THE NORMATIVITY OF MORAL OBLIGATION
What is it to be morally obligated to do something? Philosophers generally agree
that a moral obligation is something one morally must do, something it would be (morally)
wrong not to do. There are many things that there are good moral reasons to do that one is
nonetheless not obligated to do. Recently, for example, I contributed money to support a
website—watchingamerica.com—that I think there are good moral reasons to support. It
consists of articles about the U.S., its foreign policy and political life, which are taken from
newspapers around the world, including China. It is an important source of critical reaction
that Americans need to be aware and take account of. But as important as this is, I don’t
think I was morally obligated to make the contribution. There are many worthy causes
calling for our support, and there seems to be no moral obligation to support this one in
particular. I would have done no wrong if I hadn’t contributed. Moreover, the good moral
reasons to make the contribution did not necessarily outweigh other, nonmoral reasons I
might have had to use the money for some other purpose, say, to take my son to a baseball
game.
But suppose I really were morally obligated to give the money, for example, to
someone I had promised it to, or to someone in emergent need who would die without it. If
that were so, if it would be wrong for me not give it, then it seems that there couldn’t really
be better reasons for me to do something else like using the money to take my son to the
game. We can capture this with the following thesis:
Categorical
Moral obligations necessarily provide categorical and
overriding reasons for agents to comply with them.
Categorical reasons are reasons for acting that do not depend on agents’ ends, desires, or
interests. And overriding reasons are reasons that defeat or override other reasons for acting
otherwise. So Categorical says that moral obligations give agents reasons to comply that
are independent of their aims and interests and that override any reasons they might have to
do anything else.
Let me say something now about how this fits with my title. ‘Normative’ and
‘normativity’ are terms that have come to play a very important role in recent Englishspeaking moral philosophy. (As a reflection of this, note the title of Christine Korsgaard’s
important book: The Sources of Normativity.) Philosophers generally use ‘normative’ to apply
to anything that entails reasons (normative reasons, as they are called) to do something or to
have some attitude or feeling, reasons, that is, that count in favor of or justify some action or
attitude. Obviously, the idea of a reason to do something is itself normative. But so also are
the ideas of being desirable (being something there is reason to desire), estimable (being
something there is reason to esteem), and so on. Arguably, every ethical idea is normative,
and ‘normativity’ refers to this normative aspect. (I [will] say more about this in my other
lecture.)
Now if Categorical is correct, then the normativity of moral obligation involves the
fact that moral obligations necessarily provide categorical and overriding reasons (or, at least,
that they purport to). But why is this? What makes it the case that moral obligations
necessarily do create categorical and overriding reasons? Trying to answer this question has
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been one of the most difficult problems facing moral philosophers. We can see it already in
one form in Glaucon and Adeimantus’s challenge to Socrates in Plato’s Republic to show
them reasons why they should be just. And it becomes a central focus of moral philosophy
in what is called the “modern” period, beginning in the seventeenth century with the modern
natural law tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf, when the idea of moral obligation and the
moral law begin to be more carefully formulated. It is the problem Christine Korsgaard
confronts in The Sources of Normativity, when she seeks to uncover what she calls the “source”
of the normativity of the moral law by understanding its relation to the source of practical
normativity, or reasons for acting, more generally. And it is the problem that Kant sets
himself in Chapter III of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals when, having established
that the moral law presents itself as categorical and overriding, he asks what can show that it
really is, that moral obligations are really binding on all rational agents and not just an
illusion or a “figment” of the mind.
Kant’s and Korsgaard’s arguments for the bindingness of the moral law are versions
of the same underlying strategy. Both argue that any agent deliberating about what to do is
committed to morality, to there being no good reason not to comply with the moral law.
Like many other philosophers, I think that their arguments fail. It is simply impossible, I
believe, to validate the normativity of moral obligation from the “first-person” perspective
of deliberation. And I believe I know why this is so. The reason is that moral obligation is,
in a sense I hope to make clear in this lecture, an irreducibly second-personal phenomenon. I
shall argue that the normativity of moral obligation can only be appreciated and accounted
for from a second-person standpoint.
But what do I mean by “first-person” and “second-person” in this context? These
terms may be most familiar from their grammatical use: first-person singular (in English: ‘I’),
second-person singular (‘you), third-person singular (‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’), and so forth. Thomas
Nagel made famous the difference between a first-person and a third-person perspective.
Some reasons for acting can only be grasped from a first-person perspective: for example,
that my child will suffer if I don’t act, or that I will, or that a certain action is necessary to
keep my promise. These (first-personal) facts all seem different from the fact that Julian or
William (who happen to be my sons) will suffer, or that Steve Darwall will, or that a given
act is necessary to keep someone’s promise, or Steve Darwall’s promise. If I knew the latter
facts, but didn’t appreciate their relation to me, the practical significance of the situation
would obviously seem different. A first-person perspective locates oneself in relation to
what one has in view, whereas a third-person or purely observer’s perspective does not; the
latter gives one a perspective on the world, as Thomas Nagel put it, as if “from nowhere.”
Philosophers have been interested in the first-person standpoint partly because of its
role in agency and deliberation. When I am considering what to do, the question I am
implicitly asking is “What am I to do?” Or if you and I are deliberating together, our
question is “What are we to do?” Deliberation, in this way, is ultimately first-personal.
The strategy that Kant and neo-Kantians like Korsgaard use to try to account for
moral obligation’s normativity, again, is to argue that an agent deliberating from a firstperson perspective is committed to accepting the bindingness of the moral law as a
presupposition of deliberating intelligibly at all. Very roughly, the idea is that in order to
deliberate, an agent must accept two things. He must accept that there are normative reasons
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for acting, since deliberation just is seeking reasons on the basis of which to choose one
alternative rather than another. If there were no reasons to do anything, then considering what
to do would simply make no sense. But second, Kant and Korsgaard argue, a deliberating
agent must also accept that he is free in a very strong sense that Kant calls autonomy of the will.
This Kantian notion is hard to make precise, but the rough idea is that normative reasons
cannot be simply given to the will, constraining the will, as it were, from the outside, but must
derive from the will’s (or practical reason’s) own free activity. As Kant puts it, norms of
practical reason must be “self-legislated.”
Now you may be pleased to know that we don’t need to plumb the depths of Kant’s
metaphysics of ethics here. What I want to do instead is to show why even if an argument
of the kind that Kant and Korsgaard advance were to work in its own terms, it still wouldn’t
account for a very important part of the normativity of moral obligation, what I call its
second-personal aspect. And, if I have time, I would like also to indicate how, once we
appreciate the second-personal character of moral obligation, we have to accept
Categorical. From a second-person perspective, we see why, given what moral
obligations are, we have to regard them as creating categorical and overriding reasons.
So not only, as I see it, is appreciating the role of the second-person standpoint necessary
to explain a central aspect of the normativity of moral obligation that has hitherto been
neglected. It is also essential to giving a satisfying explanation of that aspect—the
necessary creation of categorical and overriding reasons—that philosophers have
generally taken to be moral obligation’s hallmark.
So what do I mean by “second-personal”? You and I take up a second-person
standpoint, for example, whenever we have a conversation together. Right now, for instance.
We address one another as a “you” to whom the other is a “you” in return. As Martin
Buber put it in I and Thou, “When one says You, the I of the . . . I-You is said, too.” It is the
element of address that is central to the second-person perspective. More specifically, what I
mean by the second-person standpoint is the perspective you and I take up when we address,
either explicitly or implicitly, claims and demands to one another, not by sheer force, as when
one of us simply demands something: e.g., “Give that to me!” but when we put forward a
claim or demand as valid or legitimate.
For example, when you claim something as your right, you address this claim to
someone even if only to the community as large. And you think that you have the authority
to claim it and that because you do others thereby have a reason to provide it to you.
Similarly, to anticipate a point that will be important in what follows, if we hold one another
responsible for complying with a moral obligation, or hold ourselves responsible, here again,
we must suppose that we have the authority to expect or demand this of each other and
ourselves. And must we also think that because we are subject to this authoritative demand
we thereby have a reason to comply.
I call reasons that depend upon authoritative claims and demands in this way, and so
must be able to be addressed second-personally, second-person reasons. Ultimately, I shall want to
argue that the reasons that are created by moral obligations are second-personal reasons.
