1st Edition
Rationality and Moral Theory How Intimacy Generates Reasons
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 details of the lived moral life – the context in which many of our most pressing moral questions arise, how we deliberate and make moral decisions, the complexities that plague our attempts to know what we ought to do – with theoretical rigor in offering an account of the nature of reasons, how we come to have moral knowledge, and how we can adjudicate between competing positions.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Agents and Their ReasonsSituating the Project
How Not to Understand Reasons of Intimacy
Friends and Other RelationsIntimacy, Fidelity, and Commitments
Friendship and Particularism
Deontological Constraints and Dispute ResolutionThe Scope of the Objective Agent-Relative
Biography
Diane Jeske received her PhD from MIT, and is now an associate professor of philosophy at The University of Iowa. She has published extensively on special obligations to intimates and is co-editor, with Richard Fumerton, of Philosophy Through Film.
"The book is clearly argued and attractively written, giving most of its arguments by way of clever, striking examples... it is a strong, accessible, original contribution to the debate about the ethics of partiality, and it merits a great deal of attention." -- Simon Keller, University of Melbourne, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
