About

Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He has an extensive teaching career, having taught for twenty-four years at the University of Michigan and twelve years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before joining Yale. His academic work focuses on moral philosophy, ethics, and the second-person standpoint in moral theory. Darwall's scholarship includes influential books such as Impartial Reason, The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought', Philosophical Ethics, and Welfare and Rational Care. His more recent works include The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability, Morality, Authority, and Law: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics I, Honor, History, and Relationship: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics II, Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant, and The Heart and Its Attitudes. Additionally, he has edited several anthologies in metaethics and normative ethics, covering topics such as moral discourse, contractarianism, consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Darwall's teaching and research contribute significantly to contemporary discussions in ethical theory and moral philosophy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Law
• Sociology
• Environmental ethics
• History
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Modern Moral Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-10-30

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Stephen Darwall is a moral philosopher who has played a central role in contemporary debates around the foundation of ethics. This book is a sequel to his earlier volume Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant, and like its predecessor it explores the history of the period through its key ethical thinkers. Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – the founding members of the 'continental' tradition – are masterfully examined as they are brought into vivid conversation with both analytic philosophy and the mainstream Anglophone philosophical tradition. The author addresses topics which include the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill; the anti-naturalism of Sidgwick and the British idealists; and Nietzsche's late-century critique of morality. He reveals that all these canonical thinkers – just like their precursors and successors – were wrestling with fundamental and enduring ethical problems, even when they claimed otherwise or were presenting their views in new and challenging terms.

  PublisherDOI

• Love

  2024-03-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 5 is a study of the central attitude of the heart: love. Just as respect is implicit in all reactive attitudes of the will, so also is love implicit in all attitudes of the heart. It has their core feature: opening the heart to another heart in the hope that the other’s heart will be open in response so that they share heartfelt connection. Love will thus be an aspect of all the attitudes of the heart we will discuss, including personal anger. Anger is frequently occasioned by and is a defense against hurt feelings. It is an aggressive heart protection policy. Love is a second-personal attitude of holding, beholding, and upholding. Love and respect are responses to and recognize two different aspects of our intrinsic value. To love someone is to see them as worthy of love. To respect someone, by contrast, is to recognize their dignity.

  PublisherDOI

• Respect and Love in Reparations and Repair for Chattel Slavery and Its Legacy

  2024-03-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 10 illustrates how the distinction between attitudes of the will and attitudes of the heart can inform debates about ethically appropriate responses to chattel slavery and its legacy that generally go under the heading of “reparations.” Although the focus is on chattel slavery in the United States, the general issues extend internationally throughout the history of racial capitalism, colonialism, and its aftermath. The aim is to illustrate the helpfulness of a distinction between “reparations,” on the one hand, and “repair,” the sense that is in play in the kind of heartfelt forgiveness that Baldwin speaks of, on the other. Only love can heal personal wounds. That is poignantly the case with the horrific harms created by chattel slavery and its legacy institutions and practices.

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• Preface

  2024-03-18

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  Extract This is a more personal book than any I have written before, the result of many years of experience, painful and joyful, for others as well as myself. It is a work of philosophy, but one that attempts to bridge the philosophical and the personal in ways I have not tried previously. Philosophy is a head thing; the personal, a heart thing. I have lived much of my life in my head—a lot, I have come to realize, as a refuge from troubles of the heart. My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic, imprisoned in an increasingly confusing and threatening world against which she was defenseless and with which she had little help. I was born in 1946, and she was not diagnosed until 1957, when I was eleven. There was no psychiatric care within a hundred miles of College Station, Texas, where we then lived, so we moved to San Antonio, where my father, an Episcopalian clergyman, took a position at a local church. Within a week of our arrival, my mother was institutionalized, where she remained, on and off, for the rest of her life.1

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• Frontmatter

  Moral Philosophy and Politics · 2024-04-01

  articleOpen access
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• Trust and Hope

  2024-03-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 6 discusses two closely connected attitudes of the heart: trust and hope. What is basic to all forms of trust is trust’s second-personal character, which sets it apart from mere reliance. There is, however, a kind of trust that is distinctively personal. When personal trust of this kind is unfulfilled, we are more likely to use the language of personal disappointment, sadness, and hurt feelings than of blame and moral indignation. This difference between deontic and personal trust is reflected in the contrast between deontic reactive attitudes—attitudes of the will—and attitudes of the heart quite generally. But although we can expect respect, love, and therefore, trust, hope, and other attitudes of the heart are nothing that can be demanded or expected. Hopes that we place in someone differ from any hope that they will do something or other.