But first to help get the intuitive idea of a second-personal reason across, consider three
different ways that you might attempt to give someone a reason to do something.
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Imagine that, for whatever reason, someone has stepped on your foot. Consider
three different kinds of reasons you might give him to move his foot from on top of yours.
One might simply be the fact that you are in pain, that he is impeding your freedom of
movement, and that these are bad things, both bad for you and simply bad things in
themselves. Suppose, for example, that you could get the person stepping in your foot to
feel sympathy for you in something like the way that Mencius describes the natural tendency
to feel compassion for a child who is about to fall into a well. The other person would then
see your pain and impediment as reasons to move his feet. Moreover, these reasons would
be completely independent of whether or not you had any right to his doing so and whether
or not he had any moral obligation to do so. In fact, he might not even have any concepts
of moral right and obligation and still see that he had some reason to move his foot in the
simple fact of your pain. In recognizing this reason, he wouldn’t be recognizing, even
implicitly, anybody’s standing to claim or demand that he move his foot. He would just be
accepting that there is a good reason for him to do so.
Now suppose, second, that you know that the person stepping on your foot sees
stepping on people’s feet as a kind of conduct that is base and therefore beneath him. A
noble person, he might think, never lowers himself to stepping on others’ feet; doing so, is
shameful and base. So you point this out to him. He could accept what you were saying, see
the reason for moving his foot to which you are pointing, without thereby acknowledging
that he is responsible to anyone, even to God, for moving his foot. He would not be
committed thereby to recognizing anyone as having any authority to claim or demand that
he move it. Here again, he would be accepting a reason to move his foot that holds quite
independently of anyone’s standing to claim or demand anything of him.
But suppose you take him to be infringing on a right not to have your feet stepped
on. In thinking this, you would be committed to thinking that this gives him a reason not to
step on your foot, to get off your foot and apologize, if he has, and so on. The very idea of
a right, as Joel Feinberg pointed out, depends upon the idea of a standing or authority that
one has to claim the right; that is to address a claim or demand for certain conduct to
another person and expect compliance. In addressing the claim or demand to the other,
moreover, one must suppose that there is a sufficient reason for the person not to step on
your foot, and to get off if he has, simply in the fact that you have this right. This reason is a
second-personal reason, since it wouldn’t exist but for the possibility of addressing claims
and demands to one another second-personally. An authority to address claims and
demands to one another is simply part of the concept of a right. To put the point the other
way around, someone might think she has the weightiest possible reasons to stay off of other
people’s feet, for example, out of compassion, or because such behavior as ignoble, without
accepting that they have any right to her doing so, since she could accept the former without
accepting anyone’s authority to demand that she keep off their feet.
Or suppose you think that we all have a moral obligation not to step on one
another’s feet and you point this out to him. Here again, I argue, the reason you would
thereby give him would be a second-personal reason. The explanation of why this is so is
that being responsible is simply part of what it is to be morally obligated. What we are
morally obligated to do is not just what there are good moral reasons to do, but what we are
morally responsible for doing. Consider my initial example of giving to support
watchingamerica.com. Part of what we must be thinking when we think that I have no
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moral obligation to support the site is that I do not have a moral responsibility to support it,
despite the good reasons to do so, that it would be unjustified for others to hold me
responsible for supporting it, for example, by feeling indignant towards me if I didn’t; and
unjustified also for me to hold myself responsible for supporting it, for example, by feeling
guilt if I chose not to do and took my son to the ballgame instead.
In his famous work, Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill expressed this conceptual
connection between moral obligation and responsibility as follows:
We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought
to be punished in some way or other for doing it; if not by law, by the
opinion of his fellow creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his
own conscience.
By “punishment” in this context, Mill does not necessarily mean anything formal, although
he thinks legal punishment is called for in the case of violation of significant rights. Mill’s
fundamental idea is that is simply part of the concept of wrongdoing, the violation of moral
obligation, that this is something we are rightly held responsible for, and that we often
appropriately do this by the ways in which we regard and implicitly address one another and
ourselves. The way I would put the point is that a moral obligation always entails a
responsibility to one another as members of the moral community. What I shall seek to
show next is that when we hold each other and ourselves thus responsible, we implicitly
address demands for compliance to one another and ourselves, and presuppose the authority
to do so as members of the moral community.
