Oxford Studies in Metaethics 12 1st

Edition Russ Shafer-Landau

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/oxford-studies-in-metaethics-12-1st-edition-russ-shaf
er-landau/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Oxford studies in metaethics. Volume 11 1st Edition

Shafer-Landau

https://textbookfull.com/product/oxford-studies-in-metaethics-
volume-11-1st-edition-shafer-landau/

The Fundamentals of Ethics 4th Edition Russ Shafer-

Landau

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-fundamentals-of-ethics-4th-
edition-russ-shafer-landau/

The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life Oxford Handbooks

1st Edition Iddo Landau

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-meaning-
in-life-oxford-handbooks-1st-edition-iddo-landau/

Oxford studies in political philosophy. Volume 2 1st

Edition Sobel

https://textbookfull.com/product/oxford-studies-in-political-
philosophy-volume-2-1st-edition-sobel/
Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 13 1st
Edition Timmons

https://textbookfull.com/product/oxford-studies-in-normative-
ethics-volume-13-1st-edition-timmons/

Oxford studies in philosophy of religion (Vol.7) 1st

Edition Kvanvig

https://textbookfull.com/product/oxford-studies-in-philosophy-of-
religion-vol-7-1st-edition-kvanvig/

Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy Volume 5 Pasnau

https://textbookfull.com/product/oxford-studies-in-medieval-
philosophy-volume-5-pasnau/

Minority Studies (OIP) (Oxford India Studies in

Contemporary Society) 2nd Edition Rowena Robinson
(Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/minority-studies-oip-oxford-
india-studies-in-contemporary-society-2nd-edition-rowena-
robinson-editor/

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume XLIX 1st

Edition Brad Inwood (Ed.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/oxford-studies-in-ancient-
philosophy-volume-xlix-1st-edition-brad-inwood-ed/
O X F O R D S TU DI E S IN M E TA E T H I C S
Oxford Studies
in Metaethics
Volume 12

Edited by
RUSS SHAFER-LANDAU

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© the several contributors 2017
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 978–0–19–880507–6 (hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–880508–3 (pbk.)
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Contents

List of Contributors vi
Introduction vii

1. Locating Morality: Moral Imperatives as Bodily Imperatives 1

Kate Manne
2. Difficult Cases and the Epistemic Justification of Moral Belief 27
Joshua Schechter
3. Moral Testimony: Going on the Offensive 51
Eric Wiland
4. Non-naturalism and Normative Necessities 76
Stephanie Leary
5. The Grounding Argument against Non-reductive Moral
Realism 106
Ralf Bader
6. What is a Moral Law? 135
Gideon Rosen
7. Ought to Is: The Puzzle of Moral Science 160
John Basl and Christian Coons
8. Disagreement Lost and Found 187
Stephen Finlay
9. Normative Language in Context 206
Alex Silk
10. On Leaving Room for Doubt: Using Frege–Geach to
Illuminate Expressivism’s Problem with Objectivity 244
David Faraci
11. Expressivism and Varieties of Normativity 265
Daniel Wodak
12. The Predicament of Choice 294
Ralph Wedgwood

Index 315
 List of Contributors

Ralf Bader is Fellow of Merton College and Associate Professor of Philosophy,

University of Oxford.
John Basl is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Northeastern University.
Christian Coons is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State
University.
David Faraci is Faculty Fellow at the Georgetown University Institute for the Study
of Markets and Ethics.
Stephen Finlay is Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California.
Stephanie Leary is Visiting Assistant Professor, Indiana University.
Kate Manne is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University.
Gideon Rosen is Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University.
Joshua Schechter is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Brown University.
Alex Silk is Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Birmingham.
Ralph Wedgwood is Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California.
Eric Wiland is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Daniel Wodak is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University.
 Introduction
Russ Shafer-Landau

This volume of Oxford Studies in Metaethics opens with Kate Manne’s

thought-provoking chapter defending a specific conception of what counts
as the core moral claims. Manne identifies these as bodily imperatives—
states that tend to arise and galvanize subjects when they are experiencing
such things as severe thirst, hunger, sleeplessness, humiliation, terror, and
torment. Manne deploys this idea in conjunction with her view that
normative claims have their source in the desire-like, conative, or “world-
guiding” states of mind of subjects—including subjects other than those on
whom the claim is made. Indeed, Manne’s view is that any subject’s bodily
imperatives can make moral claims on any moral agent. She then argues that
bodily imperatives are a good candidate for constituting the core moral
claims or basic imperatives of morality, which all others are either built
from, or at least constrained by.
Manne’s chapter is followed by a pair of chapters in moral epistemology.
Joshua Schechter’s contribution focuses on the epistemology of a certain set
of difficult moral cases—namely, those whose difficulty is not traceable to
ignorance about non-moral matters. Schechter first argues for a principle
concerning the epistemic status of moral beliefs about difficult moral cases.
The basic idea behind the principle is that one’s belief about the moral status
of a potential action in a difficult moral case is not justified unless one has
some appreciation of what the relevant moral considerations are and how
they bear on the moral status of the potential action. Schechter then argues
that this principle has important ramifications for moral epistemology and
moral metaphysics. It puts pressure on some views of the justification of
moral belief, such as ethical intuitionism and reliabilism. It puts pressure on
some antirealist views of moral metaphysics, including simple versions of
relativism. It also provides some direct positive support for broadly realist
views of morality.
Eric Wiland then offers his take on the puzzles about moral testimony
that have lately gripped a number of philosophers. Wiland sorts such
philosophers into two groups. Pessimists believe that trusting moral testi-
mony is an inadequate substitute for working out one’s moral views.
Optimists, by contrast, regard moral testimony as they do other sorts of
viii Introduction

testimony—trustworthy until proven guilty. Optimistic arguments have

largely been defensive, seeking to undercut efforts to show that there is
something specially problematic about beliefs formed directly on the basis of
moral testimony. Wiland, though, “goes on the offensive,” offering two
reasons for thinking that trusting another person’s moral testimony is
especially good. The first is an extended application of some of the lessons
from recent discussions about epistemic injustice. The second, inspired by
some of Marx’s writing, is that trusting another’s moral testimony is
necessary for perfecting ourselves. In some cases, argues Wiland, it can be
better to accept moral testimony than to arrive at the same moral view on
your own.
The next batch of chapters—four in all—deal in various ways with the
metaphysical and alethic relations that link the moral and the non-moral.
Stephanie Leary starts us off with her contribution to longstanding debates
about how (if at all) non-naturalists can account for normative superven-
ience. According to Leary, the best way to do the needed explaining is to claim
that, while there are some sui generis normative properties whose essences
cannot be fully specified in non-normative terms and do not specify any non-
normative sufficient conditions for their instantiation, there are certain hybrid
normative properties whose essences specify both naturalistic sufficient con-
ditions for their own instantiation and sufficient conditions for the instanti-
ation of certain sui generis normative properties. Leary argues that this is the
only metaphysical explanation for supervenience on offer that can both clearly
maintain the pre-theoretical commitments of non-naturalism while also
providing a metaphysical explanation not just for supervenience, but for all
metaphysical necessities involving natural and normative properties.
Ralf Bader also focuses on explanatory challenges to non-naturalism that
arise from considerations of supervenience. He is worried, specifically, by a
supervenience argument against non-reductive moral realism that threatens
to rule out the existence of irreducibly normative properties by establishing
that, for every normative property, there is a corresponding non-normative
property that is necessarily co-extensive with it. Bader offers a modification
of this argument intended to show that for every normative property, there
is a corresponding non-normative property that has the very same grounds
and is, accordingly, hyperintensionally equivalent. Bader believes that non-
reductionism can nevertheless be salvaged by distinguishing the different
grounding relations that are involved in grounding normative properties and
their corresponding non-normative properties. If he is right, then non-
reductionist versions of moral realism are committed to the existence of
irreducibly different grounding relations.
Gideon Rosen also focuses on how issues of grounding raise worries for
non-naturalists. Rosen explores this large topic by asking how non-naturalists
 Introduction ix

should understand what it is to be a moral law. His chapter explores what he

calls bridge-law non-naturalism: the view that when a particular thing possesses
a moral property or stands in a moral relation, this fact is metaphysically
grounded in non-normative features of the thing in question together with a
general moral law. Any view of this sort faces two challenges, analogous to
familiar challenges in the philosophy of science: to specify the form of the
explanatory laws, and to say when a fact of that form qualifies as a law. Rosen’s
chapter explores three strategies for answering these questions, all of which
maintain that a moral law is a true generalization of the form: it is normatively
necessary that whatever ϕs is (thereby) F.
John Basl and Christian Coons have authored the last entry in our quartet
of articles focused on the relations between the moral and non-moral. They
start with the observation that while many doubt that purely empirical
claims can entail any moral claim, moral premises often appear to have
empirical entailments. And yet it seems like a serious mistake to do “moral
science”—to infer empirical conclusions from moral premises that entail
them. The puzzle is to try plausibly to explain why this is so. After surveying
and rejecting some extant solutions, Basl and Coons advance their own
proposal. They argue that every attempted “moral science inference” faces a
dilemma. The moral premise(s), if true, either will or won’t be contingent
on some empirical truth. On the latter horn, the moral scientist must
employ a false premise or rely on non-moral assumptions that already entail
the conclusion. On the former horn, where the moral premises are inde-
pendent of empirical facts, the moral premise(s) will entail that some fact we
know to be contingent is necessary.
Stephen Finlay next offers up the first of two chapters focused on the
intersection of philosophy of language and metaethics. According to con-
textualist and other content-relativist views in metaethics, different speakers
use the same moral and normative sentences to say different things. These
views face a classic worry, which Finlay calls the problem of Lost Disagree-
ment: such views appear to be mistakenly committed to the claim that
interlocutors are too frequently talking past one another, rather than
engaging in genuine moral disagreement. The views that Finlay is interested
in attempt to solve the problem of Lost Disagreement by identifying
pragmatic, non-content-based kinds of disagreement. His chapter critically
compares two strategies of this kind: (1) quasi-expressivist views that analyze
disagreement over whether S ought to do A in terms of conflicting attitudes
toward S doing A, and (2) metalinguistic views that analyze such disagree-
ment in terms of conflicting attitudes about how to talk about S’s doing
A. Finlay argues that the second strategy is bound to fail, and makes the case
for thinking that content-relativists should be quasi-expressivists about
fundamental normative disagreement.
x Introduction

