The complexity of freedom

I maintained in Chapter 2 that no hard line could be drawn between theoretical and practical discourse, and that a proposition that might appear to have no practical implications at all could turn out to carry, at the very least, epistemic action commitments constraining the assertions it would be rational to utter or not to utter, given only that one held a certain proposition to be true. Nevertheless, some forms of discourse are more immediately practical than others. Propositions that directly commend action and others that impute responsibility, justify, blame, or excuse, while not sealed off from descriptive discourse by an is–ought gap or a fact–value distinction, are more immediately practical than, say, the propositions of theoretical physics. The former either directly enjoin what is the thing to do in specific circumstances or are action guiding by implication – an imputation of blame for an action indicates, for instance, that it would not be the thing to do under similar conditions at another time.

Because the concept of a person is profoundly important in such forms of discourse, and because to recognize someone as a person is to incur action commitments of a quite specific type, I devoted the last two chapters to an inquiry into the conditions that an entity must satisfy to be a person.