Niko Kolodny
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of California, Berkeley

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History and its Claims

Thought about value often leads to a puzzle.  We value specially certain particular things and people.  Moreover, we see ourselves as having reason to.  It seems fitting, if anything is, that we are specially devoted to, say, the particular person who is our child, or the particular pursuit that is our life’s work.  On reflection, however, we can’t help but realize that there are many other similar things and people.  Our calling is no worthier than many other callings, and our child is no more angelic than many other children.  Hence the puzzle: If we have reason to value specially this child or this calling, then don’t we also have equal reason to value any of the other similar children or callings?  The puzzle can’t be resolved by denying that we have reasons to value our children and life’s work, since this seems false to our lived experience.  But to insist that we have such reasons threatens to estrange us from those very objects of our affection.

The way forward, I suggest, is to recognize a distinctive class of reasons that arise not from the intrinsic value of the particular things and people we cherish, but instead from the histories we share with them.  Our life’s work is a pursuit to which we have been devoted; our child is a child which we have raised.  We lack the same reason, therefore, to value in the same way any otherwise similar child or pursuit with which we have no such history. 

The aim of this project is to provide a theoretical understanding of these reasons of history and to show how they illuminate broader philosophical questions about the nature of morality and reason.

In “Love as Valuing a Relationship,” Philosophical Review (2003), I argue the philosophy of love is mired at the impasse that I described above.  Some, like David Velleman, claim that the intrinsic value of the people we love is our reason for loving them.  Seeing that this cannot account for love’s particularity, others, like Harry Frankfurt, deny that we have any reason for loving them.  We can move beyond this impasse, I suggest, if we recognize that our reasons for love arise not from the intrinsic value of the people we love, but instead from our relationships, or shared histories, with them.

The topic of “special obligations” to family, friends, and compatriots has been at the center of much of recent moral and, especially, political philosophy.  The most widely advocated justification of special obligations has been that our family, friends, and other relatives are simply specially vulnerable to or dependent on us.  In “The Problems of Partiality,” (draft) I argue that such an approach will not work.  To explain special obligations, we need to appeal to reasons that arise from our relationships themselves: reasons which are, in my view, a species of reasons of history.  However, this appeal meets with some deep reservations, to which I turn in the next two papers.

Clearly, not all relationships give rise to reasons.  Thus, the question naturally arises, “If these relationships give rise to reasons, then why not those?”  In “Which Relationships?” (likely to be published in Partiality and Impartiality in Ethics, Oxford University Press) I suggest that this question harbors two different concerns.  The first, more threatening, concern is that my account implies that if one instance of a type of relationship is reason-giving, then all instances of that type are similarly reason-giving.  This is in many cases false.  If siblinghood itself gave rise to reasons, for example, then biological siblings separated at birth would have the same reasons as those raised together, which is surely not so.  The second concern is that my account fails to explain why relationships of certain types are reason-giving, whereas relationships of other types are not.  Why does friendship give rise to reasons, but not enmity, or residing at the same longitude?  In response, I articulate general principles that underlie our distinctions between valuable and valueless types of relationships.  These principles, in turn, supply an answer to the first concern, for they suggest that the valuable types are not mere biological links, but instead certain shared social histories.

Morality is, almost truistically, a matter of respecting the value of persons.  Yet I have claimed that our reasons to treat our relatives specially arise not from the value of our relatives as persons, but instead from our histories with them.  This may seem to imply that these reasons are somehow nonmoral.  In fact, I believe that this worry underlies the superficial grounds more commonly given for denying that “partiality” is part of morality.  In “Partiality and the Contours of the Moral,” (draft) I propose an alternative conception of respecting the value of persons, according to which it is a matter of respecting them not as sources of reasons, but instead as bearers of claims on us: creatures whom we can wrong by not doing what we owe it to them to do.  This conception includes partiality within morality, I argue, and it better explains the special significance that morality has for us.  Attention to reasons of history thus clarifies our view of the nature of morality.

Attention to reasons of history may also clarify our view of the nature of reasons in general.  Perhaps the most fundamental question about reasons is this: Are reasons something that we discover, or something that we create, through our desires or choices?  As I suggest in “What Matters to Us,” (draft) certain cases make the latter answer seem inescapable.  In these cases, one has reason to pursue one option in particular, even though that option is not intrinsically more valuable than other available options.  So, it seems, what breaks the tie must be some desire or choice.  Yet this overlooks the possibility of reasons of history, which are provided neither by an option’s intrinsic value, nor by one’s psychology, but instead by one’s past relation to an option.  Reasons of history are thus an indispensable part of the case that reasons, as a whole, are not creatures of our subjective states, but instead reflections of our objective situation.