Autonomy and the Second Person Within: A Commentary on Stephen Darwall’s The Second‐Person Standpoint

When you address a claim or a demand to someone, expecting him to respond to that claim as one that gives him a reason for action, you are attempting to issue what Stephen Darwall calls a second-personal reason. Whether you succeed in doing so, according to Darwall, depends on whether certain normative “felicity conditions” of making such a demand are met. Since you expect the other person to take your demand as giving him a reason, you are supposing that you have the authority to bind him by your command. Since you expect him to take your demand as giving him a reason, you are supposing that he can conform to it in the way that one conforms to a reason—by acknowledging its force and imposing it freely on himself, rather than, say, by being frightened into obedience by the fear that you will retaliate if he does not. You are assuming that he has what Darwall calls second-personal competence, the competence to respond to a demand as a reason in the right way. And for both of these reasons, you are also supposing that he is accountable both to you and to himself if he does not conform to the demand that you have made. Darwall argues that because second-personal reasons have these felicity conditions—the reciprocal authority of both parties, the competence to respond to it, and the accountability that results—the very act of addressing one entails certain recognizably moral commitments. And this is important, because Darwall thinks that these felicity con-