The Second-Person Standpoint

Morality, Respect, and Accountability

Stephen Darwall

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780674034624, 9780674022744
• eBook ISBN: 9780674253629
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Why should we avoid doing moral wrong? The inability of philosophy to answer this question in a compelling manner—along with the moral skepticism and ethical confusion that ensue—result, Stephen Darwall argues, from our failure to appreciate the essentially interpersonal character of moral obligation. After showing how attempts to vindicate morality have tended to change the subject—falling back on nonmoral values or practical, first-person considerations—Darwall elaborates the interpersonal nature of moral obligations: their inherent link to our responsibilities to one another as members of the moral community.

As Darwall defines it, the concept of moral obligation has an irreducibly second-person aspect; it presupposes our authority to make claims and demands on one another. And so too do many other central notions, including those of rights, the dignity of and respect for persons, and the very concept of person itself. The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality's supreme authority—an account that Darwall carries from the realm of theory to the practical world of second-person attitudes, emotions, and actions.

— PART I —

— 1 —

The Main Ideas I

People are self-originating sources of claims.
—JOHN RAWLS, “KANTIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM IN
MORAL THEORY”

Call the second-person standpoint the perspective you and I take up when we make and acknowledge claims on one another’s conduct and will.¹ This might be explicit, in speech, as with the performatives J. L. Austin botanized—demanding, reproaching, apologizing, and so on—or only implicit, in thought, as with Strawsonian reactive feelings like resentment and guilt (Austin 1975; Strawson 1968).² But whether explicit and voiced—“You talkin’ to me?”—or only implicit and felt, as in a resentful sulk, the I-you-me structure of reciprocal address runs throughout thought and speech from the second-person point of view.

Austin taught us that speech acts addressed to others have “felicity conditions” that must be met for them to come off properly or, indeed, at all (Austin 1975). For an utterance to count as a command, for example, certain conventional authority relations must be in the background, and this must be common knowledge between speaker and addressee. Austin was not concerned with ethics, however. The questions he cared about were social and linguistic: What conditions must be satisfied for speech acts to succeed in conventional terms? It is enough for an utterance to amount to a command in this sense that the speaker has relevant authority de facto; she need not have it de jure.

Our questions, however, are normative. A command is a form of address that purports to give a person a distinctive kind of (normative) reason for acting, one I call a second-personal reason.³ What makes a reason second-personal is that it is grounded in (de jure) authority relations that an addresser takes to hold between him and his addressee. Unlike practical reasons of other sorts, therefore, second-personal reasons must be able to be addressed within these relations.⁴ And, as I show, second-personal reasons are distinctive also in the kind of claim they make on the will.

Austinian felicity conditions are what must hold for a speech act to count as an act of some conventionally defined kind, say, a command, or for it not to be what Austin calls an “abuse,” that is, a genuine act of that kind that nonetheless violates some convention for that kind of act, say, an insincere promise (Austin 1975: 16).⁵ We, however, are interested in what we might call “normative felicity conditions”: what must be true for second-personal reasons actually to exist and be successfully given through second-personal address.

When someone attempts to give another a second-personal reason, she purports to stand in a relevant authority relation to her addressee. I shall say that her address presupposes this authority. By this, I just mean that her having the authority is a necessary condition of the validity of the reason she purports to address and is thus a normative felicity condition of successfully giving her addressee the reason. Qua attempting to give her addressee the reason, therefore, she must assume this authority, as she must assume the satisfaction of any normative felicity conditions of giving the reason.

In addition to the specific presuppositions carried by different specific forms of address, a major claim of this book is that second-personal address has certain presuppositions built into it in general. To enter intelligibly into the second-person stance and make claims on and demands of one another at all, I argue, you and I must presuppose that we share a common second-personal authority, competence, and responsibility simply as free and rational agents.

Second-Personal Reasons

To get the flavor of the kind of point I am trying to make, compare two different ways in which you might try to give someone a reason to stop causing you pain, say, to remove his foot from on top of yours.

