In chapter 5 it was shown how replies to questions can be irrelevant, but there is a still more general problem about relevance concerning argumentation. How can arguments, or any moves in a dialogue, for that matter, be judged relevant or irrelevant? This problem is a central one for critical argumentation because many of the emotional appeals commonly used in argumentation, such as appeal to pity or fear or ad hominem arguments, are fallacious because they are irrelevant arguments. They are powerful tactics of distraction that work to throw an arguer off the trail, creating distractions and confusion by arousing powerful emotions. However, appeals to emotion are not always fallacious. Sometimes they are relevant. So there is a problem of judging in any given case when such an appeal should be considered relevant or not. While argumentation schemes are helpful for this purpose, judging relevance often means one also has to examine a more lengthy chain of argumentation in a dialogue. As indicated in chapter 1, a sequence of argumentation in a dialogue should always have a particular proposition it is ultimately aimed to prove as its target. Its target is the issue that the dialogue is supposed to settle. In a critical discussion, the chain of argumentation is aimed at proving or casting doubt on some particular proposition at issue in a dialogue.

Dialogues, as we saw in chapter 1, have characteristics such as civility, meaning that the two participants take turns making various moves. This chapter begins by analyzing the different types of dialogue that embody such characteristics in order to make the dialogue successful as an environment for using rational argumentation. Such moves include not only the putting forward of arguments, but also the asking of questions, including critical questions used to respond to arguments. It is the connected sequence of questions and answers, as well as chains of arguments, that make up the dialogues. Thus, asking the right questions in a dialogue and responding appropriately to the other party's questions are important aspects of what makes a dialogue move forward. This chapter classifies the different types of dialogue and examines some of the main properties of questions and how they are used in dialogues. Questioning is obviously very important in law and politics. For example, in a trial, a lawyer has to question a witness and sometimes in cross-examination can do so in quite a probing, even aggressive way. The lawyer for the other side often needs to object to such questions. Questioning is also very important in science at the discovery stage, where hypotheses are formulated.

Asking questions often seems like an innocent and harmless enough activity, you might think, from a viewpoint of critical argumentation.

Several distinct forms of argument are identified in chapter 3 that are not deductive or inductive in nature. These arguments are inherently presumptive and defeasible, and thus they are different in nature from deductive and inductive arguments. Each of the forms of argument described in this chapter is used as a presumptive argument in a dialogue that carries a weight of plausibility. If the respondent accepts the premises, then that gives him a good reason also to accept the conclusion. But it does not mean that the respondent should accept the conclusion uncritically. Matching each form of argument is a set of appropriate critical questions to ask. In a given case, there may be a balance of considerations to take into account. There may be some arguments in favor of the conclusion and some against it. These forms of inference are called argumentation schemes, and they represent many common types of argumentation that are familiar in everyday conversations. They need to be evaluated in a context of dialogue. They are used to shift a burden of proof to one side or the other in a dialogue and need to be evaluated differently at different stages of a dialogue. Only a few of the most important and familiar of these common types of argument are described in chapter 3. Others, such as argument from consequences, are described in chapter 4.

The detection of bias, or a slant to one side in an argument, is an important skill of critical thinking. There are definite indicators of bias, studied in this chapter, that can be detected in an argument in a given case. Most of this chapter is devoted to showing how to recognize indicators of bias present in a given case. In some cases, a mass of evidence, indicating a persistent pattern of bias in a series of arguments in a dialogue, can be overwhelming. But the problem in many cases is that it is hard to identify a bias because it is concealed in the language used. Someone who is trying to persuade an audience may use emotive language in the form of loaded terms that puts a “spin” on the argument. Such use of loaded terms in natural language can often make it look like a simple statement of fact is being made. This appearance tends to disguise the real function of the discourse, which is to put forward an argument.

People typically feel that verbal disputes are trivial and that how a term is defined is of little or no importance, compared with the job of proving a point by “hard” observational evidence collected by statistics. But problems about language and verbal disputes are often far from trivial. Biased language is a powerful tool of persuasion on important issues of public policy.

Introduction: The Worry

One can feel guilty without thinking that one actually is guilty of moral wrongdoing. For example, one can feel guilty about eating an ice cream or skipping aerobics, even if one doesn't take a moralistic view of self-indulgence. And one can feel guilty about things that aren't one's doing at all, as in the case of survivor's guilt about being spared some catastrophe suffered by others. Guilt without perceived wrongdoing may of course be irrational, but I think it is sometimes rational, and I want to explore how it can be.

