This dissertation provides answers to various philosophical questions about the nature and normativity of love and friendship. Chapter 1 introduces these questions and my answers to them, while chapters 2 through 5 elaborate on these answers. Chapter 2 addresses the questions about the nature of love and friendship and argues that they’re best understood as syndromes, or as non-accidental condition-clusters that are accompanied by some set of symptoms indicating their presence. It also defends the thesis that love and friendship are psychologically grounded in reasons as well as several theses about the relations these phenomena have to their objects’ non-instrumental value. Chapters 3 through 5 address the questions about the normativity of love and friendship. Chapter 3 focuses on justification. It defends the rationalist position that love and friendship can be rationally assessed as justified or unjustified, and further argues that there are three types of reasons—value-based, quality-based, and history-based reasons—that can justify love and friendship. This chapter also argues that these phenomena are justified overall just in case the balance of reasons renders them rationally appropriate and defends the thesis that love and friendship can be completely rational. Chapters 4 and 5 address questions about the normative significance of love and friendship. Chapter 4 focuses on reasons. It argues that love and friendship generate person-based and relationship-based reasons, that these reasons are a mix of moral and non-moral ones, and that these reasons can be special in two different ways. It also defends multiple theses pertaining to how the reasons of love and friendship stack up against others that we may have. Chapter 5 focuses on duties. It argues that love and friendship generate irreducible, sui generis, special moral duties that (1) are directly grounded in the augmented moral statuses that our beloveds and friends have for us in virtue of our special relationships with them and (2) outweigh competing duties unless the contents of the latter duties are more significant than those of the former duties and the difference in significance here has reached a certain threshold.

What it is for us to blame an individual, and when is our blame appropriate? While moral psychologists have proposed a variety of theoretical approaches, they only recently started to systematically investigate the function of blaming practices and its bearing on questions about blame’s nature and normativity. In developing their function-based approaches, moral psychologists have not, however, paid much attention to the possibility that blame may have multiple functions.

My project aims to fill in this gap by developing a pluralist function-based approach to both the nature and the ethics of blame. Chapter 1 introduces the backgrounds and themes of the project. Chapter 2 directly engages with and challenges what I take to be a monist aim-based or function-based approach—the view that the aim of blame involves moral communication. Chapter 3 develops my pluralist function-based approach to the nature of blame. I suggest that blame is defined by a cluster of functions including protest, communication, and signaling. I contend that these functions are not merely accidentally associated with each other; instead, they, when realized together, have a distinct value of contributing to various first-order normative aims in an efficient and non-alienating way. Chapter 4 applies this approach to a kind of practical conflict about blame. Sometimes we face conflicting considerations about whether to blame because, I argue, blame cannot fulfill its multiple functions at the same time. In Chapters 5 and 6, I turn to examine questions about the role of reactive attitudes in theorizing moral responsibility. I argue against an influential “response-dependence” view that grounds facts about responsibility in facts about reactive attitudes; and I defend an inclusive view about the scope of reactive attitudes, according to which the controversial attitude of shame should count as a reactive attitude. The conclusion is that a pluralist function-based approach has various theoretical advantages, and reactive attitudes should play an important but limited role in this approach.

Some of our talk and thought is descriptive; it attempts to say how the world is. Some of our talk and thought is normative; it attempts to say how the world should be. This dissertation addresses the relationship between those two domains. Specifically, I investigate the question: in virtue of what do some descriptive considerations have the normative status of reasons for action? Philosophers working on this question have tended to defend three possible answers: that considerations are reasons in virtue of mind-independent normative facts, in virtue of the desires of the agents for whom they are reasons, or in virtue of the voluntary acts of will of the agents for whom they are reasons. I argue that the best answer is a hybrid of the first and third answers. While it is not always up to us whether some consideration is a reason, sometimes it is. Investigating how this can be turns out to illuminate some classic metaethical issues about the role of reflection in agency, the relationship between morality and our personal projects, and how normative motivation is possible.

