The papers in this issue were originally presented at the Annual Conference of the British Society for Ethical Theory, Southampton, July 2006. We are grateful to Elinor Mason of Edinburgh University for her work as a guest-editor.

Realists about reasons should adopt an anti-Humean theory of motivation, says Melissa Barry in her opening article. Realists agree that judgements regarding reasons are beliefs, but disagree over the question how such beliefs motivate rational action. In a Humean view beliefs about reasons must combine with independently existing desires in order to motivate action. Barry explores four possible interpretations of this role and argues that none allows a Humean theory to explain rational action as convincingly as an anti-Humean theory does.

While a deontological theory may find that some legal institutions are required by justice, it is not obvious how such a theory can assess institutions not strictly required (or prohibited) by justice. This is the problem addressed by Elizabeth Brake in her article. As a starting-point, she considers intuitions that in some cases it is desirable to attribute non-consequentialist moral value to institutions not required by justice. She argues that neither consequentialist nor virtue-ethical accounts account for these intuitions, suggesting that a distinctive deontological account is needed. The account she gives is drawn from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals.

Timothy Chappell discusses Bernard Williams’ ‘integrity objection’—his version of the demandingness objection to unreasonably demanding ‘extremist’ moral theories such as consequentialism—and argues that it is best understood as presupposing the internal reasons thesis. However, since the internal reasons thesis is questionable, so is, according to Chappell, Williams’ integrity objection. He proposes an alternative way of bringing out the unreasonableness of extremism, based on the notion of the agent’s autonomy. Because of the unique relationship between the good of the agent’s own autonomous agency and the agent himself, the agent is bound to give special protection to his own autonomous agency, because in large part he is his own autonomous agency.

Empirical findings may help in evaluating rival theories and conceptions in ethics. Jules Holroyd’s paper illustrates this. Psychologists have found out that when offered rewards for engaging in certain behaviours, subjects are subsequently less motivated to so behave. On the basis of such data, Holroyd formulates a constraint: moral appraisal should not be characterised by features that lead us (on the basis of the data) to predict that agents will suffer decreased subsequent motivation. He then argues that two prominent models of moral appraisal—a consequentialist model and Jay Wallace’s ‘emotive response’ model—violate this constraint. According to Holroyd the model that he proposes—the communicative conception of appraisal—does not violate this constraint.

Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons discuss the new trend in moral psychology: the view that deliberative moral reasoning and general principles only play a marginal role in determining moral judgements. Moral judgements are mostly ‘intuitive’, that is: automatic, fast, and subconscious. They embrace the basic intuitionist idea that most moral judgements are psychologically spontaneous and not the result of reasoning. Horgan and Timmons argue that this idea does not rule out that intuitive moral judgements are also reason-based. The theory they propose, morphological rationalism, holds that moral principles typically guide without being represented by the agent. They say that morally mature individuals typically possess such principles (their contents) morphologically and that the manner in which such principles are operative in producing particular moral judgments is by being proceduralised.

In his paper, Andrew Moore discusses two methodological desiderata of ethical theories: completeness and consistency. Completeness is desirable because part of the point of an ethical theory is to state the conditions for the overall statuses that an action might have, including at least those of right and wrong. Moore argues that many leading ethical theories are incomplete, in that they fail to account for both right and wrong. Unlike completeness, consistency is well recognised to be a desirable feature in an ethical theory. A consistent ethical theory does not state or imply any contradiction. It also does not contradict any necessary truth. Moore argues that some leading ethical theories are inconsistent, in that they allow that an act can be both right and wrong. He also considers responses to his objections on behalf of the target theories.

In the last paper, Philip Nickel defends the view that trust is a moral attitude, by putting forward the Obligation–Ascription Thesis: If E trusts F to do X, this implies that E ascribes an obligation to F to do X. He explicates the idea of obligation-ascription in terms of requirement and the appropriateness of blame. Then, drawing a distinction between attitude and ground, he argues that this account of the attitude of trust is compatible with the possibility of trust held among amoral persons on the basis of amoral grounds. It is also compatible with trust adopted on purely predictive grounds. Defending the thesis against a challenge of motivational inefficacy, Nickel subsequently argues that obligation-ascription can motivate people to act even in the absence of definite, mutually known agreements. He ends by explaining the advantages of this sort of moral account of trust over a view based on reactive attitudes such as resentment.

Amsterdam/Utrecht, May 2007