Matthew Tedesco

One common moral claim is that morality demands impartiality of us, yet virtually everyone shares the intuition that friendship is morally permissible. Given that friendship is necessarily partial, this intuition stands in apparent conflict with the impartial demands of morality. If this conflict cannot be resolved, then we must either concede that morality forbids friendship, or else we must jettison the moral requirement of impartiality. Insofar as we have good reasons to resist either of these options, we are faced with a dilemma---the moral problem of friendship. ;At least three types of solutions can be offered in attempting to resolve this problem. The first solution focuses on the moral requirement of impartiality. If morality demands impartiality, perhaps this requirement is restricted in a way that allows for the partiality of friendship. A second solution takes a consequentialist shape, building on the idea that friendship, both in our own lives and in the lives of others, seems to have very good consequences. A third solution draws from Aristotle and involves turning away from the modern moral framework that generates the moral problem of friendship. That is, if modern moral theories describe friendship as a moral problem, we can resolve this problem by turning to an approach to ethics grounded in character and virtue. ;It is my contention that all of these approaches fail to resolve the tension between the partiality of friendship and the impartiality of morality. The purpose of my dissertation is to refute the various arguments that have been or could be offered in attempting to resolve the moral problem of friendship along these three lines. I begin by framing the problem, clarifying the definition of friendship, and identifying the relevant considerations in addressing the problem. Then, for the central part of the dissertation, I present various formulations of these three possible solutions to the moral problem of friendship, arguing that each is ultimately unsuccessful. I conclude by briefly highlighting some potentially promising responses to the moral problem of friendship, including a suggestion about how we might modify our intuitions regarding friendship in order to resolve the problem

The Groningen Protocol, introduced in the Netherlands in 2005 and accompanied by revised guidelines published in a report commissioned by the Royal Dutch Medical Association in 2014, specifies conditions under which the lives of severely ill newborns may be deliberately ended. Its publication came four years after the Netherlands became the first nation to legalize the voluntary active euthanasia of adults, and the Netherlands remains the only country to offer a pathway to protecting physicians who might engage in deliberately ending the life of a newborn. In this paper, I offer two lines of argument. The first is a positive argument for the Protocol, grounded in the good of the newborn as unanimously determined by those in a position to determine it. The second addresses the widely shared belief that the killing of newborns is morally prohibited, where I offer two arguments—one grounded in the fact that the kinds of cases the Protocol is meant to govern are very rare and highly unusual, and the other focused more broadly on the role of pre-theoretical beliefs in moral reasoning—meant to undermine the strong role that the critic of the Protocol affords this belief. I argue that, given this second line of argument, the beliefs underlying my positive argument for the Protocol are in fact more secure than the widely shared belief underlying the critic’s position.

One response to the demandingness objection is that it begs the question against consequentialism by assuming a moral distinction between what a theory requires and what it permits. According to the consequentialist, this distinction stands in need of defense. However, this response may also beg the question, this time at the methodological level, regarding the credibility of the intuitions underlying the objection. The success of the consequentialist's response thus turns on the role we assign to intuitions in our moral methodology. After presenting the demandingness objection to consequentialism and revealing the underlying methodological stalemate, I break the stalemate by appealing to research in the cognitive neuroscience of intuitions. Given the evidence for the hypothesis that our moral intuitions are fundamentally emotional (rather than rational) responses, we should give our intuitions a modest (rather than robust) role in our moral methodology. This rescues the consequentialist's response to the demandingness objection

Critics have persistently charged that indirect consequentialism, despite the best efforts of its defenders, ultimately fails to appropriately account for friendship in the face of the alienation generated by the harsh demands of consequentialism. Robert F. Card has recently alleged that the dispositional emphasis of indirect consequentialism renders its defender incapable of rejecting problematic friendships that are seriously suboptimal. I argue that Card's criticism not only fails to undermine indirect consequentialism, but in fact provides considerations that both help us to better understand the theory and ultimately weigh in favor of it over Card's own brand of sophisticated consequentialism.

Judith Jarvis Thomson concludes “A Defense of Abortion” with a discussion of samaritanism. Whereas her rights-based arguments demonstrate the moral permissibility of virtually all abortions, this new consideration of samaritanism provides grounds for morally objecting to certain abortions that are otherwise morally pemissible given strictly rights-based considerations. I argue, first, that this samaritanism constraint on the moral permissibility of abortion involves an appeal to virtue-theoretical considerations. I then show why this hybridization of rights-based considerations and virtue-theoretical considerations has advantages over responses to the moral status of abortion that are either exclusively rights-based, or else exclusively virtue-theoretical. I conclude by offering some thoughts on how to utilize this hybrid strategy outside of Thomson’s particular context, as well as why we might generally favor such a strategy in our moral reasoning.