Moral Reason OXFORD PHILOSOPHICAL MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee ANITA AVRAMIDES R. S. CRISP WILLIAM CHILD ANTONY EAGLE STEPHEN MULHALL OTHER TITLES IN THIS SERIES INCLUDE Nietzsche and Metaphysics Peter Poellner Understanding Pictures Dominic Lopes Things That Happen Because They Should: A Teleological Approach to Action Rowland Stout The Ontology of Mind: Events, Processes, and States Helen Steward Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics Mathieu Marion Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian Philosophy Jonardon Ganeri Hegel’s Idea of Freedom Alan Patten Metaphor and Moral Experience A. E. Denham Kant’s Empirical Realism Paul Abela Against Equality of Opportunity Matt Cavanagh The Grounds of Ethical Judgement: New Transcendental Arguments in Moral Philosophy Christian Illies Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy James A. Harris Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry George E. Karamanolis Aquinas on Friendship Daniel Schwartz The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle Hendrik Lorenz Moral Reason Julia Markovits 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Julia Markovits 2014 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. 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For Inga and Dick Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce previ- ously published material: • Palgrave MacMillan for permission to reprint “Internal Reasons and the Motivating Intuition,” first published in New Waves in Metaethics (edited by Michael Brady) in 2011, which appears here as §2.1-3.1, in slightly amended form; • Oxford University Press for permission to reprint significant portions of “Why Be An Internalist About Reasons?,” first pub- lished in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 6 (edited by Russ Shafer-Landau) in 2011, which appear here as §3.2-3.5 in slightly amended form. This book has been many years in the making. It began as a masters’ thesis, written during my time as a B.Phil student at Oxford, which then formed the core of my doctoral dissertation, also completed at Oxford. During that time I benefitted from the generous financial support of a number of institutions. The Philosophy Faculty and Somerville College, Oxford provided me with a graduate scholar- ship, which, in conjunction with grants from the Overseas Research Studentship Award Scheme and the Oxford University Clarendon Fund Bursaries, supported my first three years of study. Christ Church, Oxford, funded my last two years of research by providing me with a Senior Scholarship. I look back on my time as a graduate student at Oxford with great fondness, and I owe all of these institutions heartfelt thanks. After completing my doctorate, I was lucky enough to receive a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows. The fellowship provided me with a rare luxury for a post-doctoral philosopher: three years of uninterrupted research time. This meant I had time to begin reworking my dissertation project into a book; but also, and just as viii Acknowledgements crucially, it meant I had time, for a while, to ignore it completely and think about new topics. By the time I returned to the manuscript in the second half of my fellowship, I was able to see it with the clearer sight afforded by distance. In that time and in the years since, with the bene- fit of the supportive philosophical community at MIT, I have rewritten much of it entirely. But the basic outlines of the project and the moti- vating thoughts behind it remain the same. Two people in particular helped me to write this book. The first is my doctoral thesis advisor Derek Parfit. I would not have thought it possible for someone to be so generous in his encouragement of a pro- ject built on premises so at odds with his own philosophical convic- tions. The defense of a philosophical position can only benefit from repeated collisions with the most forceful and persuasive arguments for the opposite view. I hope some such benefit will be evident in this book, and that I have managed at least to address, if not allay, some of Parfit’s worries about internalism. That I share many of those doubts will be readily evident to the reader. So too, I hope, will be the per- vasive influence of Parfit’s thought throughout the book, despite the distance between the conclusions for which I argue and his own. Our philosophical instincts are, I think, not so far apart as those conclu- sions make them seem. Just as indispensable to my completion of this book has been the help I have received, in a less formal capacity, from Stephen Kearns. He has read and talked through with me every argument in it. Many of the ideas developed in the book began as conversations with him, dur- ing our time as graduate students together at Oxford. I was quite con- cerned, when I left Oxford, about how I would learn to do philosophy without him. I needn’t have worried. Skype does wonders for expand- ing the reach of philosophical conversations, and Stephen’s advice has been as crucial to the final formulation of the ideas in this book as it was to their origination. I consider myself extremely lucky to have him as a long-distance sounding board. In addition to these two, a number of people gave me very generous and helpful comments, either in writing or in person, on large parts of the manuscript at various stages of development. For such help I owe Acknowledgements ix thanks to Ruth Chang, Roger Crisp, Kate Manne, Rebecca Markovits, Adrian Moore, Philip Stratton-Lake, and Kurt Sylvan. I have also ben- efitted greatly from numerous conversations about this work, in set- tings both formal and informal, over the years. Unfortunately, I won’t be able now to recall all the people who have helped me in this way, but the list includes at least Robert Adams, Brian Ball, Terence Cuneo, Stephen Darwall, Jamie Dreier, David Enoch, Caspar Hare, Niko Kolodny, Rae Langton, Ofra Magidor, Graham Oddie, Michael Smith, Daniel Star, Nicholas Sturgeon, Mark van Roojen, and R. Jay Wallace. I’ve had opportunities to present some of the work represented in the book to audiences at Berkeley, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, MIT, NYU-Abu Dhabi, Oxford, Rice, Rutgers, UC-Santa Barbara, the University of British Columbia, the University of Melbourne, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Oslo’s Center for the Study of Mind in Nature, the University of Texas-Austin, and the Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop. I know that many of the suggestions and concerns raised by audience members in those talks have made their way directly into the book. The same is true of comments made by the excellent graduate students at MIT, from whom I have been for- tunate to learn. Though many of these people no doubt deserve to be acknowledged by name, my porous memory forces me to settle instead for this general thanks. For thoughtful help in preparing the index, much better than I could have done myself, and for other sound suggestions, I thank Brendan Dill. Thanks also go to Peter Momtchiloff, my editor, and the staff at OUP, for their advice, patience, and support, as well as to an anony- mous reader for OUP, whose very helpful comments on the initial draft of the book revealed an eye that is at once generous and critical— in other words, just what any author would hope to find in a referee. And I am more grateful than I can say to Sally Haslanger, whose advice and reassurance have helped me to finish this book, and helped me in so many other ways as well. I have said that this book has been many years in the making. In fact, the earliest seed of the project was a term paper I wrote when I was a Yale undergraduate for a class on Kant’s ethics taught by Allen Wood. x Acknowledgements He introduced me to a very likeable Immanuel Kant, in whose think- ing the value of rational nature as an end in itself plays the central role. I am grateful for the introduction. A final word of thanks goes to my family: Rebecca, Benjamin, Stefanie, and Daniel (and their families), and especially to my par- ents, Inga and Dick, and my partner, Jeff Moses: without their good will, steadfast support, skills in crisis management, and stubborn faith in my abilities, any undertaking would be a great deal more difficult than it is.