Stephen Darwall

Professor Darwall is now at Yale University. His research has concerned the foundations of ethics, moral psychology, moral theory, and the history of these subjects, primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of Impartial Reason (Cornell, 1983), a theory of practical reason, The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought': 1640-1740 (Cambridge, 1995), a discussion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of obligation and motivation, Philosophical Ethics (Westview, 1988), a textbook in moral philosophy, and Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton, 2002), on the metaethics of well-being or welfare. His most recent work on the centrality of second-personal address and authority to moral obligation and responsibility--The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability was published by Harvard University Press in 2006. He is also working on a history of ethical philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present. An associate editor of Ethics and founding co-editor of Philosophers' Imprint, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, a past president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and he has held the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship on four occasions.

May 31, 2008 Retirement Memoir

Field(s) of Study

• Moral and Political, History of Ethics