Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality

by Troy Jollimore

First Published in 2001. Morality is viewed as a demanding and unsympathetic taskmaster, and as an external, foreign, even alien force. The moral life, on such a view, is a labor not of love, but of duty. One of the guiding intuitions of this book is that this picture of morality is deeply and pervasively wrong. Morality is not an external or alien force and is not at all disconnected from the agent’s values, or from her good. Indeed, what is morally required of an agent will/depend a great deal on, and will thus reflect, that agent’s values, commitments, and relationships.

190 pages, Hardcover

First published January 11, 2001

About the author

Troy Jollimore was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia and attended the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1999. He has lived in the U.S. since 1993 and is currently Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. He has been an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2006–07), the Stanley P. Young Fellow in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2012), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2013).

Jollimore's philosophical writings frequently concern ethical issues connected to personal relationships. His first book, Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality (Studies in Ethics, was published in 2001; his second, Love's Vision, appeared in 2011, and his third, On Loyalty, in 2012. He has also published on topics including the ethics of terrorism, the depiction of evil in literature, the nature of happiness, and so-called "admirable immorality."

His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2006. It was also nominated for the 2007 Poets' Prize, and individual poems in the collection received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His second collection, At Lake Scugog, appeared in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011.

Jollimore's poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney's, The Walrus, and Poetry. He is also a frequent book reviewer, writing for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Review, among others.