The moral perspective as a personal perspective

The moral perspective has traditionally been understood as an impersonal perspective. Moral philosophers are often committed to the view that personal projects and attachments, for example, are morally irrelevant. In my view, however, the moral perspective is at least partly a personal perspective. (1) My first objective is to explain in what ways the moral perspective is and is not a personal perspective. This part of the project has two dimensions. The aim of the reconstructive dimension is to provide a positive account of the ways in which the moral perspective can rightly be said to be a personal perspective, inspired by a Wittgensteinian tradition in moral philosophy. The aim of the critical dimension is to evaluate, on the basis of my reconstructive analysis, three mainstream Kantian accounts by Korsgaard, Habermas and Darwall. Although they rightly recognize that the moral perspective is a personal perspective, my hypothesis is that these accounts misrepresent several personal aspects of our moral lives and practices. (2) My second objective is to trace the implications of the fact that the moral perspective is in several ways a personal perspective for three debates in contemporary moral philosophy. If the moral perspective is, in ways that I will specify, a personal perspective, then that will have consequences for (a) practices of giving moral advice, (b) the possibility of action-guiding moral theory and (c) our understanding of the problem of moralism.