Our next offering is by Alex Silk, whose chapter, “Normative Language in

Context,” won the 2015 Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics. Silk here
develops a contextualist account of normative language, focusing in particu-
lar on normative readings of modal verbs—so-called deontic modals, such as
should and ought and must. Silk’s account draws on his general framework
for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics, which he calls
Discourse Contextualism. The large aim of Discourse Contextualism is to
derive the distinctive discourse properties and embedding behavior of
normative language from a particular contextualist interpretation of an
independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles
of interpretation and conversation. Silk’s account elucidates the distinctive
roles of normative language in discourse and deliberation, and does so in a
way that is informed by the latest developments in linguistics.
Next up is a pair of chapters devoted to pressing problems for metaethical
expressivism. David Faraci starts us off. As he notes, the Frege–Geach
problem has been, in print, the central objection leveled against expressiv-
ism. Yet most cognitivists seem to be motivated by “deeper” worries, ones
they have spent comparatively little time pursuing in print. Faraci surmises
that those deeper worries are largely metaphysical. Since, as he sees things,
expressivism is first and foremost a view about the nature of moral language
and the states of mind expressed by moral judgments, rather than a meta-
physical view, a puzzle arises about how to present these deeper worries.
Faraci’s strategy is to introduce claims about thought and language, rather
than metaphysics, that represent common intuitions about normative
objectivity. He argues that popular forms of expressivism cannot accommo-
date these intuitions if they are to solve the negation problem. This problem,
which is an aspect of the Frege–Geach worries, is how to offer a felicitous
account of negation within an expressivist semantics or metasemantics. If
Faraci is right, then expressivism really does have a problem accommodating
normative objectivity—a problem that can be stated in ways that do not rely
on assigning to the expressivist any specific metaphysical commitments.
Daniel Wodak is also critical of expressivism, though he approaches
things from a quite different angle from Faraci’s chapter. As Wodak notes,
expressivists aim to explain the meaning of fragments of language—
typically, claims about what we morally ought to do—in terms of the
non-cognitive attitudes they express. And critics, unsurprisingly, evaluate
expressivism on those terms. But this, Wodak claims, is a serious mistake, as
we don’t use those fragments of language in isolation. We make claims
about what we morally, legally, rationally, and prudentially ought to do: we
relativize “ought” and other deontic modals to different standards, or
varieties, of normativity. Wodak argues that the standard-relativity of
“ought” poses a dilemma for expressivists. If they claim that “ought” expresses
 Introduction xi

different types of attitudes when it is relativized to different standards (e.g.

morality and legality), then they struggle to explain why “ought” is univocal
when relativized. If, instead, expressivists claim that “ought” always
expresses the same type of non-cognitive attitude, then they struggle to
explain why “ought” claims that are relativized to different standards do not
express inconsistent attitudes.
Rounding up this volume is Ralph Wedgwood’s chapter on the nature of
rational choice for us limited agents. Normal agents in the actual world
cannot think about all the options that are available to them—or even about
all options that are available to them according to their evidence. Moreover,
agents cannot choose an option unless they have thought about that option.
Such agents can be irrational in two ways: either by making their choice too
quickly, without canvassing enough options, or by wasting time canvassing
ever more options when they have already thought of enough of them.
Wedgwood argues that such agents, if they are to be rational, need a kind of
background sensitivity to whether or not continuing to search for more
options has greater expected value than deciding right away. This has the
surprising result that all rational decision-making, for agents such as us,
depends on the unconscious operation of mental dispositions.
All but one of the chapters gathered here are souped-up versions of papers
delivered at the inaugural Chapel Hill Metaethics Workshop that took place
over a memorable Halloween weekend in 2015. Well before the workshop,
David Plunkett, Andrew Sepielli, Nishi Shah, Philip Stratton-Lake, and
Jussi Suikkanen helped me to set the program by vetting the many dozens of
abstracts that were submitted. I am grateful to each of these fine philo-
sophers for having volunteered their time to offer me their expert counsel.
The workshop itself hummed along without a hitch, thanks to the work of
Katie Bunyea, event coordinator extraordinaire. Some months after the
workshop concluded, our authors submitted updated versions of their
papers, which were given judicious, detailed assessments by Guy Fletcher
and an anonymous reviewer. Their comments led to a great many improve-
ments in the papers, which you now have before you. Thanks, finally, to Peter
Momtchiloff, who continues to earn my gratitude as the steady editorial hand
that keeps this series on course.
 1
Locating Morality
Moral Imperatives as Bodily Imperatives

Kate Manne

J.L. Mackie’s classic ‘argument from queerness’ poses the following challenge:
how, if at all, can we reconcile the apparent prescriptivity or imperatival quality
of moral claims with their purported objectivity or, similarly, universality?1 In
order for moral claims to have both of these features in combination, moral
properties would have to be ‘queer’, Mackie famously argued (1977, §1.6).
There are no such properties in the universe as we know it, via ordinary
scientific methods. That is, roughly, nothing is prescriptive—in telling us what
to do, and motivating us to do it—and also objective—in doing this regardless
of our desires, will, motivations, preferences, or (Mackie added) social norms
and conventions (1977, §1.5–§1.6; pp. 80–2).
Many theorists in contemporary metaethics take Mackie’s point as given,
accepting that such ‘queer’ properties are elusive in natural and social
reality.2 So the purported prescriptivity, or objectivity, or naturalness of
morality (and any other normative claims which you think of as having
these features3) will have to be reconsidered. For some theorists, e.g. avowed
non-naturalists, this may not represent a genuine bullet to bite.4 For others

1
Mackie uses numerous different terms more or less interchangeably to get at the
former idea, in particular. He says that moral claims purport to be prescriptive, directive,
practical, action-guiding, and also ‘calls for action’, in addition to saying that they purport
to be imperatives (1977, p. 40). More on this to follow, in §1.2.3.
2
I focus on the metaphysical rather than the epistemological aspect of Mackie’s
argument, the former being what I need to set up my intervention.
3
E.g., self-regarding, epistemic, or aesthetic normative claims. But I set these aside,
since they are orthogonal to my purposes.
4
Mackie himself, of course, recommended a sweeping form of error theory, at least in
the first instance. However, interpreting Mackie’s eventual views aright is not so clear-cut,
partly in view of his subsequent proposed reinvention of ethics, which much of the
remainder of the book is concerned with. A lot is going to depend on how revisionary
one can be without changing the subject entirely.
2 Kate Manne

of us, however, the aspiration implicit in Mackie’s challenge lingers. The goal
of explaining the supervenience of the moral on the natural (however one
wants to cash this out—clearly no straightforward matter) is similarly widely
shared. Hence the following further quandary, as memorably expressed by
Mackie, when it comes to finding a suitable location for morality:
What is the connection between the natural fact that an action is a piece of deliberate
cruelty—say, causing pain just for fun—and the moral fact that it is wrong? It cannot
be an entailment, a logical or semantic necessity. Yet it is not merely that the two
features occur together. The wrongness must somehow be ‘consequential’ or ‘super-
venient’; it is wrong because it is a piece of deliberate cruelty. But just what in the
world is signified by this ‘because?’ (1977, p. 41)
In this chapter, I suggest an approach to this question and Mackie’s famous
metaethical challenge (as I prefer to call it, eschewing the use of ‘queer’ as a
pejorative) which has yet to be fully explored, and seems to have consider-
able promise in rising to meet much of it. The resulting view also has
auspiciously humane-seeming first-order ethical implications. At least a
hint of the idea which I want to develop can be found in the closing lines
of Christine M. Korsgaard’s Sources of Normativity:
Of course there are entities that meet these [‘queer’] criteria . . . John Mackie must have
been alone in his room with the Scientific World View when he wrote those words. For
it is the most familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can tell us
what to do and make us do it. They are people, and the other animals. (1996, p. 166)
But Korsgaard’s intriguing and, in my view, fruitful suggestion hasn’t been
widely taken up in the literature to date—not even by Korsgaard herself, in
relation to Mackie’s challenge, if I am not mistaken. In this chapter, I’ll try to
begin to address this omission, and within a reductive naturalist and broadly
Humean framework, as opposed to Korsgaard’s neo-Kantian constructivism.
To see where I am going with this, consider the question—‘Why shouldn’t
I kick a dog for fun?’—which the villains of the collective metaethical
imagination would have us take under advisement. On the view about
morality’s source I go on to develop, the ultimate answer to this question
consists in the way the dog stands to suffer bodily—specifically, to be put into
a ‘make it stop’ state of body and mind by the would-be kicker.
There’s something intuitive to the point of obvious about ideas in this
vicinity, when it comes to first-order normative questions about the correct
criterion of right action, and whether and why certain actions fall under it
(or fail to). But I believe that their metaethical significance tends to be
underestimated.5

5
Why so? Likely a mixture of factors—including, I hazard, a view about pain and
suffering as consisting in ‘raw feels’, rather than imperatives, as well as a tacit tendency to
 Moral Imperatives as Bodily Imperatives 3

