Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality

by Troy A. Jollimore

Overview

First Published in 2001. Morality is viewed as a demanding and unsympathetic taskmaster, and as an external, foreign, even alien force. The moral life, on such a view, is a labor not of love, but of duty. One of the guiding intuitions of this book is that this picture of morality is deeply and pervasively wrong. Morality is not an external or alien force and is not at all disconnected from the agent’s values, or from her good. Indeed, what is morally required of an agent will/depend a great deal on, and will thus reflect, that agent’s values, commitments, and relationships.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138974692
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/27/2018
Series:	Studies in Ethics
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Troy A. Jollimore is Lecturer at the University of California, Davis.

Table of Contents

List of Tables; Preface; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Introduction; 1. The Objection from Friendship; 2. Agent-neutrality, Agent-relativity, and Consequentialism; 3. Friendship; 4. Preview of the Argument; Chapter 2: Consequentialism and Friendship; 1. The Nature of the Objection; 2. Friendships and Feelings; 3. Differential Ability; Consequentialism and Legitimate Values; 5. Sophisticated Consequentialism; 6. Friendship Without Partiality?; 7. A Friend to Everyone?; 8. Morality and Friendship; Chapter 3: Morality and Its Limits; 1. Introduction; 2. Are Moral Considerations Overriding?; 3. Worries About Morality; 4. Is Morality Everything?; 5. The Defense of Consequentialism; Chapter 4: Agent-Neutrality; 1. Consequentialism Without Maximization; 2. Two Types of Non-Consequentialism; 3. Is the Hybrid Theory Intuitively Plausible?; 4. Restrictions and Integrity; 5. Restrictions and Relativity; 6. Three Objections from Scheffler; 7. Relativity and Subjectivism; Chapter 5: Three Accounts of Agent-Relativity; 1, Introduction; 2. Sen: Relativity of Permissibility; 3. Nagel: Relativity of Reasons; 4. McNaught and Rawling: Relativity of Principles; 5. Moral Reasons, Moral Theories, and Moral Value Rankings; Chapter 6: Agent-Relativity: The Moral Preferability Account: 1. Preferability and Relativity; 2. Agent-Relative Reasons, Principles, and Properties; 3. Agent-Relativistic Consequentialism; 4. The Moral Agent and the Realm of Duty; Bibliography; Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book looks at the connections between personal relationships and theories of ethical behavior, arguing that many such theories simply cannot account for relationships such as friendship, and that such theories should therefore be rejected." — Troy A. Jollimore, California State University, Chico

From the Publisher