Acknowledgments

My most salient debt in connection with this volume is to the Depart- ment of Philosophy at Princeton University, which invited me to deliver the Carl G. Hempel Lectures in May of 2015.1 As a Princeton graduate alumnus, I was deeply honored to receive this invitation, and I am grateful to the members of the Princeton philosophy community for their warm hospitality during my week among them. Discussions with those in attendance for the three lectures in Princeton were exceptionally stimulating and helpful to me as I began thinking about how to expand them into a book; I profited especially from comments by John Cooper, Johann Frick, Mark Johnston, Alexander Nehamas, Gideon Rosen, Michael Smith, and several extremely sharp and interesting graduate students. I have been thinking about the relational interpretation of morality for many years now, and shorter and longer discussions of it have cropped up in numerous papers of mine in that period. But I first succeeded in working some of my ideas up into a sustained treatment of the topic in response to an invitation to deliver the Frankfurt Lectures at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt in July of 2013. Those lectures, presented under the title “Bilateralität in der Moral,” and sponsored by the impressive Excellence Cluster on the Formation of Normative Orders, covered much of the same terrain that I treated in the Hempel Lectures, albeit in a different language and a somewhat more concise format. Discussions with philosophers and other scholars and students in Frankfurt, both at the two public lectures and in the seminar that followed them, were extremely rewarding, and they encouraged me to think that the project might be worth pursuing further. I am especially grateful to Rainer Forst for serving as the gracious host of my visit, and for the interest he has continued to show in this project in the years since I delivered my lectures in Frankfurt. I received further encouragement and helpful feedback when I presented a version of the same material as a “Voltaire Lecture” at the Universität Potsdam later in the summer of 2013; Logi Gunnarsson was my host on this

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occasion, and I have benefited greatly from his trenchant comments, both at the Voltaire Lecture and in several subsequent discussions. The first drafts of the three Hempel Lectures were prepared in connection with a graduate seminar that I taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 2015. It was immensely helpful for me to be able to discuss my ideas about the moral nexus with the participants in this seminar, who offered detailed comments on my drafts, including many constructive suggestions about how my developing argument might be clarified and improved. Among these participants were Facundo Alonso, Gabriel Beringer, Lindsay Crawford, Sophia Dandelet, Omar Fakhri, Nicholas French, Tyler Haddow, Nicolas Jaber, Ethan Jerzak, Julian Jonker, Daniel Khokhar, and James Steijger. Material from the Princeton lectures was presented at several different ven- ues in the years to follow, including the Murphy Institute at Tulane University, Duke University, the University of Toronto, a conference on “The Direction of Moral Duties” in Vancouver, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The interest that audiences showed on these occasions, and the cogent questions and feedback that they provided, helped to keep the project alive during a period when I was preoccupied by heavy administrative commitments at Berkeley. I am happy to be able to single out Facundo Alonso and Ariel Zylberman, who both provided written comments on all three of my Hempel Lecture texts, as well as Arthur Ripstein, who pressed me very hard on some central issues in a series of emails after a presentation of mine in Toronto, and Michael Morgan, who has followed my project closely over the years. A sabbatical leave from the University of California, Berkeley, in the academic year of 2016–17, provided the conditions I needed to expand the Hem- pel Lectures into the first draft of this book. The leave was also supported by a Humanities Research Fellowship from Berkeley, for which I am very grateful. An earlier fellowship from the same source, in the academic year of 2010–11, helped me to lay the foundations for the book project; my sabbatical leave during that year was also made possible by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foun- dation (in the form of a “Wiedereinladung” as “Forschungspreisträger”). Judy Chandler Webb generously endowed the professorship I hold at Berkeley, which makes available research funds that have contributed to my research on this project throughout its different stages. The support I received from these disparate sources has been invaluable, even if it took longer than originally anticipated for my ideas about the moral nexus to come together in book form.

