Abstract

Recently, there has been much discussion of two challenging arguments that suggest that if we were to lack free will of the sort required for moral responsibility we would lose one of the most important things that give our lives meaning, namely, valuable human relationships such as friendship. One line of argument, defended by Robert Kane, suggests that freely chosen relationships have an irreplaceable value, and the other, defended by Peter Strawson and recently taken up in a new form by Seth Shabo and others, suggests that the most valuable relationships are ones that require susceptibility to the emotions of resentment and indignation that presuppose freedom and responsibility. These arguments have been ably challenged (see, for example, Pereboom 2014). But even if these arguments are unsound, their conclusion might still be true. In this paper, I aim to defend a distinctive third kind of approach. It appeals to the nature of friendship as requiring a special kind of obligations, and in this way draws a closer connection between the aspects of friendship that require free will and moral responsibility itself. The reasoning rests on two main premises. The first is that genuine friendship entails special obligations. Two people are not friends unless they have obligations toward one another that are partially defining of friendship. The second premise is that one has obligations only if one has the freedom to meet them. This idea is closely related to a principle taken to be axiomatic in various ethical and even deontic logical systems: Ought Implies Can. Putting these premises together, we can conclude that friendship (as well as other special relationships) require freedom. Defending these two premises takes us into two entirely separate debates, one in ethical theory and one in free will and responsibility, and a secondary aim of the paper is to bring these two vibrant discussions together.