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What kind of life best ensures human welfare? Since the ancient Greeks, this question has been as central to ethical philosophy as to ordinary reflection. But what exactly is welfare? This question has suffered from relative neglect. And, as Stephen Darwall shows, it has done so at a price. Presenting a provocative new \"rational care theory of welfare,\" Darwall proves that a proper understanding of welfare fundamentally changes how we think about what is best for people. Most philosophers have assumed that a person's welfare is what is good from her point of view, namely, what she has a distinctive reason to pursue. In the now standard terminology, welfare is assumed to have an \"agent-relative normativity.\" Darwall by contrast argues that someone's good is what one should want for that person insofar as one cares for her. Welfare, in other words, is normative, but not peculiarly for the person whose welfare is at stake. In addition, Darwall makes the radical proposal that something's contributing to someone's welfare is the same thing as its being something one ought to want for her own sake, insofar as one cares. Darwall defends this theory with clarity, precision, and elegance, and with a subtle understanding of the place of sympathetic concern in the rich psychology of sympathy and empathy. His forceful arguments will change how we understand a concept central to ethics and our understanding of human bonds and human choices.

An adequate moral psychology of obligation must bear in mind that although the “sense of obligation” is psychological, what it is a sense of, moral obligation itself, is not. It is irreducibly normative. I argue, therefore, that the “we” whose demands the sense of obligation presupposes must be an ideal rather than an actual “we.”

Darwall criticizes Joseph Raz's Normal Justification Thesis (NJT) for practical authority. He contends that the thesis would allow someone to come to have authority over someone else, even in the absence of any relationship of accountability between them. However, for a person to have the authority to make demands on another person, the second must be answerable to the first (or, put differently, the first must have the standing to hold the second accountable). This feature, he argues, is absent in Raz's account of practical authority. The NJT fails as an account of authority understood as the capacity to create preemptive reasons. For the authority relationship to obtain, it is not enough that one person has a reason to treat another person's directive as giving her preemptive reasons.

Derek Parfit's (1984) mounted a striking defense of Act Consequentialism against a Rawls-inspired Kantian orthodoxy in moral philosophy. (2011) is notable for its serious engagement with Kant's ethics and for its arguments in support of the “Triple Theory,” which allies Rule Consequentialism with Kantian and Scanlonian Contractualism against Act Consequentialism as a theory of moral right. This critical notice argues that what underlies this change is a view of the deontic concept of moral rightness that ties it closely to blameworthiness and accountability in a way that effectively concedes a Rawlsian publicity condition. It is also argued that Parfit's arguments that Kantian and Scanlonian Contractualism entail Rule Consequentialism can be resisted. Two elements of Parfit's metaethics are critically discussed. First, concerning Parfit's arguments against subjectivist theories of practical reason, it is argued that a form of subjectivist theory exists that is not only consistent with Parfit's claim that all reasons for acting are object rather than state given, but that can support that claim. Second, it is argued that Parfit's arguments against identifying normative with natural statements and facts do not transfer seamlessly to identifying normative with natural properties.

Relating to Immanuel Kant's notion of 'autonomy of the will,' Darwall maintains that the idea of a right or claim to autonomy actually presupposes autonomy of the will. He also argues that the addresser and addressee alike can accept and act on reasons that are grounded, not in the value of anything that might be an object of their desire or volition, but in an authority they have to make claims on each other simply as free and rational wills. In this sense, he claims that perspective presupposes autonomy of the will.

What is it for two or more people to be with one another or together? And what role do empathic psychological processes play, either as essential constituents or as typical elements? As I define it, to be genuinely with each other, persons must be jointly aware of their mutual openness to mutual relating. This means, I argue, that being with is a second‐personal phenomenon in the sense I discuss in The Second‐Person Standpoint. People who are with each other are in one another's presence, where the latter is a matter of second‐personal standing or authority, as in the divine presence or in the king's presence. To be with someone is, therefore, to give the other second‐personal standing, implicitly, to claim it for oneself and, thus, to enter into a relation of mutual accountability. Second‐personal relating, I argue, requires a distinctive form of empathy, projective empathy, through which we imaginatively occupy others' perspectives and view ourselves as if from their point of view. Projective empathy is thus an essential constituent of “being with.” But it is not the only form of empathy that being with typically involves. Further, I discuss ways in which emotional contagion, affect attunement, as well as projective empathy typically enter into the complex psychological (and ethical) phenomenon of being with another person.

Only in the last twenty-five years have scholars begun to appreciate Samuel Pufendorf’s importance for the history of ethics. The signal element of Pufendorf’s ethics for recent commentators is his idea that morality arises when God imposes his superior will on a world that can contain no moral value of or on its own. But how, exactly, is “imposition” accomplished? According to Pufendorf, human beings do not simply defer to God in the way elephant seals do to a dominant male. Rather, imposition is realized through recognition of God’s authority to direct and hold us answerable. This brings a whole battery of concepts into play—recognition, accountability, imputation, and authority—along with the capacities to operate with them in practical thought. What is brilliantly original in Pufendorf is his appreciation of these conceptual connections and his awareness of their implications for moral psychology. Authority is a kind of “moral power,” as Pufendorf calls it, which agents can exercise only within a social, moral space that is constituted by their respective obligations to and rights against one another, and whose exercise directly affects those rights and obligations. Only “sociable” beings with the capacity for mutual recognition are thus capable of moral obligation. Recent commentary has generally missed these important aspects and so, in my view, what is most fascinating and original in Pufendorf’s thought. Pufendorf was far from the first thinker to hold some version of a divine command theory of morality. But he may have been the first to attempt to work out what such a view must look like if it is to take seriously the conceptual links between authority, recognition, and accountability, as well as the psychology necessary for these to be realized in the moral life. In the end, however, this introduces an instability into Pufendorf.s view. I argue that whereas Pufendorf seeks to derive human moral powers, equal dignity, and sociability from God’s superior moral power, the very idea of moral powers, including God’s, seems already to presuppose a more basic moral power or dignity that is shared by any being who is capable of sociable relations.

In his reply, Stephen Darwall thanks Christine Korsgaard, R. Jay Wallace, & Gary Watson for their insightful comments on, The Second-Person Standpoint, that help to hold him responsible for what he writes. Thomas Nagel's, The Possibility of Altruism (1970), is drawn upon to discuss two kinds of reasons that could be given to someone to get him to remove his foot from on top of yours. One reason stems from the agent-neutral problem of being in pain & the other is derived from a claim you have either as a victim or a representative of the moral community. Korsgaard's comments about both the nature of moral obligation & the reflective character of deliberative agency are addressed, along with Wallace's critique of the two key examples used in the book; & the questions Watson raised about morality as equal accountability & congruence between moral obligation & well-being. It is concluded that exchanges like these are one of the most enjoyable experiences found in philosophy. J. Lindroth