The paper addresses the problem of authenticity from a point of view that diverges from the more usual social, political, or moral approaches, by focusing very explicitly on the internal psychological make-up of human agents in an attempt to identify the conditions that would enable us to use the colloquial phrase 'being true to ourselves' in a way that is philosophically tenable. First, it is argued that the most important and problematic condition is the requirement that agents can be the (...) source of normative constraints which they themselves should attempt to respect. In the main part of the paper an argument is developed against a more or less Humean interpretation of this crucial requirement, according to which agents can be the source of normative constraints because they have desires , and a more or less Kantian interpretation, according to which agents can be the source of normative constraints because they have the capacity to judge . The Humean account is unsatisfactory, because it fails to make sense of the normativity of the content of desires, and because it cannot account on its own for what makes a person's desires her own . The Kantian account is also unsatisfactory, because, although it can account for the difference between being true to someone else and being true to certain principles, it is unable to account for the difference between being true to oneself and being true to principles. In the final part I shall suggest a way out of this impasse by claiming that the intelligibility of the phenomenon of being true to oneself crucially depends on the, yet to be explored, possibility of developing an account of self-respect that involves both de se attitudes and the idea of ourselves being valuable entities. (shrink)

Philip Pettit's ethocentric account of rule-following is elaborated and defended in this paper as basically a story about the capacity to reason organized around largely implicit assumptions about what is and what is not normal. It is argued that this account can be insightfully used to elucidate the practical reasoning of agents confronted with the normative indeterminacy that seems to be characteristic of radically new situations. It is shown that practical reasoning consists to a large extent in the capacity to (...) articulate, specify, and evaluate implicit assumptions about what is and what is not normal. One corollary of this account of practical reason is investigated in some detail: the predominant role of intrapersonal divergence of habits in reasoning about an apparent normative indeterminacy and the related, merely criteriological role of convergence with respect to determining the right rules to follow. (shrink)

Prinz claims that empirical work on emotions and moral judgement can help us resolve longstanding metaethical disputes in favour of simple sentimentalism. I argue that the empirical evidence he marshals does not have the metaethical implications he claims: the studies purporting to show that having an emotion is sufficient for making a moral judgement are tendentiously described. We are entitled to ascribe competence with moral concepts to experimental subjects only if we suppose that they would withdraw their moral judgement on (...) learning that they were fully explained by hypnotically induced disgust. Genuine moral judgements must be reason-responsive. To capture the reason-responsiveness of moral judgement, we must turn to either neo-sentimentalism or to a non-sentimentalist metaethics, either of which is fully compatible with the empirical evidence Prinz cites. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Frank Hindriks.