I’ll be focusing in this chapter on the moral claims or imperatives (terms

I alternate between, merely for the sake of terminological variety) which
I call basic or core (ditto). Core moral claims are meant to be normative in
their own right, and also to place constraints on which other actual claims
will make normative claims on us. Those which call for violating core moral
claims, for example, may be held to be immoral and hence unfit to make
normative claims on us qua moral agents, I argue.
My central goal is to explore the possibility of identifying core moral claims
with the states of mind (or again, better, body and mind) which I call bodily
imperatives—e.g. the ‘make it stop’ state of mind mooted earlier, in the dog
case.6 Such states will often arise and galvanize a subject when they are
experiencing unremitting pain, severe thirst, hunger, sleeplessness, humili-
ation, terror, torment, or similar. Some philosophers of mind, in particular
Colin Klein (2007; 2015), have recently argued that token pain states just are
bodily imperatives. This imperative theory of pain (and other acute distress
states, plausibly, by extension) is admittedly controversial. But its critics are
often objecting primarily to the identification of pain with imperatives like the
above ones. And I do not need an identity thesis for my purposes (although
I find it tempting). All I need is the—to my mind, intuitively compelling—
idea that pain and other acute distress states are often closely associated
with such bodily imperatives. These include emotional distress, and distress
with a social intentional object (e.g. one’s loved ones being threatened).
So, by bodily imperatives I don’t mean something crudely or narrowly
physical, but rather something visceral in the broad sense, as well as consum-
ing and inescapable. This will become clearer in the discussion of them that
follows (§1.1.3).
I’ll be combining this idea with another I’ve defended at length elsewhere,
viz., that the desire-like, conative, or ‘world-guiding’ states of mind which
make normative claims on agents need not belong to the agent on whom the
claim is made, on a broadly Humean or desire-based view in metaethics
(Manne, 2015). Indeed, on the view I defend, any subject’s bodily imperatives
can make moral claims on any moral agent. Bearing this in mind, I believe
that bodily imperatives are a good candidate for constituting the core moral
claims or basic imperatives of morality. And although a full development
and defence of this view would be impossible in this short space, I hope to
have at least made it visible and demonstrated its interest by the end of this
chapter, as well as bringing out some of its limitations and disappointments.

picture morality as centralized, univocal, and speaking in a booming voice, rather than a
whimper.
6
And normative claims of other kinds, in particular self-interested ones, will presum-
ably have to be explained in terms of metaphysically similar materials, lest the theory take
on an unattractively motley appearance. See §1.1.5, and also Manne (2015).
4 Kate Manne

1 . 1 CL A I M S O F T H E B O D Y

1.1.1 Democratism as a Humeanism

It will help to begin by situating the idea of basic moral imperatives as bodily
imperatives within the family of Humean or (as I use the terms, equivalently)
desire-based views in metaethics—these being among its natural competitors.
I will take as my point of departure two ideas of Mark Schroeder’s which are
fruitful in this connection. The first is that, when it comes to metaphysically
explaining normative reasons (or normative claims on us, to leave room for
the distinction between claims and reasons which I draw in §1.2.4)7, a would-
be reductive naturalist should cast their net quite widely. That is, we should
consider explaining normative claims in terms of members of a broad class of
the mental states or psychological features which Schroeder stipulatively
labels desires. His examples of desires in this sense include intentions,
whims, cravings, pleasant sensations, and attitudes of valuing (2007, p. 9).
In my view, it is natural to construe this broad and technical notion of desire
as encompassing any state of mind on the part of a subject with a ‘world-to-
mind’ or ‘world-guiding’ direction of fit. Such states of mind effectively ask
that the world be made, or alternatively kept, a certain way; that is, the world
is supposed to come to fit the mind of the subject the desire belongs to. In
contrast, belief-like states of mind aim to represent the world accurately; their
contents are supposed to fit the way the world is, or will be (in the case of
predictions). Desires in the intended, broad sense of the term hence have
satisfaction conditions; whereas belief-like or world-guided attitudes instead
have truth conditions.
The second idea of Schroeder’s (2007, pp. 2–10) which I want to borrow
is that we should initially keep our options open, when it comes to settling
on a particular version of a Humean theory in metaethics. For many
purposes, including my own, it is useful to understand these as a family of
views united by:
The Minimal Humean Commitment: All of the basic normative claims
made on agents are metaphysically explained by desires of some kind.8

7
Very briefly, to head off confusion—I think of normative reasons as being normative
claims which pass a further, motivation-based test. Roughly, a reason for an agent A must
be such that A would recognize this reason and be motivated to act on it, were A to be
maximally receptive to such recognition. This is close to the form of reasons internalism
which I defend elsewhere (Manne, 2014), cashing it out there, as here, as a defeating or
‘vetoing’ condition on reasons.
8
Although I borrow this formulation from Schroeder, he may have implicitly
intended an agent-centred or intra-agent restriction. But helpful personal correspondence
 Moral Imperatives as Bodily Imperatives 5

This basic commitment can be, and has been, taken in numerous different
directions. For it leaves wide open the question of when, how, and
which of someone’s desires will give rise to normative claims—and, I’d add,
on whom.
Schroeder (2007) for his own part has developed a particularly sophisti-
cated version of a Humean theory of reasons, viz., ‘Hypotheticalism’, which
will serve as my stalking horse intermittently in what follows. According to
the Hypotheticalist, the basic normative claims on an agent (which Schroe-
der takes to be reasons, unlike me; see note 9) are all metaphysically
explained by her own desires. Specifically, an agent will have a reason to
X iff and because X-ing would promote the satisfaction of some desire of
hers, as compared with doing nothing. This is effectively to relax the
strength of the promotion relation which desire-based theorists have trad-
itionally employed here. Schroeder’s innovation hence helps to mitigate the
problem that Humean views characteristically face of under-generating
reasons, particularly moral ones (more on this to follow, in §1.2.2).
I want to go in a different—indeed, in some ways, opposite—direction.
On the metaethical view I’ll go on to explore, basic moral claims on agents
just are desires (i.e. world-guiding psychological states) of a certain kind. But
these desires may belong to subjects other than the agent—any creature with
the relevant kinds of desires whatsoever, I’ll be assuming.9 This is to relax
the intra-agent restriction implicit in agent-centred, desire-based views, such
as Hypotheticalism. So, the move I’m making will give rise to a view which,
in skeletal form, and restricted to core moral claims for the time being,
would be this:
Democratic Humeanism (Skeletal Version): Any core moral claim on
an agent A to X for the sake of a subject S consists in some kind of
desire on S’s part that could be fulfilled or promoted by A’s X-ing.10
(Manne, 2015)

confirms we’re in agreement that a view need not be restricted in this way in order to
belong to the same family for many purposes, e.g. preserving an elegant form of reductive
naturalism.
9
Technically, there is room to allow that the only moral subjects are human beings
(or some such). But I’ll bracket off such conceptual possibilities in what follows, since they
seem to me so implausible.
10
Compare Christine M. Korsgaard’s ‘publicity of reasons’ thesis. In Lecture 4 of
Sources, Korsgaard defends the view that reasons, by their very nature, have an essentially
public character. Korsgaard draws on Wittgenstein’s private language argument in this
connection. As I interpret Korsgaard, on the resulting picture, reasons do not belong to
anybody in particular, and are by their very nature shared, or at least shareable, across
agents. (Korsgaard’s target being the ‘egoistic myth’ that we retreat into ‘private delibera-
tive spaces and then re-emerge to announce the results’, as opposed to deliberating
together; 1996, p. 141.) Korsgaard’s view here provides an important precedent and
6 Kate Manne

Note that this leaves room for moral subjects who are not themselves moral
agents (e.g. human infants and most if not all kinds of non-human animals).
It is also meant to allow the subject S and the agent A to be one and the same
person in the limit case, so as not to rule out by conceptual fiat the possibility
of core moral duties to the self. One more point of preliminary clarification:
the set of agents on whom the subject calls may be more or less restrictive,
determinate, or specific. The subject may call out for anybody’s help what-
soever in certain cases. This will be important for my ensuing purposes.
The skeletal version of Democratic Humeanism—or ‘Democratism’, to
introduce a pithier name for it this time around—obviously contains large
lacunae, concerning which desires on the part of which subjects will consti-
tute core moral claims on whom (i.e. on which agents). In much of the first
half of this chapter, I’ll be taking up these questions. I’ll do this by initially
winnowing the class of desires I want to focus on here twice over—first to
what I dub ‘calls for action’ (§1.1.2), and then to the subclass of calls for
action I’m calling ‘bodily imperatives’ (§1.1.3). I’ll go on to indicate how
one might construe these as core moral claims (§1.1.4), and how to proceed
from there in turn to developing a view which encompasses further moral
claims with a broader social basis, and other normative claims besides (e.g.
self-regarding claims, and other-regarding claims which are not naturally
viewed as moral), using the same set of metaphysical building blocks
(§1.1.5). Then, in the second half of the paper, I will consider some of
the costs, benefits, and let-downs which would flow from going Democratic
about the basic source of morality.

