ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I concluded that our reasons of intimacy simply cannot be understood in line with common sense if we assimilate them to objective agent-neutral reasons or to subjective agent-relative reasons. In order to see whether we ought to try to accommodate our pre-theoretical understanding of these reasons, we need to turn to a consideration of the nature of intimacy. If intimate relationships generate or ground a special class of reasons, then an examination of the nature of such relationships ought to provide some guidance to understanding reasons of intimacy. After all, the diffi culty with the agent-neutral and the subjective accounts of reasons of intimacy seemed to be what they took to ground the reasons: for the former, the focus is on the objective value, either instrumental or intrinsic, of the relationship (or of the parties to the relationship), while, for the latter, the focus is the psychology of the agent herself. The diffi culty with the agent-neutral account is that whatever value my relationships have, other relationships of the same type that are not my own will have the same sort of value, as will my own possible but not actual relationships. Thus, the fact that I am actually intimate with Tracy has no special signifi cance in and of itself in my rational deliberations. However, if we take this fact seriously by moving to the subjective account, we are left with making reasons of intimacy highly dependent upon the agent’s own internal states, regardless of the past history of the relationship at stake.
