... Tenenbaum, Sergio. '&amp... more ... Tenenbaum, Sergio. ''Accidie, Evaluation, and Motivation.'' In Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality, edited by Sarah Stroud, 147171. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Tenenbaum, Sergio. ''Direction of Fit and Motivational Cognitivism.'' In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. ...
It is widely affirmed that human beings have irreplaceable valuable, and that we owe it to them t... more It is widely affirmed that human beings have irreplaceable valuable, and that we owe it to them to treat them accordingly. Many theorists have been drawn to Kantianism because they think that it alone can capture this intuition. One aim of this paper is to show that this is a mistake, and that Kantianism cannot provide an independent rational vindication, nor even a fully illuminating articulation, of irreplaceability. A further aim is to outline a broadly Aristotelian view that provides a more fitting theoretical framework for this appealing conception of human value. The critique of Kantianism is extended to contemporary theorists with a broadly Kantian orientation. The paper closes with an outline of a virtue-theoretic ethical theory that follows Aquinas in taking love to be a master virtue—one that refines the other virtues so as to provide a continuous practical sensitivity to the irreplaceable value of fellow human beings.
Life and Action 2 is a relatively short book, but it sets out an extremely original and illuminat... more Life and Action 2 is a relatively short book, but it sets out an extremely original and illuminating way of thinking about a wide range of very basic philosophical questions, including the nature of life, the nature of agency and action, the structure and normative implications of social practices, and the relationship between natural facts and normativity. Along the way, it makes a compelling case for a fundamental reconsideration of contemporary practices of philosophical specialization, though it does this indirectly, by offering an example of the truly exciting insights that come into reach for those capable of weaving together the ordinarily isolated and divergent conversations of logicians, metaphysicians, ethical theorists, political philosophers, and action theorists (which is to say, for Michael Thompson and very few others). Thompson's guiding idea is that concepts such as life form, organism, agent, action, and practice capture distinctive "categories of being" and that we move on a distinctive field of formal inferential connections when we make use of these concepts. The aim of Thompson's book is to light up the inferential proprieties that are resident to these areas of human thought. He attempts a return to what we already implicitly grasp in our "ordinary" thought about life and action, and yet somehow utterly misconstrue when we undertake to philosophize about the structure of this thought or about the things toward which it is directed. If Thompson's picture of these matters is right, then in one sense, nothing could be easier than to exhibit an appreciation of the proprieties of thought that he seeks to illuminate. We show ourselves to have an implicit grasp of these proprieties when we turn our minds to living things and their characteristics, or to agency and action, or to human practices and the patterns of deliberation 1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at an "Author Meets Critics" session of the 2010 Central APA. This revised version is informed both by Michael Thompson's oral and written responses to the earlier version and by the excellent commentary offered at the same session by Paul Hurley. I benefited, in particular, from Hurley's probing critique of Thompsonian action theory. 2. Michael Thompson, Life and Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 223 pages).
In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a ... more In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it.
... O'Neill's view, maxims need not and usually do not reflect our context-spec... more ... O'Neill's view, maxims need not and usually do not reflect our context-specific reasons for particular actions; rather, they are the general policies that we follow in determining how our changing circumstances bear on what we ought to do.12 In the case at hand, the maxim that ...
Sarah Buss argues that if we are to rise to the challenge of standing up to justice when doing so... more Sarah Buss argues that if we are to rise to the challenge of standing up to justice when doing so is costly, we will have to internalise a sense of our own unimportance. That is, we will have to cultivate an attitude that is ‘the opposite of self‐love’. I try to show that what we need is not to eliminate our love of self but to give it a proper and discerning shape, so that it conduces to our goodness rather than to our self‐interest narrowly construed.
... Maggie Little, Nancy Sherman, Henry Richardson, Tamar Schapiro, Bennett Helm, Sergio Tenenbau... more ... Maggie Little, Nancy Sherman, Henry Richardson, Tamar Schapiro, Bennett Helm, Sergio Tenenbaum, Justin D'Arms, Dan Jacobsen, Ruth Chang, Elijah ... Finally I thank my children, Ben and Ethan, and my wife Saphira Baker, for the constant encouragement and good humor ...
Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in... more Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in the face of powerful inclinations to act immorally, and indeed that opposing inclinations only highlight the worth of the action. I argue that this conclusion rests on an implausibly mechanistic account of desires, and that many desires are constituted by tendencies to see certain features of one's circumstances as reasons to perform one or another action. I try to show that inclinations to violate moral requirements sometimes manifest a morally objectionable half-heartedness in one's commitment to those very requirements, and-by extension-to the values that undergird these requirements.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, May 1, 2003
In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by h... more In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of “commissive” utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation.