If guilt were essentially a feeling about having done something morally wrong, then feeling guilty about self-indulgence or survival would of course be irrational. The only reason why I can conceive of guilt's being rational in these cases is that I think the emotion need not involve any judgment or perception of immorality. But I also think that the emotion of guilt must involve a judgment or perception whose content is normative in a more general sense. In particular, I believe that guilt requires a sense of normative vulnerability, which I would define as follows.

At the bottom of normative vulnerability is the sense of being somehow unjustified, of having nothing to say for oneself. But feeling unjustified in some respect does not by itself amount to feeling guilty, since one doesn't feel guilty, for instance, about beliefs or assertions for which one is aware of having no justification.

At the end of “The Imagination and the Self,” Bernard Williams uncovers a common confusion about the range of thoughts in which the metaphysics of personal identity is implicated. When I imagine being someone else, I can be described as imagining that I am the other person – which sounds as if I am imagining a relation of identity between that person and me, David Velleman. As Williams points out, however, this particular way of imagining that I am another person is not really about me or my identity with anyone.

If my approach to imagining that I am Napoleon, for example, is to imagine being Napoleon, then I simply imagine a particular situation as experienced by Napoleon. I imagine the landscape at Austerlitz as seen through Napoleon's eyes, the sounds of battle as heard through his ears, the nap of a tunic as felt by his hand. Although Napoleon doesn't appear in the resulting mental image, he does appear in the content of my imagining, since I am imagining Austerlitz specifically as experienced by him.

Introduction

Love and morality are generally assumed to differ in spirit. The moral point of view is impartial and favors no particular individual, whereas favoring someone in particular seems like the very essence of love. Love and morality are therefore thought to place conflicting demands on our attention, requiring us to look at things differently, whether or not they ultimately require us to do different things.

The question is supposed to be whether a person can do justice to both perspectives. Some philosophers think that one or the other perspective will inevitably be slighted – that a loving person cannot help but be inattentive to his moral duty, while a fully dutiful person cannot help but be unloving. Other philosophers contend that a person can pass freely between these perspectives, tempering either with insights drawn from the other and thereby doing justice to both.

A Problem for Kantian Ethics

The latter arguments have been especially effective when pressed by consequentialists. Consequentialism makes no fundamental demands on an agent's attention: it says that an agent ought to think in whatever way would do the most good, which will rarely entail thinking about how to do the most good. Although the consequentialist standard is impartial and impersonal, its satisfaction allows, and probably requires, partial and personal attention to individuals.

Kantian moral theory cannot efface itself in this fashion, because it makes fundamental demands on an agent's practical thought.

We have many expressions to describe a person who is trustworthy and true – a rock, a brick, a Mensch. In a more analytical mood, we describe such a person as grounded or centered. I want to consider what it is to be grounded or centered, and then to explain what being grounded or centered has to do with being trustworthy and true.

My account begins with a quality generally regarded as distinctive of persons – namely, self-awareness. Of course, a brick or a rock isn't self-aware; but a person can be a brick or a rock in the figurative sense only through the utmost development of that which differentiates him as a person from bricks and rocks literally so called. If we want to identify the relevant differences, however, we do better to contrast a person with something that comes a bit closer to personhood – say, a cat.

“And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” So ends Chapter 2 of Genesis. Chapter 3 narrates the Fall and its aftermath: “The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” Presumably, they made themselves aprons to cover their nakedness, because they were now ashamed.

Why were Adam and Eve ashamed? And why hadn't they been ashamed before? The text of Genesis 3 suggests that they became ashamed because they realized that they were naked. But what realization was that? They were not created literally blind, and so they weren't seeing their own skin for the first time. The realization that they were naked must have been the realization that they were unclothed, which would have required them to envision the possibility of clothing. Yet the mere idea of clothing would have had no effect on Adam and Eve unless they also saw why clothing was necessary. And when they saw the necessity of clothing, they were seeing – what, exactly? There was no preexisting culture to disapprove of nakedness or to enforce norms of dress. What Genesis suggests is that the necessity of clothing was not a cultural invention but a natural fact, evident to the first people whose eyes were sufficiently open.

Or, rather, this fact was brought about by their eyes' being opened.

