There is a disturbing kind of situation that presents agents with only two possibilities of moral action—one especially praiseworthy, the other condemnable. I describe such scenarios and argue that moral action in them exhibits a unique set of parameters: performing the commendable action is especially praiseworthy; not performing is not blameworthy; not performing is wrong. This set of parameters is distinct from those which characterize either moral obligation or supererogation. It is accordingly claimed that it defines a distinct, yet unrecognized, (...) deontic category, to which the name ‘Forced Supererogation’ is appropriate. The moral parameters of Forced Supererogation and the relations between them are discussed, especially the divergence of wrongness and blame. I argue that this new category allows a more accurate classification of moral actions than that imposed by the strained dichotomy of obligation versus supererogation. (shrink)

Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who (...) we are as persons. Given this centrality, important questions arise concerning the justification of friendship and, in this context, whether it is permissible to “trade up” when someone new comes along, as well as concerning the possibility of reconciling the demands of friendship with the demands of morality in cases in which the two seem to conflict. (shrink)

This paper attempts to fill an epistemological gap in our theorizing about love with a sketch of an epistemology of love that unfolds by addressing Whitney Houston’s famous epistemological questions pertaining to how we can know whether another loves us. After arguing for three possible sources of the knowledge of love, it offers initial answers to how the knowledge of the presence or absence of another’s love can be acquired from the relevant possible sources previously established. These initial answers, though, (...) are unsatisfying because they invite more difficult questions that are then addressed, such as those pertaining to the kinds of things that constitute love’s expressions along with how to detect these expressions given the possibility of false positives. Addressing these questions ultimately leads to a sharpened, Aristotle-inspired account of how to acquire the knowledge of the presence or absence of another’s love by inferring it, respectively, from the successful or failed detection of love’s expressions. (shrink)

The article presents an analysis centered on the emotional lapses of artificial intelligence (AI) and the influence of these lapses on two critical aspects. Firstly, the article explores the ontological impact of emotional lapses, elucidating how they hinder AI’s capacity to develop a moral sense. The absence of a moral emotion, such as sympathy, creates a barrier for machines to grasp and ethically respond to specific situations. This raises fundamental questions about machines’ ability to act as moral agents in the (...) same manner as human beings. Additionally, the article sheds light on the practical implications within human-machine relations and their effect on human friendships. The lack of friendliness or its equivalent in interactions with machines directly impacts the quality and depth of human relations. This concerningly suggests the potential replacement or compromise of genuine interpersonal connections due to limitations in human-machine interactions. (shrink)

This paper uses the tools of experimental philosophy to examine the nature of interpersonal normativity in collective action, focusing on cases of immoral collective action and collective action by friends. The results of our two studies, which expand on recent empirical interventions into longstanding debates in social ontology, demonstrate that according to our everyday judgments there are interpersonal obligations in cases of collective action, even when immoral, and that, while friendship elicits judgments of togetherness, it does not affect the norms (...) of collective action. We also situate these results in the philosophical literature and discuss their consequences for a “pluralism” about sociality. (shrink)

Are the members of echo chambers blameworthy for their beliefs? If we follow Sarah Stroud's account of friendship, we end up with the following conclusion: if echo chambers involve friendship, then the individuals have strong reasons not to live up to epistemic demands or ideals when the friendships are formed in the echo chambers they are members of. This result stands in striking contrast with the received view, according to which the members of echo chambers are blameworthy for their epistemic (...) vices and faulty beliefs. The received view uses individual epistemic vices to propose individualistic solutions for the problem of echo chambers. I argue that this is misleading, simply because the members of echo chambers are not blameworthy due to the friendships cultivated in the echo chambers. (shrink)

