Collective Harm Cases pervade the modern world. In these cases, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual seems to make a difference. For example, while climate change is caused by millions of people acting in certain ways (driving in cars, flying in planes, using coal-generated electricity, etc.), it seems that no individual such act will make a difference. Similarly, while the large-scale consumer patterns of wealthy nations can affect the lives of people in poorer nations, it is hard to believe that any individual purchase will make a difference for the worse. In cases of this sort, if it is true that no individual act will make a difference, it is unclear how we can say that anyone ought, or even has reason, to act otherwise. But if we cannot, this would be very troubling. Morality would be powerless in a wide array of cases in which it should have force. This is the Problem of Collective Harm.

I argue that the key to solving the Problem of Collective Harm is to reject a standard, intuitive assumption that underlies it. The assumption is that if an act cannot make a difference with respect to an outcome, then it cannot play a morally significant, non-superfluous causal role in bringing that outcome about. Or, to put it another way, we must reject the assumption that helping to bring about an outcome requires making a difference to it. This assumption is highly natural, but I argue that it is mistaken and that once we see that it is mistaken, the central puzzle of the Problem of Collective Harm is resolved.

Chapter 1 is devoted to setting out the problem and how I will approach it. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss a range of proposed solutions that have been put forth by others. The upshot of the critique of these views will be that we cannot solve the Problem of Collective Harm unless we can reject the assumption that helping requires making a difference. In Chapter 4, I turn to my positive proposal. There I give an account of what is required for an act to help to bring about an outcome, where this does not require being able to make a difference. I use this account to explain our reasons for action in Collective Harm Cases, and I give an error theory that explains why the standard assumption seems right, even though it is not. In Chapter 5, I highlight some noteworthy features of my proposal and some important questions about it that still need to be addressed.

We value many things for their historical significance--for instance, the Parthenon, Gettysburg, the redwood forests, and the tea ceremony. While they may also be beautiful, educational, or useful, we often value them simply in virtue of their historical properties. This mode of valuation carries with it a suite of common assumptions: what we value for its history is irreplaceable, it demands preservation, and we should value it only if we have a personal stake in its history. My dissertation interrogates these seemingly intuitive commitments, and explores the moral, evaluative, and political consequences of rethinking them. I develop an account of the norms governing our interactions with historically valuable objects and places, yielding an improved understanding of the values latent in such diverse examples as heirlooms, relationships, artworks, artifacts, and historic sites. It also, I argue, sheds light on other important sources of value, including persons and the natural environment.

It is often thought that things worth valuing for their historical properties are necessarily irreplaceable, and that this fact makes a defining contribution to their distinctive value. For example, no candidate substitute can be valuable in the same way as my father's ring. Against this widespread view, I argue that a plausible understanding of historical significance entails that many things we value for their histories are not irreplaceable after all. What makes historically significant things worth valuing is not their irreplaceability, but rather the connection with the past that they afford.

This raises the difficult question of how we can best realize a connection with the past. I argue that historical value, like value in general, fundamentally involves reasons to engage appropriately with valuable things: that is, to respond to them in a manner sensitive to the specific ways in which they are valuable, for instance, by viewing a painting, playing a sport, or savoring a fine meal. This contrasts with the views of many philosophers, who believe that the value of objects fundamentally involves reasons to preserve them. As I argue, reasons for preservation are subordinate to and explained by reasons for engagement--there is no reason to preserve even the Mona Lisa if no one can have the opportunity to engage with it. Recognizing the centrality of engagement in evaluative theory and practice has extensive implications, both in historical cases and beyond.

Consider the distinction between personal and impersonal value. It is natural to think that some objects (such as family heirlooms) have merely personal value, whereas others (such as the pyramids or the Grand Canyon) have value for anyone. But how exactly are we to understand this distinction? Traditional accounts suggest that things are impersonally valuable if they would be valued from a suitably "detached" perspective. But I show that this criterion does not reliably identify things of impersonal value. On the alternative framework I propose, an object's value is impersonal if and only if it is appropriate (and therefore evaluatively permissible) for anyone to engage with it. Only a few people have reason to engage with a family heirloom, whereas the pyramids are candidates for universal engagement. Moreover, this account leaves open the possibility that the reasons that each individual has to value the pyramids can vary with that individual's particular history, interests, and capacities, unlike the shapeless "agent-neutral" reasons of the traditional view.

