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<p>Normative blackballing in the context of a friendship refers to a practise where one party actively tells the other that they no longer wish to be friends in virtue of that friend holding abhorrent beliefs. This paper argues that normative blackballing is not morally required in cases where one party develops a morally bad belief <i>if</i> we hold the view that friendships are <i>robust</i> attachments. If this is true, then at least two of the major positions within the current debate on the specific wrongness of being friends with bad people are wrong to argue that the termination of a friendship can be morally required of us. I will draw on Brennan’s work(2023) and take the argument as given that no objective sufficiency criteria can be offered to justify normative blackballing. I will then show how subjective accounts also fail to justify normative blackballing by showing that there is no mechanism to appropriately weigh trivial, but passionately held, beliefs. If <i>any</i> belief an agent themself considers sufficiently bad justifies normative blackballing, then this undermines friendship’s robust nature. We either have to accept the subjective criteria and reject robustness, or accept robustness and deny that beliefs are sufficient for normative blackballing.</p>

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Would You Still Love Me if I Were a Worm? Robust Relationships and Why Beliefs cannot be the Grounds for Normative Blackballing

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年9月1日

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  • Aloysius Aquinas Ventham

摘要

Normative blackballing in the context of a friendship refers to a practise where one party actively tells the other that they no longer wish to be friends in virtue of that friend holding abhorrent beliefs. This paper argues that normative blackballing is not morally required in cases where one party develops a morally bad belief if we hold the view that friendships are robust attachments. If this is true, then at least two of the major positions within the current debate on the specific wrongness of being friends with bad people are wrong to argue that the termination of a friendship can be morally required of us. I will draw on Brennan’s work(2023) and take the argument as given that no objective sufficiency criteria can be offered to justify normative blackballing. I will then show how subjective accounts also fail to justify normative blackballing by showing that there is no mechanism to appropriately weigh trivial, but passionately held, beliefs. If any belief an agent themself considers sufficiently bad justifies normative blackballing, then this undermines friendship’s robust nature. We either have to accept the subjective criteria and reject robustness, or accept robustness and deny that beliefs are sufficient for normative blackballing.