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17An important part of friendships are the so-called special obligations generated by them. Friends owe things to each other that they do not owe to strangers. While such special obligations are an important part of our everyday practice, they raise several philosophical questions. These questions include the status of special obligations (are such obligations sui generis or is it possible to reduce them to general moral principles?), the source of such special obligations (what grounds special ob…Read more
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1Cultural Relativism (2nd ed.)In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Living ethics: an introduction with readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 35-43. 2025.
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53An important part of friendships are the so-called special obligations generated by them. Friends owe things to each other that they do not owe to strangers. While such special obligations are an important part of our everyday practice, they raise several philosophical questions. These questions include the status of special obligations (are such obligations sui generis or is it possible to reduce them to general moral principles?), the source of such special obligations (what grounds special ob…Read more
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21Feminism, Friendship, and PhilosophyCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 28 (sup1): 63-82. 2002.In recent years, more and more philosophical work has come to be done under the rubric of ‘feminist philosophy.’ In particular, more and more work in philosophical ethics has come to be identified by both those who produce it and those who read it as within the domain of ‘feminist ethics.’ As a philosophical ethicist and a feminist, the question naturally arises as to whether I do feminist ethics. The question seems particularly natural in my case, because a great deal of my research has focusse…Read more
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28Being Evil by Luke Russell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)Philosophy 97 (4): 545-548. 2022.
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78The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship (edited book)Routledge. 2022.A superb compilation that explores the history, major topics, and controversies in philosophical work on friendship. It gives an overview and in-depth exploration of the connections between friendship and the history of philosophy, morality, practical rationality, value theory, and interpersonal relationships more generally.
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21On Loyalty and Loyalties: The Contours of a Problematic Virtue, by John Kleinig: New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. x + 315, US$36.95 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4): 823-826. 2016.
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8The Evil Within: Why We Need Moral PhilosophyOup Usa. 2018.Slave-holders, Nazis, and psychopaths are indisputably bad people. But the ways in which they attempt to justify their actions provide uncomfortable parallels with our own moral deliberations. Moral philosophy provides tools for examining and evaluating our moral deliberations, and so serve an important function in moral education.
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101First, Second and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity By Jennifer WhitingAnalysis 78 (1): 184-186. 2018.© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected], Second and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity is a collection of previously published articles by Jennifer Whiting. In the preface to this volume, Whiting states that this is the first of three volumes, which will include her essays published between 1980 and 2011. Whiting is a highly respected schola…Read more
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3Friendship and the grounds of reasonsLes Ateliers de L’Ethique 3 (1): 61-69. 2008.Friendship and other intimate relationships have created difficulties for moral philosophers. While morality seems to require us to remain impartial between persons, friendship seems to generate demands or obligations of partiality toward our intimates. But the difficulty can be removed once we cease to focus on categorizing reasons as moral or non-moral. This tendency to divide reasons into categories of moral vs. non-moral leads us to give those that we label ‘moral’ pride of place and to assu…Read more
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1The Persistence and Importance of PersonsDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1992.In this thesis I will defend a Reductionist criterion of personal identity, and show that that criterion supports certain commonsense claims about the morality and rationality of special concern and about the morality of the distribution of goods among persons. ;In Chapter 1 , I will introduce the problem of personal identity across time. We will see that a plausible theory of personal identity supports and motivates the commonsense claim that we should be specially concerned about our future se…Read more
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34Associative Obligations, Voluntarism, and EqualityPacific Philosophical Quarterly 77 (4): 289-309. 2017.Samuel Scheffler has identified two important objections to associative obligations, the voluntarist objection and the distributivist objection. The voluntarist is concerned about protecting the autonomy of the agent who is supposed to have associative obligations. However, the appropriate account of the source of associative obligations reveals that they pose no threat to autonomy, if we understand autonomy in a weak rather than a strong sense. The distributivist is worried about the claims of …Read more
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262Friendship, virtue, and impartialityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1): 51-72. 1997.The two dominant contemporary moral theories, Kantianism and utilitarianism, have difficulty accommodating our commonsense understanding of friendship as a relationship with significant moral implications. The difficulty seems to arise from their underlying commitment to impartiality, to the claim that all persons are equally worthy of concern. Aristotelian accounts of friendship are partialist in so far as they defend certain types of friendship by appeal to the claim that some persons, the vir…Read more
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241Families, Friends, and Special ObligationsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (4). 1998.Most of us accept that we have special obligations to our family members: to, e.g., our parents, our siblings, and our grandparents. But it is extremely difficult to offer a plausible grounding for such obligations, given the apparent fact that familial relationships are not voluntarily entered. I did not choose to be my mother's daughter or my brother's sister, so why suppose that such facts about me are morally significant? Why suppose that I owe more to my mother or to my brother than natural…Read more
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142A defense of acting from dutyJournal of Value Inquiry 32 (1). 1998.Philosophers who, in the light of these attacks, have attempted to vindicate the motive of duty have done so in a half-hearted way, by stressing the motive of duty’s function as a secondary or limiting motivation, or by denying “that acting from duty primarily concerns isolated actions.” I will defend duty as a primary motive with respect to isolated actions. Critics of acting from duty and philosophers who have attempted to respond to them have done little work spelling out exactly what it is f…Read more
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128Special relationships and the problem of political obligationsSocial Theory and Practice 27 (1). 2001.
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414Friendship and reasons of intimacyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (2): 329-346. 2001.Reasons of intimacy, i.e. reasons to care for friends and other intimates, resist categorization as either subjective Humean reasons or as objective consequentialist reasons. Reasons of intimacy are grounded in the friendship relation itself, not in the psychological attitudes of the agent or in the objective intrinsic value of the friend or the friendship. So reasons of intimacy are objective and agent-relative and can be understood by analogy with reasons of fidelity and reasons of prudence. S…Read more
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91Rationality and Moral Theory: How Intimacy Generates ReasonsRoutledge. 2008.This book provides answers to both normative and metaethical questions in a way that shows the interconnection of both types of questions, and also shows how a complete theory of reasons can be developed by moving back and forth between the two types of questions. It offers an account of the nature of intimate relationships and of the nature of the reasons that intimacy provides, and then uses that account to defend a traditional intuitionist metaethics. The book thus combines attention to the d…Read more
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25Review of Robert Audi, Moral Value and Human Diversity (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (11). 2008.
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87Introducing Philosophy Through Film: Key Texts, Discussion, and Film Selections (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2009._Philosophy Through Film_ offers a uniquely engaging and effective approach to introductory philosophy by combining an anthology of classical and contemporary philosophical readings with a discussion of philosophical concepts illustrated in popular films. Pairs 50 classical and contemporary readings with popular films - from Monty Python and _The Matrix_ to _Casablanca_ and _A Clockwork Orange_ Addresses key areas in philosophy, including topics in ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of m…Read more
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101Readings in Political Philosophy: Theory and Applications (edited book)Broadview Press. 2011.This anthology surveys important issues in Western political philosophy from Plato to the present day. Its aim is to show both the continuity and the development of political thought over time. Each unit begins with readings on the fundamental theoretical principles underlying political discourse. Theory is then connected to practice in readings on contemporary issues as well as court cases and other political documents