Just when philosophers of science thought they had buried Freud for the last time, he has quietly reappeared in the writings of moral philosophers. Two analytic ethicists, Samuel Scheffler and John Deigh, have independently applied Freud's theory of the superego to the problem of moral motivation. Scheffler and Deigh concur in thinking that although Freudian theory doesn't entirely solve the problem, it can nevertheless contribute to a solution.

Freud claims that the governance exercised over us by morality is a form of governance that was once exercised by our parents and that was subsequently assumed by a portion of our own personalities. This inner proxy for our parents was established, according to Freud, at the time when we were obliged to give up our oedipal attachment to them. Freud therefore declares that “Kant's Categorical Imperative is … the direct heir of the Oedipus complex.”

Scheffler and Deigh are skeptical of Freud's claim to have explained the force of Kant's imperative. In Freud's thoroughly naturalistic account, our obedience to moral requirements owes nothing to their meriting obedience; it's due entirely to incentives that appeal to our inborn drives. Freud thus explains the influence of morality in a way that tends to debunk its rational authority, whereas the Categorical Imperative is supposed to carry all the authority of practical reason.

But Scheffler and Deigh believe that moral requirements can carry rational authority, as Kant believed, while still emanating from a distinct portion of the personality, formed out of identifications with other persons in the manner described by Freud.

Kant believes that we must come up against practical conflicts in order to feel the normative force of morality, because that force consists in our own unwillingness to live with practical conflicts of two kinds: contradictions in conception and contradictions in the will. Every instance of immorality is, according to Kant, an instance of one or the other conflict; and only by recognizing and recoiling from these conflicts do we come under the guidance of morality. Because these conflicts are contradictions, they are conflicts of reason, and their instances are irrational as well as immoral. We come under moral guidance, then, in recognizing and recoiling from conflicts of practical reason.

I am going to argue against Kant's account of contradictions in the will, and in favor of an alternative account, which I shall call “concessive.” My arguments will imply that Kant is wrong about one of the ways in which wrongdoing is irrational, and hence about one of the ways in which we are guided by morality.

Kant is committed to the proposition (i) that wrongdoing entails irrationality in the agent, since a perfectly rational agent always does the right thing. He is also committed to the more specific proposition (ii) that wrongdoing entails irrationality in the action, since the balance of valid reasons for acting always favors doing the right thing. The latter, more specific proposition has often been the target of criticism.

Many philosophers have thought that human autonomy includes, or perhaps even consists in, a capacity for self-constitution – a capacity, that is, to define or invent or create oneself. Unfortunately, self-constitution sounds not just magical but paradoxical, as if the rabbit could go solo and pull himself out of the hat. Suspicions about the very idea of this trick have sometimes been allayed by appeal to the political analogy implicit in the term “self-constitution”: a person is claimed to constitute himself in the same way as a polity does, by writing, ratifying, and revising articles of constitution. But a polity is constituted, in the first instance, by its constituent persons, who are constituted antecedently to it; and suspicions therefore remain about the idea of self-constitution at the level of the individual person.

One philosopher has tried to save personal self-constitution from suspicions of paradox by freely admitting that it is a trick. A real rabbit can't pull himself out of a hat, according to this philosopher, but an illusory rabbit can appear to do so: the secret of the trick is that the rabbit isn't real. We ask, “But if the rabbit isn't real – and there's no magician, either – then who is performing the trick?” He replies, “Why, of course: the hat.” A rabbit can't pull himself out of a hat, but a hat can make it appear that a rabbit is pulling himself out of it.

The Overall Strategy

The overall strategy of Kant's moral theory is to derive the content of our obligations from the very concept of an obligation. Kant thought that we can figure out what we are obligated to do by analyzing the very idea of being obligated to do something. Where I am using the word ‘obligation,’ Kant used the German word Pflicht, which is usually translated into English as “duty.” In Kant's vocabulary, then, the strategy of his moral theory is to figure out what our duties are by analyzing what duty is.

A duty, to begin with, is a practical requirement – a requirement to do something or not to do something. But there are many practical requirements that aren't duties. If you want to read Kant in the original, you have to learn German: there's a practical requirement. Federal law requires you to make yourself available to serve on a jury: there's another practical requirement. But these two requirements have features that clearly distinguish them from moral obligations or duties.

The first requires you to learn German only if you want to read Kant in the original. This requirement is consequently escapable: you can gain exemption from it by giving up the relevant desire. Give up wanting to read Kant in the original and you can forget about this requirement, since it will no longer apply to you.