On the Kantian view, respect is owed to persons as self-originating sources of valid claims. Hegelians insist on the constitutive role of social recognition. In the article that opens this issue, Carla Bagnoli proposes a dialogical interpretation of Kant’s conception of respect that assigns recognition a constitutive role in the formation of personality. The dialogical interpretation acknowledges the relational nature of our identity and thus vindicates an important Hegelian claim about the social nature of the self, but it does not argue for the priority of a community over the self.

It is commonly accepted that manipulation using force, threat, or fraud, is morally wrong. But what about motive manipulation – shaping the wants, desires, and intentions of agents so that they willing do what you want them to do? In the second article, Eric M. Cave shows that most existing condemnations of manipulation are unable to explain why motive manipulation is morally wrong. He argues that the principle of modest autonomy can provide such an explanation. This principle tells us to refrain from activities that threaten the capacity of others to supplement, winnow, reorder, revise, or strive towards their own concerns as they see fit.

How can we decide between alternatives when it is impossible to know beforehand what their morally relevant properties will be? To solve this problem, Sven ∅ve Hansson develops the idea of hypothetical retrospection. This idea holds that a decision is evaluated under the assumption that one of the branches of possible future developments has materialised. This evaluation is based on the deliberator’s present values, and each decision is judged in relation to the information available when it is taken. The basic decision rule is to choose an alternative that comes out as morally acceptable (permissible) from all hypothetical retrospections.

The general aim of Imtiaz Moosa’s article is to show that naturalism and intuitionism need not be incompatible. He starts with extracting from Brentano’s works three formal arguments against ‘genealogical explanations’ of ethical claims. He then proceeds to counter these arguments by showing how genealogical arguments of even apodictic moral claims are logically possible, albeit under certain unlikely, stringent conditions. His final step is showing that, contrary to evolutionary ethics, Nietzsche’s ethics does meet these conditions.

Julia Annas argues for a particular account of virtue in which the intellectual structure of virtue is analogous to the intellectual structure of practical skills. She claims that Aristotle rejects the idea that virtue is a skill, despite the frequent analogies that he draws between skills and virtues. In his article, Matt Stichter puts forth the view that while Aristotle rejects the Socratic model of virtue as a skill, he does not reject the model of virtue as a skill altogether. In his view Annas has mischaracterized Aristotle’s position on the skill model, because she has not recognized that Aristotle endorses a different view of the nature of skills than Socrates and the Stoics.

In an article published in this journal (vol. 5:2), Devin Henry argues that Aristotle allows for the possibility of genuine akrasia, whereby a person acts while knowing in an unqualified sense that what he is doing is wrong. In his article, Byron James Stoyles shows that Henry’s interpretation is advantageous for the reason that it makes clear how Aristotle could have made good sense of genuine akrasia, while maintaining non-trivial distinctions between temperance, self-indulgence self-control and akrasia. There are, however, some interpretive challenges that follow from Henry’s account which Stoyles intends to explain and resolve.

Larry Temkin claims that there is intransitivity because equality and other familiar moral considerations such as utility and Rawls’ principle of maximin are essentially comparative. In the last article of this issue Michael Weber states that the case for equality being comparative is largely built upon Derek Parfit’s discussion of the ‘Mere Addition Paradox.’ This paradox suggests a powerful argument for the intransitivity of the relation ‘better than.’ The crux of the argument is the view that equality is essentially comparative, according to which the same inequality can be evaluated differently, depending on what is being compared to. Weber argues that the comparative view of equality should be rejected, and hence so too this argument for intransitivity.

Amsterdam/Utrecht, March 2007