Honor, History, and Relationship: Essays In Second-Personal Ethics Ii - Softcover

One might say that a great philosophical book is measured not only by the compelling force of its arguments but also by the gripping power of the questions it makes possible. Darwall's new work succeeds on both accounts, especially since it gives us the conceptual resources to ask elemental philosophical questions we could not have formulated before. Darwall's work continues to provide a fresh and stimulating perspective on fundamental and familiar philosophical questions. As such, HHR promises to become mandatory reading for anyone wishing to explore the second-personal turn in practical philosophy. (Ariel Zylberman, Ethics)

It's wide-ranging, historically grounded, thoughtful, and humane. In short, it's contemporary moral philosophy at its best. (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

In Honor, History, and Relationship Stephen Darwall explores the idea of a second-personal framework for morality and its foundations, in which we are committed to morality by presuppositions that are inescapable when we relate to others (person to person). He expands on the argument set forth in The Second-Person Standpoint to explore the second-personal framework in three further settings. The first concerns a fundamental difference between the form that respect and the concept of person take in honor cultures, on the one hand, and the shape these assume in morality conceived as equal accountability, on the other. One essay explores this difference directly while others investigate related themes of justice versus retaliation and vengeance for insult and injury to honor, including in the writings of Adam Smith and Nietzsche on ressentiment. A second setting concerns the role of second-personal ideas in the development of a distinctively "modern" moral philosophy, beginning in seventeenth-century Europe. Two essays here discuss the centrality of second-personal notions in two formative modern natural law theorists: Grotius and Pufendorf. And two others concentrate on the role of reciprocal recognition in Kant and Fichte, respectively. A third group of essays treat the second-personal structure of interpersonal relations. There are three essays in this group: one on promising as a second-personal transaction between promiser and promisee, a second on what it is to be with another person, and a third on the role of second-personal standing in personal relationships.