Personal Relationships

Abstract

Abstract Personal relationships, such as friendships and family relationships, vary widely in their quality, but play a crucial role in many of our lives. A human life with no such partial ties is difficult to imagine, and many believe that a life devoid of close personal relationships cannot be a life well‐lived. These were familiar ideas to Aristotle and other ancient Greek philosophers, but the impartialist basis of Kantian and Utilitarian approaches to ethics raises challenges about the place of personal relationships in an ethical life. To what extent can Kantianism and Utilitarianism allow us to engage in friendships and family relationships? Debates about these questions have also led to more abstract disputes about whether such theories are fatally flawed – if living by their dictates turns out to be incompatible with genuine friendship, or whether, conversely, friendship itself might have to be renounced by those seeking to live an ethical life. More radically, the special authority that morality and moral reasons are commonly assumed to have are sometimes questioned from a perspective that regards personal relationships as essential to a life worth living. Ethical scrutiny of partiality also extends to questions about the proper grounds of various familial obligations, such as parental obligations to children, and adult children's obligations to their elderly parents, and to questions about the content of such obligations, and even whether there are any such special duties in the first place.