ABSTRACT
Michael Tomasello, in his “natural history of human morality,” argues that second-person collaborative relations already contain moral considerations; there are both second-person and detached or third-person moralities. Tomasello takes his view to differ from that implied by P.F. Strawson in his famous paper, “Freedom and Resentment.” In his critical response to Strawson, Jay Wallace explores how a richer second-person interpretation of the place of certain reactive attitudes in our interpersonal relations can show how there are a spectrum of interpersonal relations that involve morality in various ways. In this chapter, I survey these developments and then indicate how a reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of ethics and politics can help us appreciate what is valuable in the views of Tomasello and particularly Wallace.
