Bennett W. Helm

We must distinguish between a capacity for goal-directedness of a sort found in chess-playing computers and a capacity for robust desire, which involves finding there being something in favor of the relevant course of action in light of its significance to the subject. Existing accounts of desire, especially those given in terms of instrumental rationality, either ignore or presuppose such significance, in both cases failing to give an adequate account of robust desire. My positive thesis in this paper is that we can understand what it is to be a subject of significance and so what it is to have desires only in terms of the emotions, and I offer an explicit account of emotions, desire, and significance in terms of patterns of non-instrumental rationality the subject must display in its behavior.

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.

Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” usefully connected the concepts of freedom and responsibility with the reactive attitudes, but there has been some controversy concerning both the nature of that connection and what the reactive attitudes are. I shall argue—tentatively and speculatively—that we can best understand the reactive attitudes by seeing them as individually presupposing and jointly constituting both our respect for persons and the dignity to which that respect is responsive. Consequently, being both a proper subject and object of the reactive attitudes is to be a member of the normative community of fellow persons within which one both takes responsibility and is held responsible for what one does. This just is to be a responsible agent.