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The feeling of respect for the moral law is the moral incentive capable of explaining actions on moral principles, “from duty alone”. It is the psychologically forceful motive of duty. Actions have “moral worth” when produced by this motive. But they are not “virtuous” actions. Moral worth and virtue are different categories of moral appraisal of actions, with different criteria. So it is possible to act in a way that is morally worthy and lacking in virtue, and to act in a way that is virtuous and lacking in moral worth. In Kant's ethics we are obligated to cultivate certain virtuous feelings, so that these, when sufficiently strong as motive forces, can prevail over other motives. We are obligated also to cultivate the feeling of respect for law.

This chapter proposes a quality-of-will based theory of moral worth. It argues that people are praiseworthy for acts of good will and blameworthy for acts of ill will or absence of good will, and the amount of praise or blame they deserve varies with the depth of their motivation or extent of their indifference. Since good will is wanting to perform actions that have whatever property it is that makes action right, a full account of moral worth is impossible until the property that makes actions right is known.

The “radical evil” of human nature is, in Kant's view, our enduring predisposition to deviate from the moral law. It comes in three degrees: frailty (moral weakness), impurity, and depravity (wickedness). We are evil in these ways by an act of free choice antecedent to moral experience, in the intelligible world. In this world we can make progress in combating radical evil by strengthening our moral resolve. Our being evil by nature does not preclude our having a good will, however. In Kant's view a good will is universal. It is our common “predisposition to personality”, our tendency to feel respect for the moral law, and the basis of our human dignity. Acting on that incentive gives an action “moral worth”.

This chapter is concerned with two topics. The first is Kant conception of maxims, which are the subjective principles on which finite rational agents act. It claims that maxims are freely adopted by an agent; and consist in general rules to act in a certain way in given situations in order to attain a chosen end. It further argues that for the attribution of a maxim to an agent it suffices that it can be judged to have been implicit in the actions of that agent, even if the agent did not make a consciousness commitment to adopt it. The second topic is Kant’s claim that an action has moral worth only if it is performed from duty alone. It defends this claim against Schiller’s objection that in order for an action to have moral worth the agent must not have any other reason to perform it.

To understand the nature of moral motivation, it is important first to understand the nature of motivation. This chapter begins with a discussion of motivation itself and then sketches four possible theories of distinctively moral motivation: instrumentalist, cognitivist, sentimentalist, and personalist theories. It then evaluates these theories in light of recent evidence from neuroscience and allied fields.

It is commonly said that the supplementary ‘shun and avoid’ and ridicule tests are distinguished from the principal test because words can be actionable under these tests even if they do not suggest that the plaintiff has been at fault. The distinction is said to be supported by authority that goes back to the time before the common law's claim to protect reputation was firmly established. The analysis of the ‘shun and avoid’ test in this chapter is structured around these two themes of moral fault and precedent. A study of imputations regarding chastity, disease, and insanity leads to a rejection of the moral fault distinction in favour of a focus on moral worth, and shows that the ‘shun and avoid’ test has little basis in precedent. Accordingly, there needs to be a substantial revision of the place the ‘shun and avoid’ test occupies in the contemporary legal framework.

What is it to understand why a moral proposition is true? Moral understanding, in this sense, differs from moral knowledge (both knowledge that p is true and knowledge why it is true). Moral understanding involves a number of related abilities and is more similar to ‘knowledge how’. Moral understanding is important, moreover, because it is a vital component of morally worthy action: doing the right thing on the basis of moral knowledge (even on the basis of knowledge why an action is right) is not sufficient for the action to have moral worth.

This chapter presents examples which show that agent-autonomy is a necessary condition for moral praise- or blameworthiness. It argues that commonsensical conclusions about praise and blame can be held and accounted for, if one follows the theory of moral worth developed in Chapter 3. The cases of kleptomaniacs, of a person operating under the influence of a nefarious neurosurgeon or hypnotist who instills in him a bad desire, and the role of constitutive moral luck in moral life are discussed.

This chapter argues that the model of global justice developed in this book adequately reflects our moral equality and also can defensibly claim to be cosmopolitan. The chapter begins by considering the kind of equality a model of global justice should reflect. An account of relational equality (in general) and democratic equality (in particular) is endorsed. There are problems and opportunities extending such an account from the domestic to the global sphere, which are addressed. It is argued that the account captures our equality better than rival conceptions (such as those that reflect a commitment to a global difference principle, global equality of opportunity, or global basic income). Altogether the account shows strong support for our equal moral worth and supports our equality on multiple levels, as is shown using examples. The kind of cosmopolitanism endorsed is also located using familiar distinctions and introducing some new ones.

This chapter examines how morality animated the work of the court and its users in Aintab. It explains that preserving reputation was a goal of much litigation at court and of many of the voluntary statements which Aintabans had the judge write into the court record. The chapter discusses two general issues that affected the ways in which individuals approached the court. The first was the nature of the case at hand; and the second was resistance to the hierarchy of social and moral worth discussed in the previous chapter.

