You Owe Me a Make‐Up: Second Thoughts on the Second Person

In many ways, Stephen Darwall's recent book, The Heart and its Attitudes, stands perfectly well on its own. 1 It is, to use Darwall's own preferred terminology, a heartfelt work exploring the structure of what he dubs heart-to-heart second-personal encounters.Darwall describes himself as an "analytic moral philosopher," and there is some fairly abstract ethical and moral-psychological theorising here, but this is also a highly personal book.The opening and closing pages include reflections on Darwall's own relationship to his mother, who, we learn in the Preface, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was a child.Two of the chapters are clearly the products of long and painful reflection on the experience of growing up as a white male in a deeply racist America.But while it stands on its own, this new book is also very much a continuation; it is written as a kind of completion of, and in part as a corrective to, Darwall's influential 2006 book, The Second-Person Standpoint. 2 Both works are in turn deeply indebted to Peter Strawson's landmark British Academy Lecture, "Freedom and Resentment" (Strawson 1962), and, in part by way of Strawson, to Kant.In what follows, one of my aims will be to listen for the Kantian tenor in Darwall's thinking:in his account of the second-person standpoint and its transcendental presuppositions; in his commitment to the principle that 'ought' implies 'can'; in the binaries (what Hegel described as Verstand) that structure his analysis and serve to demarcate frontiers of intelligibility and unintelligibility in ethics.One thread I trace concerns Darwall's evolving views about what he calls "second-person competence" and its consequences for inclusion in the moral community.But one of the many merits of Darwall's book is the way that it is anchored in personal experience, so before turning to its contents, I propose to do a little anchoring of my own. | PARENTING LESSONS FROM MEATHEADIn 1998, the American actor and director, Rob Reiner, took a foray into electoral politics.3 Reiner was famous for his role as Archie Bunker's hippie son-in-law in the ground-breaking 1970s sitcom, All in the Family.Reiner played Michael, the cultural counterweight to his father-in-law's bigotry, racism and sexism.