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This thesis is concerned with tracing out the manifold connections between personhood and morality to argue that morality is based on fundamental properties of the person, and therefore a moral philosophy that ignores or truncates the person is one that fails to understand the central function of morality in our social practices and understanding of the self. It is at the same time to argue that morality is integral to personhood and enters the construct of the person at the most basic level. My method is to exploit our sense that our concept of the person exists to capture that which makes us more than natural beings. First, persons must self-define. What it is to be a person is not given. Persons, and each person, must create an ideal of the person to act, and through action try to realize that ideal and through that process in fact realize themselves. Second, the human psyche has its own needs and drives unrelated to those of the physical being that propel the being towards personhood. Third, persons have depth. When we recognize a being to be a person, it is evidence of depth that we recognize. Without depth persons would not be. We have evolved a specialized vocabulary -- a moral vocabulary -- that both recognizes that depth and facilitates its creation. Together these entail that the person cannot be constructed without that construct being eventually set in moral terms, and that sociality is a basic unit of analysis of the person: persons exist as beings who recognize each other and exist in a matrix of recognition within which persons come to be. In as much as existing as a person is the proper form of existence for our kind and personhood is dependent on the voluntary activity of other persons, existence as a person must as far as possible be guaranteed. This is the foundational task of morality and the source of its basic requirements. / text

Most philosophers believe that morality gives us reasons, and that those reasons apply necessarily and universally. I refer to this rather general view as the Normativity Thesis. My dissertation is (1) a defense of the Normativity Thesis, and (2) an inquiry into what form the Normativity Thesis should take. I defend the Normativity Thesis on the grounds that morally wrong action always provides sufficient reason for criticism of the wrongdoer. I then argue that sufficient reason to criticize always involve the failure on the part of the criticizable person to respond to her own reasons. Thus, morally wrong action involves the failure to respond to reasons. It is commonplace to capture the relationship between reasons and morality as follows: Necessarily, for all A, x: if A’s doing x was morally wrong, then when A did x, there was a reason for A not to do x. This thesis, however, is in tension with a prominent theory about reasons for action, Humeanism: Necessarily, for all A, x: if A has a reason to do x, then A has some desire that will be served by doing x. The tension results from the fact that it appears to be possible that someone lacks any desire that is served by ii refraining from immoral action. I provide a novel argument for Humeanism, inspired by Bernard Williams’ famous argument for that thesis. Thus, I argue, since we have very good reason to accept Humeanism, the standard way of specifying the Normativity Thesis is problematic. I suggest that given Humeanism, we are compelled towards a specification of the Normativity Thesis that gives a central role to what I call moral sentiments: compassion and respect. On my view, the normativity of morality derives from reasons to have those sentiments, rather than reasons for action. Finally, I suggest that this view of the normativity of morality provides strong but non-conclusive reason to adopt a particular view about the nature of the property of moral wrongness, or what it fundamentally is to be morally wrong -- a view that again places moral sentiments at center stage. / text

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