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.