... Tenenbaum, Sergio. '&amp... more ... Tenenbaum, Sergio. ''Accidie, Evaluation, and Motivation.'' In Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality, edited by Sarah Stroud, 147171. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Tenenbaum, Sergio. ''Direction of Fit and Motivational Cognitivism.'' In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. ...
It is widely affirmed that human beings have irreplaceable valuable, and that we owe it to them t... more It is widely affirmed that human beings have irreplaceable valuable, and that we owe it to them to treat them accordingly. Many theorists have been drawn to Kantianism because they think that it alone can capture this intuition. One aim of this paper is to show that this is a mistake, and that Kantianism cannot provide an independent rational vindication, nor even a fully illuminating articulation, of irreplaceability. A further aim is to outline a broadly Aristotelian view that provides a more fitting theoretical framework for this appealing conception of human value. The critique of Kantianism is extended to contemporary theorists with a broadly Kantian orientation. The paper closes with an outline of a virtue-theoretic ethical theory that follows Aquinas in taking love to be a master virtue—one that refines the other virtues so as to provide a continuous practical sensitivity to the irreplaceable value of fellow human beings.
Life and Action 2 is a relatively short book, but it sets out an extremely original and illuminat... more Life and Action 2 is a relatively short book, but it sets out an extremely original and illuminating way of thinking about a wide range of very basic philosophical questions, including the nature of life, the nature of agency and action, the structure and normative implications of social practices, and the relationship between natural facts and normativity. Along the way, it makes a compelling case for a fundamental reconsideration of contemporary practices of philosophical specialization, though it does this indirectly, by offering an example of the truly exciting insights that come into reach for those capable of weaving together the ordinarily isolated and divergent conversations of logicians, metaphysicians, ethical theorists, political philosophers, and action theorists (which is to say, for Michael Thompson and very few others). Thompson's guiding idea is that concepts such as life form, organism, agent, action, and practice capture distinctive "categories of being" and that we move on a distinctive field of formal inferential connections when we make use of these concepts. The aim of Thompson's book is to light up the inferential proprieties that are resident to these areas of human thought. He attempts a return to what we already implicitly grasp in our "ordinary" thought about life and action, and yet somehow utterly misconstrue when we undertake to philosophize about the structure of this thought or about the things toward which it is directed. If Thompson's picture of these matters is right, then in one sense, nothing could be easier than to exhibit an appreciation of the proprieties of thought that he seeks to illuminate. We show ourselves to have an implicit grasp of these proprieties when we turn our minds to living things and their characteristics, or to agency and action, or to human practices and the patterns of deliberation 1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at an "Author Meets Critics" session of the 2010 Central APA. This revised version is informed both by Michael Thompson's oral and written responses to the earlier version and by the excellent commentary offered at the same session by Paul Hurley. I benefited, in particular, from Hurley's probing critique of Thompsonian action theory. 2. Michael Thompson, Life and Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 223 pages).
In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a ... more In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it.
... O'Neill's view, maxims need not and usually do not reflect our context-spec... more ... O'Neill's view, maxims need not and usually do not reflect our context-specific reasons for particular actions; rather, they are the general policies that we follow in determining how our changing circumstances bear on what we ought to do.12 In the case at hand, the maxim that ...
Sarah Buss argues that if we are to rise to the challenge of standing up to justice when doing so... more Sarah Buss argues that if we are to rise to the challenge of standing up to justice when doing so is costly, we will have to internalise a sense of our own unimportance. That is, we will have to cultivate an attitude that is ‘the opposite of self‐love’. I try to show that what we need is not to eliminate our love of self but to give it a proper and discerning shape, so that it conduces to our goodness rather than to our self‐interest narrowly construed.
... Maggie Little, Nancy Sherman, Henry Richardson, Tamar Schapiro, Bennett Helm, Sergio Tenenbau... more ... Maggie Little, Nancy Sherman, Henry Richardson, Tamar Schapiro, Bennett Helm, Sergio Tenenbaum, Justin D'Arms, Dan Jacobsen, Ruth Chang, Elijah ... Finally I thank my children, Ben and Ethan, and my wife Saphira Baker, for the constant encouragement and good humor ...
Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in... more Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in the face of powerful inclinations to act immorally, and indeed that opposing inclinations only highlight the worth of the action. I argue that this conclusion rests on an implausibly mechanistic account of desires, and that many desires are constituted by tendencies to see certain features of one's circumstances as reasons to perform one or another action. I try to show that inclinations to violate moral requirements sometimes manifest a morally objectionable half-heartedness in one's commitment to those very requirements, and-by extension-to the values that undergird these requirements.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, May 1, 2003
In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by h... more In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of “commissive” utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation.
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