Before I do that, however, let me recapitulate the argument to this point. We have
been seeking to understand the distinctive normativity of moral obligation, that is, the
distinctive character of the reasons for acting that a moral obligation gives us. Philosophers
have traditionally attempted to capture this with the thesis I called Categorical: that moral
obligations necessarily give rise to categorical and overriding reasons. But this just raises
a further question: Why, exactly, do moral obligations necessarily create such reasons?
Kant and Korsgaard’s response is to argue that an agent deliberating about what to do is
committed to treating moral obligations as providing categorical and overriding reasons.
Again, arguments of this Kantian kind are widely believed by philosophers to fail. What
I have been arguing, however, is that even if they succeeded in their own terms, even if,
that is, they established that we always have conclusive reasons to do as we are morally
obligated, they would not yet capture an important aspect of moral obligation, namely,
that we are necessarily responsible for acting as we are morally obligated. To capture the
distinctive normativity of moral obligation, it is necessary also to stress moral
obligation’s conceptual tie to responsibility. It is part of the concept of moral obligation
that we are responsible (to one another as members of the moral community) for
complying with moral demands.
I turn now to showing more specifically how holding one another and ourselves
morally responsible always involves the implicit address of demands that we presuppose
the authority to address to one another as members of the moral community. It will
follow that moral obligations are second-personal reasons in the sense I earlier
mentioned, and that this is a central aspect of the normativity of moral obligation.
Finally, I will suggest that appreciating the second-personal character of the reasons that
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moral obligations distinctively create can put us into a position to see why, from the
second-person standpoint, we are committed to regarding these reasons as necessarily
categorical and overriding also.
To understand the way in which holding someone responsible (whether to
someone else or ourselves) involves at least the implicit address of demands, I shall draw
from P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment.” Written in 1962 as an address to the
British Academy, Strawson’s essay has been described by Philip Pettit as “perhaps the
most influential philosophical paper of the twentieth century.”1 The main influence of
Strawson’s article has been in debates about freedom of the will, but I believe that what
Strawson said also has important implications for understanding the nature of moral
obligation. Strawson pointed out that there is a fundamental difference between the way
we regard someone when we relate to her (from what I call a second-person standpoint)
and an “objective attitude” toward someone (in my terms, third-personal attitude). Allow
me to quote at some length from Strawson’s own discussion:
To adopt the objective attitude to another human being is to see him,
perhaps, as an object of social policy; as a subject for what, in a wide
range of senses, might be called treatment; as something certainly to be
taken account, perhaps precautionary account, of; to be managed or
handled or cured or trained; perhaps simply to be avoided . . . .The
objective attitude may be emotionally toned in many ways, but not in all
ways: it may include repulsion or fear, it may include pity or even love,
though not all kinds of love. But it cannot include the range of reactive
feelings and attitudes which belong to involvement or participation with
others in inter-personal human relationships; it cannot include resentment,
gratitude, forgiveness, anger, or the sort of love which two adults can
sometimes be said to feel reciprocally, for each other. If your attitude
towards someone is wholly objective, then though you may fight him, you
cannot quarrel with him, and though you may talk to him, even negotiate
with him, you cannot reason with him. You can at most pretend to quarrel,
or to reason, with him.
When we take up a second-person standpoint in relating to someone, we see ourselves as
responsible to one another in a distinctive way. There is abundant psychological
evidence, for example, that human beings find it more difficult to inflict harm on another
defenseless person directly, especially in the other’s presence when there is eye contact or
mutual recognition of some other form, than they do when they can be anonymous.2
Moreover, there are, as Strawson famously pointed out, certain characteristic “holding
responsible” emotions and attitudes—what he called “reactive” attitudes and feelings—
that essentially involve a second-person perspective and that are incompatible with
viewing someone “objectively” in his sense. Some of these are “participant” attitudes,
since we feel them from the perspective of someone participating in the particular
transaction that is the object of the attitude—that of the victim, say, or of someone who
Philip Pettit, “The Law of Demand,” review of The Second-Person Standpoint, Times Literary
Supplement (2007).
