If there exists a right thing to do, why should the internal consistency of persons’ attitudes matter, at all? Acting on one’s best judgment or to taking the means one believes necessary to one’s ends could lead one into incorrect action. Perhaps acting against one’s best judgment or with inconsistent intentions could lead one into right behaviors or away from wrong ones. So why be consistent? Why not just be correct? Why should akrasia matter? Why not just right action? Why should rationality matter? Why not just reasons?

I try in my dissertation to answer these questions through an account of the structure of right action as such. I do not suggest one has reason in every case sufficient to make consistent action always right action. I argue instead acting on one’s best judgment about what is right partially constitutes any instance of right action, at all. Right action, I argue, must be done because it is right, which suggests it must be done out of the attempt to do what is right. Yet one who tries to do what is right forms her best judgment about what is right and tries to act on it. She may fail to do the right thing with consistency. Yet she cannot succeed in doing the right thing without it.

Chapter 1 formulates this account as a response to Niko Kolodny’s critique of theories justifying internal consistency. Kolodny argues all the going theories either (1) entail one should act on one’s beliefs merely because one has them, (2) give implausible reasons as to why one should be consistent, (3) require one to act for the sake of consistency rather than correctness, or else (4) do not explain why one’s beliefs should guide one’s actions, at all. An accurate theory must avoid all these unacceptable results. This account of right action avoids them by suggesting not the sufficiency but the necessity of consistent action to right action. One must form and act on one’s best judgment as a constitutive part of carrying out any particular right action as such.

Chapter 2 argues for the sufficiency of the above account of right action to ordinary uses of the concept by responding to an objection Nomy Arpaly raises against accounts of right action as entailing action on best judgment. She argues no such view can account for the actions of the titular character from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck, being from the antebellum American South, believes he should report his friend Jim to the authorities because Jim recently escaped enslavement. But after their journey down the Mississippi River together, Huck finds he cannot go through with it and instead helps Jim escape. Arpaly claims Huck acts against his best judgment and yet still acts rightly. I argue Huck does act rightly but acts on a non-deliberative form of judgment on which persons appear to act over the vast majority of their lives. Huck sees Jim’s humanity and inchoately knows he cannot turn him in. Persons who “act against their best judgment” as Huck does seem to act rightly where those merely causally overpowered by emotion or desire do not.

Chapter 3 presents two accounts of the Instrumental Principle. Wrong ends do not make it right to take the means one believes necessary to them. So what does one mean in saying, “I don’t think you should be a musician, but if you’re intending to be one, shouldn’t you be practicing?” What is this “should”? I give two accounts. First, persons cannot achieve ends if they do not intend means they believe necessary to achieving them. One must achieve ends intentionally to count as achieving them. But intentionally achieving ends entails intending the means one views as necessary to achieving them. Instances of instrumental inconsistency thus give evidence of one’s general unreliability for right action. Second, actually correct ends seem to count in favor of the means necessary to achieve them. One who believes an end to be correct but not the means she views as necessary to it thus has inconsistent beliefs. Someone trying to do what is right necessarily pursues an accurate view of the facts and act on it. But an inconsistent view cannot be accurate. Instances of instrumental inconsistency thus give evidence a person lacks the intention to do what is right, which right action as such requires.

Chapter 4 attempts to explain the relationship Bernard Williams identifies between right action and integrity. Pure consequentialism views the right action as in every case the action producing the maximally good state of affairs. Williams argues such views of right action take inadequate account of the cost such actions impose on persons’ commitments. For instance, one usually takes it one should look after one’s family even though seeing to the welfare of strangers might produce greater aggregate happiness in the world. Intuitively, Williams argues, one’s integrity, one’s fidelity to one’s commitments, partially determines when one acts rightly and what it is right for one to do. I suggest that under a conception of integrity closer to ordinary language this argument holds not merely intuitively but deductively. Under the above account, forming and trying to act on her best judgment about what is right partially constitutes right action as such. But integrity ordinarily means forming and trying to act on one’s best judgment about what is right. So, on the one hand, acting against one’s best judgment constitutes failed right action in every particular case. On the other hand, action constitutively requiring one not to form or act on one’s best judgment cannot be right action, at all. Right action’s structure rules out pure consequentialism a priori as one of its possible contents. Pure consequentialism cannot give the content of right action inasmuch as right action has the structure it ordinarily seems to have, that is, if one must do the right thing because it is right.

