This paper compares Aquinas’ account of the fundamental evaluative notions of good and bad with the theories of normativity offered by the philosophers Christine Korsgaard and T. M. Scanlon. This paper was initially motivated by the observation that Korsgaard and Scanlon each share a point of contact with Aquinas’ thought, even though their views on normativity are very different from one another, and from Aquinas’ own views. Korsgaard’s approach to normativity shares at least one feature with Aquinas’ moral theory, namely, an acknowledgment of the normativity of nature, correctly understood. Scanlon does not have any such commitment, but he does offer an account of the fundamental status of reasons which is suggestively similar to Aquinas’ claim that practical reason depends on first principles. The upshot is that Aquinas seems to agree with some significant aspect of two distinct theories of normativity, whose proponents disagree with each other in fundamental ways. And this raises a question – what is it about Aquinas’ understanding of normativity, as we would put it, which allows him to hold together seemingly incompatible approaches in this way? This paper offers an answer to this question.

Christine Korsgaard avers that the value we place on specific personal choices — understood as goals or ends — involves committing to them, or forming a care, which is itself conditioned by the value-conferring ability of the valuer. In other words, personal autonomy implies the objective value of the agent’s autonomous choosing and their coeval cares projects. Commentators like Andrea Sangiovanni, Paul Guyer, and Rae Langton criticize Korsgaard’s commitment-based conception of autonomous choosing. This article reviews these objections and then proposes a modified Korsgaardian framework concerning the objective value of autonomous choosing, which, I propose, avoids these critical objections.

It may be possible, now or in the future, for humans to technologically intervene to reduce the amount of suffering experienced by wild animals. There is a debate about whether, if humans can do this, they should. Here, I consider the implications for this debate of the theological claim that humans have been granted dominion over the other animals. I argue that it's more plausible to interpret the dominion claim as granting humans (i) the responsibility to care for the well-being of individual animals than to interpret it as giving humans either (ii) the right to do whatever they want to other animals or (iii) the responsibility to care only for the well-being of aggregates of animals (such as whole species). I then show how this understanding of dominion undermines a range of arguments against intervening to reduce wild animal suffering. These arguments claim that humans do not stand in the right sort of relationship for intervention to be obligatory (or perhaps even permissible). But if we possess such dominion, we do stand in the right sort of relationship for it to be obligatory.

There are several senses in which Kant’s moral law is independent of sensibility. This paper is devoted mainly to Kant’s account of ‘physical conditions independence’, or the idea that the moral law can compel us to pursue ends that might be impossible to realize empirically. Since this idea has received little attention from commentators, this paper addresses both its textual basis in Kant’s writings and its overall philosophical viability.