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This chapter continues the discussion from Chapter 16 and connects it with the earlier discussion of Scanlon's buck-passing account of value. It argues that one state of affairs can be better than another without that betterness relation being grounded in differences with respect to absolute goodness. To use Scanlon's phrase, when we say that one state of affairs is better than another, we pass the buck of justification: we do not thereby reveal the basis for choosing one over the other, but merely advert to the existence of some such basis. So there is such a relation as one state of affairs being absolutely better than another. But we need some independent argument for the thesis that absolute goodness is a reason-giving property before we can reach the conclusion that whenever one state of affairs is better than another, the explanation must be that this property is more fully present in one case than the other.

This chapter focuses on how others have also arrived at a skeptical conclusion about absolute goodness, although the route by which this book comes to that conclusion is different from those that others have taken. This chapter states that doubts may not have occurred to the author had he not read some other authors. The chapter acknowledges a debt to them and calls attention to the ways in which this book's approach to this subject differs from theirs. These authors include P. T. Geach, Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and T. M. Scanlon.

This chapter defends Hypotheticalism's account of the nature of desire. Chapters 2 through 7 were neutral on the nature of desire, but in this chapter it is argued that in order for it to be possible to be motivated by our reasons without thinking about their background conditions, the background conditions on reasons must be the kind of thing to be motivationally efficacious. It is argued, following Scanlon, that desires involve directed attention and represent certain things as being reasons. But it is also shown that this thesis does not require that reasons be part of the analysis of desires; on the contrary, Hypotheticalism can explain, while Scanlon's view cannot, how reasons get to be part of the content of desires.

This chapter evaluates and rejects the claim that judges must adhere to the law in suboptimal-result cases because they swore a solemn oath of office to uphold the law. The relationship between oaths and promises is discussed. The basic point is that a promise to perform an otherwise immoral act does not give the promisor a reason to perform it. This principle is supported via examples and extended examination of current theories of promise keeping, including deflationary theories, consequentialist theories, free-rider theories, and reliance theories. It is suggested, however, that taking an oath may satisfy an INUS condition on acquiring judicial duties in realistic legal systems.

Because blame is liable to harm, some account is needed of its warrant. Without supplementation, the conversational theory is inadequate. The mere meaningfulness of a conversational response to one who is blameworthy is not enough to account for the sense of appropriateness in blaming. Conversational responses need not be liable to harm, but blaming is. So, the conversational theory needs supplementing. One way to do so is without any appeal to desert at all. No mention need be made of it being good that a wrongdoer is harmed. Blaming within the framework of the conversational theory could instead be justified on contractualist grounds. Another alternative is to account for the harm in blaming via non-basic desert. The exposure to the liability of harm on this approach is shown to be warranted due to the value of an arrangement in which persons treat each other with respect by holding one another accountable. Finally, it is possible to embrace a basic desert thesis, since there are good reasons to do so. Thus, while a conversational theory need not commit to a basic desert thesis for blame, it is consistent with one.

In his influential discussion of thick concepts Williams argues that the facts that make judgements, which apply thick concepts correctly, true, provide reasons for action — albeit only for the members of a community who have a disposition to be guided by the concepts in question. His internalism about practical reasons may help to explain this claim: the disposition to be guided by a thick concept provides the link to existing motives that all reasons must have. Understood thus, Williams makes room for explaining and vindicating Oscar Wilde's ‘…not one of my words’-dictum about certain thick concepts. However, the chapter argues that the combination of the account of thick concepts that Williams expounds with reasons internalism leads into a dilemma: either the facts that thick concepts, correctly applied, refer to, do not provide reasons (not even for those who have a disposition to be guided by them) — except perhaps in the way in which any other, non-evaluative fact may provide a reason; or they provide reasons for everyone, independently of the disposition to be guided by the concepts. Getting out of the dilemma requires giving up on reasons internalism or, alternatively, modifying the account of thick concepts that Williams sets out.

This chapter aims to assess Kantian contractualism as an account of morality's foundations, focusing on the version advanced by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe To Each Other. It begins by introducing the core ideas of justifiability to others; reasonableness; reasonable rejectability; personal reasons; the individualist restriction; and the motivational characterization of the contractors. It then argues that even if Scanlon's Kantian contractualism can satisfy the moral accuracy criterion, it fails to satisfy the explanatory adequacy criterion. This is not because the Kantian contractualist apparatus is epiphenomenal or redundant (the redundancy objection), as has often been argued, but because its reliance on a substantive theory of practical reason makes it susceptible to the charges of circularity (the circularity objection) and explanatory non-fundamentality (the non-fundamentality objection).

Although some paternalistic government policies are morally wrong, not all are. Even some “hard” paternalistic policies are morally justifiable. This position is consistent with a due respect for individual autonomy. J. S. Mill's arguments in On Liberty fail to provide good reasons to think that all paternalistic prostitution laws are unjustifiable. Recent academic critics of prostitution laws, Lars Ericsson, Martha Nussbaum, and David Richards, fail to give convincing grounds to oppose all paternalistic prostitution laws. The contractualist views of John Rawls and T. M. Scanlon provide no reason to believe that paternalism is always wrong. The cliché that “it is not the government's business to protect us against ourselves” is considered and rejected as a basis for opposing paternalistic prostitution laws.