2
I discuss some of this in The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability, Chapter
7, “The Psychology of the Second Person.”
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identifies with her. Participant reactive feelings and attitudes include, for example,
resentment, gratitude, and guilt. But it is also possible for people who were not
themselves involved to have reactive responses that hold a participant responsible.
Though, when I hear of the abusive and sometimes torturous treatment of innocent Iraqi
citizens by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, I feel guilt as an American citizen on my
government’s behalf, it is also possible for you to have a non-participant’s reactive
response—indignation, say, or moral blame—that likewise involves holding responsible.
The important point for our purposes is that all reactive attitudes, whether
participant or non-participant, are second-personal in the sense that, as Strawson
emphasized, they all involve an implicit relating to another. Specifically, Strawson and
other philosophers who have been influenced by him argue, all reactive attitudes involve
the implicit making of a demand, which demand is necessarily presupposed to be
legitimate. We can see this by looking briefly at the difference between guilt and shame.
To feel guilty about having done something is to feel as though one is to blame
for having done that thing; as though others could legitimately expect or demand (and
that one could, as a representative of the moral community expect or demand of oneself)
that one not have done what one did. Guilt is in this way second-personal. It involves
the implicit acknowledgment of an authority to make demands of one and hold one
responsible. Moreover, in feeling guilt and implicitly making the demand of oneself, one
necessarily sees oneself as not having had a good enough reason to do what one feels
guilty about doing. [Parenthetically, a delicate point: since this is a feeling and not
necessarily a considered judgment, one’s seeing oneself as not having had a good enough
reason may also be just a feeling and not a considered judgment.] It is simply impossible
to feel guilt and not feel that you didn’t have a good enough reason to do what you did.
Of course, you may have conflicting feelings. It may also feel to you as if you did have
good reasons. The point is that feeling guilt itself involves feeling that you didn’t. In
addition, in feeling guilt it also seems to one as if one were free not to have done what
one did. Even with survivor guilt of the sort that Holocaust survivors feel, the feeling
involves its seeming as though one might have done something to avoid culpability: “If
only I had not taken that train.” Finally, the natural expressions of guilt are themselves
second-personal: apology, the making of amends, and so on.
Compare now shame. The natural expression of shame is not engagement but a
form of disengagement, the desire to shrink from view. And shame presents itself not as
the response to an implicitly addressed (and therefore second-personal) charge, but as a
response to being seen in some shameful way. In this way, shame is not a secondpersonal or reactive feeling, but a third-personal one. Neither need the object of our
shame be something we have done, nor need we see ourselves as having been free to
avoid what we see as shameful. People can be ashamed, whether warrantedly or not, of
their parents, or social status, or whatever.
For our purposes, then, the central points to be drawn from Strawson’s seminal
article are the following. When we hold someone responsible (whether ourselves or
someone else), we take up a second-person perspective on her and her conduct and
presuppose an authority to have expectations or make demands of her. But what
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authority is that? Strawson’s answer, and mine also, is that it is an authority we have just
as persons and, therefore, as equal members of a mutually accountable moral community
of all persons. If consequently, the concept of moral obligation includes that of moral
responsibility, it follows that moral obligation has this ineliminable second-personal
element and that the distinctive reasons for acting that moral obligations provide are
second-personal reasons—moral obligations are demands we legitimately make of one
another as members of a mutually accountable moral community.
It follows, therefore, that even if Korsgaard and Kant’s arguments were successful
in their own terms, even if they could establish Categorical, they would still miss an
essential aspect of the normativity of moral obligation—this irreducibly second-personal
element: moral obligations are what members of the moral community have the authority
to demand of one another and themselves as such members. In closing, I want briefly to
suggest two final points.
