David Gauthier

Breaking Up: An Essay on Secession

Current discussion of the normative issues surrounding secession is both helped and hindered by the existence of but one philosophic treatment of these issues sufficiently systematic and comprehensive to qualify as a theory of secession Allen Buchanans.1 He provides the unique focal point, and so simplifies the task of those who seek to begin from the present state of the art. But in providing the unique focal point, Buchanan complicates the task of those who view, or think they view, secession rather differently than he does. He defends a moral right to secede but a very qualified right, focusing on state-perpetrated injustice, the preservation of group culture and, in extreme cases, the literal survival of group members (152-3). And Buchanan further insists that where preservation of group culture is at stake, Neither the state nor any third party

Artificial Virtues and the Sensible Knave

No action can be requird of us as our duty, unless there be implanted in human nature some actuating passion ormotive, capable of producing the action. This motive cannot be the sense of duty. A sense of duty supposes an antecedent obligation: And where an action is not requird by any natural passion, it cannot be requird by any natural obligation; since it may be omitted without proving any defect or imperfection in the mind and temper, and consequently without any vice. Now tis evident we have no motive leading us to the performance of promises, distinct from a sense of duty. If we thought, that promises had no moral obligation, we never shoud feel any inclination to observe them. ... But as there is naturally no inclination to observe promises, distinct from a sense of their obligation; it follows, that fidelity is no natural virtue, and that promises have no force, antecedent to human conventions.2

Resolute Choice and Rational Deliberation: A Critique and a Defense

Etude des conditions possibles de la deliberation rationnelle dans le cadre du probleme de la decision dynamique, fonde sur le changement des evaluations et des preferences de lagent. Examinant les quatres modes du choix determine chez McClennen (reduction simple, forme normale, consistance dynamique et separabilite), lA. montre que la rationalite du choix determine releve des procedures de la deliberation, et non pas des preferences de lagent

Hobbes: The Laws of Nature

Are Hobbess laws of nature to be understood primarily as theorems of reason, or as commands of God, or as commands of the civil sovereign? Each of these accounts can be given textual support; each identifies a role that the laws may be thought to play. Examining the full range of textual references, discussing the place of the laws of nature in Hobbess argument, and considering how the laws may be known, give strongest support to the first of the three accounts, that the laws are primarily rational precepts and only secondarily civil and divine commands.

Morality, Rational Choice, and Semantic Representation

(1) In his recent paper, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” John Rawls makes use of a footnote to disown what to many readers must have seemed one of the most striking and original underlying ideas of his theory of justice, that it “is a part, perhaps the most significant part, of the theory of rational choice.” That Rawls should issue this disclaimer indicates, at least in my view, that he has a much clearer understanding of his theory, and its relationship to rational choice than he did at the time that he wrote A Theory of Justice . As I note in Morals by Agreement (pp.4–5), Rawls does not show that principles of justice are principles of rational choice. Hence, in appropriating the idea, I can claim diat I am undertaking a pioneering enterprise. No doubt Thomas Hobbes would have undertaken it had the resources of the theory of rational choice been at his disposal, but I do not intend to pursue counterfactuals in a search for historical antecedents. Moral theory as rational choice theory is, I claim, a new venture.

Reason to be moral

Much of Kur t Baier s work in moral theory has been addressed to showing how the conviction that each person has adequate reason to be moral can be defended and a c c o m m o d a t e d with our other deeply held convict ions about morality. And this, it seems to me, is the most important single task that a moral theorist can set himself (or herself, despite Annet te Baier s worrying paper, What do Women Want in a Moral Theory? ) . 2 I propose to look critically at Kur t Baier s a t tempt to defend this conviction. Agreed as we are about its importance and about many of the arguments relevant to its defence, our agreement lapses at crucial points. In trying to show where, in my view, Baier s arguments do not succeed, and in suggesting what alternative arguments might succeed, I can hope to further but not, of course, to conclude a long,standing debate between us.

Le Promeneur Solitaire : Rousseau and the Emergence of the Post-Social Self

1. The portrait and the man – each is unique. “Here is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly from nature and completely true to it.” And this man, “it will be myself…. Myself alone… . I am different.” And yet this unique portrait of this unique man, “may be used as the first comparative work in the study of man, which is certainly yet to be begun.”

Review essay: The roots and roles of normative governance

My thoughts for this book began with a straight piece of philosophical problem-solving...: what the term rational means (p. vii). The terrain here is familiar in memory, mapped by Ethics and Language, and The Language of Morals, before we tired of meanings and analyses of our moral terms and sought something more substantive, A Theory of Justice. Allan Gibbard offers us a return to non-cognitivism, but his mapping is more ambitious, not limited to ethics or morality but covering the entire normative expanse of rationality: [T]o call something rational is [as a first approximation] to express ones acceptance of norms that permit it (p. 7). Gibbard proposes a theory of what rational means. He does not propose a theory of rationality. The reader who comes to Wise Choices, Apt Feelings in search of a substantive account of what is rational will find little directly to satisfy her. Gibbard would, I think, hope that she will learn how better to direct her search, especially in the area of morality. As he says at the end: