Second-Personal Ethics and Its Critics

Undergraduate

Beginning with The Second-Person Standpoint in 2006, I have been articulating an approach to ethical theory that can be called “second-personal ethics.” I have done this in a series of subsequent papers—collected in Morality, Authority, and Law and Honor, History, and Relationship (2013)—and in The Heart and Its Attitudes (2014). Up until this last work, the second-personal framework was concerned to provide a grounding for deontic morality—the part of ethics that focuses on moral obligation, right, and wrong. In the more recent work on heartfelt connection attempts to elaborate a very different evaluative conception, one that is tied to love rather than respect. These works have elicited significant critical attention. The initial works on deontic morality have been comments on and criticized by Christine Korsgaard, Gary Watson, and R. Jay Wallace, among others. The Heart and Its Attitudes have been responded to by Quinn White, Sanford Diehl, Tamar Schapiro, Ariel Zylberman, and Yuan and Yuan. Prior work in ethics strongly advised. HU W 7pm-8:55pm