Those who believe that they have special obligations to their community — to their family, state or nation, clan, tribe, or cultural group — often insist that they have duties not merely to present and future members. They also claim to have responsibilities to, or in respect to, their predecessors. David Miller, in his defence of ‘nationality,’ claims that the existence of a nation as a historical community is one of the features which make it ‘a community of obligation.’ ‘“Because our forebears have toiled and spilt their blood to build and defend the nation, we who are born into it inherit an obligation to continue their work….’” Being a member of a nation, says Yael Tamir, requires individuals to keep faith with its history. Annette Baier thinks that if we fail to pass on our inherited public goods to our descendants we can be blamed not only for harming their interests but also for not carrying out the intentions of our forebears.

We believe we owe one another respect. We believe we ought to pay what we owe by treating one another ‘with respect.’ If we could understand these beliefs we would be well on the way to understanding morality itself. If we could justify these beliefs we could vindicate a central part of our moral experience.

Respect comes in many varieties. We respect some people for their upright character, others for their exceptional achievements. There are people we respect as forces of nature: we go to great lengths to accommodate their moods, wiles, and demands. Finally, most of us seem to respect people simply because they are people. This is the sort of respect of special interest to moral theory.

In order to be worthy of this last sort of respect, it is not only sufficient but necessary that one be a person. We can, of course, take a similar attitude toward nonpersons.

Summing up the lessons of the final book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke describes two ‘ways to enlarge our Knowledge, as far as we are capable.’ One involves the cultivation of our capacity for demonstrative reasoning, the other the proper framing of the ideas from which any such reasoning must issue and on which mere ‘experimental Knowledge’ (IV .iii.29: 560) is likewise founded. Under the latter heading, we are urged to aim not only for ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’ ideas, but also for ‘perfect’ ones. Finally, a laconic insertion in the fourth edition specifies how the perfection of one class of ideas is to be pursued:

Jerry Fodor is loath to have content be constituted, even in part, by inferential relations. This loathing, I will argue, gets him into trouble. In his latest book, Concepts, Fodor contrasts informational atomism, his view of concepts and their content, with inferential role theory. The latter, he argues, is almost certainly false. This strikes cognitive science at its core, he adds, since the major theories of concepts currently in vogue in cognitive science are all variants on inferential role theory.