Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Specifying the Limits of the Robustness of Associative Duties across Change

Robert Arrell

Abstract: Special relationships generate associative duties that exhibit robustness across change.  It seems insufficient for friendship, for example, if I am only disposed to fulfil associative duties towards you as things stand here and now.  Certainly we would scarcely deem me much of a friend if my disposition to fulfil associative duties towards you wanes with the fading of your looks, the dimming of your wit, or the greying of your hair. 

However, robustness is not required across all variations.  Were you to become monstrously cruel towards me, we might expect that my associative duties towards you would not be robust across that kind of change. The question then is this: is there any principled way of distinguishing those variations across which robustness of the disposition to fulfil associative duties is required, from those across which it isn’t?

In this presentation I propose a way of answering this question that invokes distinctions concerning how we value persons and relationships, and how persons and relationships possess value - distinctions that I contend are central to the project of specifying not only the limits of robustness, but also the source, of reasons and duties of partiality more generally.