A Relational Moral Theory

Abstract

Chapter 7, which completes Part II, appeals to the conception of harmony/communality from the previous chapter to articulate a new deontological moral theory, which prescribes respect for beings insofar as they are by nature capable of communing as a subject or being communed with as an object. What typically makes actions wrong is, roughly, that they are not friendly towards or harmonious with innocent parties, where particularly wrongful behaviour is unfriendly or discordant in respect of them. The chapter draws out several corollaries from an ethic of rightness as friendliness, such as that one normally should not promote harmony using a very discordant means, and that having befriended someone provides extra reason to help him compared to a stranger. The chapter demonstrates that this moral theory, in the light of its corollaries, accounts better for the African and global intuitions than the welfarist and vitalist approaches considered earlier in Part II.