ABSTRACT
This paper has two main targets. The first is Stephen Darwall’s claim that moral obligation is essentially second personal. The principal conclusion of the paper will be that it is not – or that it is not, as Darwall says of testimony, second personal ‘all the way down’. Moral obligation cannot be fully second personal because what we are morally obliged to do depends fundamentally and irreducibly on facts about the situations we find ourselves in; that is, moral reasons are at bottom state-of-the-world-regarding or third personal in character. The second target of the paper is Benjamin McMyler’s second-personal theory of testimony and trust. The other main conclusion reached is that one cannot give a secondpersonal theory of either testimony or trust; although both are second personal up to a point, neither are so ‘all the way down’. As a consequence, or so I argue, neither are the moral obligations that are generated by trust. From this it follows that moral obligation cannot be essentially second personal in character.