Finally, I argue that the historical mode of valuation is often properly understood as a kind of aesthetic valuing. While many twentieth century philosophers have acknowledged the importance of art historical properties to aesthetic evaluation, I distinguish between art historical properties and the more general historically significant properties that are found both within and beyond the artworld. I then argue that these historical properties can be accommodated on a number of influential accounts of aesthetic value, and indeed, that they comprise an important dimension in aesthetic experience. This helps cement the extension of aesthetic inquiry beyond the artworld, and articulates a familiar yet surprising way in which we engage with the past.

Which aspects of our psychology are most central to explaining our intentional actions, and how should we conceive of them in light of their abilities to play those explanatory roles? These are key questions in moral psychology, and my dissertation tries to answer them, or at least to provide a beginning. As with much else in philosophy, the basic contours of this debate first came to us in Plato. Though I am not primarily concerned with the historical details, the initial argument of the dissertation and its distinctive approach reflect these Platonic origins in an interesting way.

In Plato’s Protagoras, he presents Socrates as having an intellectualist moral psychology; that is, as claiming that all intentional action is motivated by a belief about what is best. This leads him to argue against the possibility of weakness of will. Plato himself later rejected this view, most notably in the Republic. There he argued that properly accounting for psychological conflict required dividing the soul into three “parts” - rational, spirited, and appetitive. I argue for what can be seen as a contemporary analogue of this later Platonic view; in particular, I argue that making sense of important aspects of our agency requires thinking of ourselves as having three distinct motivational capacities, which I identify as reason, desire, and the will.

I begin by arguing that we can only act akratically, that is, against our judgment about what we ought to do, if there is a way to act for a reason besides our faculty of reason. This is because in such cases we have already formed a judgment about what we have most reason to do, and there is nothing besides this that can plausibly be attributed to an act of reasoning. And yet we do act akratically, and when we do so we act on the “weaker reason”. So there must be some other way to act for a reason than through reason. An obvious suggestion is that we act in such cases through desire. However, once we introduce this division between reason and desire, I argue that we will need a third, which I call the will - a capacity to consciously decide to act a certain way when reason and desire are insufficient or in conflict.

Though the appeal to desire in the initial argument in some ways seems obvious, to speak of desire, especially as a motivational capacity alongside reason, is to be embroiled in controversies that have dominated philosophical thinking about action since the early modern period. So I dedicate three chapters to defending the approach to desire appealed to by my tripartite theory. In the first, I argue against the “Humean” dispositionalist account of desire in favor of an evaluative conception. In the second, I argue that most recent evaluative accounts either fail to show how desire is really evaluative or else are overly intellectualized. In the third, I argue that we should think of desire as a form of responsiveness to apparent reasons, and show how this fits with both animal as well as human desire.

The last part of the tripartite view to be discussed is the will, which I introduce by way of a discussion of intention. I start by arguing that intention is a type of commitment to action that cannot be reduced to beliefs or desires, though in many cases beliefs and desires lead directly to intentions. Once we have this distinction between beliefs and desires and intentions, we can say more explicitly what the will is - it is a capacity to decide, where that involves the deliberate act of forming an intention. The basic claim of the tripartite view, that there are three distinct sources of motivation, can now be put in terms of intention, i.e., as saying that there are three distinct routes to an intention - evaluative judgment (a conclusion of practical reasoning), desire, and decision.

In the final chapter, I briefly apply the view to the problem of identification, an issue in moral psychology which might initially seem to be particularly difficult to account for on the tripartite view. On the contrary, I argue that the tripartite view has certain advantages over other approaches, and sketching what I call the character view of identification allows me both to review the basic shape of the tripartite view and demonstrate once more its wide appeal.

