Miscellaneous
Paper given by Robbie Arrell (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne). Special relationships generate associative duties that exhibit robustness across change. It seems insufficient for friendship, for example, if I am only disposed to fulfil associative duties towards you as things stand here and now. However, robustness is not required across all variations. Were you to become monstrously cruel towards me, we might expect that my associative duties towards you would not be robust across that kind of change. The question then is this: is there any principled way of distinguishing those variations that require robustness of the disposition to fulfil associative duties from those that don’t? In this paper I suggest a way of answering this question that draws on the distinction between how things have value, and how we value things – a distinction that is central to the broader account of the sources and generation of associative duties that I propose.