30/09/2024: Fabienne Peters on Inaugural Address: Relational Moral Demands

ABSTRACT

To act rightly is to act in accordance with moral demands. But what grounds moral demands? Much contemporary moral philosophy tends to take a non-relational approach to answering this question. According to non-relational moral theories, to act rightly is to act in a way that honours or promotes the (non-relational) moral properties of individuals, for example their well-being or their rights. According to relational moral theories, by contrast, at least some moral demands are grounded in a relation between individuals. To act rightly, is to act in accordance with what our moral relations to other individuals demand from us. Within relational theories, there is a further distinction to be drawn. Most contemporary relational theories presuppose that moral relations are determined by relational moral properties of the individuals involved. Call this account of relational moral demands individuals-first relationalism. Radical relationalism, by contrast, rejects the normative priority of moral properties of individuals – whether they are relational or non-relational properties. Instead, it has a relations-first structure. My aim in this paper is to argue that some moral demands are radically relational.

ABOUT

Fabienne Peter is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, specialising in moral and political philosophy and in social epistemology, including political epistemology. She has published extensively on political legitimacy and democratic theory. Her current research is in meta-ethics. She served as Head of Department at Warwick from 2017 to 2020. Before joining Warwick, she was a postdoc at Harvard University and then an assistant professor at the University of Basel. She has also held visiting positions at the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU and the Murphy Institute at Tulane University. She has previously been an editor of Economics and Philosophy and is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy.