•  116
    Agent-Relative Reasons as Second-Order Value Responses
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (4): 477-491. 2020.
    Agent-relative reasons are an important feature of any nonconsequentialist moral theory. Many authors think that they cannot be accommodated within a value-first theory that understands all value as agent-neutral. In this paper, I offer a novel explanation of agent-relative reasons that accommodates them fully within an agent-neutral value-first view. I argue that agent-relative reasons are to be understood in terms of second-order value responses: when an agent acts on an agent-relative reason,…Read more
  •  93
    Deontic buck-passing aims to analyse deontic properties of acts in terms of reasons. Many authors accept deontic buck-passing, but only few have discussed how to understand the relation between reasons and deontic properties exactly. Justin Snedegar has suggested understanding deontic properties of acts in terms of both reasons and reasons to require: A is required to φ iff A has most reason to φ, and there is most reason to require A to φ. This promising proposal faces two open questions: the q…Read more
  •  89
    Collegial Relationships
    with Monika Https://Orcidorg Betzler
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (1): 213-229. 2021.
    Although collegial relationships are among the most prevalent types of interpersonal relationships in our lives, they have not been the subject of much philosophical study. In this paper, we take the first step in the process of developing an ethics of collegiality by establishing what qualifies two people as colleagues and then by determining what it is that gives value to collegial relationships. We argue that A and B are colleagues if both exhibit sameness regarding at least two of the follow…Read more
  •  81
    Relationships as Indirect Intensifiers: Solving the Puzzle of Partiality
    European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 390-410. 2018.
    Two intuitions are important to commonsense morality: the claim that all persons have equal moral worth and the claim that persons have associative duties. These intuitions seem to contradict each other, and there has been extensive discussion concerning their reconciliation. The most widely held view claims that associative duties arise because relationships generate moral reasons to benefit our loved ones. However, such a view cannot account for the phenomenon that some acts are supererogatory…Read more
  •  80
    Agent-Relative Reasons and Normative Force
    Philosophia 49 (1): 359-372. 2020.
    The distinction between agent-relative reasons and agent-neutral reasons is philosophically important, but there is no consensus on how to understand the distinction exactly. In this paper, I discuss several interpretations of the distinction that can be found in the literature: the Motivational Interpretation, the Scope Interpretation, and the Goal Interpretation, and argue that none of these interpretations is entirely convincing. I propose a novel interpretation of the distinction, which I ca…Read more
  •  71
    Responding Appropriately to the Impersonal Good
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (3): 701-714. 2019.
    A promising strategy to make progress in the debate between consequentialist and non-consequentialist moral theories is to unravel the background assumptions of the respective views and discuss their plausibility. This paper discusses a background assumption of consequentialism that has not been noticed so far. Consequentialists claim that morality is about maximizing the impersonal good, and the background assumption is that an appropriate response to the impersonal good is necessarily a respon…Read more
  •  69
    Friendship, Value and Interpretation
    Theoria 83 (4): 319-340. 2017.
    A widely held view concerning the justification of associative duties is the so-called relationships view, according to which associative duties within personal relationships arise because of the value of those relationships. Against this view, it has been argued that there can be cases of undemanding friendships, that is, genuine friendships with no associative duties. In this article, I argue that undemanding friendships do not show that associative duties are not grounded in the value of the …Read more
  •  65
    New Developments in Family Ethics: An Introduction
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 13 (6): 641-651. 2016.
    _ Source: _Volume 13, Issue 6, pp 641 - 651 During the last three decades, moral philosophy has seen an increased interest in the ethics of special relationships. The relationship that has gained the most attention in recent years is the family. While there has been some progress in understanding family relationships and their ethical implications, there is still much theoretical ground to cover. In this special issue of the Journal of Moral Philosophy, we present four papers that discuss new qu…Read more
  •  65
    Authority in Relationships
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (2): 187-204. 2015.
    Authority consists in having standing to make a claim on another person’s actions. Authority comes in degrees: persons have the authority to make moral demands on each other, but if they participate in close relationships, such as friendships or love relationships, their authority over each other is greater, compared to the authority of strangers to make demands, as participants in personal relationships can demand more from each other than can strangers. This paper discusses the phenomenon of a…Read more
  •  60
    The Value of Sacrifices
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (3): 399-418. 2018.