I argue that death can be (and sometimes is) bad for cattle because it destroys relationships that are valuable for cattle for their own sake. The argument relies on an analogy between valuable human relationships and relationships cattle form with conspecifics. I suggest that the reasons we have for thinking that certain rich and meaningful human relationships are valuable for their own sake should also lead us to think that certain cattle relationships are valuable for their own sake. And just (...) as death is bad for us when it destroys our valuable relationships, so death is bad for cattle when it destroys their valuable relationships. This argument is important because it pinpoints something that is bad about death for cattle that is overlooked by popular accounts of the badness of death for non-human animals that focus exclusively on the impact of death on lifetime well-being levels. Thus, the argument reveals an overlooked moral cost of some of our farming practices. (shrink)

What does friendship require of us cognitively? Recently, some philosophers have argued that friendship places demands on what we believe. Specifically, they argue, friendship demands that we have positive beliefs about our friends even when such beliefs go against the evidence. Call this the doxastic account of the cognitive demands of friendship. Defenders of the doxastic account are committed to making a surprising claim about epistemology: sometimes, our beliefs should be sensitive to things that don’t bear on their truth. I (...) consider both motivations and worries for the doxastic account before developing a new account: the attentional account. According to it, friendship places demands on how we direct our attention. I argue that the attentional account can accommodate the considerations that motivate the doxastic account and weather the worries that trouble it, all while avoiding its surprising epistemological commitments. Along the way, I question the assumption that the cognitive demands of friendship center on positivity, and argue that the attentional account can support a more robust picture of friendship that calls for significant amounts of impartial thinking. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the neo-Aristotelian conception of “friendships of character” appears to misrepresent the essential nature of "genuine", or "true", friendship. We question the neo-Aristotelian imperative that true friendship entails disinterested love of the other “for their own sake” and strives at enhancing moral virtue. We propose an alternative conception of true friendship as involving affective and motivational features which we call closeness, intimacy, identity, and trust. Even on this minimal construal, however, friendship can turn vicious when (...) one of its characteristics becomes overpowering and thereby destroys the very goods for which the friendship was originally sought. (shrink)

What is common to all instances of friendship? Given their seemingly heterogeneous character, Phelan (2019. “Rethinking Friendship.” Inquiry) suggests that friendships are relationships that result from collaborative norm-manipulation. In this paper, I suggest that this proposal fails to account for all friendships without relying on the notion of some kind of care.

Associative duties are agent-centered duties to give defeasible moral priority to our special ties. Our strongest associative duties are to close friends and family. According to reductionists, our associative duties are just special duties—i.e., duties arising from what I have done to others, or what others have done to me. These include duties to abide by promises and contracts, compensate our benefactors in ways expressing gratitude, and aid those whom we have made especially vulnerable to our conduct. I argue, though, (...) that reductionism faces a problem: special duties are not strong enough to account for the strength of our associative duties. At the bar of associative duties, we are required to do what no special duty can warrant. I then present an alternative reductionist analysis of associative duties—the ‘Identity-Enactment Account’—which not only accounts for the peculiar strength of our associative duties, but also characterizes them in an intuitively compelling way. On this account, our strongest associative duties are special duties to protect or promote the welfare of the duty’s beneficiary by adopting and enacting a practical identity in which the duty’s beneficiary features prominently. There are persons who can legitimately demand a prominent place in our mental lives, for the protection and intimacy it affords. They can, in effect, legitimately demand to be among our nearest and dearest. The correlative of such a demand is, on our part, an associative duty we have toward them. (shrink)

