A Defence of Associative Duties

Abstract

In this thesis, I defend associative duties – typically understood as non-contractual, special moral responsibilities that arise from valued relationships – as a genuine class of duties. I do this in the spaces of both normative ethics and liberal, political philosophy. The thesis accordingly has two parts. In the first, I defend a particular account of associative duties against their reduction to obligations and conventional divisions of moral labour, and against popular rival accounts that view associative duties not as duties so much as instruments for realizing a valuable state of affairs in which the relationships to which they are socially attached exist. I suggest the following instead: certain relationships are characterized by properties that constitute moral reasons – which in cases amount to duties given their symmetricity and weight – whose recognition is the same as non-instrumentally valuing the relationships. In the second, I defend the claim that we owe associative duties to our compatriots while in dialogue with liberalism, whose twin values of liberty and equality both cut against associative duties qua non- contractual responsibilities to afford priority to the welfare of our associates. By outlining problems that arise from her traditional eschewing of associative duties, I tempt the liberal to an interpretation of the conflicts between her values and associative duties as “extrinsic”, that is, as between genuinely competing values and their attendant demands.