Moral Reason

225 Pages·2014·1.269 MB·English

by  Julia Markovits

Moral Reason
OXFORD PHILOSOPHICAL MONOGRAPHS
Editorial Committee
ANITA AVRAMIDES R. S. CRISP WILLIAM CHILD ANTONY EAGLE
STEPHEN MULHALL
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Things That Happen Because They Should: A Teleological Approach to Action
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The Ontology of Mind: Events, Processes, and States
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Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics
Mathieu Marion
Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian
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Hegel’s Idea of Freedom
Alan Patten
Metaphor and Moral Experience
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Kant’s Empirical Realism
Paul Abela
Against Equality of Opportunity
Matt Cavanagh
The Grounds of Ethical Judgement: New Transcendental Arguments in Moral
Philosophy
Christian Illies
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Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to
Porphyry
George E. Karamanolis
Aquinas on Friendship
Daniel Schwartz
The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle
Hendrik Lorenz
Moral Reason
Julia Markovits
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For Inga and Dick

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce previ-
ously published material:
• Palgrave MacMillan for permission to reprint “Internal Reasons
and the Motivating Intuition,” first published in New Waves in
Metaethics (edited by Michael Brady) in 2011, which appears here
as §2.1-3.1, in slightly amended form;
• Oxford University Press for permission to reprint significant
portions of “Why Be An Internalist About Reasons?,” first pub-
lished in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 6 (edited by Russ
Shafer-Landau) in 2011, which appear here as §3.2-3.5 in slightly
amended form.
This book has been many years in the making. It began as a masters’
thesis, written during my time as a B.Phil student at Oxford, which
then formed the core of my doctoral dissertation, also completed at
Oxford. During that time I benefitted from the generous financial
support of a number of institutions. The Philosophy Faculty and
Somerville College, Oxford provided me with a graduate scholar-
ship, which, in conjunction with grants from the Overseas Research
Studentship Award Scheme and the Oxford University Clarendon
Fund Bursaries, supported my first three years of study. Christ Church,
Oxford, funded my last two years of research by providing me with a
Senior Scholarship. I look back on my time as a graduate student at
Oxford with great fondness, and I owe all of these institutions heartfelt
thanks.
After completing my doctorate, I was lucky enough to receive a
Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows. The fellowship
provided me with a rare luxury for a post-doctoral philosopher: three
years of uninterrupted research time. This meant I had time to begin
reworking my dissertation project into a book; but also, and just as
viii Acknowledgements
crucially, it meant I had time, for a while, to ignore it completely and
think about new topics. By the time I returned to the manuscript in the
second half of my fellowship, I was able to see it with the clearer sight
afforded by distance. In that time and in the years since, with the bene-
fit of the supportive philosophical community at MIT, I have rewritten
much of it entirely. But the basic outlines of the project and the moti-
vating thoughts behind it remain the same.
Two people in particular helped me to write this book. The first is
my doctoral thesis advisor Derek Parfit. I would not have thought it
possible for someone to be so generous in his encouragement of a pro-
ject built on premises so at odds with his own philosophical convic-
tions. The defense of a philosophical position can only benefit from
repeated collisions with the most forceful and persuasive arguments
for the opposite view. I hope some such benefit will be evident in this
book, and that I have managed at least to address, if not allay, some of
Parfit’s worries about internalism. That I share many of those doubts
will be readily evident to the reader. So too, I hope, will be the per-
vasive influence of Parfit’s thought throughout the book, despite the
distance between the conclusions for which I argue and his own. Our
philosophical instincts are, I think, not so far apart as those conclu-
sions make them seem.
Just as indispensable to my completion of this book has been the
help I have received, in a less formal capacity, from Stephen Kearns.
He has read and talked through with me every argument in it. Many of
the ideas developed in the book began as conversations with him, dur-
ing our time as graduate students together at Oxford. I was quite con-
cerned, when I left Oxford, about how I would learn to do philosophy
without him. I needn’t have worried. Skype does wonders for expand-
ing the reach of philosophical conversations, and Stephen’s advice has
been as crucial to the final formulation of the ideas in this book as it
was to their origination. I consider myself extremely lucky to have him
as a long-distance sounding board.
In addition to these two, a number of people gave me very generous
and helpful comments, either in writing or in person, on large parts of
the manuscript at various stages of development. For such help I owe
Acknowledgements ix
thanks to Ruth Chang, Roger Crisp, Kate Manne, Rebecca Markovits,
Adrian Moore, Philip Stratton-Lake, and Kurt Sylvan. I have also ben-
efitted greatly from numerous conversations about this work, in set-
tings both formal and informal, over the years. Unfortunately, I won’t
be able now to recall all the people who have helped me in this way,
but the list includes at least Robert Adams, Brian Ball, Terence Cuneo,
Stephen Darwall, Jamie Dreier, David Enoch, Caspar Hare, Niko
Kolodny, Rae Langton, Ofra Magidor, Graham Oddie, Michael Smith,
Daniel Star, Nicholas Sturgeon, Mark van Roojen, and R. Jay Wallace.
I’ve had opportunities to present some of the work represented in
the book to audiences at Berkeley, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell,
MIT, NYU-Abu Dhabi, Oxford, Rice, Rutgers, UC-Santa Barbara,
the University of British Columbia, the University of Melbourne, the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Oslo’s Center for
the Study of Mind in Nature, the University of Texas-Austin, and the
Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop. I know that many of the suggestions
and concerns raised by audience members in those talks have made
their way directly into the book. The same is true of comments made
by the excellent graduate students at MIT, from whom I have been for-
tunate to learn. Though many of these people no doubt deserve to be
acknowledged by name, my porous memory forces me to settle instead
for this general thanks.
For thoughtful help in preparing the index, much better than I could
have done myself, and for other sound suggestions, I thank Brendan
Dill. Thanks also go to Peter Momtchiloff, my editor, and the staff at
OUP, for their advice, patience, and support, as well as to an anony-
mous reader for OUP, whose very helpful comments on the initial
draft of the book revealed an eye that is at once generous and critical—
in other words, just what any author would hope to find in a referee.
And I am more grateful than I can say to Sally Haslanger, whose
advice and reassurance have helped me to finish this book, and helped
me in so many other ways as well.
I have said that this book has been many years in the making. In fact,
the earliest seed of the project was a term paper I wrote when I was a
Yale undergraduate for a class on Kant’s ethics taught by Allen Wood.