moral world consisting of a set of mutually recognised values and expectations. In passing she explains how hypocrisy may be analysed within this conception.
• Daniel Statman, ‘Hypocrisy and self-deception’, Philosophical Psychology vol. 10 (1997)
  Statman argues that hypocrisy is really almost always really self-deception, and not deserving of moral condemnation.
• Dan Turner, ‘Hypocrisy’, Metaphilosophy vol. 21 (1990)
  Turner argues that hypocrisy is simply a matter of disparity between expressed and practised values, and is as such morally neutral in itself: there are examples of good hypocrisy as well as bad.
• Kyle G. Fritz and Daniel Miller, ‘Hypocrisy and the Standing to Blame’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly vol. 99 (2018)
  Fritz and Miller argue that hypocrites are distinguished by a ‘differential blaming disposition’ which implies a rejection of the equal applicability of norms conferring the right to blame, which is itself grounded in the moral equality of persons. This, they say, is what costs the hypocrite her standing to blame others.
• Cristina Roadevin, ‘Hypocritical Blame, Fairness, and Standing’, Metaphilosophy, vol. 49 (2018)
  Roadevin argues that the hypocrite’s failure to consider his own faults shows that he doesn’t understand the equal applicability of moral standards, which undermines his authority to demand that others examine and address their own faults.
• Benjamin Rossi, ‘The Commitment Account of Hypocrisy’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 21, no. 3
  Rossi argues against differential blaming disposition accounts of hypocrisy on the grounds that they don’t account for certain examples of hypocrisy. Instead, he defends a ‘commitment account’, according to which hypocrites are disposed to communicate commitment to some norm and yet not disposed to accept blame from others for his failing to respond to the norm appropriately themselves.
• Kyle G. Fritz and Daniel Miller, ‘When Hypocrisy Undermines the Standing to Blame: a Response to Rossi’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 22 (2019)
  Fritz and Miller reply to Rossi’s criticisms of the differential blaming disposition analysis of hypocrisy, and criticise Rossi’s view in turn.
• Ori Herstein, ‘Justifying Standing to Give Reasons: Hypocrisy, Minding Your Own Business, and Knowing One’s Place’ Philosophers’ Imprint vol. 20 (2020)
  Herstein analyses norms of standing that restrict reason-giving, which include norms restricting hypocritical reason-giving. He argues that the right analysis shows that hypocritical reason-giving may be valid; what the norms do is not disable the standing of the hypocrite but give permission to the hypocrite’s interlocutor to ignore her, because hypocritical criticism is disrespectful.
• Y. Sandy Berkovski, ‘Moral criticism, hypocrisy, and pragmatics’, Philosophical Studies vol. 180 (2022)
  Berkovski analyses the pragmatic features of exchanges in which accusations of hypocrisy are made to raise doubts about standard accounts of the standing to blame before proposing a kind of realist account of moral criticisms according to which moral criticisms are moves in a conflict situation, and that charges of hypocrisy are attempts to prevent the hypocrite from gaining the upper hand.

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic:

• One key divide in the philosophy of love is between rationalists and anti-rationalists. Rationalists (such as Badwhar, Velleman, and Kolodny) think that love is made fitting by reasons and can be unfitting when the right kinds of reason are absent. Anti-rationalists (such as Frankfurt and Han) deny this—they think it is more like a kind of arbitrary commitment or orientation towards the beloved that makes considerations relating to that person into reasons for the lover.
• Among rationalists, the key divide is between quality theorists, what we might call ‘humanity theorists’, and relationship theorists. Quality theorists (such as Badhwar and Jollimore) think that love is made fitting by the beloved’s properties, such as her wit, beauty, or courage. Humanity theorists (such as Velleman and Setiya) think that love is made fitting by the humanity or the value as an end-in-herself of the beloved. Relationship theorists (such as Kolodny) think that love is made fitting by the value of the relationship between the lover and the beloved.
• Each view faces some key objections that you should be familiar with, and you should have answers to the objections that apply to the view you defend:
  • The anti-rationalist view faces the objection that it makes love too arbitrary and too alien to the lover’s rational agency, as well as the more pedestrian objection that we often do cite reasons for love.