The familiar terrain of Kant's account of the mind involves a two-fold distinction: between the two major faculties of cognition and desire, and between the higher and lower sub-faculties of each. But Kant's account of the mind contains a third major faculty that is missing from this picture--the faculty of feeling of pleasure and displeasure. Roughly, this is the faculty responsible for subjective sensation and feeling/emotion. However, at this point, a tension emerges. Just as the higher faculties of cognition and desire are identified with a function of reason, so, too, is the higher faculty of feeling. But if this is the case, does it mean that reason has or produces its own emotions? And if so, what could these emotions be like? Furthermore, wouldn't they conflict with the dichotomy thought to exist in Kant between reason and emotion (due in part to the metaphysical constraints of his theory)? In my dissertation, I argue that Kant (implicitly) conceives of emotion in functional terms. That is, emotions are evaluative judgments that initiate action. These judgments can manifest themselves in a variety of forms, depending on the objects and principles involved. This turn to a functional conception thus gives Kant the flexibility to account for emotions across a wide spectrum, from the instinctual emotions of non-rational, embodied animals to the purely rational emotions of a non-embodied god. My dissertation first develops the basic functional structure of emotion implicit in Kant's work (found especially in the Lectures on Metaphysics). It then shows the implications this cognitive structure has for understanding several central features of Kant's practical theory, including the nature of animal versus human non-moral motivation, happiness, and finally, the moral feeling of respect.

Many philosophers have explored what it is to commit a moral wrong and how to understand the violation of moral obligations. Many more have written about the nature of blame and agency. But much is left to say about the most common kind of moral wrong, the type of wrong that populates our everyday interactions. These are the wrongs performed by agents who are in the grip of anger or fear. Or who undervalue their obligations. Or who are intoxicated, or impaired, or coerced. When we morally assess wrongs like these, we don't get clean black and white declarations of moral success or failure. We get a lot of muddy gray. We get mitigating circumstances.

It is easy to consider mitigating circumstances rare and exotic - cases that exist in courtrooms and police procedurals. But this is a mistake. Moral mitigation, cases where the circumstances of an agent's moral performance make it appropriate to reduce the amount of blame she deserves for her wrong act, might be the norm and not the exception. And so figuring out how mitigation works will tell us how to get moral assessment right in the real world.

I will argue that mitigating circumstances can best be understood as circumstances that affect the deliberative part of action, and that successes and failures in the component parts of deliberation must be taken into consideration during moral assessment. In Chapter 1, I offer an introduction to the context of the project, discussing the scope and aim of this dissertation. Here I offer a number of preliminary remarks to set up the discussion to follow.

Chapter 2 focuses on the moral assessment process itself. I discuss the nature of the moral assessment process and suggest that approaching the moral assessment of action from the outside in - from the obligations that bind the agent all the way back to the deliberative parts of intention-formation - will offer a number of advantages when assessing action. This method will allow us to make room for a common sense notion of mitigation that includes reduction in blame, and it will also make way for us to draw moral distinctions between actions that differ in their inner-deliberative content and process.

In Chapters 3 and 4, I expand the picture of moral assessment I offered earlier, arguing that mitigating circumstances will turn out to be circumstances that cause or reflect distinctive kinds of performances in the inner-deliberative content and process. I will explore how this approach can handle a number of intuitively mitigating circumstances, such as coercion, adolescence, and intoxication.

And finally, in Chapter 5, I will situate this picture within the larger landscape of moral assessment, orienting this approach to mitigation alongside excuse and justification. I conclude with an appeal to consider this expansion of the moral assessment process as a means to handle complex and nuanced moral cases.

Thinking is something we do, and some of the thinking we do is morally wrong. If we included examples of morally wrong mental action among starting points for philosophical reflection, how would they be explained by our best ethical theories and what might they illuminate about ordinary examples of morally wrong overt action? My project develops the view that some mental activities are genuine practical actions, and I propose that the moral norm for mental practical actions is the standard of their kind: using standards of goodness to make determinations about what to do. The practical activity standard requires practical agents to use valid standards of goodness only. A practical activity which fails to meet this standard cannot be good, I conclude, since it fails to meet the standard of its kind. I illustrate how this standard of practical activity can be used to articulate what makes it is morally wrong to fantasize about murder. To address the practical mechanics of fantasizing about murder, a mental activity that consists in mentally imagining murder for pleasure, I sketch an account of the practical imagination. Since our practical ends are regulative standards determining the goodness of what we do, our practical ends can determine the mental content of our imaginings. I argue that, by imagining murder for the sake of pleasure, the fantasizer uses an invalid standard of goodness and thereby violates the practical activity standard. The fantasizer's use of an pleasure as a standard of goodness is invalid, I argue, because it applies to the ends of whichever practical agent's murder is imagined but incorrectly determines that it would be good because pleasing. I show how this basic argument strategy can be extended to other salient moral phenomena, including morally wrong mental hopes as well as familiar examples of morally wrong overt actions such as making a false promise and killing for profit. I address examples of acting for the wrong reason and sketch a few interesting implications for future research. I suggest that the moral significance of the practical activity standard suggests a friendly reinterpretation of Kant's Humanity Formula as a deliberative constraint against using the standard of practical activity as a mere means. Since the standard of practical activity captures the nature of practical agents as rational, to use it as a mere means is to use the rational nature of a practical agent as a mere means. According to the view that begins to emerge, morality calls for us to deliberate about the ends of other practical agents not only when our activities would do something to them (and hence use them) but also when our activities would do something about them (and hence use their rational nature).