    ABSTRACTMost authors who discuss the normative impact of sacrifices do so with regards to the impact that a sacrifice can have on the practical reasons of the agent who makes it. A different and underappreciated phenomenon of sacrifices is their other-regarding normative impact: the sacrifice of person A can have an impact on the practical reasons of person B, either by generating practical reasons for B to act in certain ways or by intensifying existing reasons of B for specific courses of acti…Read more
  •  55
    Colleagues are not only an integral part of many people’s lives; empirical research suggests that having a good relationship with one’s colleagues is the single most important factor for being happy at work. However, so far, no one has provided a comprehensive account of what it means to be a colleague. To address this lacuna, we have conducted both an empirical as well as theoretical investigation into the content and structure of the concept ‘colleague.’ Based on the empirical evidence that we…Read more
  •  36
    Second-Personal Reasons and Special Obligations
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 14 (3): 293-308. 2014.
    The paper discusses the second-personal account of moral obligation as put forward by Stephen Darwall. It argues that on such an account, an important part of our moral practice cannot be explained, namely special obligations that are grounded in special relationships between persons. After highlighting the problem, the paper discusses several strategies to accommodate such special obligations that are implicit in some of Darwall’s texts, most importantly a disentanglement strategy and a reducti…Read more
  •  33
    Intrinsically bad gratitude
    Zeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 4 (1): 73-89. 2021.
    This paper discusses under which circumstances grateful responses can become intrinsically bad. It is argued that gratitude should be understood as an appropriate response to value and that it is subject to the so-called recursive account of intrinsic value, according to which appropriate responses to value are intrinsically good, and inappropriate responses to value are intrinsically bad. As a result, gratitude can become intrinsically bad in two cases: i) when gratitude has the wrong object, i…Read more
  •  25
    The Duty of the Patient to Cooperate
    Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft Und Ethik 21 (1): 7-26. 2017.
    In discussing the normative implications of the doctor-patient relationship, medical ethics has mostly focused on the duties of doctors to their patients. This focus neglects an important normative dimension of the doctorpatient- relationship, namely the duties of patients to doctors. Only few authors have discussed the content and ground of the moral duties of patients, and each of these accounts are wanting in some way. This paper discusses patients’ duties and argues that patients have a rela…Read more
  •  24
    The Value of Caring
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (1): 118-126. 2017.
    This article responds to Barry Maguire's recent attempt to justify partiality within a consequentialist framework.
  •  15
    Research Involving Minors−A Duty of Solidarity?
    with Joerg Loeschke and Bert Heinrichs
    Ethics in Biology, Engineering and Medicine 6 (1-2): 67-80. 2015.
  •  15
    Reasons for Love: A Holistic Account
    Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 10 89-93. 2018.
    In the philosophy of love there is discussion about the reasons for love and how to understand them. According to the property-approach, reasons for love are grounded in features of the beloved; according to the relationship-approach, they are grounded in facts about the relationship. The property-approach seems to be intuitively the more plausible view, but it faces the problems of fungibility and continuity. The talk defends the property-approach by applying Dancy’s holistic conception of reas…Read more
  •  11
    Die handlungsleitende Funktion von Moraltheorien. Kommentar zu From Value to Rightness
    Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 75 (4): 587-590. 2021.
  •  6
    Die Motivation der Anständigen
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 71 (4): 608-613. 2023.
  •  4
    Filiale Pflichten
    In Johannes Drerup & Gottfried Schweiger (eds.), Handbuch Philosophie der Kindheit, J.b. Metzler. pp. 244-251. 2019.
    Filiale Pflichten sind Pflichten, die Kinder ihren Eltern aufgrund der Eltern-Kind-Beziehung schulden. Es handelt sich also um eine besondere Form von speziellen Pflichten – Pflichten, die ein Akteur gegenüber einem anderen Akteur nicht aufgrund ihres gemeinsamen Menschseins hat, sondern aufgrund einer besonderen Beziehung, in der sie zu einander stehen. Spezielle Pflichten werden bisweilen argwöhnisch betrachtet, weil Unparteilichkeit ein wichtiges Element der Moral darstellt und spezielle Pfli…Read more
  •  1
    The value of sacrifices
    with Marcel van Ackeren and Alfred Archer
    In Löschke, Jörg (2020). The value of sacrifices. In: van Ackeren, Marcel; Archer, Alfred. Sacrifice and Moral Philosophy. London: Routledge, n/a, . 2020.
  • The Ethics of Relationships: Broadening the Scope (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.