This dissertation is a study in philosophical ethics organized around Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (TTL). I use the novel as a testing ground for the concepts and claims of Aristotelian ethics. TTL, I argue, helps illustrate the power and plausibility of the core ideas in the Aristotelian tradition, but the novel also exposes some of this tradition’s limits. In particular, I contend that TTL bears out the following Aristotelian views: that the concept of character is grounded in distinctively ethical concerns; that a person’s perceptual orientation to the world is a core element of their character; that a person’s actions are partly explained by their character; that a person’s character is distinct from their self-conception; and that character is formed and maintained through processes of habituation. However, I argue, TTL casts doubt on the traditional thesis, often called the ‘unity of virtue’, that a person cannot have any one virtue of character without having them all.

In chapter 1, I discuss the minute stylistic choices that allow Woolf to capture the nature of a point of view and the ethical significance of clashes between points of view. I draw attention, first, to the way in which Woolf’s prose realistically depicts the psychology of the mundane moment, particularly the way in which the moment is charged both by the subject’s history and by their anticipation of the future. Then I turn to perhaps the most peculiar feature of TTL, namely its narrative form: the narrator moves fluidly, and sometimes rapidly, through different characters’ perspectives, while still retaining an independent voice. (The characters themselves are not narrating.) I argue that this form of narration is designed to make the reader understand the stakes, and feel the drama, of the engagement between perspectives that profoundly differ. The meeting of different perspectives is a distinctive and basic condition of ethical life; thus, I suggest, TTL can be understood as a work organized around ethical concerns. In the remainder of the chapter, I further substantiate the connection between TTL’s narrative style and its ethical purpose. I try to articulate more precisely the sense in which Woolf’s narration brings us within her characters’ perspectives. TTL’s narrative style is often called ‘stream of consciousness’, and I argue that this is apt, although we have to make some significant qualifications. Woolf’s narrative form draws attention to the distinctive challenges that we face in ongoing relationships, especially with those whom we share a home with. In the context of ongoing relationships, I suggest, we find an important place for the concept of character. I conclude the chapter by noting the close connection between character (in the colloquial sense) and point of view.

In chapter 2, I argue that there is an organic link between Aristotelian ethics and the core themes of TTL. That is not only because Woolf’s depictions of character are realistic and richly detailed—although that is true—but also because her characters themselves think a great deal about each other’s characters. In particular, I draw attention to Lily and Bankes’s candid conversation about Mr. Ramsay, which prompts Lily to ask (silently, to herself), “How did one judge people, think of them?” I argue that the subject of Lily and Bankes’s conversation, Mr. Ramsay’s character, is an instance of the phenomenon that ethicists in the Aristotelian tradition have tried to help us understand. I briefly survey some of the main features of the Aristotelian conception of character. I raise the question: what distinguishes Aristotelianism from its rival theories in contemporary ethics (consequentialism, contractualism, and Kantianism)? I argue that the distinguishing feature of Aristotelian ethics is not its interest in character per se, but rather its conception of how a person’s character explains the things they do. Aristotelian ethicists think that a person’s character encompasses not just their ways of reasoning about how to act (i.e. practical deliberation), but also their tendencies of perception, thought, and feeling. Therefore, the Aristotelian view readily accepts that a person’s character is independent of their self-conception, and particularly their self-conscious reasons for doing the things they do. (In the course of this argument, I rely on illustrations from TTL.) I conclude the chapter by returning to Lily and Bankes’s conversation. I suggest that Woolf depicts Lily having a moment of insight about what it means, and what difference it makes, to recognize someone (particularly Mr. Ramsay) as the whole person they are. I outline four different ways of understanding her insight, in general terms, which I return to at length in chapter 4.