Immanuel Kant argued that morality requires us to act on principles that we can will as universal laws. However, there has always been profound disagreement about how to apply this requirement, and about why this demand should be morally fundamental. This dissertation offers new answers to these questions by developing a deeper understanding of the “practical” principles that Kant wants us to be able to will as universal laws.

My primary thesis is that practical principles state three things: a reason to act, the end or goal that this reason requires us to accomplish, and the means that we must use to achieve that end. Several crucial lines of Kant’s thought require this structure for practical principles, I argue. Primarily: practical principles, as principles for action, must also be causal principles, and Kant’s views on causation require practical principles to have the structure I propose.

I use this structure to answer some venerable problems: first, why can’t we will any principle whatsoever as a universal law, especially if we make each principle unique to each case? Because Kant requires causal relations to be rule-governed, I argue, in a way that prevents practical principles from being unique to each situation.

Next, why isn’t morality satisfied when everyone could follow our principles? Under my interpretation, practical principles say how we are required to act. As rational beings, though, we cannot be required to contradict ourselves. Everyone could contradict themselves in order to follow a principle, but we cannot be required to do so. So I argue that “willing” our principles as universal laws is supposed to capture how principles cannot require us to contradict ourselves.

Last, why must we act on principles that we can will as universal laws? Kant answers: to act that way is to give laws to ourselves, and we must think of ourselves as laws to ourselves. That is autonomy. But if I give a law to myself, couldn’t I release myself from that law, too? I conclude by using my interpretation to explain how laws that we give to ourselves can also impose genuine requirements on us.

Advancements in reproductive technology have expanded the influence that parents can have on their children. Pre-implantation screening and selection, prenatal screening and selective abortion, and fetal gene therapy now make it possible for parents to select features of their children, even before those children are born. Reproductive selection has most frequently been used to select against disabilities. However, procreators have now begun to use reproductive selection to select for disabilities, such as deafness and dwarfism. Though parents are often afforded a special moral permission to determine many aspects of their children’s lives, that permission does not obviously include a permission to select for disabilities in their future children.

I argue for a role-based framework to address the morality of using reproductive selection to select for disabilities. Procreators are not unrelated to their offspring; they are often the prospective parents of their offspring. Insofar as procreators procreate in order to become parents, they assume the role of parent and its subsequent obligations. The parental role has a moral end, namely, the facilitation of the child's future autonomy. Parental obligations are keyed to this end. As prospective parents, procreators are also obligated to facilitate the autonomy of their future children. Procreators are prohibited, then, from selecting traits for their children that would impose obstacles to their children's autonomy. Insofar as a disability is an impediment to autonomy, it is not a trait that procreators have a permission to choose on behalf of their offspring.

Recent advances in assisted reproductive technologies as well as in preconception, preimplantation, and prenatal screening and testing give prospective parents more information and more reproductive options than previous generations had. But, for families with a history of a serious, heritable medical condition, having more options does not necessarily make it easier for prospective parents to know how to do what is best for their children. Testing is available for a number of conditions for which there is no treatment, leaving prospective parents in a position to make a so-called "different-child choice." If they want to have biological children of their own, they can choose to create only a child that will not inherit the condition or to leave it up to chance whether the condition will be passed on to the next generation. In this dissertation, I consider the moral difficulties that prospective parents in this situation face. I analyze several prominent approaches to selection in different-child choices, including the expressive effects approach made by disability rights advocates, the parental beneficence approach, the parental acceptance approach, and the non-identity problem approach. These existing approaches reach starkly divergent conclusions about the permissibility of reproductive selection in different-child choices. I argue that each of these existing approaches fails to capture the full moral complexity of the decisions these prospective parents face. I then offer my own account of the ethics of reproductive selection in different-child choices, arguing that prospective parents should focus on what is best for the child in their deliberations by acting as a proxy decision maker tasked with evaluating the balance of benefits and burdens for a child born into each possible initial situation. Only by carefully evaluating the expected effects of having a particular condition in a particular family's context can the prospective parents make a good decision in a different-child choice situation. The ethics of different-child choices in reproductive selection are deeply context-dependent, and prospective parents should not expect any easy answers in many of these cases.