Both Kant and Hill write in praise of humility and in condemnation of arrogance, a trait widely regarded as the vice to which the virtue of humility is the prevention and cure. Arrogance can easily be seen as a failure to respect both other people and oneself. It might be thought, however, that humility and self-respect are in tension, for the one is widely thought to involve a low opinion of one’s worth and the other a high regard for it. With the help of Kant and Tom Hill, this chapter focuses on understanding relations among various kinds of humility, arrogance, and self-respect. It is argued that humility is not the virtue opposing arrogance, but rather, self-respect is, and that humility is at best an ancillary virtue and the servant of self-respect; but at worst, it is as serious a vice as arrogance, indeed, an aspect of it.

Chapter 2 defends the claim that each sentient individual possesses an ultimate and equal intrinsic moral worth. It then argues that in light of that worth, all sentient creatures possess a set of fundamental rights which impose duties on moral agents. The final claim of the chapter is that one of the duties which moral agents have is to create and maintain a political order dedicated to the protection of the worth and rights of all sentient creatures. In other words, this chapter claims that ‘sentient equality’ and ‘sentient rights’ provide the justification for political institutions, and serve to shape and constrain their design.

This chapter defends an account of moral worth. Moral worth is a status that some, but not all, morally right actions have. Unlike with merely right actions, when an agent performs a morally worthy action, she is necessarily creditworthy for doing the right thing. The chapter begins by arguing that two dominant views of moral worth have been unable to fully capture this necessary connection. On one view, an action is morally worthy if and only if its agent is motivated by the features of the action that make it right. On the other, an action is morally worthy if and only if its agent is motivated by the action’s rightness itself. But neither of these views can capture the connection between moral worth and creditworthiness, because each leaves room for cases of accidentally doing the right thing. The chapter then defends a new account: the Guise of Moral Reasons Account. On this account, morally worthy actions are right actions that are motivated by moral reasons as such. This account rules out cases of accidentally doing the right thing, thus capturing the necessary connection between moral worth and creditworthiness for doing the right thing.

An action has moral worth when it’s a morally right action and when it is motivated in such a way that its being right is not accidental. When an action is, in this way, non-accidentally right, the agent is morally praiseworthy for doing the right thing. According to the Right Reasons View, an agent performs an action with moral worth, or is praiseworthy for doing the right thing, roughly to the extent that she does the right thing for reasons that make it right to act in this way (e.g., Arpaly, Markovits). According to another kind of view, actions with moral worth spring from the ‘motive of duty,’ or are based on the agent’s justified belief or knowledge that she ought to act in the relevant way (e.g., Sliwa, Johnson King). These are both attractive ideas. But given certain plausible assumptions, these ideas are in tension with each other. Chapter 9 suggests that the extent to which this is so depends on how the nature of moral thought is to be understood, and that certain forms of expressivism—relational expressivism, in particular—allow the pursuit of a reconciliatory approach.

Chapter 3 inserts Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960) into contemporary bioethical discussions about the value of disabled lives. This novel portrays the murder of an intellectually disabled boy, Bishop, by his fourteen-year-old cousin, a murder that serves as the culmination of debates about his value staged in the novel. Considering points of view about the worth of intellectually disabled human beings expressed by O’Connor’s fictional characters alongside those expressed by Peter Singer and other philosophers and bioethicists, the chapter demonstrates a revealing convergence of (ableist) views held by the intensely secular Singer and the fervently Catholic O’Connor. In staging debates about Bishop’s worth in a rationalistic world, O’Connor accepts eugenic positions she purports to critique.

It has been argued by Arpaly and Markovits that an action with moral worth is done for the right reasons—reasons that make it right. This chapter argues that the “right reasons” view of moral worth has implications for normative ethics. The simplest conclusions concern the relationship between the true normative theory and commonsense morality. A more elaborate argument shows the “right reasons” view points us towards ethical pluralism, and if that view is true, familiar versions of Kantianism and utilitarianism are false and there are multiple factors involved in making actions right, one (but not all) of which has to do with wellbeing. An important premise of this argument defended herein the claim that Kant is wrong about the moral worth of actions performed from altruism and not from the categorical imperative.

This chapter argues that the often-heard claim that all serious present-day political philosophers are in some fundamental sense egalitarians is wrong. It also rejects the claim that the methods currently used in political philosophy presuppose basic equality. It further argues that there is no universal duty “of equal respect and concern,” no duty of the state to respect all citizens equally, and no equality of rights or worth; and that appeals to “recognition respect” and related concepts are to no avail for grounding basic equality. Attempts to go back a step and to claim that certain rights inequalities or discriminatory rules are themselves “grounded” in equal respect and concern at some deeper, norm-generating level are, it argues, also futile. Finally, it contends that the “This is not what we mean” strategy of escaping anti-egalitarian arguments reduces egalitarianism to triviality and empty rhetoric; it thus concludes that liberal egalitarianism should be abandoned.