Introduction

PEOPLE MEAN MANY DIFFERENT THINGS when they talk about morality. In a familiar modern sense, however, morality may be thought of as a set of normative constraints on attitudes and actions that stem from the fact that we inhabit a common world together with other agents. More specifically, and more controversially, it may be thought of as a normative nexus that links us individually with each of the persons who might potentially be affected by what we do. According to what I will call the relational interpretation of it, morality involves a set of requirements on action that are constitutively connected to claims that others have against us, just insofar as they are persons. Requirements that are connected to claims in this way have a built-in directionality, specifying things that we owe it to others to do. So on the relational interpretation, morality could be said to be fundamentally a matter of what we owe to each other.

This book offers a statement and defense of the idea that morality collects a set of fundamentally relational requirements. A leading idea of the discussion is that moral standards have some significant normative features that can be made sense of only if we interpret them in relational terms. They function to define practical requirements, which regulate the deliberations of agents in the distinctive manner of obligations; and they also have interpersonal significance, providing a normative basis for relations of moral accountability. I argue that the relational approach is better able than the alternatives to illuminate these significant aspects of the moral. In addition, I shall highlight and defend the major philosophical commitments and presuppositions of the relational interpretation, which have not been subjected to sustained critical investigation. I shall also discuss some of the first-order implications of the relational approach, for questions about what, specifically, we owe it to each other to do, and about the nature of the reasoning that goes into deciding issues of this kind.

The idea of relational requirements in the most general sense is implicit in talk of moral and legal rights. More specifically, it is familiar from discussions of claim rights, in the sense made familiar by Wesley Newcombe Hohfeld. These rights are commonly understood to be complexes of claims, privileges, and powers that are invested in agents, and that correspond to duties on the part of other agents. My right to a piece of property that has legitimately come into my possession, for instance, involves a claim against other people that they should not use it without my permission, where that claim defines a duty that others are under; it involves, furthermore, a permission to do with the piece of property as I wish, as well as a power to transfer my claims in it to others as I see fit. According to this way of thinking, those who make off with my property without my authorization will violate a claim I have against them, thereby transforming their relationships to me in a way they will not change their relationships to other parties. They will have not only have acted wrongly; they will also have wronged me in particular, providing me with what we might think of as a privileged ground for objecting to what they have done.

Hohfeldian rights of this general kind are a familiar part of our normative repertoire, deeply embedded in our thinking about (for instance) the structures of private law. Contracts, for instance, seem to generate a complex of directed duties and corresponding claims, and a similar structure of claim rights is arguably implicit in the law of torts. Whether there are similar claim rights at the most fundamental level of moral thought is a more controversial suggestion, one that has been questioned, in different ways, by consequentialists and proponents of certain virtue-theoretic views. Even those who are open to the idea that there are basic moral claim rights, however, naturally tend to think of them as constituting just a part of morality; the "realm of rights" that Judith Jarvis Thomson has written about, for instance, is seen by her as a sub-region within a larger moral territory. Thus, there are many moral duties that people seem to be under that do not correspond to any Hohfeldian claim rights in the familiar sense, including imperfect obligations of mutual aid, duties of gratitude, environmental imperatives, and sundry requirements of moral virtue.

I agree that morality cannot be understood exclusively in terms of moral rights in the narrow, Hohfeldian sense. But it nevertheless strikes me as promising to interpret morality in relational terms, as a set of requirements on agents that are like the obligations of the Hohfeldian domain in being constitutively connected to claims that other individuals have against us. Relational elements are pervasive in many significant features of modern, secular morality, and it is my belief that these elements can be brought together into a comprehensive interpretation of the moral realm. The account I defend is not a theory of moral rights, as these are conventionally understood; rather it extracts a relational core from ordinary talk about rights and directed duties, and proposes that this relational structure can be extended, in an illuminating way, into a general framework for understanding the nature and normative significance of moral requirements.

The extension of the relational model that I shall defend, however, is not meant to capture everything that might intuitively be understood to be a reason or requirement of morality. There is a broad conception of the moral according to which it collects all standards of deliberate human conduct, whatever their source. In this broad sense, it is a moral defect if someone acts with disregard for the beauty of the natural world, or attaches importance to an...