Chapter 3 is a sustained study of Mrs. Ramsay’s character, consisting in close readings of many scenes featuring her. This study is motivated by two purposes. First, it is meant to help substantiate the idea of the ‘whole person’—we will try to understand how the different sides, or parts, of Mrs. Ramsay are integrated into a single whole. Second, this study serves to illustrate the general Aristotelian conception of character by bringing it to bear on a particular, vividly and realistically rendered, subject.

The first part of the chapter is about Mrs. Ramsay’s life’s work as a homemaker, since her character has been formed around that project. Her overarching aim is to unify her household, including family and guests. Her keen perception of others’ characters is, I suggest, part of what enables her to do this work so well. Furthermore, I argue, much of her labor consists in cultivating opportunities for shared perception among the members of the household.

In the second part of the chapter, we directly confront the fact that Mrs. Ramsay’s orientation as a caregiver, and her conception of herself, are rooted in traditional gender ideology. I draw attention to moments at which her regressive thinking about gender leads her to misunderstand and mistreat people—to push girls and women into marriage; to coddle men, particularly her husband; to be unkind to herself. These tendencies, I suggest, are parts of her character. At the same time, though, Woolf is careful not to treat these as ‘fixed’ traits; Mrs. Ramsay clearly has enough critical distance from herself to recognize that something is awry. She still has the capacity for growth. However, Woolf shows how her relationship with her husband holds her back—and him too, in fact. I argue that character-centric criticism points in the wrong direction here, since the ethical problem is essentially in their relationship, not their characters considered independently.

In the last part of the chapter, I discuss Mrs. Ramsay’s reflections on the happiness she has found in her life. These reflections take place in quiet solitude, where she becomes a “wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” Ultimately, feeling “waves of pure delight,” she recognizes that she “had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness.” Woolf contrasts this “core of darkness” with her constitution as a social being—that is, precisely, her character. I argue that this passage illustrates why it is wrong to identify Mrs. Ramsay, considered as a whole person, with her character. I then contend that Mrs. Ramsay’s happiness, as Woolf depicts it, is not a subjective feeling, but rather a quality of the common life she has taken part in: the happiness she has known is not hers alone. Woolf does want us to recognize that her happiness is grounded in her character, since the Ramsays’ common life has been created and sustained by her caring labor. (We connect this to the canonical Aristotelian claim that happiness consists in the active exercise of good character.) At the same time, however, Woolf emphasizes that Mrs. Ramsay can feel this happiness because of an aspect of her that lies beyond her character: her capacity to become the “wedge-shaped core of darkness.”

In chapter 4, we return to the general questions raised at the end of chapter 2. What does it mean to recognize someone as a whole person, and why does that matter? Drawing on our study of Mrs. Ramsay, we develop an idea about character that Woolf illustrates powerfully in TTL: that a person’s good and excellent qualities (or, if you prefer, the things we like about them) and their flaws (or the qualities we find difficult) are not entirely distinct; they are of a piece with each other. Given that character is holistic in this way, I argue, we have good reason to reject the canonical Aristotelian thesis (the ‘unity of virtue’) that a person cannot have any one virtue of character without having the rest of them. (The idea, in slogan form, is that virtue is one thing.) My argument proceeds by way of a detailed discussion of the conditions in which we could realistically expect growth in Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay. I argue that substantial growth for either of them would necessarily involve a process of undoing: breaking old habits, reckoning with repressed emotions, and learning not to depend on familiar coping mechanisms. If that is true, I argue, then it is unreasonable to expect growth to result in their becoming more perfect (i.e. virtuous) in every way. I contend that, through Lily and James, Woolf draws attention to the challenge of staying open to the growth of loved ones, while still retaining a healthy sense of realism about that process.

There are many ways of getting a person to do something without using or threatening physical force. A sergeant can command a private to clean the latrine; a parent can ask her teenage son to babysit his little brother; and a homeless person on the street can beg you for change. My aim in this dissertation is explain the normativity of these various forms of address and identify the similarities (along with the differences) amongst them. The guiding thought that structures my proposed accounts is that the values of these different forms of address depend on how they contribute to (or detract from) the values inherent in our interpersonal relationships.