Recent research in social psychology suggests that our attitudes and actions don’t typically issue from our reflective capacities. Instead, it appears that they often issue from what psychologists refer to as “automatic” processes, understood as psychological processes that operate quickly, efficiently, and outside of our conscious awareness and control. Much of this same research also suggests that when we do exercises our reflective capacities (rare as it may be), it’s usually not to question our attitudes and actions but rather to rationalize them (that is, to come up with reasons to do, think, and feel things that we want to do, think, and feel anyway). In light of these findings, a number of people have recently argued that we aren’t the kind of rational, reflective creatures that philosophers have traditionally thought we are. My aim in this dissertation is to respond to their worries. In the first half, I focus on questions related to our ability to do things for reasons. Common sense suggest that we often do things for reasons, but if our attitudes and actions typically issue from automatic processes, to what extent is this true? I argue that the best way to make good on the idea that we often do things for reasons is to accept both that our ability to do things for reasons doesn’t depend on our reflective capacities and that many of the processes that actually guide our attitudes and actions, though perhaps “automatic,” are nevertheless quite responsive to reasons. In the second half of the dissertation, I focus on whether we can rely on our reflective capacities to improve our agency. Although I deny that we need these capacities to do things for reasons, the reasons for which we do things aren’t always good reasons, and it’s only natural to think that we can rely on our reflective capacities to monitor and control their influences on us. However, this sort of view faces to main empirical challenges. First, it appears that we often don’t know what the causes of our attitudes and actions are, so how can we be expected to monitor and control their influences on us? Second, even if we do know what the causes of our attitudes and actions are, why should we think that we’re inclined to use reflection to question them? Isn’t it much more likely that we’ll use it to rationalize them instead? In response to the first challenge, I argue that once we recognize that reflection doesn’t require us to have introspective access to its objects, it becomes more plausible to think that we’re often in a good position to reflect on the causes of our attitudes and actions. In response to the second challenge, I argue that as long as we focus on the ways in which other people improve our reflection, the idea that we’ll often be inclined to use reflection to question our attitudes and actions becomes more plausible as well.

For many egalitarians, social justice requires equality in the distribution of goods or opportunities. By contrast, relational egalitarians take social relationships among members of society, not distribution, to be the proper object of egalitarian concern. This dissertation provides a conceptual framework for theorizing about relational equality. I demonstrate its appeal by using it to develop an account that attends to neglected aspects of relational equality, grounds its core commitments, and provides resources for addressing some of the most pressing objections raised against it. I conceptualize ‘relating’ in terms of three components: status/standing, regard, and treatment. All three components can be worked out in negative and/or positive terms: persons can lack or possess statuses; regard can require lacking or possessing beliefs and attitudes; treatment can require negative or positive behavioral norms. I characterize egalitarian relationships in terms of both negative and positive norms that are responsive to the equal value of persons and their nature as reasons-responsive agents. I identify some egalitarian norms that apply to various relationships among responsible agents living interdependently, including norms of mutual accountability, fairness, and answerability. Relational equality, as I describe it, is an attractive social ideal. I ground it as a political value that generates demands of justice by connecting it to the fair value of the basic liberties, the social bases of self-respect, and fair equality of opportunity. Although this strategy fits with a broader range of liberal commitments, I propose an alternative that appeals to a minimal perfectionist liberalism inspired by J.S. Mill. I argue that relational equality provides necessary social conditions for persons to realize their nature as deliberative agents within society.

I argue for an ahistorical account of moral responsibility. An agent is responsible for her behavior, and is thus a fitting target of reactive attitudes such as praise and blame, if and only if the agent acts while in the possession of the reasons-responsiveness capacities to recognize reasons and to act in accord with the reasons she recognizes. We need not augment this account with conditions tied to the agent’s history, as the account can provide satisfying explanations for cases of culpable incapacity (where the agent is incapacitated because of her prior misbehavior) and of bad history (where the agent’s wrongdoing is the product of having been neglected or mistreated). This ahistorical account of moral responsibility shows us that responsibility is about the sort of agent you are when you act, not about what happened in your past.

This dissertation in part aims to use the case of addiction to consider which theory of moral responsibility best accounts for and explains the features core to assessments of blameworthiness. In this project, I argue that Reasons Responsiveness theories provide a better framework for tracking and explaining the features necessary to responsible agency than Quality of Will theories. I also show how the condition of addiction can help refine theoretical commitments made by Reasons Responsiveness theories with regard to assessing blameworthiness for wrongdoing. Further, I give direction as to how we should think about addiction in theorizing about responsibility, including how we might conceptualize the condition, which of its features are most important in assessments of responsibility, and whether, why, and how significantly the condition might undermine responsible agency. After clarifying my assumptions about moral responsibility in chapter 1, in chapter 2 I argue against conceptualizing addiction as irresistibly compelling addictive substance use. I also offer some paradigmatic cases of addiction that have been influential in philosophical discussions about moral responsibility and introduce complications to these cases given the richer notion of addiction I defend. In chapter 3, I challenge the claim that Quality of Will views alone rightly account for moral responsibility in the case of Frankfurt’s so-called “willing addict.” I contend that the stipulations about addiction, wrongdoing, and control in the cases invite implicit assumptions that impact how the cases are often sorted in terms of blameworthiness and excuse. In chapter 4, I contend that structural Quality of Will views depend on the feature of effort to distinguish relevantly different cases of so-called “unwillingness” with regard to wrongdoing. Yet, I argue that this dependence on effort puts the views at a loss for explaining cases in which effort is absent because responsible agency seems undermined in some important way. In chapter 5, I argue that non-structural Quality of Will views cannot explain how addiction can mitigate blameworthiness for addiction-explained wrongdoing. Finally, in chapter 6, I offer guidance for how capacitarian Reasons Responsiveness views might explain the relevance of culpability for addiction in assessments of blameworthiness for addiction-explained wrongdoing.