1.1.2 Calls for Action

Elsewhere, I’ve suggested that the desires which constitute basic normative
claims have what I dubbed a ‘call for action’ structure. Such desires on the part
of a subject S distinguish a set of ordered pairs of agents and actions, {<A, X>},
such that S would be willing for A to X in service of some end of S’s, E.11

valuable inspiration for Democratic Humeanism (see, e.g., the passage I quoted in
opening). But my idea is nevertheless importantly different. According to Democratic
Humeanism, reasons still belong to individual agents. Indeed, I think it is actually crucial
that they do so, since it will enable us to make sense of the fact that they represent
prescriptive claims on particular people (as I argue in Manne, 2015, §2). So, rather than
deleting the place for the agent in the relevant predicate, I want to go the other way, in
effect—and to think of both reasons and the desires they consist in as relative twice over,
i.e. to subjects as well as to agents.
11
Note that, on the account I develop elsewhere, a normative claim’s strength or
weight will be proportional to both the depth or fundamentality of the subject’s end E, as
 Moral Imperatives as Bodily Imperatives 7

All told then, the desires which count as ‘calls for action’ can be repre-
sented with an ordered triple, like so:
<Subject (S), end (E), {< agent (A), willed means (X)>}>
To unpack this bit-by-bit, it gives us:
• S, the subject of the desire, i.e. the human or non-human animal who is
possessed of a will, and who issues this call for action—which may be
voiced aloud or inward and silent, and issued voluntarily or no (of which
more shortly).
• E, the subject’s end, which corresponds to something which S desires for its
own sake, and for her own sake, moreover.12 This might be represented
(not wholly uncontroversially) as a proposition S wants to come true (or to
remain so).
• {<A, X>}, a set of ordered pairs of agents A and means X such that S would
be willing for A to X in service of achieving E (whether or not any of these
agents hear this call, and perhaps even regardless of their being in a
position to do so).
So much for calls for action; now for the proper subset of these I’m dubbing
‘bodily imperatives’.13

1.1.3 Bodily Imperatives

Imagine yourself in a state of intense pain, even agony. There is a real sense
in which the body rebels and recoils against such sensations. Some philo-
sophers of mind, most notably Colin Klein, have even argued that pain just
is a command or imperative issued by the body, e.g. to protect a certain part
of it.14 Sometimes people writhe almost as if they are trying to escape their

well as the necessity and efficacy of A’s X-ing in order for E to ever come to fruition
(Manne, 2015, §3).
12
These two conditions are needed to avoid standard problems to do with double-
counting reasons.
13
The notion of a ‘call for action’ obviously resonates with Stephen Darwall’s notion
of a second-personal reason (2009) and, more recently, his discussion of ‘bipolar
obligations’ (2013, chapter 2), drawing on Michael Thompson. But there are important
differences too: e.g. the embodied nature of core moral reasons on my account, as well as
the fact that I end up being more equivocal about the notion of authority.
14
Among the features of Klein’s ‘imperativism’ about pain that makes it particularly
congenial for my purposes is its billing pains as imperatives which motivate directly, or in
an unmediated way, and as hence being analogous to second-personal commands. This
jives remarkably well with the line of thought I pursue in §1.2.4. Klein wants us to take
the parallel between pains and imperatives in ordinary language quite literally; he argues
8 Kate Manne

own skin. (See Korsgaard, 1996, p. 147.) Sometimes they cry out. Some-
times they suffer in silence, but have to grit their teeth in order to do so.
Such pain is hence closely associated with a kind of ‘make it stop’ state of
body and mind, as I propose to think about it, for my initial purposes. But
there are many other states or, perhaps better, movements of the will which
are similarly gripping and involuntary, in a sense I’ll expand on shortly.
Think of the feeling of being trapped, and wanting to be free; the ‘let me go’
inward lunge of a frightened animal, be they human or non-human.
Severe thirst is like this too. The mandate to find something to drink
when one is parched has an absorbing, compelling quality. Ongoing hunger
is an interestingly tricky case, since it is easily dulled by the weakness which
lack of calories is the common cause of. As this shows, bodily imperatives
need not be intense, although they go deep (in a sense which, again, I’ll
explain in a moment). They can be the waning chill felt by someone right on
the edge of frostbite.15
Examples in this vein are easy to multiply. Think of the feeling of
struggling to draw breath; the desperate need to sleep; the yen for silence
when there are loud, jarring noises which you can’t control. Think of the
frantic urge to protect those you love when they are in danger. Think of the
feeling of burning with shame, and wanting to disappear, having been
subject to the most brutal, degrading, or humiliating forms of treatment.
Such viscerally experienced states of desperation will often be at least partly
emotional in nature, and may owe to social proclivities, practices, and
sensibilities which are more or less particular to particular kinds of animals.
They are not intended to be restricted to the narrowly bodily or physical
needs which most if not all animals have in common with one another. So
states which rely on intelligent and distinctively human capacities, if there
are any, are still eligible to count as being bodily imperatives, on my
intended conception. This is reflected in my ensuing characterization of
them as distinctive kinds of calls for action.
But first, what other states might belong in this family? This question is
difficult if not impossible to answer by introspection, let alone in the
abstract, for those of us who have had the good fortune not to have suffered
in the relevant ways (or only rarely and briefly). Many people have asked
me whether some men’s urge to rape might be among them. The answer is
‘no’, although the need not to be violated certainly is. What makes me say
this? Whatever the merits of my subsequent proposed account of bodily

they have the same kind of content, motivating role, and direction of fit, strikingly (2015,
§1.1–§1.3).
15
When one’s body temperature drops below a certain threshold, one begins to feel
warmer—a particularly cruel deception. (See Manne, 2015, §3.)
 Moral Imperatives as Bodily Imperatives 9

imperatives, we have an epistemological guide as to what counts as being

among them for adult human beings which seems to me reliable. It has also
been subject to rigorous and extensive testing—would that it were other-
wise. Bodily imperatives are the sorts of states which torturers are able to use
against their victims. For when the body is protesting, people can be broken.

1.1.4 Bodily Imperatives as (Distinctive) Calls for Action

Having indicated roughly what I mean by a bodily imperative, I will now
offer a constitutive account of them as a special kind of call for action.
I propose to do this in terms of three of their features which are relatively
distinctive, especially in combination, although I don’t want to rule out the
need for further additions for other purposes.
First, bodily imperatives tend to be levelled towards an especially unspe-
cific, or open-ended, set of agents, rather than to particular agents whose
help we would be willing to accept in some endeavour. In other words, we
tend not to be too fussy about who responds to our most desperate pleas,
cries, appeals, and entreaties, in comparison with other calls for action
(where we will often insist on doing something for ourselves, or only want
the help of particular other people, e.g. our intimate relations).16 Subjects
whose bodily imperatives go unmet for any length of time will often be
reduced to a kind of howling at the moon—for help from somebody,
anybody, nobody in particular. (See Manne, 2015, §2.)
Second, bodily imperatives are typically issued involuntarily, and hence
are more or less non-negotiable, when it comes to the sorts of embodied,
vulnerable, sentient creatures who we know and are ourselves, as human
animals. There are states of the will which one cannot will oneself not to be
in. (They are the ‘involuntary voluntary’, as it were, then.) When someone is
in intense pain, for instance, his will tends to be mobilized in such a way that
he cannot choose to disregard it, or avoid being held its captive. Whereas
one can often, with effort, prevent oneself from being gripped in this way by
other, more ‘first-world’ desires, e.g. ones which are consumerist in nature.
The desire for a new iPhone may be intense; but it is usually possible not to
let one’s will be galvanized by the allure of it.
True, people differ in the degree to which they actually manage to prevent
this, and the strategies they may have to use in order to do so. But the
important point is that it is comparatively difficult, if not impossible, to
disengage one’s will in this way when it comes to the movements of the will

16
See Manne, 2015, §2, for a discussion of first-personal intentions as a subtype of
second-personal calls for action, wherein the subject calls on herself qua agent to
undertake some action to some purpose.
10 Kate Manne

I’m calling bodily imperatives. Even if someone being tortured manages not to
give in, or to crack under pressure (as we say), he will be in a state of profound
ambivalence, rather than indifference.17 His countervailing commitments,
and his will itself, may be strong enough to enable him to stand firm, or
even to keep from crying out. But his body will continue to protest inwardly
against such treatment, arguably in order for it to count as being torturous.
Third, and finally, bodily imperatives typically go deep or are compara-
tively fundamental desires for a subject. The basic idea, which I’ve given a
more precise gloss elsewhere (2015, §3), is that one of S’s ends, E1, is deeper
or more fundamental than another of S’s ends, E2, if S would choose for E1
to be satisfied prior to E2, all else being equal. We shouldn’t assume that
those goods which are standardly slotted at the bottom of Maslow’s hier-
archy of needs will correspond to all or only the ends which constitute a
subject’s highest priorities. But they will at least tend to be among them.
So, to summarize, we can represent bodily imperatives as calls for action
(<S, E, {<A, X>}>) distinguished by:
1. The relatively unspecific and often universal set of agents A whose help
S would be willing to accept in service of achieving E.
2. Their being issued in a largely involuntary way, it being difficult if
not impossible for S not to be subject to these galvanizing movements
of the will.
3. The end E going especially deep or being comparatively fundamental
when it comes to S’s priorities.

1.1.5 Explaining other Normative Claims using these Resources

It’s worth pausing over a significant advantage of Democratism over other,
existing forms of Humeanism at this juncture. Once we have distinguished a
class of core moral claims or (to remind you, equivalently) basic moral
imperatives, then we seem to have principled reasons for saying that some
calls for action (or other desires, for that matter) are morally objectionable or,
simply, immoral. (The latter judgment being a decisive, or ‘all in’, moral
verdict.) If there is a basic moral claim on an agent A to X for the sake of S1,
constituted by S1’s bodily imperative, then another subject S2’s call for A to
actively disregard, violate, or flout S1’s bodily imperative here is immoral in

17
Ambivalence (or, sometimes better, being ‘in two minds’ about something) involves
the subject’s simultaneously desiring or welcoming and being averse to the relevant state of
affairs (possibly under different descriptions); whereas indifference involves neither desire
nor aversion, such that the subject does not mind what happens ‘one way or the other’.
 Moral Imperatives as Bodily Imperatives 11

this way (e.g. cruel, sadistic, wanton, etc.).18 It is immoral in the obvious
and indeed literal-minded sense of directly contravening one of the core
claims of morality.
The notion of an immoral call for action (or, again, desire more generally)
having been given a Humean-friendly characterization, we can say that the
moral claim it might otherwise make on an agent will be cancelled or silenced
(to use John McDowell’s expression). The thought essentially being this: as
a moral agent, your most basic (although by no means only) task in life is to
abide by subjects’ bodily imperatives, and prevent them from being ignored,
violated, flouted, etc. Another subject’s calling for you to do just that
therefore runs counter to the fundamental aims of the exercise.19 It is
natural to think that such calls for action do not represent morality’s claims
on us as its agents, even if they could or would do otherwise.20
Other types of calls for action could also be argued to be constrained by
bodily imperatives. Consider a subject’s desire to ignore, violate, or flout her
own bodily imperatives which, remembering to construe the notion of bodily
imperatives in the intended sense, would effectively constitute self-torturing.
Even if there are no moral duties to the self, such self-destructive tendencies
could be argued to make no normative claims on agents whatsoever (includ-
ing the subject qua agent, absent a defence of special self-permissions).
Having distinguished a class of immoral as well as self-destructive desires, it
becomes easier to see how the picture might be developed from that point
onwards. On the simplest subsequent version of Democratism, we would
say that any other call for action (i.e. one that is neither immoral nor self-
destructive) gives rise to normative claims of the expected kind, given their
source and intended targets.21
For example, self-interested or self-regarding normative claims would
then comprise the (again, non-self-destructive, and perhaps also morally
acceptable22) calls for action which are made by an agent on herself qua