First, once we have appreciated the way in which moral obligation is essentially
connected to the making of demands on ourselves and others from a second-person
standpoint, we are in a position to see why we have to accept that the reasons for
complying with moral obligations are categorical and overriding. A moral obligation,
again, is conceptually related to moral responsibility and moral blame. If an action is a
moral obligation, then it is something we are morally responsible for doing, and we are
justifiably subject to blame if we fail to comply with it without adequate excuse. When,
however, we blame someone for something, we presuppose an authority to demand that
she have done what she did not do and to hold her responsible. But now consider the
attitude one takes toward someone—whether to oneself or to someone else—when one
blames or holds that person responsible. The attitude is a reactive attitude, in Strawson’s
sense, involving the address of a putatively legitimate demand and so a second-personal
reason. It follows that in order to blame someone and hold her responsible, one must
suppose that she had a reason not to violate the moral obligation just in the fact that the
moral community legitimately demands this, irrespective of her ends, desires, or interests.
So it follows that one must suppose that there exists a categorical reason to comply with
the moral obligation or demand.
But what about the weight of the reason? Must we also suppose that the reason to
do what one is morally obligated to do overrides or defeats any reasons that might exist
not to comply and do something else? It seems that we must. To see this, ask yourself if
it is possible to blame someone for doing something while simultaneously seeing him as
having had sufficient reason for doing what he did. I submit that it is not. Either one will
not really be blaming the person or one will not really be accepting that he had good
reasons for doing what he did.
Another way to see this is through the idea of accountability. One form that
moral responsibility takes is that we are accountable to one another for complying with
moral obligations. But if someone can establish that he had good reasons to do what he
did, then he will have accounted for himself. It is simply unintelligible to continue to
blame someone for what he did if one comes to accept that he did what he did for good
reasons, reasons that outweighed any created by his moral obligation. It follows that
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when we take up a second-person standpoint and hold one another and ourselves
responsible for complying with moral obligations, we are committed to thinking not just
that there were reasons for complying that were categorical, but also that the reasons
outweighed any there might have been not to comply. Once we become convinced that
there were indeed good reasons for the person to have acted as he did, we are forced to
the conclusion that he was not really under a moral obligation to have acted otherwise.
This means that appreciating the second-personal dimension of moral obligation
helps us to see why moral obligations must purport to provide reasons that are both
categorical and overriding. But why should we suppose that such reasons actually exist?
Maybe we are committed to thinking they exist when we hold people responsible for
complying with moral obligations, but it seems quite possible to step back from this way
of viewing ourselves and one another and ask whether the reasons we are committed to
accepting from inside the moral community really do exist? Might morality not be, as
Nietzsche supposed, simply an ideology we have come to accept for contingent historical
reasons, but which corresponds to no genuine normative reasons for acting in fact?
This is the challenge that I take up in The Second-Person Standpoint. I cannot of
course reproduce the argument here, but in closing I would like to say something about
its shape. First, I argue that whenever we take a second-person standpoint and attempt to
address any claims or demands whatsoever at all, we are committed to two assumptions
about ourselves and our addressee or addressees. One is that, since we can intelligibly
hold someone responsible for complying our claim or demand only if we see him as
capable of holding himself responsible, we have to suppose that we and our addressee
share this basic capacity or competence that any responsible agent must have. More
specifically, we must assume that our addressee is capable of taking a second-person
perspective and making the claims or demands of himself, for example, by being subject
to attitudes of self-blame and guilt. I call this capacity second-personal competence. We
must suppose, therefore, that both we and our addressee are both second-personally
competent.
Even more important, I argue that we must also presuppose that we and our
addressee share a common basic second-personal authority just as beings who are
capable of entering into second-personal relations. From the second-person standpoint,
we are committed to the equal authority to make claims and demands of one another as
beings who are second-personally competent, and it is this equal authority that underlies
the idea of the moral community as a whole of all beings with the capacity to enter into
mutually accountable relations.
So conceived, the moral community is what Kant calls the “realm” or “kingdom”
of ends. And what he calls the distinctive value or “dignity” of persons is an equal
authority that is shared by any agent that is capable of entering into second-personal
relations. If I am right, however, these fundamental moral ideas are not something we are
committed to just by virtue of being rational agents capable of intelligible deliberation of
any kind. Our commitment to morality comes from the second-person standpoint we
cannot help adopting when we relate to one another.
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It follows that appreciating the role of the second-person standpoint is essential
both for appreciating the distinctive normativity that moral obligation purports to have
and for showing that it has this normativity in fact.
Stephen Darwall
University of Michigan
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