On the shared-ends account of close friendship, proper care for a friend as an agent requires seeing yourself as having important reasons to accommodate and promote the friend's valuable ends for the friend's own sake. However, that friends share ends doesn't inoculate them against disagreements about how to pursue those ends. This essay defends the claim that, in certain circumstances of reasonable disagreement, proper care for a friend as a practical and moral agent requires allowing your friend's judgment to decide what you are to do, even when you disagree with that judgment (and even when the judgment is in fact mistaken). In these instances, your friendship can make it the case that you may not act on your own practical and even moral judgments because, at those times, you have a duty as their close friend to defer to their judgments. As a result, treating your friend properly as a responsible agent can require that you assist them in committing what may in fact be serious moral wrongs.
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Research Article|
October 01 2016
A Good Friend Will Help You Move a Body: Friendship and the Problem of Moral Disagreement
The Philosophical Review (2016) 125 (4): 473–507.
Citation
Daniel Koltonski; A Good Friend Will Help You Move a Body: Friendship and the Problem of Moral Disagreement. The Philosophical Review 1 October 2016; 125 (4): 473–507. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-3601037
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