Philosophy 290-7

Recent Work in Moral Philosophy

The seminar will be devoted to a close reading of two new works in systematic moral philosophy: The Second-Person Standpoint by Stephen Darwall, and Climbing the Mountain by Derek Parfit. Darwall’s book explores the “essentially interpersonal” character of moral obligation, investigating the implications of this feature of morality for questions about the authority and normative significance of moral demands. Parfit’s (still-unpublished) manuscript attempts to “develop and combine existing [moral] theories of three kinds: Kantian, contractualist, and consequentialist”; he argues that these three theories, when properly interpreted, converge on a single way of understanding moral requirements. The study of these two books should introduce seminar participants to some of the central questions in moral philosophy, while exposing them systematically to the views of two important contemporary philosophers.