  • The quality theory faces the Shakespearean objection that “love is not love that alters when it alteration finds”, the ‘promiscuity’ objection that it implies that we should love everyone who shares our beloved’s qualities as much as we love our beloved and indeed should readily transfer our loving attentions to people with better qualities than our beloveds, and the ‘universality’ objection that it implies that everyone should love our beloveds as much as we do.
  • The humanity theory also faces the promiscuity and universality objections, since everyone has the single quality that makes love fitting.
  • The relationship theory faces the objection that it cannot make sense of love at first sight.
• There are also other objections to each view, some of which may be stronger than these, but these are certainly the first ones to familiarise yourself with.

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• Harry Frankfurt, ‘Autonomy, Necessity, and Love’, in his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
  Frankfurt takes love to involve a concern to benefit the beloved. He argues that love is necessitating, and that actions performed out of necessitating love are autonomous, because when a person acts out of love, “his volitions...derive from the essential character of his will.” (This explains why betraying one’s love is a way of betraying oneself, too.) Love is therefore not a matter of choice; it is, as Kant supposes duty to be, a matter of ‘categorical imperatives’. But where Kant thinks that autonomy is achieved only through conformity to one’s purely rational will and therefore the impersonal moral law, Frankfurt argues that true self-government must be government by aspects of self that individuate us, as he claims our impersonal, rational will does not.
• J. David Velleman, ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, Ethics 109 (1999)
  Expounding a Kantian account of morality, Velleman argues love is not in tension with it, as many have supposed, but in fact a response to the same fundamental value. He argues against theories of love that take it essentially to involve aims (to be with the beloved, or to benefit the beloved, for example), instead proposing that love essentially involves an arresting awareness (mediated via the ‘manifest person’) of the value of the beloved as an end in himself that disarms mechanisms of emotional self-protection from others, as it disarms mechanisms of self-interested motivation in the case of the respect that morality requires. Velleman elaborates further on his view in ‘Beyond Price’.
• Niko Kolodny, ‘Love as Valuing a Relationship’, The Philosophical Review 112 (2003)
  Kolodny presents a set of objections to anti-rationalist views (focusing on Frankfurt’s) and the rationalist views he takes to be the leading alternatives, namely quality theories and Velleman’s Kantian view. In their place he proposes the ‘relationship view’ that love is a matter of valuing and is rationalised by one’s ongoing relationship with the beloved and partly consists in and is sustained by the belief that it is. The relationship view, Kolodny argues, avoids the problems with its rivals.
• Neera K. Badhwar, ‘Love’, in LaFollette (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics (Oxford, 2005)
  Badhwar argues, as against accounts of love that analyse it in terms of some sort of concern or desire, that love is “an ongoing affirmation” of the beloved as worthy of existence in her own right that has essential affective dimensions—in particular, pleasure in the beloved’s existence. She further argues that it is rationalised by complex qualities of person and character, rejecting views such as Velleman’s that don’t, in her view, sufficiently make sense of the selectivity of love.
• Troy Jollimore, ‘Love: the Vision View’, in Kroeker and Schaubroek (eds), Love, Reason and Morality (Taylor & Francis, 2016)
  Jollimore defends the view that love is rationalised by the qualities of the beloved against the four key objections from universality, promiscuity, trading up, and inconstancy. The main idea is that loving someone involves a certain kind of increased sensitivity to the good qualities of the beloed and a certain blindness to the qualities of others.
• Esther Engels Kroeker, ‘Reasons for Love’, in Martin (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy (Routledge, 2018)
  Kroeker gives a brief overview of the debate between rationalists, anti-rationalists, and hybrid theorists before going on to present her own hybrid view. According to Kroeker, love can be either a response to reasons or not, or it can combine rational and arational components.
