Agora Speaker Series: Professor Abe Roth (Ohio State University)

Abstract

Some reasons of partiality in personal relationships are constitutive of the relationship. Part of what it is to be friends, for example, is to have a special reason to be concerned with each other’s wellbeing or interests. This is over and above an impartial reason for concern, which one may afford anyone: it’s because he’s my friend that I’m more concerned with helping him than an equally deserving stranger.

Other reasons of partiality are mediated by the relationship but not constitutive of it. Friends will typically share concerns about things quite outside of themselves or their relationship. Because you are friends with someone, you will have special reasons of partiality that favor acting for an end of theirs rather than some equally worthy end of a stranger. Amongst the most important cases are those where you take up an end which is, for the friend, non-instrumental or final – e.g. some political or environmental cause.

There appears to be a genuine puzzle reconciling (1) the possibility of sharing and acting for a friend’s non-instrumental end, with (2) this being an instance of you having and acting for a reason of partiality. She cares about the cause for its own sake, whereas your concern insofar as it is a reason of partiality is grounded in your relationship with her. The problem is that the respective reasons you and the friend have for pursuing the friend’s end are too divergent to count as genuinely sharing the end.

Solving this puzzle will have important implications for our understanding of agency. I will argue that our ability to act on such reasons of partiality is facilitated by – arguably requires – engaging in a distinctive form of joint agency that exhibits practical intimacy. This involves a form of interpersonal authority that underwrites one’s entitlement to another’s reasons, and this entitlement is crucial for the sharing of ends in personal relationships such as friendship.

Bio

Abe Roth is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Ohio State University. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1996, and was on the faculty in Philosophy at UCLA from 1998-2002, and at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2002-2006. He works mainly in the philosophy of action (especially shared agency and collective intentionality), and related areas of epistemology, mind, moral psychology, ethics, and social ontology. He has published in various places, including The Philosophical Review, Noûs, Ethics, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Philosophical Studies.