In Axel Honneths Recht der Freiheit (RF) dienen persönliche Beziehungen, zu welchen Honneth neben Familien- und Liebesbeziehungen auch die Freundschaft zählt, der Verwirklichung einer „besondere[n], schwer zu charakterisierende[n] Form von Freiheit“ (RF 233). Diese Behauptung fügt sich ein in die Kernthese des Rechts der Freiheit. Demnach vermochte es die „Freiheit im Sinne der Autonomie des Einzelnen“ innerhalb unzähliger „Vorstellung[en] vom Guten“ als einzige, die moderne Gesellschaft nachhaltig zu prägen, wohingegen alle anderen Werte, die in der Moderne wirkmächtig geworden sind, als (...) „Facette[n] der konstitutive[n] Idee der individuellen Autonomie“ (RF 35) verstanden werden müssen. Wir argumentieren, dass Honneths Erörterung des Werts von Freundschaft in dreierlei Hinsicht sein Ziel verfehlt: Erstens zwingt sie Honneth zu einer radikalen Beschneidung des Freundschaftsbegriffs, indem er einen überzogenen Kontrast zwischen antiken und modernen Konzeptionen von Freundschaft zeichnet. Zweitens marginalisiert Honneth mit seiner Betrachtung andere Axiologien der Freundschaft, welche dieser gewichtige instrumentelle, konstitutive und finale Werte zuweisen. Drittens scheint selbst eine schwächer angelegte These, die den Wert, den Freundschaften für die individuelle Freiheit haben, auf die Stellung eines primus inter pares zurückstuft, immer noch den zentralen Wert, den Freundschaften für uns haben sollten, zu verfehlen. Dadurch wird Honneths Kernthese von der Exklusivität des Wertes der Freiheit für unsere Gesellschaft in Frage gestellt. (shrink)

A widely held view concerning the justification of associative duties is the so-called relationships view, according to which associative duties within personal relationships arise because of the value of those relationships. Against this view, it has been argued that there can be cases of undemanding friendships, that is, genuine friendships with no associative duties. In this article, I argue that undemanding friendships do not show that associative duties are not grounded in the value of the relationship that gives rise to (...) them by providing an interpretivist account of the normativity of friendships. I argue that friendships are complex values that need to be interpreted in order to determine which response to them would be appropriate, and that understanding one's friendship as undemanding is one valid interpretation of the value of friendship. Subsequently, I demonstrate that this solution is not ad hoc, because friendship is not the only complex value that needs to be interpreted. (shrink)

The loss of friendship can be a frequent occurrence for children as they explore their social worlds and navigate their way through the demands of particular relationships. Given that friendship is a relationship of special regard, and associated with a particular partiality to our friends, the ending of friendship and the subsequent interactions between former friends, can be difficult areas for schools to deal with. Whilst there has been considerable research on the formation and maintenance of friendship, a consideration of (...) what happens after friendship has had surprisingly limited attention. Much of our current understanding of issues on moral behaviour fails to fully address the positioning of former friends in our moral thinking particularly as regards matters arising from the priority of attachment. Recent empirical research seems to indicate that the memory of prior encounters has a far greater influence on future reciprocal exchanges than previously accepted. This paper considers suggests that this view of memory can be played out in two contrasting ways. First, a prudential view suggests that as our former friends were previously given access to our intimate secrets and confidences, self-interest would seem to indicate that we treat them well. Secondly, a residual duties view suggests that some obligations remain after the friendship has ended based on the history of the relationship. Finally, I then draw out some of the implications this may have for schools and the education of children. (shrink)

A long standing argument in philosophy purports that friendship plays a considerable role in our self-knowledge and perspectives on the world, much of which can be accredited to the enduring influence of the Aristotelian conceptualisation of friendship. More recent thinking on friendship terminations has given cause to rethink and clarify the basis of such suppositions. This has particular relevance within the realm of childhood where 'friendship termination' is considered a common experience. This article seeks to remind us that friendship can (...) also blind us to the faults of others. We may believe the friend to share the same set of values and commitments, but we can be wrong: we may see our friend through the proverbial rose-tinted glasses and fail to spot the ways in which the friend actively damages our well-being. I concentrate on four interlinked grounds for dissolving friendship within the realm of childhood so that we can better exami.. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the nature of love and friendship precludes them from being bought or sold. It will be argued in this paper that this view is false: There is no conceptual bar to the commodification of love and friendship. The arguments offered for this view will lead to another surprising conclusion: That these goods are asymmetrically alienable goods, goods whose nature is such that separate arguments must be provided for the views that they can be bought and (...) sold. The possibility of asymmetric alienability has not yet been recognized in the literature on commodification. (shrink)

