ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an account of Stephen Darwall’s concept of second-person reasons, a key notion in his Kant-inspired theory of moral normativity. After presenting his argument for the holism of the second-person standpoint, his account of persons as free and rational agents, and his claim that moral normativity requires symmetry between the addressor and addressee of normative claims, the chapter turns to Levinas’s phenomenological approach to second-person reasons. While Levinas rejects a Kantian “reasons-first” account of normativity, his “normativity-first” account of reason addresses a point left obscure in Darwall’s theory. Central to Levinas’s position is the idea that, in the face of the other, we experience a kind of normative claim on us that does not presuppose symmetry but first makes entering into the second-person standpoint possible. Through a transcendental-phenomenological analysis of Levinas’s concepts of freedom, desire, welcome, discourse, apologia, generosity, conscience, and the good beyond being—and with reference to Heidegger’s structurally similar account of the performativity of the self—the chapter argues that the capacity for reason presupposed in Darwall’s second-person standpoint is possible only on the basis of an interdictory command that precedes reason. The chapter concludes with a Levinasian approach to second-person reasons based on the “command to command,” arguing that it preserves a good bit of Darwall’s understanding of specifically moral normativity.
