Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality

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.

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