It has been alleged that the demands of friendship conflict with the norms of epistemology—in particular, that there are cases in which the moral demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby come to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified or responsible belief :329–351, 2004; Stroud in Ethics 116:498–524, 2006; Hazlett in A luxury of the understanding: on the value of true belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). (...) The burden of this paper is to explain these appearances away. I contend that the impression of epistemic partiality in friendship dissipates once we acknowledge the sorts of practical and epistemic reasons that are generated by our values: value-reflecting reasons. The present proposal has several virtues: it requires fewer substantial commitments than other proposals seeking to resist the case for epistemic partiality ; it is independently motivated, as it cites a phenomenon—value-reflecting reasons—we have independent reasons to accept; it provides a single, unified account of how various features of friendship bear on belief-formation; and makes clear how it is the very value we place on friendship itself that ensures against epistemic partiality. (shrink)

Intuitively, one who counts a morally bad person as a friend has gone wrong somewhere. But it is far from obvious where exactly they have gone astray. Perhaps in cultivating a friendship with a bad person, one extends to them certain goods that they do not deserve. Or perhaps the failure lies elsewhere; one may be an abettor to moral transgressions. Yet another option is to identify the mistake as a species of imprudence—one may take on great personal risk in (...) counting a bad person as a friend. In this paper, I argue that none of these intuitive explanations are entirely convincing; for many such proposals run contrary to widely accepted features of friendship. However, they do point us in the direction of a more satisfying explanation—one which concerns a person’s moral priorities. An individual who counts a morally bad person as a friend is, I propose, one who betrays a distinct kind of defect in her values. (shrink)

Medical ethics prohibits caregivers from discriminating and providing preferential care to their compatriots and comrades. In military medicine, particularly during war and when resources may be scarce, ethical principles may dictate priority care for compatriot soldiers. The principle of nondiscrimination is central to utilitarian and deontological theories of justice, but communitarianism and the ethics of care and friendship stipulate a different set of duties for community members, friends, and family. Similar duties exist among the small cohesive groups that typify many (...) military units. When members of these groups require medical care, there are sometimes moral grounds to treat compatriot soldiers ahead of enemy or allied soldiers regardless of the severity of their respective wounds. (shrink)

Many persons find it intuitive that being friends with someone with immoral beliefs is wrong as such. I contest this claim, instead I argue that there is nothing necessarily wrong with such friendships. In coming to this conclusion I examine a number of arguments, including two of the most notable contributions put forward by Mason (2021) and Isserow (2018), that attempt to elucidate the wrongness involved in such friendships and find they do not successfully do so. I conclude by offering (...) some arguments as to why such friendships are not necessarily wrong. (shrink)

Aristotle distinguishes friendships of pleasure or utility from more valuable ‘character friendships’ in which the friend cares for the other qua person for the other’s own sake. Aristotle and some neo-Aristotelians require such friends to be fairly strictly symmetrical in their separateness of identity from each other, in the degree to which they identify with each other, and in the degree to which they are virtuous. We argue that there is a neglected form of valuable friendship–neither of friendship nor utility–that (...) allows significant asymmetries. We know of no sustained discussion of such ‘asymmetrical’ friendships in the literature. (shrink)

Those who are said to argue are typically seen as annoying, domineering types who treat conversation as a duel in which the goal is in the words of Gerry Spence's recent bestseller, "to win every time." The most immediate manifestation of this resistance to argument as both inescapable and healthful comes from our students; even when they learn to appreciate and evaluate tropes at an advanced level, they still often wonder aloud, "Should I engage openly in argument?" This paper aspires (...) to paste a happy face on the practice of argument as a partial antidote to this resistance. (shrink)