18
As before, I leave open the possibility that S1 and S2 may be one and the same subject.
19
This doesn’t provide an answer to the ‘Why be moral?’ question, of course. But, like
many theorists, I tend to doubt that one can be provided that would not be either
irrelevant, or question-begging.
20
For a helpful analogy, consider citizens in a toy direct democracy who are entitled to
vote for or against, or even propose, any law—bar proposing or voting to prevent other,
similarly situated citizens from doing so. I thank Barry Maguire for the comparison.
Consider too that freedom over one’s person does not extend to the freedom to give up
one’s freedom, i.e. to sell oneself into indentured servitude.
21
On an alternative, more complex view, any call for action would be a normative claim
only if it did not call for violating, ignoring, or flouting deeper or more fundamental ones.
22
The latter condition would be endorsed by someone who holds that moral crime
never pays, and that the satisfaction of wicked desires doesn’t truly benefit a subject. I find
this view implausible, but again, it shouldn’t be ruled out by conceptual fiat.
12 Kate Manne

subject. We might also want to extend the view to encompass further

other-regarding normative claims in the form of a subject’s (morally and
prudentially acceptable) calls for action which go well beyond her bodily
imperatives. At least some such claims are not naturally called moral (in my
idiolect, at any rate).23 For example, consider someone’s asking you to do
them a minor favour.24
And, importantly, we should also countenance normative claims which
have a social basis, these tending to be somewhat under-discussed in con-
temporary metaethics, in my view. Consider the norms of valid social
practices, which might themselves be conceived as calls for action with a
collective or group subject, rather than an individual one. I have argued in
previous work that such norms constitute genuine normative claims on the
participating agents to abide by them, when the practice as a whole is valid
(Manne, 2013). And I suggested that, as a substantive normative matter, the
validity of a practice will plausibly have to do (somehow) with its being
generally conducive to the flourishing of people and other creatures, and not
inherently prone to violate the rights of anyone. The large lacuna in this
proposal was spelling out the notion of validity in a way that was compatible
with my metaethical ambitions. Some people quite reasonably worried that
whatever resources were adduced to fill in the picture would inevitably
compromise its potential to offer a supplement to enrich other forms of
reductive naturalism. The above resources offer genuine hope for spelling
out the notion of validity in an appropriate way—e.g. most simply, by
saying that valid social practices cannot be prone (roughly, liable non-
accidentally) to cause anyone’s bodily imperatives to be violated, ignored,
flouted, etc. Otherwise, the relevant practice would be morally unaccept-
able. Calls for action of either an individual or collective kind are con-
strained by the calls for action which are irrevocable and go the deepest, as
with bodily imperatives as I’ve defined them.
We might also distinguish a class of social practices which are vital in the
sense of being the only or best way of promoting the fulfilment of everyone’s
bodily imperatives (inter alia), for people and other creatures living together,

23
Alternatively, or in addition to this, one might take this to be the place to locate
some normative claims to perform morally supererogatory actions.
24
Note that each of the types of normative claims above is meant to be non-derivative.
Following on from there, a great deal of work of course remains. We would have to offer a
suitable account of instrumental and other derivative (e.g. pre-emptive) reasons, and
reasons provided by reasons which would exist in possible worlds which extend this one
into the future. There is also the category of epistemic reasons to consider (whether or not
these can be understood as hypothetical being highly controversial).
 Moral Imperatives as Bodily Imperatives 13

in the material and social world as we know it. The norms of vital social
practices might then be argued to have a greater moral significance than the
norms of merely valid ones. We could also look at practices which are
conducive to or vital for satisfying desires which are not bodily imperatives,
but nonetheless go relatively deep or are fairly fundamental according to the
definition outlined in Section 1.1.4. (Here is where we might hope to
extrapolate an appropriate normative story about practices such as truth-
telling, promise-keeping, special obligations, and so on—channeling Hume
on the artificial virtues as historical inspiration.)
Of course, spelling all this out properly would be a huge undertaking,
requiring far more space than a single chapter to tackle—all the more so
since there would be advantages in exploring multiple lines of inquiry in
tandem, so as to leave room for theorists with different views in first-order
normative ethics to go their different ways here. The point in this section has
just been to suggest that, although the task in front of us is doubtless a
formidable one, it doesn’t seem insurmountable in principle, at least at this
juncture. There are seemingly sensible ways to proceed, which would throw
up a wide range of theoretical choice-points. But this is as it should be, and
warrants pressing onwards.

1 .2 Q U E E R M E T AE T H I C AL T H E O R Y

1.2.1 Reconsidering Mackie’s Challenge

If we construe basic moral imperatives as bodily imperatives, and imagine
the rest of the picture filled out in some suitable way (as per §1.1.5), then
how far could we go in meeting Mackie’s challenges? The view would
presumably be just as acceptable as a form of reductive naturalism as any
other member of the Humean family. On this picture, normative claims are
just actual claims which meet certain constraints (e.g. they are not immoral
or self-destructive), with these constraints themselves spelled out in terms of
actual claims with a more basic normative status (including, but not neces-
sarily limited to, bodily imperatives; see note 21). Democratism will also
make short work of the supervenience of the moral on the natural, since it
identifies moral and other normative claims with natural ones. Moreover,
Democratism seems to have prima facie plausible first-order ethical implica-
tions. This will come out in bits and pieces during the course of what follows.
But I now turn to the main question which will concern me for the
remainder—the extent to which Democratism might vindicate moral
claims’ reputation for being prescriptive or imperatival, on the one hand, as
well as objective or, similarly, universal, on the other. I return now, in other
14 Kate Manne

words, to Mackie’s classic challenge about their odd combination of features

(i.e. the unfortunately named ‘queerness’ worry). It is time now to put this
question to the Democrat.25

1.2.2 Objectivity and Universality

The idea that moral claims are objective permits of numerous different
readings. And, on a Democratic picture, the categoricity of morality—such
that its claims hold independently of what any subject happens to want, will,
desire, and so on—is of course off the table now, as it would be on any other
Humean or desire-based metaethical theory. However, according to this
picture, basic moral claims will be universal or nearly so, due to their non-
specificity (recalling §1.1.4). Insofar as you accept the idea that the relevant
bodily imperatives are a more or less indiscriminate plea or cry for help—i.e.
levelled towards someone, anyone, no one in particular—then the same can
be said of the moral claims they constitute.
Basic moral imperatives will be objective in a sense too, bearing in mind
the many different ways in which this idea can be cashed out. It strikes me,
moreover, as being a particularly important one (although theorists will no
doubt differ in what scratches their itch for objectivity in ethics). For while
these moral imperatives could hardly be more dependent on desires (in the
broad or formal sense that encompasses bodily imperatives, recall), they will
be independent of the desires of the agent on whom the claim is made. It
will not be ‘up to us’ what morality asks of us as agents. Nor will it generally
be up to us as subjects which core moral claims extend from us to others.26
For bodily imperatives involve movements of the will that are themselves
involuntary (again, as discussed in §1.1.4). All in all, Democratism will
vindicate the objectivity of moral claims in a sense which might be called
non-negotiability, both from the perspective of the agents on whom they are
made, as well as the subjects from whom they originate.
My sense is that Democratism may stand a better chance of making
sense of morality’s universality than even the most well-developed forms
of agent-centred Humeanism. I have in mind the views defended by Julia

25
According to an informant in sexuality studies, Mackie may or may not have
intended the term ‘queer’ as a reference to homosexuality, given the time, place, and
context. But it’s possible, especially given the nasty pun it seems to make for—the idea
that two features are innocent enough on their own, but don’t naturally go together.
26
Cf. adaptive preferences, and the idea that a subject cannot by dint of will dissolve a
moral claim exerted on others by (e.g.) her desperate hunger. However, her aversion to
being force-fed may also exert a competing claim on agents not to do so, leaving those who
wish to help her facing two irrevocably conflicting claims—though one of them may be
stronger.
 Moral Imperatives as Bodily Imperatives 15

Markovits (2014), in addition to Schroeder’s Hypotheticalism. However,

both Markovits and Schroeder do impressive theoretical work to argue
that their agent-centred Humean theories (respectively) can capture the
universality of moral reasons after all. So we shouldn’t expect an easy
victory for the Democrat here, by any means. (Nor the reverse vis-à-vis
prescriptivity, which I’ll turn to in §1.2.3.)
Different as Markovits’ and Schroeder’s views are, in both their form and
their aim, they encounter a similar dilemma.27 The attempt to accommo-
date moral reasons’ universality as an agent-centred Humean tends to come
at the expense of their purported prescriptivity—despite the latter being one
of the main traditional attractions of such a view. For example, on Schroeder’s
Hypotheticalism, reasons are massively over-determined, such that an agent
A will have a reason to X iff and because A has a desire which would be
promoted by her X-ing, as compared to doing nothing. This allows Schroeder
to claim that there may be reasons for any agent to do the morally right thing,
since this would always promote the satisfaction of her desires to some extent
or other (2007, §6.3). But, as Schroeder freely admits, it seems highly
unlikely that A will be motivated to X, if this would promote some desire
of hers only in the most foolish or roundabout of ways. Schroeder offers
the example of eating one’s car, in order to get one’s daily dose of iron in.
Such a perverse method of desire-satisfaction—cutting off your nose to spite
your face, if the point of ingesting iron is good health in the long run—will
not, and should not, inspire motivation. (Sure, you’d get your iron in; but it
would kill you in the process.) It seems similarly implausible to say that such a
desire prescribes this action for you—as the discussion of prescriptivity in
Section 1.2.3 will serve further to confirm. Does this desire tell you to do this,
or command this action inwardly? The answer is surely ‘no’. I don’t think it
even hints it.
Markovits pursues a very different strategy in service of similar goals, and
mounts an impressive argument that the norms of procedural rationality put
rational pressure on an agent to recognize the value of others as well as
herself, in order to make sense of the value she attaches to her own ends and
projects. The natural and inevitable worry about this argument is that, once
the notion of procedural rationality is made sufficiently broad, it’s not clear
that agents will or even should always care about what they would value,
were they in full compliance with the norms of procedural rationality. It
hence becomes increasingly unclear that normative reasons are connecting
with the cares and concerns of the actual agent, as opposed to an idealized,

27
Markovits, for example, is not a reductive naturalist, since she takes the norms of
procedural rationality to be irreducibly normative.
16 Kate Manne

fictional character loosely based on a real-life person. And this might be

thought to compromise the prescriptivity of normative reasons, in at least
one of the three senses I’m about to distinguish.

