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Moral Obligation, Accountability, and Second-Personal Reasons

Stephen Darwall’s aim in The Second-Person Standpoint is to reorient the way we think about moral obligation and accountability. Though he advances on many fronts, we focus on what we take to be the main lines of argument. Darwall begins by discussing second-personal reasons, a sub-class of agent-relative reasons, where the defining feature of such reasons is their connection with accountability. What makes it appropriate for others to hold us accountable for failing to act in a certain way, according to Darwall, is that we have sufficient second-personal reasons for acting in that way. However, he claims, there is also a conceptual connection between moral obligation and accountability, so moral obligation too must be second-personal. We are morally obliged to act in a certain way only if we have sufficient second-personal reasons for so acting. He concludes that accounts of moral obligations that see them as grounded in agent-neutral reasons, and those which hold that they may be overridden by non-moral obligations, are both radically mistaken. We wish to explain why, as we see it, Darwall’s own arguments are inconclusive. For all he says, moral obligations may be grounded in agent-neutral reasons alone and may themselves be overridden by non-moral obligations.