One would be to get him to feel sympathetic concern for you in your plight, thereby leading him to want you to be free of pain.⁶ Were he to have this desire, he would see your being in pain as a bad thing, a state of the world that there is reason for him (or, indeed, for anyone who is able) to change. And he would most naturally see his desire that you be pain-free not as the source of this reason, but as a form of access to a reason that is there anyway.⁷ In desiring that you be free of pain, he would see this possible state of affairs as a better way for the world to be, as a possible outcome or state that, as Moore put it, “ought to exist for its own sake” (Moore 1993: 34).⁸

Structurally, the situation would be entirely analogous to a purely epistemic case, for example, one in which you give him reasons to believe that you are in fact in pain. Were he to credit the way things seem from the perspective of his desire, he would accept a state-of-the-world-regarding and agent-neutral reason for removing his foot.⁹ The reason would not be essentially for him as the agent causing another person pain. It would exist, most fundamentally, for anyone who is in a position to effect your relief and therefore for him, since he is well placed to do so.¹⁰ Finally, in “giving” him the reason in this way, you wouldn’t so much be addressing it to him as getting him to see that it is there anyway, independently of your getting him to see it or even of your ability to do so.¹¹ There are two points here. First, in pointing to the reason, you would be directing him epistemically rather than practically, albeit on a question of practical reason. Qua this form of reason-giving, you would be asking him to agree, as it were, that there is a reason for him to do something rather than asking him to agree to do it. Any claims you might make would thus be on his beliefs about practical reasons and not directly on his will. Second, your being able to give him the reason would not depend in any way on his seeing you as trying to give it to him or as having any competence or authority to do so. Anything you might do to get him to see the reason would serve. It might be most effective, indeed, if he were to see you as so defenseless and vulnerable as to be unable even to reason with him, like a young child.

Alternatively, you might lay a claim or address a purportedly valid demand. You might say something that asserts or implies your authority to claim or demand that he move his foot and that simultaneously expresses this demand. You might demand this as the person whose foot he is stepping on, or as a member of the moral community, whose members understand themselves as demanding that people not step on one another’s feet, or as both. Whichever, the reason you would address would be agent-relative rather than agent-neutral.¹² It would concern, most fundamentally, his relations to others (and himself) viewed from his perspective within those relations, in this case, that his keeping his foot on yours causes another person pain, causes inconvenience, and so on. The reason would not be addressed to him as someone who is simply in a position to alter the regrettable state of someone’s pain or of someone’s causing another pain. If he could stop, say, two others from causing gratuitous pain by the shocking spectacle of keeping his foot firmly planted on yours, this second, claim-based (hence second-personal) reason would not recommend that he do so.¹³ It would be addressed to him, rather, as the person causing gratuitous pain to another person, something we normally assume we have the authority to demand that persons not do to one another.¹⁴

What is important for our purposes is that someone can sensibly accept this second reason for moving his foot, one embodied in your claim or demand, only if he also accepts your authority to demand this of him (second-personally). That is just what it is to accept something as a valid claim or demand.¹⁵ And if he accepts that you can demand that he move his foot, he must also accept that you will have grounds for complaint or some other form of accountability-seeking response if he doesn’t. Unlike the first state- or outcome-based reason, this second is second-personal in the sense that, although the first is conceptually independent of the second-personal address involved in making claims and holding persons responsible, the second is not. A second-personal reason is one whose validity depends on presupposed authority and accountability relations between persons and, therefore, on the possibility of the reason’s being addressed person-to-person. Reasons addressed or presupposed in orders, requests, claims, reproaches, complaints, demands, promises, contracts, givings of consent, commands, and so on are all second-personal in this sense. They simply wouldn’t exist but for their role in second-personal address. And their second-personal character explains their agent-relativity. As second-personal reasons always derive from agents’ relations to one another, they are invariably fundamentally agent-relative.¹⁶

It is perhaps obvious that reasons that depend on orders or requests are second-personal in this sense, but I argue that moral obligations and demands are quite generally second-personal also. (This was implicit in my remark above that you might demand that someone stop causing you pain not just as his victim, but also as a member of the moral community.) I claim that to understand moral obligation as related to moral responsibility in the way we normally do, we have to see it as involving demands that are “in force” from the moral point of view, that is, from the (first-person plural) perspective of the moral community.¹⁷ As I clarify presently, however, this does not diminish their second-personal character, since that concerns their “demand addressing” quality.¹⁸

Of course, there might be agent-relative norms and reasons constraining our conduct toward one another that are not second-personal. We might think of the feet of persons as something like sacred ground that we all have reason to avoid stepping on, without supposing that this has anything to do with anyone’s authority to demand this, even God’s. Once, however, we have the idea that there exists a reason to forbear stepping on people’s feet in the fact that this is something we can or do reasonably demand of one another, or that we are accountable for this forbearance, we have the idea of a second-personal reason—a kind of reason that simply wouldn’t exist but for the possibility of the second-personal address involved in claiming or demanding.

