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This PhD dissertation comprises five chapters on a variety of intersecting topics within moral psychology, metaethics, and epistemology. Broadly speaking, the first half of the dissertation focuses on individual agency, normativity and the self; while the second half explores aspects of our normative lives as social agents. More specifically, the first half contains papers on underdetermination by value, self-improvement, and the problem of self-creation; while the second half contains papers on epistemic angst as a social problem and the normativity of social norms. A theme of the first half is that the internal dynamics of individual agency share more in common with inter-agential social dynamics than is usually thought. A theme of the second half is that the reasons emerging from inter-agential social dynamics are more pervasive and powerful than many working in metanormative theory have allowed. Together, the two halves of the dissertation lay some of the groundwork for a novel account of human agency, together with an improvement on our understanding of the nature of robust normativity. In Chapter 1, I articulate and attempt to solve the problem of rational underdetermination as it confronts idealizing subjectivists. In Chapter 2, I introduce a novel thought experiment designed to sound some skeptical notes about self-improvement and interrogate their significance for our understanding of the relationship between agency, identity and self-improvement. In Chapter 3, I criticise a recent, prominent solution to the old problem of self-creation and propose an alternative I label ‘indirect evaluative voluntarism’. In Chapter 4, I pivot to problems generated by our interactions with other agents. I attempt to establish a claim of a posteriori necessity regarding social norms’ reason-giving power that follows from the best account of what they and we are like. My argumentative strategy for establishing that conclusion is to show that the relevant instrumental normativity is simply contingent on a human agent’s having any desires whatsoever, on the model of a universal hypothetical imperative. In Chapter 5, I articulate a distinctively social, epistemic form of angst and use it to explain some communities’ distrust of experts and one another; identify three structural problems manifesting epistemic angst; sketch a partial solution to it; and explain what remains to be done to solve it. Chapter 1 now appears in Synthese as ‘Too many cooks’., Gates Cambridge

Penser la responsabilité comme un problème éthique va de soi ; mais en irait-il de même si on l’abordait aussi comme un problème esthétique ? Le cinéma peut-il nous éduquer, nous changer, nous éveiller à nous-mêmes, nous amener à prendre la mesure de notre propre responsabilité ? Autrement dit, à quelles conditions la responsabilité peut-elle devenir un problème de cinéma ? Ce mémoire porte sur le rapport entre esthétique et éthique dans le cinéma d’Alfred Hitchcock, et ce, à partir de la question de la responsabilité. Il s’agit d’examiner de quelle manière l’esthétique d’Alfred Hitchcock peut être la condition d’un questionnement éthique, et, inversement, d’évaluer comment la responsabilité donne un sens ou une valeur éthique à l’esthétique de ce cinéaste. À cet objectif général s’en ajoute un second, complémentaire : faire la preuve qu’Hitchcock problématise la responsabilité en recourant aux moyens propres au cinéma, et que c’est précisément en problématisant l’éthique qu’il découvre ce qui appartient en propre au cinéma. C’est autour de trois grands axes que s’articule cette lecture éthique de l’œuvre d’Hitchcock. À l’instar de Deleuze qui parlait d’Alfred Hitchcock comme étant le « cinéaste de la relation », on cherchera à voir comment le problème des relations s’articule, relève ou participe d’un problème plus profond, celui de la responsabilité. On tirera ensuite les conséquences de cette prépondérance des relations pour montrer comment l’identité personnelle s’en trouve profondément affectée. Par l’étude de films particuliers, on sera à même de voir comment la notion d’identité est tantôt instable, tantôt fictive ou relative, pour ne pas dire violente. Enfin, on en arrivera à la responsabilité entendue comme l’exigence d’en passer par une création de soi par soi, laquelle est étroitement liée à la reconnaissance de notre condition humaine et la reconnaissance de l’humanité d’autrui, mais aussi à la prise de conscience de ce que nous sommes, de ce que nous avons été et de ce que nous aspirons à être., One may easily accept that responsibility is a matter that pertains to ethical thinking; but what if we also make it an aesthetical problem? Are we willing to accept that cinema has the ability to educate us and change us, so that we can acknowledge our own responsibilities? In other words, under what conditions can responsibility become a cinematographical problem? This dissertation is about the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Hitchcock’s films, based on the problem of responsibility. Throughout analysis and descriptions of many of his films, I will examine how Hitchcock’s aesthetic can lead to an ethical questioning, and, conversely, how responsibility gives meaning or ethical value to the aesthetic of this filmmaker. In doing so, an additional objective is added: to demonstrate that Hitchcock problematizes responsibility only with the means of cinema, and that it is precisely through this ethical questioning that he discovers what is cinema, its means, its possibilities and its specificity. This ethical reading of Hitchcock’s films is divided into three sections. Taking up Deleuze’s reading where Hitchcock was described as the filmmaker of relations, the first section is an attempt to evaluate how relationship’s economy is articulated with or belongs to a deeper problem, that of responsibility and accountability. The second section follows by demonstrating how relationships transforms the very notion of identity, which is revealed as unstable, fictional, partial, when not simply violent. Indeed, we’ll see how during trials, the defendant is denied the possibility of having his own voice, or how domestic spaces represent a danger for the integrity of key feminine characters struggling to find their place in this world. In the final section, it will be clear to us that for different reasons, comically or dramatically, Hitchcock’s films are filled with character’s living a life of self-denial; characters who, instead of being part of this world, are simply haunting it. Therefore, the problem of responsibility will be defined as the demand for self-creation, that is, being the actors of our own existence. For this, we need to acknowledge our human condition, which is precisely that we are not yet accountable for our place in this world; but moreover, responsibility is about acknowledging who we are, who we’ve been and who we aspire to be.