Chapter One poses three questions about the normativity of requesting: (1) What kind of speech-act is performed in making a request?, (2) How demanding are our reasons to grant requests?, and (3) What explains why we ever have reasons to grant requests? In response to (1), I claim that requesting involves an attempted exercise of a normative power, which is an ability to intentionally effect a normative change by communicating the intention to do so. In response to (2), I argue that requests generate “weakish” obligations that implicate the requester and the requestee in relations of interpersonal accountability while still affording the requestee significant discretion about whether to comply. Request-based reasons are thereby distinguished from command-based ones which afford their targets very little deliberative discretion. In response to (3), I argue that we possess the power to request because of the valuable role in plays in conducting our interpersonal relationships (e.g. friendship) on terms that realize important interests we have in autonomy, equality, and recognition, interests that are constitutively linked to the value of such relationships.

Chapter Two takes up the question of whether requests can ever be wrongful. Now many requests don’t raise any normative concerns even if granting them would be burdensome (e.g. your shy friend asking you to go to a boring party so she’ll have someone to talk to). But things seem different in other cases. If a man asks his female subordinate for a backrub in the workplace, something seems normatively problematic regardless of whether he truthfully notes that she’s free to decline. I argue that some requests, like this one, wrong their requestees even though they do not harm them. The proposed explanation is that, in making such a request, the requester expresses a lack of due consideration or regard for the significant interests of the requestee. The request itself, qua communicative act, thereby constitutes a form of disrespectful treatment that the requestee has reason to object to and which implicates them in a regrettable relationship of inferiority.Chapter Three turns to the phenomenon of begging and poses two questions about this social practice: (1) What is it about begging that makes it inherently demeaning, as it seems to be?, and (2) How can begging motivate the person it addresses? In response to (1), I argue that begging constitutively involves relating to another person as an inferior, rather than equal, as a means of motivation. This gives the act a kind of expressive badness that the beggar has reason to regret even if they have all-things-considered reason to beg for aid (say because that’s the only way of addressing their terrible condition). Several different cases of begging are considered in provided a normative explanation of the practice that reflects the fact that it is unified in some ways and protean in others. In response to (2), I propose four different but mutually consistent ways in which begging can motivate its target: (i) via benevolence, (ii) via flattery, (iii) via vicarious embarrassment, and (iv) via emotional manipulation.

Chapter Four takes up the classic problem of political obligation (“PPO”) which we may provisionally characterize as the philosophical challenge of explaining whether there’s a moral duty to obey the law as such. In the first part of the chapter, I introduce two forms of skepticism that question PPO’s philosophical significance. The first form denies that the existence of political obligations would make a significant practical difference for what agents have reason to do while the second form denies that political obligations are important for addressing potential complaints that individuals have against the state’s activities. In the second part of the chapter, I propose an associative account of political obligations that purports to justify PPO’s significance in the face of both forms of skepticism. On this view, respect for the law constitutes a valuable form of recognition, and the individual members of a polity, construed as free and equal moral persons, owe this form of recognition to one another. But having respect for the law, which ultimately amounts to having respect for one’s fellow citizens, is nothing more or less than having political obligations. PPO is then significant not because it helps explain whether we have reasons to do what the law dictates or whether a complaint against the state can be met, but rather because political obligation represents a rather demanding political ideal which is a core element of a fully robust form of justice.

The dissertation concludes with a brief appendix on the normative grounds of parental authority. I consider two different “child-based” models and argue that they entail either (1) that the relation between being a parent and having parental authority is implausibly weak and accidental, or (2) implausible conclusions about the kinds of accountability relations that are associated with successful exercises of parental authority. I suggest that a “relationship-based model” can avoid these two worries by basing parental authority in two importantly related sets of interests: (i) those that parents have in shaping and nurturing their own child’s development in ways that reflect their own reasonable conceptions of what’s valuable in life, and (ii) those that children have in their relationship being shaped in this way by their parents. These two sets of interests jointly constitute a core element of what makes the parent-child relationship deeply valuable in the first place and what makes parenting, as it seems to many, one of the most valuable things one can do in life.

