Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: It is widely accepted that friendship affects the evaluation of our behavior. In virtue of friendship, acts and omissions may be variously allowed, forbidden, required, or otherwise considered better or worse. Typically it is taken for granted that such changes concern the moral evaluation of our behavior. This paper challenges this assumption. I argue that friendship involves nonmoral duties of benevolence, and is thus governed by a distinct normativity that includes moral and nonmoral duties. In this respect friendship alters the normative evaluation of our behavior, but not the moral evaluation. Such an understanding, I argue, accounts better than its purely moral alternative for how we think about important phenomena related to friendship, and can be well explained theoretically.
Source: The Monist
Author: Anna Goppel
Institution: University of Bern
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,036
OpenAlex ID: W4409385243