• Christopher Howard, ‘Fitting Love and Reasons for Loving’, in Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 9 (Oxford, 2019)
  Howard defends the Quality View of reasons for love against several objections, including the key objections from promiscuity, trading up, inconstancy, and universality. His main response to the key objections is simply to deny that fittingness implies decisive reason. Thus, for instance, from the fact that some quality of your beloved makes it fitting for everyone to love him, it doesn’t follow that everyone has decisive reason to love him.
• Yongming Han, ‘Do We Love For Reasons?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (2021)
  Han defends an anti-rationalist debunking of the appearance that we come to love for reasons. According to Han’s account, we come to have the desires constitutive of love for someone via a process of association with the satisfaction of prior desires to be around people with the qualities the beloved has. Thus the qualities explain but don’t rationalise the love. This deprives rationalists of one of the arguments for rationalism, and moreover, Han argues, since rationalists need certain anti-rationalist explanations whereas anti-rationalists don’t need any rationalist resources, the appearance turns out to favour anti-rationalism over rationalism, contrary to what is standardly supposed.

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• Kieran Setiya, ‘Love and the Value of a Life’, The Philosophical Review 123 (2014)
  Setiya defends a view of the essential content of love as a disposition to give priority to the beloved’s needs, rather than a desire to benefit them or a Velleman-style arresting awareness, and of the rationality of love as given by the beloved’s humanity, rather than by her qualities, the lover’s relationship with her, or her rational nature. He then goes on to draw interesting conclusions with regard to the permissibility of saving the few rather than the many in thorny philosophical subject of rescue dilemmas.
• Adrienne M. Martin, ‘Love, Incorporated’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (2015)
  Martin draws on a Kantian psychology in elaborating an account of love as incorporation into rational motivation of subrational motives. She argues that this accounts for a range of types and gradations of love and makes sense of both the rational and arational aspects of love, before defending it against important objections.
• Benjamin Bagley, ‘Loving Someone in Particular’, Ethics 125 (2015)
  Bagley that leading accounts of love can’t adequately make sense of central cases of love in which lovers love their beloveds for the attractive qualities that make them who they are. Drawing on ideas about improvisation in music, he suggests a theory of love as involving the working out of indeterminate identities together that he claims does better and can answer the key concerns about quality views.
• Kyla Ebels-Duggan, ‘Against Beneficence: A Normative Account of Love’, Ethics 119 (2009)
  Ebels-Duggan rejects the view (associated most with Frankfurt) according to which love centrally consists in taking one’s beloved’s well-being as a reason to act because, in failing to distinguish between a person’s rational aims and her well-being, it does not take the beloved’s agency or the reciprocity of loving adult relationships seriously enough. In place of this view she defends a Kantian view according to which love ideally involves regarding one’s beloved as having ‘selection authority’ and ‘judgment authority’, and therefore taking on one’s beloved’s ends and shaping one’s other ends in light of these.
• Monique Wonderly, ‘Love and Attachment’, American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2017)
  As against the common view that self-interestedness is inimical to love, Wonderly argues that an essential element of romantic love is attachment, which involves the lover’s taking the beloved to be important partly because the lover needs the beloved—a self-interested aspect of love, but one that adds to it rather than spoils it. Wonderly expands on the concept of attachment being invoked here and argues that it accounts well for the depth of romantic relationships and the nonsubstitutability of partners.
• Bennett W. Helm, ‘Love, Identification, and the Emotions’, American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2009)
  Arguing from a sophisticated analysis of ‘person-focused’ emotions such as pride and shame, Helm argues that love is a “distinctive kind of affectionate, identificatory commitment to another...that emerges from a rational pattern of person-focused emotions”. He contends that this explains the distinctive intimacy of (certain forms of) love without falling foul of egocentrism on the one hand and a conflation of love and mere concern on the other.
• David North, ‘You’ve Changed!’, Ethics vol. 136 (2025)
  Helpfully clarifying what’s at stake between relationship theorists and quality theorists of our reasons for love, North engages with the question how to think about love’s constancy as the beloved’s properties change over time. This is often taken to be a key challenge for quality theorists, but North argues that quality theorists have good explanations of the appropriatness of constancy in the relevant cases, while relationship theories in fact have trouble making sense of the fittingness of falling out of love.
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