I defend the view that we act “under the guise of the good.” More specifically, I argue that an intention to do something is a belief that one ought to do it. I show how conflicts in intention and belief, as well as more complex impairments in these states, account for the central problem cases: akrasia in belief and intention, apparently unintelligible choices, and lack of motivation or accidie.

Extremism about Demands is the view that morality is significantly more demanding than prevailing common-sense morality acknowledges. This view is not widely held, despite the powerful advocacy on its behalf by philosophers such as Peter Singer, Shelly Kagan, Peter Unger, and G.A. Cohen. Most philosophers have remained attracted to some version of Moderation about Demands, which holds that the behavior of typical well-off people is permissible, including the ways that such people tend to employ their economic and other resources. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that proponents of Extremism have not taken sufficiently seriously the central convictions that motivate the Moderate view.

This dissertation offers an improved defense of Extremism about Demands. At its center is an argument that appeals dialectically to requirements of justice that Moderates themselves already implicitly accept. Specifically, I claim that any plausible set of Moderate moral principles will, when applied to a world like ours, yield demands on typical well-off people that far exceed the demands of common-sense morality.

My argument has two cruxes. The first is the idea that our concern for justice is at least partially grounded in a concern for individuals’ interests, broadly construed. The other is a principle that I call Injustice entails Obligations, which says that we are collectively subject to requirements of justice that, if fully complied with, would ensure the transition from current injustice to a just state of affairs. Any view that is compatible with both the interest-based view of (part of) our concern for justice and Injustice entails Obligations will, I argue, require sacrifices from typical well-off people that substantially exceed what prevailing common-sense morality requires of them.

Moderates typically emphasize the idea that each person has an important interest in pursuing the projects, plans, relationships, and commitments that are most important to her. But they also believe that acceptable Moderate principles will properly balance this idea with the idea that from a properly impartial perspective everyone, and everyone's interests, are equally morally important. Because Moderates accept the latter idea, they are already committed to thinking that in a just world, everyone would have a sufficient minimum share of society’s resources. I argue that even if we limit our focus to distributive justice in a single society such as the United States, and even if we assume that distributive justice requires only a sufficient minimum, the extent to which the status quo must be transformed in order for justice to be achieved is still too great to be compatible with Moderate demands on typical well-off people.

There are a number of ways to try to argue that Moderate principles and Injustice entails Obligations are compatible with Moderation about Demands. For instance, it might be argued that all or nearly all of the demands to sacrifice in order to promote justice can be assigned to the super-rich, rather than to typical well-off people. Or it might be argued that the sacrifices of a single well-off person cannot be required because they amount to a mere “drop in the bucket” relative to what needs to be done in order to fully achieve justice. I show that such arguments fail.

The argument that I consider in greatest detail derives from John Rawls’s view that the principles of justice apply to the institutions of the “basic structure of society,” and do not apply directly to the conduct of individuals. If this “Institutionalism” is right, then it cannot be the case that individuals are obligated to promote justice directly in the way that I suggest they are. Furthermore, it might seem that a view that assigns all of the burdens of promoting justice to the basic structure satisfies the imperative to transition from injustice to justice, since if the relevant institutions were to begin doing everything that the Rawlsian view says they ought to be doing, the requirements of justice would be met. I argue, however, that there is no understanding of Institutionalism on which it is itself consistent with the following desiderata: Moderate principles, and the associated interest-based view of (part of) the ground of our concern for justice; Injustice entails Obligations; and Moderate demands. So, Institutionalism cannot make Moderate principles and Injustice entails Obligations compatible with Moderate demands.

Moderate principles and Injustice entails Obligations, then, remain incompatible with Moderation about Demands. Since there are compelling reasons to accept both Moderate principles and In justice entails Obligations, I conclude that we must reject Moderation about Demands. The obligations that justice places on typical well-off people are substantially more extensive than is acknowledged by prevailing common-sense morality.