Abstract
Some of the relationships that we have with other people play a fundamental role in our lives, being a significant source of meaning and value for us. Other relationships, although less personally intense, also shape our lives in noteworthy ways. All such relationships also make demands of us, and can in various ways limit (as well as enhance) our freedom and be in other respects burdensome. Jonathan Seglow’s fine new book is about some of the more important of these relationships and the moral duties that attach to them. In particular, he is concerned to defend “the thesis that we owe duties to those with whom we enjoy relationships on account of those relationships, and specifically on account of their value” (p. 1). These are “associative duties,” which “in their broadest sense, are duties we owe participants in our relationships on account of the relationships we share with them, so the relationship is constitutive of the duty, informing its nature in some way” (p. 5). However, intuitively appealing as it may be, the view that we have such distinctive associative duties is philosophically controversial and, in fact, quite unfashionable. Not, of course, that it is widely denied that we have any duties to families, friends and such like, but these are thought to be entirely explicable in terms of familiar general moral principles, such as consent, fairness, gratitude etc. And if they are not so explicable, then we do not really have such moral duties. Part of Seglow’s case, therefore, also involves showing why reductionist accounts of these duties are inadequate.
Defending Associative Relationships is, to the best of my knowledge, the most extensive and detailed attempt to articulate an associative account of the moral duties arising from a broad range of relationships. After two chapters that set out in general terms his account of the nature and justification of associative duties and the kinds of relationships that give rise to them, Seglow explains how his view can be elaborated in the contexts of parental relationships, filial duties, friendship, (unusually) voluntary associations and the state, although, as he acknowledges, this still leaves aside several other important relationships, such as those between partners, siblings, neighbours and colleagues. The final chapter addresses what is taken by some critics to be the most powerful argument against the whole idea of associative duties, the so-called distributive objection, according to which “by directing participants in social relationships to give each other’s interests priority over the interests of outsiders, associative duties create a situation which is distributively unjust” (p. 23). In short, associative duties require the favouring of some people over others, who properly have more pressing moral claims on us. Elsewhere, he responds to both the “voluntarist objection,” according to which associative duties illegitimately constrain our liberty by saddling us with additional moral demands that have not arisen from our own choices, and the “respect objection,” which holds that associative duties can in various ways disrespect those who are excluded from a particular relationship. This last objection is one that has not been set out with such clarity previously, and it is much to Seglow’s credit that he should try to strengthen objections to the view that he seeks to defend.
The core of Seglow’s account is what he calls “the relationship goods theory,” according to which “participants in social relationships uniquely enjoy certain relationship goods, and their associative duties involve promoting those goods” (p. 2). Relationship goods are co-created by participants in relationships, which cannot be realised unilaterally. While all associative duty generating relationships are said to have this normative structure, the content of the goods vary according to the particular kind of relationship. Thus, parental relationships and democratic states, for example, both give rise to relationship goods, but the nature of those goods is of course quite different. Moreover, Seglow’s argument also has an important critical dimension, in that relationships have to generate genuinely morally valuable goods, if they are to give rise to associative duties. This “critical nonreductionism” about associative duties is to be distinguished from a simple nonreductionism, which is characterised as holding that “we owe associative duties to our participants in relationships just because they are participants and for no other reason, other perhaps than social convention” (p. 12). It is the value of relationships, therefore, that is crucial to explaining the associative duties that attach to them. There is much detailed and subtle discussion of the nature of relationships, relationship goods, how they connect with associative duties and why such duties are resistant to reductionist explanations, which it is impossible to lay out here. I should, though, remark that I found much of this enlightening and persuasive; especially, for example, the way in which he distinguishes associative duties from special duties, his discussion of the role of relationship-independent and relationship-dependent interests within the account of associative duties, his measured but acute responses to the distributive and voluntarist objections, and much else besides.
In explaining particular relationship goods, it is no doubt difficult to avoid either saying too little or too much; either leaving the content of the relationship-specific goods empty or specifying them too restrictively. I feel that Seglow inclines towards the latter, and that excessive prescriptivism and idealism is sometimes at work in his account of the goods to be found in specific kinds of relationship. This is further reflected, notwithstanding a few general qualifying statements, in his succumbing too often to the desire, so common among moral and political philosophers, to tell people how they should act. So, rather than simply exemplifying how associative duties can function in practical moral argument, he is often keen to instruct us about the precise duties of a good parent, friend, citizen etc. Of course, not just anything can count as a parental relationship or a relationship of friendship, or as the relative associative duties, but even on the view that relationship goods are what is crucial, there appears to me to be more scope for diversity and difference in the construction, interpretation and weighing of those goods than Seglow sometimes allows. Moreover, this tendency is, I think, exacerbated by his emphasis on the “critical” aspect of his nonreductionism. This leads him to neglect the significance in our lives of relationships that, as we might say, have gone bad, in that they no longer deliver significant goods of any sort, or relationships in which we do just happen to find ourselves and from which it is neither easy nor painless to extricate ourselves (such as our family of origin and our polity). It would seem that on Seglow’s account these do not give rise to associative moral duties (although, of course, that does not mean he is committed to believing that there are no duties of any kind at play in such cases). However, I think that such relationships can give rise to associative duties, but that to understand how this is possible we need to focus not just on relationship goods but also on the meaning such relationships have for us, and their place in our narrative identity.
In order to enlarge a little on these points, I want to consider his discussion of political obligations (and here I should declare an interest, as a section of the relevant chapter criticises—not unfairly—my own views on this topic). This is also an interesting issue on which to focus because sceptics about associative duties in general are especially resistant to the idea that political obligation can be understood in terms of such duties. Seglow’s argument is that political obligations are grounded in the distinctive relationship good of democratic respect. Briefly, this consists, on the one hand, “in public recognition of each citizen’s public standing as an ultimate lawmaker” and, on the other hand, that “citizens are subject to the law” (p. 140). In short, “democratic respect is realised when citizens obey just those laws which are created and maintained in their name”; and, being “co-produced by participants in a relationship who are also the good’s beneficiaries,” it clearly meets the conditions for a relationship good (p. 141). There is much that is attractive in this familiar picture of citizens as both authors and subjects of the laws, but as an account of political obligation it seems to me to have important limitations. First, and Seglow explicitly embraces this obvious implication, it will apply at best only to democratic polities. So, on his account, citizens of non-democratic polities can have no political obligations, even to their fellow citizens. Moreover, given the way that Seglow develops the idea of democratic respect, it will apply only to democracies that embody a very substantial measure of material as well as formal equality. Additionally, it is only if citizens can and do participate in the kind of democratic process that Seglow describes that the relationship good of democratic respect can be produced. What if they don’t? On the face of it, it looks as if such a demanding conception of democratic respect is not going to explain political obligations for the vast majority of citizens in virtually any polities, past or present. Seglow is certainly alert to this objection, but it seems to me that his view of actually existing democracies inclines to the optimistic, which even then has him conceding that citizens’ associative obligations “are weaker than they could be” (p. 147). Perhaps, like the philosophical anarchists, we should just accept that few people, if any, has ever had any political obligations; but this does not appear to be where Seglow wants to end up. And, in my opinion, nor should he. But if he is to avoid it, he will need to revise his associative account of political obligations quite significantly.
These more sceptical reflections on Seglow’s argument are, however, only an indication of what a rich, thoughtful and carefully argued book he has written. And there is much in it that it has not been possible for me to mention. So, even if I am not entirely persuaded by all of his arguments, Seglow has done much to clarify and advance our understanding of associative obligations. Above all, and I am unequivocally with him on this, he has done much to show their importance as an independent source of moral claims on us.