1.2.3 Varieties of Prescriptivity

When it comes to the prescriptivity or the imperatival quality of moral
claims, Mackie uses a large—indeed, somewhat bewilderingly large—range
of terms seemingly interchangeably for getting at what he has in mind. He
speaks of such claims as being directive, practical, action-guiding, and (least
familiarly but, in my view, perhaps most suggestively) as being ‘calls for
action’. He also speaks of the claim that an action is morally obligatory as
representing it as having ‘ “to-be-pursuedness” somehow built into it’. The
claim that an action is wrong similarly represents it as having the property of
‘not-to-be-doneness’, mutatis mutandis.
Richard T. Garner draws a useful distinction between two different ideas
that seem to be entangled in Mackie’s discussion, under the heading of the
above family of terms, concepts, and properties (1990). The first is the idea
that moral claims tell us what to do, i.e. that they recommend or require of us
an action, in much the same way as a second-personal imperative, instruc-
tion, social norm, or rule might. (Mackie himself mentions the example of
parade ground orders, 1977, p. 29.) The second is the idea that moral claims
may motivate us to act under suitable conditions. Both ideas in turn admit of
numerous different readings.
It might seem that the first, ‘telling’ quality of moral claims is something
which Democratism is well placed to capture. Basic moral claims will have
an imperatival quality on this view because the states of mind they consist in
are in fact imperatives. They have a content which aims to regulate the world,
rather than representing it. They have ‘the form of the norm’, i.e. their
nature and structure mirrors that of the normative claims they constitute.
However, the idea that a claim tells us what to do, and might motivate us to
do it, may be analytically distinct but more intimately related (as a causal or
constitutive matter) than Garner’s discussion allows. For it’s not obvious that
a claim which has the form of an imperative, but no realistic chance of getting
a motivational grip on its would-be addressee, is really telling them what to
do—as opposed to merely trying, and failing to. By way of an analogy: a hand
extended towards another person, only to be regarded as irrelevant, or beneath
their consideration, does not make for half of a handshake. In failing to elicit a
response, it becomes an empty gesture—an aborted attempt at an interaction
that takes two. Similarly, perhaps, with the attempt to tell someone to do
something. (‘You certainly told him.’ ‘He wouldn’t listen. But I tried to.’)
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
dangerous in their tendency. It belongs not to state legislatures to
decide on the constitutionality of the laws made by the general
government; this power being exclusively vested in judiciary courts
of the Union.
That his excellency the governor be requested to transmit a copy of
this resolution to the executive of Virginia, to be communicated to
the General Assembly of that state; and that the same be sent to the
Governor and Council for their concurrence.

Samuel C. Crafts, Clerk.

In Council, October 30, 1799.—Read and concurred in

unanimously.

Richard Whitney, Sec’y.

 Resolutions of 1798 and 1799.

(The original draught prepared by Thomas Jefferson.)

The following resolutions passed the House of Representatives of
Kentucky, Nov. 10, 1798. On the passage of the first resolution, one
dissentient; 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, two dissentients; 9th,
three dissentients.
1. Resolved, That the several states composing the United States of
America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to
their general government; but that by compact under the style and
title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments
thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes,
delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each
state to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-
government: and, that whensoever the general government assumes
undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no
force; that to this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an
integral party; that this government, created by this compact, was
not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers
delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not
the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but, that as in all other
cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party
has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the
mode and measure of redress.
2. Resolved, That the Constitution of the United States having
delegated to Congress a power to punish treason, counterfeiting the
securities and current coin of the United States, piracies and felonies
committed on the high seas, and offences against the laws of nations,
and no other crimes whatever; and it being true, as a general
principle, and one of the amendments to the Constitution having also
declared, “that the powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the
states respectively, or to the people,” therefore also the same act of
Congress, passed on the 14th day of July, 1798, and entitled “An act
in addition to the act entitled An act for the punishment of certain
crimes against the United States;” as also the act passed by them on
the 27th day of June, 1798, entitled “An act to punish frauds
committed on the Bank of the United States,” (and all other their acts
which assume to create, define, or punish crimes other than those
enumerated in the Constitution), are altogether void and of no force,
and that the power to create, define, and punish such other crimes is
reserved, and of right appertains solely and exclusively to the
respective states, each within its own territory.
3. Resolved, That it is true, as a general principle, and is also
expressly declared by one of the amendments to the Constitution,
that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the
states respectively, or to the people;” and that no power over the
freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press being
delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by
it to the states, all lawful powers respecting the same did of right
remain, and were reserved to the states or to the people; that thus
was manifested their determination to retain to themselves the right
of judging how far the licentiousness of speech and of the press may
be abridged without lessening their useful freedom, and how far
those abuses which cannot be separated from their use should be
tolerated rather than the use be destroyed; and thus also they
guarded against all abridgment by the United States, of the freedom
of religious principles and exercises, and retained to themselves the
right of protecting the same, as this, stated by a law passed on the
general demand of its citizens, had already protected them from all
human restraint or interference: and that, in addition to this general
principle and express declaration, another and more special
provision has been made by one of the amendments to the
Constitution, which expressly declares, that “Congress shall make no
laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,”
thereby guarding in the same sentence, and under the same words,
the freedom of religion, of speech, and of the press, insomuch that
whatever violates either, throws down the sanctuary which covers
the others; and that libels, falsehood, and defamation, equally with
heresy and false religion, are withheld from the cognisance of federal
tribunals. That therefore the act of the Congress of the United States,
passed on the 14th of July, 1798, entitled “An act in addition to the
act entitled An act for the punishment of certain crimes against the
United States,” which does abridge the freedom of the press, is not
law, but is altogether void and of no force.
4. Resolved, That alien friends are under the jurisdiction and
protection of the laws of the state wherein they are: that no power
over them has been delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to
the individual states distinct from their power over citizens; and it
being true, as a general principle, and one of the amendments to the
Constitution having also declared, that “the powers not delegated to
the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to the states,
are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people,” the act of the
Congress of the United States, passed the 22d day of June, 1798,
entitled “An act concerning aliens,” which assumes power over alien
friends not delegated by the Constitution, is not law, but is altogether
void and of no force.
5. Resolved, That in addition to the general principle as well as the
express declaration, that powers not delegated are reserved, another
and more special provision inferred in the Constitution, from
abundant caution has declared, “that the migration or importation of
such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to
admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year
1808.” That this commonwealth does admit the migration of alien
friends described as the subject of the said act concerning aliens; that
a provision against prohibiting their migration, is a provision against
all acts equivalent thereto, or it would be nugatory; that to remove
them when migrated is equivalent to a prohibition of their migration,
and is, therefore, contrary to the said provision of the Constitution,
and void.
6. Resolved, That the imprisonment of a person under the
protection of the laws of this commonwealth on his failure to obey
the simple order of the President to depart out of the United States,
as is undertaken by the said act, entitled, “An act concerning aliens,”
is contrary to the Constitution, one amendment in which has
provided, that “no person shall be deprived of liberty without due
process of law,” and, that another having provided, “that in all
criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a public
trial by an impartial jury, to be informed as to the nature and cause
of the accusation, to be confronted with the witnesses against him, to
have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to
have assistance of counsel for his defence,” the same act undertaking
to authorize the President to remove a person out of the United
States who is under the protection of the law, on his own suspicion,
without jury, without public trial, without confrontation of the
witnesses against him, without having witnesses in his favor, without
defence, without counsel, is contrary to these provisions also of the
Constitution, is therefore not law, but utterly void and of no force.
That transferring the power of judging any person who is under
the protection of the laws, from the courts to the President of the
United States, as is undertaken by the same act concerning aliens, is
against the article of the Constitution which provides, that “the
judicial power of the United States shall be vested in the courts, the
judges of which shall hold their office during good behavior,” and
that the said act is void for that reason also; and it is further to be
noted that this transfer of judiciary power is to that magistrate of the
general government who already possesses all the executive, and a
qualified negative in all the legislative powers.
7. Resolved, That the construction applied by the general
government (as is evident by sundry of their proceedings) to those
parts of the Constitution of the United States which delegate to
Congress power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, excises; to
pay the debts, and provide for the common defence and general
welfare of the United States, and to make all laws which shall be
necessary and proper for carrying into execution the powers vested
by the Constitution in the government of the United States, or any
department thereof, goes to the destruction of all the limits
prescribed to their power by the Constitution: That words meant by
that instrument to be subsidiary only to the execution of the limited
powers, ought not to be so construed as themselves to give unlimited
powers, nor a part so to be taken as to destroy the whole residue of
the instrument: That the proceedings of the general government
under color of those articles, will be a fit and necessary subject for
revisal and correction at a time of greater tranquillity, while those
specified in the preceding resolutions call for immediate redress.
 8. Resolved, That the preceding resolutions be transmitted to the
Senators and Representatives in Congress from this commonwealth,
who are enjoined to present the same to their respective Houses, and
to use their best endeavors to procure at the next session of Congress
a repeal of the aforesaid unconstitutional and obnoxious acts.
9. Resolved lastly, That the governor of this commonwealth be,
and is hereby authorized and requested to communicate the
preceding resolutions to the legislatures of the several states, to
assure them that this commonwealth considers union for special
national purposes, and particularly for those specified in their late
federal compact, to be friendly to the peace, happiness, and
prosperity of all the states—that, faithful to that compact, according
to the plain intent and meaning in which it was understood and
acceded to by the several parties, it is sincerely anxious for its
preservation; that it does also believe, that to take from the states all
the powers of self-government, and transfer them to a general and
consolidated government, without regard to the special delegations
and reservations solemnly agreed to in that compact, is not for the
peace, happiness, or prosperity of these states; and that, therefore,
this commonwealth is determined, as it doubts not its co-states are,
to submit to undelegated and consequently unlimited powers in no
man, or body of men on earth: that if the acts before specified should
stand, these conclusions would flow from them; that the general
government may place any act they think proper on the list of crimes
and punish it themselves, whether enumerated or not enumerated by
the Constitution as cognisable by them; that they may transfer its
cognisance to the President or any other person, who may himself be
the accuser, counsel, judge, and jury, whose suspicions may be the
evidence, his order the sentence, his officer the executioner, and his
breast the sole record of the transaction; that a very numerous and
valuable description of the inhabitants of these states, being by this
precedent reduced as outlaws to the absolute dominion of one man
and the barriers of the Constitution thus swept from us all, no
rampart now remains against the passions and the power of a
majority of Congress, to protect from a like exportation or other
grievous punishment the minority of the same body, the legislatures,
judges, governors, and counsellors of the states, nor their other
peaceable inhabitants who may venture to reclaim the constitutional
rights and liberties of the states and people, or who, for other causes,
good or bad, may be obnoxious to the view or marked by the
suspicions of the President, or to be thought dangerous to his or their
elections or other interests, public or personal; that the friendless
alien has been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment; but
the citizen will soon follow, or rather has already followed; for,
already has a sedition act marked him as a prey: that these and
successive acts of the same character, unless arrested on the
threshold, may tend to drive these states into revolution and blood,
and will furnish new calumnies against republican governments, and
new pretexts for those who wish it to be believed, that man cannot be
governed but by a rod of iron; that it would be a dangerous delusion
were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the
safety of our rights; that confidence is everywhere the parent of
despotism; free government is found in jealousy and not in
confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited
constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with
power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to
which, and no farther, our confidence may go; and let the honest
advocate of confidence read the alien and sedition acts, and say if the
Constitution has not been wise in fixing limits to the government it
created, and whether we should be wise in destroying those limits?
Let him say what the government is, if it be not a tyranny, which the
men of our choice have conferred on the President, and the President
of our choice has assented to and accepted over the friendly
strangers, to whom the mild spirit of our country and its laws had
pledged hospitality and protection; that the men of our choice have
more respected the bare suspicions of the President than the solid
rights of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of
truth, and the forms and substance of law and justice. In questions of
power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him
down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. That this
Commonwealth does therefore call on its co-states for an expression
of their sentiments on the acts concerning aliens, and for the
punishment of certain crimes hereinbefore specified, plainly
declaring whether these acts are or are not authorized by the federal
compact. And it doubts not that their sense will be so announced as
to prove their attachment to limited government, whether general or
particular, and that the rights and liberties of their co-states will be
exposed to no dangers by remaining embarked on a common bottom
with their own: but they will concur with this commonwealth in
considering the said acts as so palpably against the Constitution as to
amount to an undisguised declaration, that the compact is not meant
to be the measure of the powers of the general government, but that
it will proceed in the exercise over these states of all powers
whatsoever. That they will view this as seizing the rights of the states
and consolidating them in the hands of the general government, with
a power assumed to bind the states (not merely in cases made
federal) but in all cases whatsoever, by laws made, not with their
consent, but by others against their consent; that this would be to
surrender the form of government we have chosen, and live under
one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our
authority; and that the co-states recurring to their natural rights in
cases not made federal, will concur in declaring these void and of no
force, and will each unite with this Commonwealth in requesting
their repeal at the next session of Congress.

