Ashley Purdy

The paper supports the view that loyal action is essentially insensitive to good (or all-things-considered) judgement and analyses what this amounts to. While some philosophers (principally, R.E. Ewin and Simon Keller) hold that loyalty is judgement insensitive, more of them (for instance, Andrew Oldenquist, Josiah Royce and John Kleinig) hold that loyalty is essentially a commitment to a cause, which commitment can be pursued through good judgement. I support the view that loyalty is judgement insensitive with two points: it captures what it is about paradigmatic cases of loyalty that makes them paradigmatic, and it sufficiently distinguishes loyal action from conscientious and pragmatic action. I then argue that there are two guises of judgement insensitivity – immediacy of action or recalcitrance to good judgement – and that immediacy is more paradigmatic of loyalty. An interesting upshot of this view is that one cannot directly abide by a putative duty of loyalty.

Moral metaethical constitutivists claim that moral reasons can be reduced to the constitutive aims or principles of agency. While such a project promises to secure the universality and conclusiveness of moral reasons, it also threatens to leave insufficient space for acting on other values. In this paper, I argue that moral metaethical constitutivism is unlikely to overcome the burdensomeness objection, according to which a theory is objectionably burdensome if it leaves insufficient space for the agent’s own projects, relationships, and so on. I argue that neither Christine Korsgaard’s reflective endorsement account nor Michael Smith’s capacities account can overcome the objection, and suggest that the problems that they encounter are likely to generalize to any moral metaethical constitutivism. It is unlikely that what is constitutive of agency is sensitive to the unique goods of humanity, and thus unlikely that good moral agents could also live good human lives.

Aristotle claims that character friends are similar to each other. How should we understand this similarity, and what role does it play in friendship? In the paper, I argue that a broad similarity of ‘tastes’—which I understand as the appreciation of relatively good ends—is at least a facilitating condition on the formation of character friendship. This is because it (i) facilitates seeing the other as good in the first place, which is essential to character friendship; and (ii) enables the friends to spend time and share in activities together, which is characteristic of character friendship.

Part of T. M. Scanlon’s project in What We Owe to Each Other (1998) is to explain the importance and priority of moral reasons. But Scanlon also argues that this priority of moral reasons is compatible with the pursuit of other things we value, such as friendship. To this end, Scanlon claims that contractualist moral reasons internally accommodate our interests in such values. In this paper, I argue that Scanlon is unsuccessful in showing the compatibility of morality and the pursuit of our other values. The contractualist may not be able to be a good friend.