What is a robustly demanding good, and what has that got to do with friendship and love? Find out in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast in which Nigel Warburton interviews Princeton Professor Philip Pettit about this topic.
This is philosophy bites with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
This episode of Philosophy Bytes was sponsored by the examining ethics podcast from the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePaul University.
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Of us have friends, and for most of us, friendship enriches life.
According to the eminent philosopher Philip Pettit, a regular and always welcome friend on philosophy bites, certain goods, like friendship, possess a particular characteristic.
They are robustly demanding.
Philip Pettit, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you.
Glad to be here.
The topic we're going to discuss today is robustly demanding goods.
What is a robustly demanding good?
Love is one, friendship is another.
Various other virtues in the like respect, for example, or honesty, they're all robustly demanding goods.
So what makes them robustly demanding is the following.
If I am to give you, say, take the last one, I'm to give you respect, then it's not enough that I treat you respectfully in a given instance, because I might be doing that simply because it suits me.
It's in my interest.
It's got to be the case that I would also have treated you respectfully had things been different in various ways.
For example, had it not been in my interest to do so.
In that sense, in order to give you respect, I've got to give you that form of respectful treatment that's called a restraint, actually.