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• The Heart and its Attitudes

  2024-03-18 · 23 citations

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  Abstract The book provides the first systematic treatment of attitudes that mediate heartfelt connection: second-personal attitudes of the heart. These are instances of what P. F. Strawson called “reactive attitudes,” but they are much less studied than those—guilt, resentment, and blame—that mediate mutual accountability: second-personal attitudes of the will. Both sets of attitudes are held from a “participant” or second-person standpoint, imply address, and call for reciprocation. But whereas the attitudes that mediate accountability, and therefore deontic morality, implicitly demand respect, second-personal attitudes of the heart invite, and hope for, rather than demand or expect, heartfelt connection. Examples include love, gratitude, trust, faith, hope, and a host of others. Although attitudes of both kinds are inevitably involved in human relationship, deontic attitudes of the will mediate our relations to other persons considered simply as one person among others, which is the fundamental relationship of deontic morality. Attitudes of the heart, by contrast, mediate personal relationship in which we share heartfelt connection. By studying both attitudes of the will and attitudes of the heart, the book is able to provide the first general characterization of reactive attitudes. A reactive attitude is any attitude felt from a second-person stance that implicitly calls for the person who is its object to have a reciprocal attitude in return—whether an attitude of the will or an attitude of the heart.

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• Heart, the Very Idea

  2024-03-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The chapter introduces the topic of heartfelt connection and discusses both why it has been ignored by philosophers and its importance in life and its philosophical relevance. It introduces the Strawsonian structure of “reactive attitudes,” which mediate human relationship from a “participant” (second-person) perspective. It also discusses reactive attitudes’ central features. It argues that the metaphorical character of “heart” is no bar to philosophical investigation, since it can easily be interpreted as a syndrome of emotional vulnerabilities and susceptibilities and, is any case, something everyone recognizes in their own experience. It then introduces each of the chapters to follow along with short summaries.

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• Heartfelt Being with

  2024-03-18

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  Abstract Personal loving relations involve relatings. Their heartfelt quality consists in openings of friends’ and lovers’ hearts in the hope that the other’s will be open to one in return. Heartfelt relating involves not just communication of propositions about feelings, but communication of emotions and feelings themselves, so that through them we are able to feel the other person. Although the communication of feeling need not be in one another’s presence, this is obviously preferable, understanding “presence” sufficiently broadly to include the joy we can hear, for example, in another’s voice over the phone, or the sadness we can see in their eyes on a screen. Chapter 8 investigates what is necessary to be with others in a way that makes one and them emotionally present to one another. What this involves is less spatiotemporal contiguity than mutual openness of hearts.

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• Two Species of Reactive Attitudes

  2024-03-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter discusses the fundamental distinction between attitudes of the will and attitudes of the heart. Whereas the former mediate mutual accountability and presuppose that both parties share a fundamental dignity or second-personal authority that entitles both to respect, the latter aim at heartfelt connection and presuppose that both parties have an intrinsic value of a different kind, that both parties are worthy of love. Dignity, in the relevant sense, is that through which we are entitled to “exac[t] respect,” as Kant puts it. The structures of deontic and nondeontic reactive attitudes are identical. Both must assume that their objects are capable of the relevant attitudes, both toward the other and toward themselves. And both must assume that both parties have a kind of value that makes the attitude that recognizes the value fitting to its object.

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Frequent coauthors

• Thomas Pogge

  136 shared

• Idil Boran

  Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy

  135 shared

• Stephen M. Gardiner

  135 shared

• Nenad Miščević

  135 shared

• Adam Swift

  Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy

  135 shared

• Mathias Risse

  University of Graz

  135 shared

• Stefan Gosepath

  Freie Universität Berlin

  135 shared

• K.E. Meyer

  Baidu (China)

  135 shared