Mark Lebar

Florida State University | FSU · Department of Philosophy

Morality seems to play a special role in human life distinct from conventional norms, like those of etiquette, or simple preferences based on subjective tastes. There are various theories of the foundations of morality, some of which treat morality as “subjective” in an important way. “Moral realism” is, however, a family of theories that take mora...

This essay is about authority or standing-not legal but moral standing, which we construe as a basic moral relation of authority between persons: the authority to obligate each other. Our thesis is that self-ownership is a form of this moral standing, one people have insofar as they are separate individuals. And unlike legal standing, self-ownershi...

To the extent that we are interested in justice as a virtue of character, we might start with Aristotle’s conception, but a fresh look at justice can, potentially, open avenues of thought in more than one direction. The fruits of interaction between Aristotelian and Kantian thought have been manifest in a wide variety of ways in recent years, and t...

In the ethical theories of the ancient Greeks, eudaimonia provided a grounding for the value of all other goods. But a puzzle for such views is that some things are good for us irrespective of the intervention of eudaimonia and its requirement of virtuous activity. In this article, the author considers challenges to the eudaimonist account of value...

From its earliest roots in Greek philosophy, among the most prominent virtues-and arguably the most important of the social virtues-has been justice. While during this same period political philosophy focused intense energy on understanding justice as a property or quality of societies, discussion of justice as a virtue of individuals mostly disapp...

In “Two-Level Eudaimonismand Second-Personal Reasons,” Bradford Cokelet argues that we should reject one strategy-one I advanced earlier in this journal-for reconciling a virtue-ethical theoretical framework with that part of our moral experience that has been described as (among other things) second-personal reasons. Cokelet frames a number of rel...

Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics can each be understood as claiming that all human beings desire to live well, and that this desire, when accompanied by correct beliefs about the role of virtue in living well, moves people to be virtuous. Call this claim 'psychological eudaimonism' ('PE'). Neither Plato, Aristotle, nor the Stoics, however, investig...

Many philosophers have thought Lewis Carroll’s wonderful fable “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” teaches us an important lesson. What that lesson is, is less clear. Here I will argue that the fable has important implications for the relationship between constructivism and particularism in an adequate theory of practical rationality. By “a theory...

When H.A. Prichard launched his attack on the “mistake” in moral philosophy of “supposing the possibility of proving what can only be apprehended directly by an act of moral thinking,” he had Plato squarely in his sights. I Plato, in fact, is the poster boy for the strategy of trying to “supply by a process of reflection a proof of the truth of wha...

In this chapter I explore the relationship between virtue and politics. There are of course many interesting and important questions about what virtue is and what kind of virtue is important; similarly, there are many different questions we could ask about “politics,” so that the question of their relation is hopelessly broad. To be useful at all,...

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Constructivism about practical judgments, as I understand it, is the notion that our true normative judgments represent a normative reality, while denying that that reality is independent of our exer-cise of moral and practical judgment. The Kantian strain of practical constructivism (through Kant himself, John Rawls, Christine Korsgaard, and other...

  Theories of human well-being struggle with a tension between opposing intuitions: on the one hand, that our welfare is subjectively determined by us as individuals, and on the other that there are objective constraints on what can count as our good. I argue that accounts driven primarily by subjectivist intuitions fail to come to grips with the s...

It seems that in interpreting others we sometimes simulate, sometimes apply theory. Josef Perner has suggested that a fruitful line of inquiry in folk psychology would seek "criteria for problems where we have to use simulation from those where we do without or where it is even impossible to use." In this paper I follow Perner with a suggestion tha...

In Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard gives an account of why we should find the interests of others reason-giving — why our pursuit of our own interests should be constrained by the reasons of others. The key, according to Korsgaard, lies in the nature of reasons themselves. Reasons must be shareable to be reasons. So-called “private reas...

Contemporary debate over public welfare policy is often cast in Kantian terms. It is argued, for example, that respect for the dignity of the poor requires public aid, or that respect for their autonomy forbids it. In some recent political discourse, the views of Kant himself have been invoked in defense of public welfare provision. Some have argue...