Edmund Bullock, S. H. R.
John Campbell, S. P. T.

Passed the House of Representatives, Nov. 10, 1798.

Attest, Thos. Todd, C. H. R.

In Senate, Nov. 13, 1798.—Unanimously concurred in.

Attest, B. Thurston, C. S.

Approved, Nov. 19, 1798.

Jas. Garrard, Gov. of Ky.

By the Governor,

Harry Toulmin, Sec. of State.

House of Representatives, Thursday, Nov. 14, 1799.

The House, according to the standing order of the day, resolved

itself into a committee of the whole House, on the state of the
commonwealth, Mr. Desha in the chair; and after some time spent
therein, the speaker resumed the chair, and Mr. Desha reported that
the committee had taken under consideration sundry resolutions
passed by several state legislatures, on the subject of the alien and
sedition laws, and had come to a resolution thereupon, which he
delivered in at the clerk’s table, where it was read and unanimously
agreed to by the House, as follows:—
The representatives of the good people of this commonwealth, in
General Assembly convened, having maturely considered the
answers of sundry states in the Union, to their resolutions passed the
last session, respecting certain unconstitutional laws of Congress,
commonly called the alien and sedition laws, would be faithless,
indeed, to themselves and to those they represent, were they silently
to acquiesce in the principles and doctrines attempted to be
maintained in all those answers, that of Virginia only excepted. To
again enter the field of argument, and attempt more fully or forcibly
to expose the unconstitutionality of those obnoxious laws, would, it
is apprehended, be as unnecessary as unavailing. We cannot,
however, but lament that, in the discussion of those interesting
subjects by sundry of the legislatures of our sister states, unfounded
suggestions and uncandid insinuations, derogatory to the true
character and principles of this commonwealth, have been
substituted in place of fair reasoning and sound argument. Our
opinions of these alarming measures of the general government,
together with our reasons for those opinions, were detailed with
decency and with temper, and submitted to the discussion and
judgment of our fellow-citizens throughout the Union. Whether the
like decency and temper have been observed in the answers of most
of those states who have denied or attempted to obviate the great
truths contained in those resolutions, we have now only to submit to
a candid world. Faithful to the true principles of the Federal Union,
unconscious of any designs to disturb the harmony of that Union,
and anxious only to escape the fangs of despotism, the good people
of this commonwealth are regardless of censure or calumniation.
Lest, however, the silence of this commonwealth should be construed
into an acquiescence in the doctrines and principles advanced and
attempted to be maintained by the said answers, or lest those of our
fellow-citizens throughout the Union who so widely differ from us on
those important subjects, should be deluded by the expectation, that
we shall be deterred from what we conceive our duty, or shrink from
the principles contained in those resolutions—therefore,
Resolved, That this commonwealth considers the Federal Union,
upon the terms and for the purposes specified in the late compact, as
conducive to the liberty and happiness of the several states: That it
does now unequivocally declare its attachment to the Union, and to
that compact, agreeably to its obvious and real intention, and will be
among the last to seek its dissolution: That if those who administer
the general government be permitted to transgress the limits fixed by
that compact, by a total disregard to the special delegations of power
therein contained, an annihilation of the state governments, and the
creation upon their ruins of a general consolidated government, will
be the inevitable consequence: That the principle and construction
contended for by sundry of the state legislatures, that the general
government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers
delegated to it, stop nothing short of despotism—since the discretion
of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution,
would be the measure of their powers: That the several states who
formed that instrument being sovereign and independent, have the
unquestionable right to judge of the infraction; and that a
nullification by those sovereignties of all unauthorized acts done
under color of that instrument is the rightful remedy: That this
commonwealth does, under the most deliberate reconsideration,
declare that the said alien and sedition laws are, in their opinion,
palpable violations of the said Constitution; and, however cheerfully
it may be disposed to surrender its opinion to a majority of its sister
states, in matters of ordinary or doubtful policy, yet, in momentous
regulations like the present, which so vitally wound the best rights of
the citizen, it would consider a silent acquiescence as highly criminal:
That although this commonwealth, as a party to the federal compact,
will bow to the laws of the Union, yet it does, at the same time,
declare that it will not now, or ever hereafter, cease to oppose in a
constitutional manner every attempt, at what quarter soever offered,
to violate that compact. And, finally, in order that no pretext or
arguments may be drawn from a supposed acquiescence on the part
of this commonwealth in the constitutionality of those laws, and be
thereby used as precedents for similar future violations of the federal
compact—this commonwealth does now enter against them its
solemn protest.
Extract, &c. Attest, T. Todd, C. H. R.
In Senate, Nov. 22, 1799—Read and concurred in.

Attest, B. Thurston, C. S.
Washington’s Farewell Address to the People
of the United States, Sept. 17, 1796.
Accepted as a Platform for the People of the Nation, regardless of
party.