Moral philosophy frequently treats self and other-regarding reasons as opposed poles in our practical deliberations, where the former are presumed to be motivated by hedonic ends and the latter by morality. I believe this mischaracterizes our deliberative process by neglecting a third motive and portrays us as baser creatures that we actually are. In what follows, I offer another account that I think better explains our life-structuring decisions and sheds light on an otherwise neglected aspect of our character.

I begin by considering a body of hedonic literature that contends that people's happiness is tied to internal set points and that the range and extent of deviations from these points are determined by a variety of internal mechanisms that attenuate our joys and sorrows. As a result, our relative levels of happiness fail to correlate with the goodness or badness of events in our lives, as instead we find ourselves on what has been termed “the hedonic treadmill.”

This raises a question about what rationally motivates many of our self-regarding decisions, if not happiness. I suggest that our awareness of ourselves as objects we care about generates a class of non-hedonic, self-regarding reasons, what I call “self-making reasons,” and that these guide us in life-structuring decisions. I argue that a person’s interest in defining herself in light of her existential circumstance gives her a motive to act in a particular way and develop certain capacities, even if neither will increase her happiness. I try to show how a person’s interest in herself as a thing in the world, and the self-making reasons that follow, form the basis of her character and are appropriately subject to judgment, both from herself and others.

In closing, I argue that self-making reasons are normatively interesting despite exceeding the bounds of traditional, other-regarding morality and they give us reason to consider a more expansive conception of ethics beyond what is required and proscribed.

Many of the things that make for a meaningful human life--the various projects and relationships that make a life worth living--appear to require that we focus a good deal of our attention and resources on ourselves and the few people with whom we have close ties. Yet, the well-being of other people should matter to us even when we have no personal connection with them. And it must be admitted that the special attention we give to what is good for us and our friends often means that other people will be significantly worse off than they would have been had we instead devoted our resources and efforts toward them. How, then, can such self-centeredness be morally justified, and in what form? This is a question of permission. But there is also a question about the variation among our obligations to others. Given that we have obligations to concern ourselves with and promote others' welfare, why should it be the case, as it seems to be, that we have greater obligations in this regard toward our friends than we do toward strangers?

This dissertation addresses these and related questions. I argue, first, that the kind of privileged status we may legitimately assign to our own lives and interests should be understood in terms of what we must assume responsibility for. Each person has a kind of responsibility for his or her own welfare that others do not share. This contrasts with views according to which we are permitted to assign greater weight to our own interests, or see them as providing us with different and stronger reasons for action than the interests of other people.

Second, I present an account of why we are specially responsible for how our own lives go. The reason is that accepting this responsibility is a condition of maintaining the authority to lead one's life in view of what one judges to be of value while also respecting others' right to do the same.

Third, I build on this account to explain the special obligations grounded in friendship. What is required in order to properly respect another person's autonomy, in this sense, will differ, however, depending on whether the other person is a stranger or a friend. In particular, friends have a kind of mutual influence over each other's lives that would be problematic among strangers. In the context of a friendship, however, such mutual influence is compatible with securing the right kind of authoritative connection between each individual's pursuits and his or her own conception of the good. It is this important fact about friendship which, I argue, helps explain why we generally have a greater responsibility for the welfare of our friends than we do for that of strangers.

Religious freedom is often listed among the core freedoms that characterize the liberal state—along with freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of the person. But it may seem that what is valuable about religion, from a liberal point of view, would be sufficiently protected by these other core freedoms. Does religious freedom have a special role to play in a liberal state?

Traditionally, liberal theorists have thought that religious freedom required maintaining separation between the state and religion. But problems arise when separation is applied strictly to every type of religion-state interaction, without attention to the underlying values at stake. This dissertation defends a conception of religious freedom that makes room for cooperation and compromise, with the aim of creating mutually beneficial relationships between religion and the state. Separation is an important component of this picture, but not its guiding principle.

This dissertation discusses two areas in which strict adherence to religion-state separation may lead to problematic outcomes. First, strict adherence to separation lends support to an all-or- nothing approach to religious accommodation. But compromise can often be more valuable for both religious persons and the state, especially when the meaning or purpose of the religious activity is consistent with the purpose of the conflicting law. In such cases, compromise may generate creative solutions to conflicts and may promote mutual understanding and respect between religious persons and their fellow citizens. This compromise-based approach to accommodation is limited, however, by the principle that accommodation should not be used as a form of political protest.

Second, strict adherence to separation supports protecting the autonomy of religious institutions to oversee their internal own affairs. But the state must also protect the rights and interests of the members of religious institutions. As such, the state must ensure that religious institutions are voluntarily associations, whose members have both a right and a genuine opportunity to exit the association. As one example, the state should generally not enforce religious arbitration agreements against members of religious institutions, even when they have voluntarily agreed to them.