The structure of practical rationality
Item
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Title
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The structure of practical rationality
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:11ee5f1cc9fd:10107
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identifier
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10213
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Creator
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Hammer, Carl J.,
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Contributor
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Stefan Bernard Baumrin
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy | action | agency | ethics | metaethics | normativity | obligation
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Abstract
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Many pressing metaethical problems can be conceived as a need for placing a kind of meaningful and objective morality into an integrated and explanatory worldview, and this requires a constructive explanation of moral obligation. There are two major problems for giving such an explanation. On the one hand, moral obligations must be grounded in a general scheme of practical normativity; otherwise, they can have no authority. On the other hand, moral obligations must arise from social relations; otherwise, they lose their character as demands that a moral community has the authority to enforce.;To explain practical normativity in general, I implement and refine a certain kind of explanatory strategy for normativity, which has been developed by J. David Velleman and Christine Korsgaard -- constitutivism . To use this strategy, agency and action are conceptually analyzed in terms of a constitutive aim and it is argued that this aim has supreme authority for all who qualify as agents in this technical sense. I argue that a rational agent must aim at systematization of the agent's commitments, and that this aim has the authority to determine correct decision-making for the agent.;To show how this can be worked into a theory of moral obligation with its special social character, I argue first for Stephen Darwall's conception of moral obligations as arising from second-personal accountability relations. Then I argue that having a commitment to participation in the moral community -- the social group of individuals who jointly subscribe to mutual accountability -- is a plausible condition of human nature (what most people are like). Further, it is also plausible, I argue, that for most people this commitment has an authoritative systematic position within one's scheme of commitments. Moral obligations arise directly from the accountability relations within the moral community, and so the authority of one's commitment to the moral community translates into the authority of moral obligations for that individual.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Philosophy
