Stephen Darwall interviewed in 3:AM Magazine

January 3, 2014

An interview with Professor Stephen Darwall appears in 3:AM Magazine. Professor Darwall discusses his second-personal ethics and its relation to consequentialism, deontology and contractualism, as well as different views of recognition, revenge and resentment in the history of ethical thought. “I agree with Mill,” says Darwall, “that vengeance has nothing to do with morality.” For although vengeance, he continues, “is taken against another person, it is not second personal in the sense of holding another accountable through a respectful demand for respect. Unlike second-personal reactive attitudes it involves no implicit demand that the other hold himself accountable.” Professor Darwall also recounts his own initiation into philosophy as a Yale undergraduate. Asked what made him become a philosopher, he answers that philosophy did.