Since second-personal reasons are always fundamentally agent-relative, the second-person stance is a version of the first-person standpoint (whether singular or plural). It is the perspective one assumes in addressing practical thought or speech to, or acknowledging address from, another (whether as an “I” or as part of a “we”) and, in so doing, making or acknowledging a claim or demand on the will. It involves practically directed and directive thought, thought that is addressed to, and that makes a claim on, a free and rational agent. What the second-person stance excludes is the third-person perspective, that is, regarding, for practical purposes, others (and oneself), not in relation to oneself, but as they are (or one is) “objectively” or “agent-neutrally” (including as related to the person one is). And it rules out as well first-personal thought that lacks an addressing, second-personal aspect.

Thus, although second-person address is always also first-personal, it is never merely first-personal. One can occupy a first-person perspective, whether singular or plural, without explicitly addressing anyone. And even if all speech (and perhaps thought) involves implicit address of some form, a central theme of this book is that addressing second-personal practical reasons differs from other forms of reason-giving (advice, for example) in the distinctive claim it makes on the will.

Logical and Personal Relations

It may help to understand the idea of a second-personal reason to consider it in light of a criticism that Christine Korsgaard makes of Thomas Nagel’s idea that “deontological constraints” are agent-relative.¹⁹ Quoting Nagel’s remark that such constraints “permi[t] a victim always to object to those who aim at his harm,” Korsgaard replies that “this is absolutely right,” but that “the theory that deontological reasons are agent-relative … cannot accommodate it” (Nagel 1986: 184; Korsgaard 1996d: 297–298). I argue that moral requirements are connected conceptually to an authority to demand compliance. Korsgaard notes that from the fact that an agent has an agent-relative reason to do something, it does not follow that anyone has a reason to complain if he does not do it. In our terms, no second-personal authority follows. In my view, however, it is not the agent-relativity of the reason that explains the deficit. Indeed, as I have said, second-personal reasons invariably are fundamentally agent-relative in the most familiar sense of having an ineliminable reflexive reference to the agent.²⁰ The truth is that whether a norm or reason is agent-relative or agent-neutral, unless it is itself second-personal, no reason to object follows directly from the fact that an agent contravenes it; indeed, no reason to object follows whatever the weight or priority of the norm or reason. Someone could acknowledge a norm or reason, whether agent-relative or agent-neutral, of whatever priority or stringency, without yet acknowledging anyone’s authority to demand that he comply with it. The former is, as it were, a matter of the logical form or weight of norms or reasons, whereas the latter concerns their second-personal authority.

Ultimately, Korsgaard wishes to reject the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction and to argue that all reasons for acting must be capable of being “shared.” As she puts the point regarding the reasons involved in “deontological” moral obligations, “they supervene on the relationships of people who interact with one another. They are intersubjective reasons” (Korsgaard 1996d: 298). It is a fundamental point of agreement between this claim of Korsgaard’s and the outlook I defend in this book that moral obligations are irreducibly second-personal in this way (although unlike Korsgaard, I fail to see why all reasons for acting must be shareable in this sense).²¹ In my view, however, the second-personal aspect of moral obligation cannot be explained by non-second-personal features of their logical form, nor by whether they are public or private in any usual sense.²² As I hope to make clear, second-personal authority is simply an essential, irreducible aspect of moral obligation.

Whether a reason is second-personal is a matter not of logical relations but of personal relations. Second-personal reasons structure our relatings to one another. And I argue that those connected to moral obligation and the equal dignity of persons are what we are committed to whenever we relate to one another second-personally at all.

A Circle of Irreducibly Second-Personal Concepts

Second-personal reasons are invariably tied to a distinctively second-personal kind of practical authority: the authority to make a demand or claim.²³ Making a claim or a demand as valid always presupposes the authority to make it and that the duly authorized claim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Works Cited
• Index