Some have argued that liberalism is committed to the principle that the government should remain as neutral as possible toward conceptions of the good life. Some paternalistic prostitution laws, however, are consistent with what is right in this principle. This position is defended by reference to T. M. Scanlon's contractualist theory of morality, and also by reference to Ronald Dworkin's early work on rights. Although some might characterize as “perfectionist” the paternalistic argument for prostitution laws stated in chapter 1, the kind of perfectionism that this argument involves is morally unobjectionable and is consistent with what is right in the idea of government neutrality.

Contractarianism is more than a theory of the origin or legitimacy of states. Agreements required for productive cooperation, or merely for peaceful coexistence, are held to be the basis for morality, or a large part of it. Game theory is used to analyse the rationality of such agreements. Social conventions, which are not strictly agreements, also evolve over time in a community and acquire moral force. Although morality and society thus march together, individuals may always hold some social conventions to be immoral.

This chapter raises the question of how we are to understand the epistemic condition for responsibility. It introduces the searchlight view, which asserts that agents are responsible only for those features and results of their acts of which they are aware when they perform the acts, and it documents that view's prominence. It then suggests that the searchlight view is problematic because it draws on a conception of the responsible agent that is closely linked to the first-personal perspective while purporting to specify a necessary condition for the applicability of a concept—responsibility—whose natural context is third-personal. The chapter ends with an outline of the book's main arguments.

According to the proposal introduced in Chapter 6, what renders an unwitting wrongdoer or foolish agent responsible is the causal connection that obtains between his failure to realize what he should realize and the psychological and physical features that make him the person he is. The proposal therefore presupposes that responsible agents are in fact constituted by constellations of features that are capable of causing the relevant cognitive failures. In this chapter, that presupposition is defended. On the view that emerges, an agent's constitutive features are precisely those whose causal interaction sustains his capacities to reach judgments about reasons and to make conscious choices based on them. The account thus incorporates elements of both attributionism and volitionism while moving essentially beyond them.

Contemporary philosophers have for the most part come to agree on a particular, historically distinctive conception of the nature and point of human action. On the ascendant view, all actions borrow their point, and their intelligibility as actions, from the states of affairs that they are calculated to bring about. This world‐making conception of agency is deeply flawed, and the path to a more adequate conception lies in the retrieval of certain key elements of an earlier tradition of thought about human activity that can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. The aim of this chapter is to bring out the problems with the ascendant conception of agency, and to illuminate the conception that informs the tradition of thought that it has displaced, so as to set the stage for retrieving certain lost insights into the virtues and their place in the best human activities and lives.

How should we characterize the quarry of practical thought? Some hold that practical thinking must ultimately find some non‐evaluative fact to be a reason for action. Some have affirmed a ‘buck‐passing’ view of the good, according to which talk of goodness or value can be reduced to talk of the reason‐giving force of non‐evaluative facts. In this book, it has been argued that practical thinking must sometimes apprehend the intrinsic goodness or value of an activity, where this cannot be reduced to the reason‐giving force of any non‐evaluative fact. The task of this chapter is to show that this latter, recognizably Ancient understanding of value‐talk remains implicit in a great deal of our talk about value, and that we cannot consistently renounce it without incurring a steep cost in the metric of articulacy about value. Nor can we sequester off a subset of the things we care about, under the heading of the moral, and reduce our talk of values to talk of reasons in this domain. Our actual sense of the moral value of human beings cannot plausibly be characterized in terms of the reason‐giving force of non‐evaluative facts about them.

The discussion of obligations to future generations often assumes that though the global poor can be wronged because there are obligations the affluent owe to them, those who will live in the further future can't. They can't be wronged, the thought goes, because though we have obligations with regard to future generations, they aren't obligations owed to them. This chapter argues that the assumption is mistaken. Adopting a Scanlonian contractualist account of what it is for one person to wrong another, it turns out that there is no good reason to think that those who will live in the further future can't be wronged by the choices we make now. This conclusion, it is suggested, has importance for how we understand the normative basis of claims to reparations for past injustice.

This chapter presents the main argument of the book. It explains why both nationalist and cosmopolitan views do not account for a distinctive and politically important class of socioeconomic fairness concerns in international political morality. It sets out basic assumptions about the global economy, the book’s proposed principles and their policy applications, and its practice-based constructive methodology.

This chapter argues that any coherent morality will make room for partiality, not merely in the sense that it will permit or require partial behaviour in some circumstances, but also in the sense that it will treat ‘reasons of partiality’ as bearing directly on the rightness and wrongness of actions. Reasons of partiality include project-dependent, relationship-dependent, and membership-dependent reasons. Although the content of morality is not exhausted by such reasons, Thomas Scanlon and others have suggested that moral reasons in general have their source in interpersonal relationships of a certain kind. This chapter examines these suggestions and identifies a number of difficulties that must be addressed if such a ‘relational’ view of morality is to be defended.