Friends and Fellow-citizens:—

The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the

executive government of the United States being not far distant, and
the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in
designating the person who is to be clothed with that important
trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more
distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you
of the resolution I have formed to decline being considered among
the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made. I beg you, at
the same time, to do me the justice to be assured that this resolution
has not been taken without a strict regard to all the considerations
appertaining to the relation which binds a dutiful citizen to his
country; and that in withdrawing the tender of service, which silence,
in my situation, might imply, I am influenced by no diminution of
zeal for your future interests; no deficiency of grateful respect of your
past kindness; but am supported by a full conviction that the step is
compatible with both.
The acceptance of, and continuance hitherto in, the office to which
your suffrages have twice called me, have been a uniform sacrifice of
inclination to the opinion of duty, and to a deference for what
appeared to be your desire. I constantly hoped that it would have
been much earlier in my power, consistently with motives which I
was not at liberty to disregard, to return to that retirement from
which I had been reluctantly drawn. The strength of my inclination
to do this, previous to the last election, had even led to the
preparation of an address to declare it to you; but mature reflection
on the then perplexed and critical posture of our affairs with foreign
nations, and the unanimous advice of persons entitled to my
confidence, impelled me to abandon the idea.
I rejoice that the state of your concerns, external as well as
internal, no longer renders the pursuit of inclination incompatible
with the sentiment of duty or propriety; and am persuaded, whatever
partiality may be retained for my services, that, in the present
circumstances of our country, you will not disapprove my
determination to retire.
The impressions with which I first undertook the arduous trust
were explained on the proper occasion. In the discharge of this trust,
I will only say, that I have with good intentions contributed towards
the organization and administration of the government the best
exertions of which a very fallible judgment was capable. Not
unconscious in the outset of the inferiority of my qualifications,
experience, in my own eyes—perhaps still more in the eyes of others
—has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself; and every day
the increasing weight of years admonishes me, more and more, that
the abode of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.
Satisfied that if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my
services, they were temporary, I have the consolation to believe that,
while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene,
patriotism does not forbid it.
In looking forward to the moment which is intended to terminate
the career of my public life, my feelings do not permit me to suspend
the deep acknowledgment of that debt of gratitude which I owe to my
beloved country for the many honors it has conferred upon me; still
more for the steadfast confidence with which it has supported me;
and for the opportunities I have thence enjoyed of manifesting my
inviolable attachment, by services faithful and persevering, though in
usefulness unequal to my zeal. If benefits have resulted to our
country from these services, let it always be remembered to your
praise, and as an instructive example in our annals, that under
circumstances in which the passions, agitated in every direction,
were liable to mislead; amidst appearances sometimes dubious,
vicissitudes of fortune often discouraging; in situations in which, not
unfrequently, want of success has countenanced the spirit of
criticism,—the constancy of your support was the essential prop of
the efforts, and a guarantee of the plans, by which they were effected.
Profoundly penetrated by this new idea, I shall carry it with me to my
grave, as a strong incitement to unceasing vows, that Heaven may
continue to you the choicest tokens of its beneficence; that union and
brotherly affection may be perpetual; that the free Constitution,
which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained; that its
administration, in every department, may be stamped with wisdom
and virtue; that in fine, the happiness of the people of these states,
under the auspices of liberty, may be made complete, by so careful a
preservation and so prudent a use of this blessing as will acquire to
them the glory of recommending it to the applause, the affection, and
the adoption of every nation which is yet a stranger to it.
Here, perhaps, I ought to stop; but a solicitude for your welfare,
which cannot end but with my life, and the apprehension of danger
natural to that solicitude, urge me, on an occasion like the present, to
offer to your solemn contemplation, and to recommend to your
frequent review, some sentiments, which are the result of much
reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me
all important to the permanency of your felicity as a people. These
will be afforded to you with the more freedom, as you can only see in
them the disinterested warning of a parting friend, who can possibly
have no personal motive to bias his counsel; nor can I forget, as an
encouragement to it, your indulgent reception of my sentiments on a
former and not dissimilar occasion.
Interwoven as is the love of liberty with every ligament of your
hearts, no recommendation of mine is necessary to fortify or confirm
the attachment.
The unity of government which constitutes you one people, is also
now dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of
your real independence—the support of your tranquillity at home,
your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very
liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that,
from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be
taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the
conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress
against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be
most constantly and actively, (though often covertly and insidiously)
directed,—it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate
the immense value of your national union to your collective and
individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and
immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourself to think and speak
of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity,
watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing
whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can, in any event, be
abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of
every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or
to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.
For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest.
Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a
right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which
belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just
pride of patriotism, more than appellations derived from local
discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same
religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have, in a
common cause, fought and triumphed together; the independence
and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels and joint
efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes. But these
considerations, however powerfully they address themselves to your
sensibility, are generally outweighed by those which apply more
immediately to your interest; here every portion of our country finds
the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving
the union of the whole.
The North, in an unrestrained intercourse with the South,
protected by the equal laws of a common government, finds, in the
productions of the latter, great additional resources of maritime and
commercial enterprise, and precious materials of manufacturing
industry. The South, in the same intercourse benefiting by the agency
of the North, sees its agriculture grow, and its commerce expanded.
Turning partly into its own channels the seamen of the North, it
finds its particular navigation invigorated; and while it contributes,
in different ways, to nourish and increase the general mass of the
national navigation, it looks forward to the protection of a maritime
strength to which itself is unequally adapted. The East, in like
intercourse with the West, already finds, and in the progressive
improvement of interior communication, by land and by water, will
more and more find, a valuable vent for the commodities which each
brings from abroad or manufactures at home. The West derives from
the East supplies requisite to its growth or comfort, and what is
perhaps of still greater consequence, it must, of necessity, owe the
secure enjoyment of indispensable outlets for its own productions, to
the weight, influence, and the maritime strength of the Atlantic side
of the Union, directed by an indissoluble community of interests as
one nation. Any other tenure by which the West can hold this
essential advantage, whether derived from its own separate strength,
or from an apostate and unnatural connexion with any foreign
power, must be intrinsically precarious.
While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and
particular interest in union, all the parts combined cannot fail to
find, in the united mass of means and efforts, greater strength,
greater resource, proportionably greater security from external
danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations;
and what is of inestimable value, they must derive from union an
exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so
frequently afflict neighboring countries, not tied together by the
same government; which their own rivalship alone would be
sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances,
attachments and intrigues, would stimulate and embitter. Hence,
likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military
establishments, which, under any form of government, are
inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly
hostile to republican liberty; in this sense it is that your union ought
to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of
one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.
These considerations speak a persuasive language to every
reflecting and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the
Union as a primary object of patriotic desire. Is there a doubt,
whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let
experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation, in such a case,
were criminal. We are authorized to hope, that a proper organization
of the whole, with the auxiliary agency of governments for the
respective sub-divisions, will afford a happy issue to the experiment.
It is well worth a fair and full experiment. With such powerful and
obvious motives to Union, affecting all parts of our country, while
experience shall not have demonstrated its impracticability, there
will always be reason to distrust the patriotism of those who, in any
quarter, may endeavor to weaken its bands.
In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it
occurs as a matter of serious concern, that any ground should have
been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical
discriminations—Northern and Southern—Atlantic and Western:
whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a
real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of
party to acquire influence within particular districts, is to
misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot
shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings
which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render
alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by paternal
affection. The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a
useful lesson on this head; they have seen in the negotiation by the
executive, and in the unanimous ratification by the Senate, of the
treaty with Spain, and in the universal satisfaction at that event
throughout the United States, decisive proof how unfounded were
the suspicions propagated among them, of a policy in the general
government, and in the Atlantic States, unfriendly to their interest in
regard to the Mississippi—that with Great Britain, and that with
Spain, which secure to them everything they could desire in respect
to our foreign relations, towards confirming their prosperity. Will it
not be their wisdom to rely for the preservation of these advantages
on the Union by which they were procured? Will they not henceforth
be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them
from their brethren, and connect them with aliens?
To the efficacy and permanency of your Union a government of the
whole is indispensable. No alliance, however strict between the
parties, can be an adequate substitute; they must inevitably
experience the infractions and interruptions which all alliances, in all
time, have experienced. Sensible of this momentous truth, you have
improved upon your first essay, by the adoption of a Constitution of
government, better calculated than your former for an intimate
union, and for the efficacious management of your common
concerns. This government, the offspring of our own choice,
uninfluenced and unawed—adopted upon full investigation and
mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the
distribution of its powers—uniting security with energy, and
containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just
claim to your confidence and your support. Respect for its authority,
compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties
enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty. The basis of our
political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their
Constitutions of government; but the Constitution which at any time
exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole
people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power
and right of the people to establish government, presupposes the
duty of every individual to obey the established government.
All obstruction to the execution of laws, all combinations and
associations under whatever plausible character, with the real design
to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and
action of the constituted authorities, are destructive to this
fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize
faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force, to put in the
place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a
small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and,
according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the
public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and
incongruous projects of fashion, rather than the organ of consistent
and wholesome plans, digested by common counsels and modified
by mutual interests.
However combinations or associations of the above description
may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course
of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning,
ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the
power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of
government; destroying, afterwards, the very engines which had
lifted them to unjust dominion.
Towards the preservation of your government, and the
permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that
you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its
acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit
of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. One
method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution,
alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to
undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. In all the changes to
which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least
as necessary to fix the true character of governments as of other
human institutions; that experience is the surest standard by which
to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that
facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion
exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis
and opinion; and remember, especially, that for the efficient
management of your common interests, in a country so extensive as
ours, a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect
security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a
government, with powers properly distributed, and adjusted, its
surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name, where the
government is too feeble to withstand the enterprise of faction, to
confine each member of the society within the limits described by the
laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the
rights of person and property.
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state
with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical
discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and
warn you, in the most solemn manner, against the baneful effects of
the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having
its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under
different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled,
or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest
rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened
by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissensions, which, in
different ages and countries, has perpetrated the most horrid
enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads, at length, to
a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries
which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and
repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later,
the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate
than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his
own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.
 Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which,
nevertheless, ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and
continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the
interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils, and enfeeble the
public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded
jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against
another; foments, occasionally, riot and insurrection. It opens the
door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated
access to the government itself, through the channels of party
passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to
the policy and will of another.
There is an opinion that parties, in free countries, are useful
checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep
alive the spirit of liberty. This, within certain limits, is probably true;
and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with
indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of
the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit
not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there
will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And
there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force
of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be
quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into
a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.
It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking, in a free
country, should inspire caution in those intrusted with its
administration, to confine themselves within their respective
constitutional spheres, avoiding, in the exercise of the powers of one
department, to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment
tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and
thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A
just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which
predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the
truth of this position.
The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political
power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, and
constituting each the guardian of the public weal, against invasions
by the others, has been evinced by experiments, ancient and modern;