Me, You, Us: Essays - Hardcover

The eleven essays in this collection (three previously unpublished) cover a vast swath of territory including normative ethics, metaethics, political philosophy, moral responsibility, meta-philosophy, and even a light-hearted contribution to professional ethics... I note that the final essay, "Global Norming," is one of the funniest things I have read of late. I read this on the airplane and literally laughed out loud multiple times. But behind the humour is a serious commentary on a dilemma that we all face as teachers and letter-writers, that of balancing the duty of veracity with our obligation to place our students. It should be required reading for anyone whose job description includes writing letters of recommendation. (Evan Tiffany, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

The essays in Me, You, Us address a range of issues in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and moral psychology, but are unified by their starkly individualistic view of the moral subject. That view regards persons as permanently separated from others by the impenetrability of their subjectivities, and hence as the sole ultimate bearers of both interests and responsibility. Because they are organized around a strong form of moral individualism, the essays challenge recent tendencies to conceptualize normative issues in terms of relationships, collectivities, and social meanings.

Of the twelve essays in the collection, the ones on ethics and metaethics deal with questions about the nature of moral standing, the basis of our moral equality, and the justification of the common practice of assigning greater weight to one's own interests than to the interests of others. The essays in political philosophy discuss both the ways in which the wider society does and does not penetrate the individual self and the recent influential attempt to redirect our thinking about justice from the distribution of goods to the relations of domination and subordination that obtain among individuals. The essays in moral psychology criticize some relational accounts of responsibility and blame, and address the complicated relation between what a person knows and what he is responsible and blameworthy for. Three of the collection's essays have not been previously published.