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My sabbatical in 2016–17, spent in Berlin, coincided fortuitously with the first year of my tenure as an Einstein Visiting Fellow. This fellowship, supported by the Einstein Foundation in Berlin, provides an affiliation with the Topoi Excellence Cluster and the Humboldt-Universität, as well as generous funding for the activities of a research group (the “Einstein Ethics Group,” as we call ourselves). My work on the moral nexus has provided the theoretical framework for the work of the Einstein Ethics Group during the first phase of its existence, and it has been exceptionally fruitful to be able to discuss aspects of the project with the other group members. They are Jan Gertken and Felix Koch (who hold postdoctoral fellowships from the Einstein Foundation) and Daniele Bruno, Francesca Bunkenborg, and Simon Gaus (who hold or held dissertation stipends in the Einstein Group). Together, we planned and organized a series of workshops and conferences in Berlin, starting in the fall of 2016, on topics that relate in one way or another to my own work on relational normativity and morality. Themes of these workshops were “The Moral Foun- dations of Tort Law” (focused on Arthur Ripstein’s Private Wrongs); “Moral Address: Responsibility as an Interpersonal Practice”; “The Nature of Moral Obligation”; and “Contractualism, Risk, and Population Ethics” (focused on some recent work by Johann Frick). We also hosted a one-week visit to Berlin by Samuel Scheffler, who discussed with us his work in two separate sessions on “Membership and Political Obligation” and “Why Care about Future Generations?” Though my work was not officially under discussion at these sessions, they were extremely helpful to me as I was developing my own thoughts on closely related topics over the past two years. I am grateful to all who took part in our workshops, but would like to single out in particular the distinguished philosophers who accepted our invitations to come to Berlin to present work or to participate in our discussions. (They may not have realized that they would be contributing to my project by agreeing to be involved in our workshops, but the book would not have taken the final shape it did without the benefit of the stimulus I received from discussions with them.) These philosophers are Ulrike Heuer, Daniel Markovits, Erasmus Mayr, David Owens, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, and Arthur Ripstein (at “Moral Foundations of Tort Law”); Christopher Bennett, Robin Celikates, Miranda Fricker, Coleen Macnamara, Leonhard Menges, Paul Russell, and Angela Smith (at “Moral Address”); Jona- than Dancy, Stephen Darwall, Tamar Schapiro, Thomas Schmidt, Holmer Steinfath, Sarah Stroud, Ralph Wedgwood, and Susan Wolf (at “The Nature of Moral Obligation”); Christoph Fehige, Johann Frick, Tim Henning, Ulrike

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Heuer, Erasmus Mayr, Kirsten Meyer, Lukas Meyer, Véronique Munoz-Dardé, Juri Viehoff, and Tatjana Višak (at “Contractualism, Risk, and Population Ethics”); and Samuel Scheffler (during his week in Berlin as our philosopher- in-residence). I would also like to thank Berit Braun, Micha Gläser, Nora Kreft, and Thomas Schmidt, who have been stalwart and valued participants in most of these events, as well as Gerd Grasshoff, the Director of the Topoi Excellence Cluster, and Kerstin Rumpeltes, who provided outstanding logistical support. Thanks above all to the Einstein Foundation for the Visiting Fellowship that made these many rewarding activities in Berlin possible. The Einstein Ethics Group sponsored an additional workshop in May 2017, organized by Jan Gertken and Thomas Schmidt, devoted to discussion of the first complete draft of my manuscript for this book. The workshop was- at tended by a large group of mostly European philosophers, and I profited greatly from their acute critical and constructive suggestions during a series of intense but very productive sessions. The interest that people at the workshop seemed to take in my project was deeply gratifying, and helped to reassure me that the book might make a worthwhile contribution, on balance, despite its manifest shortcomings. The invited participants in this workshop, to whom I am especially indebted, were Monika Betzler, Christine Bratu, Tim Henning, Ulrike Heuer, Doug Lavin, Erasmus Mayr, Véronique Munoz-Dardé, and Peter Schaber. Comments by Valentin Beck, Logi Gunnarsson, Stefan Gosepath, Paul Guyer, Thomas Schmidt, and the Einstein Group members were also very helpful. I also received valuable feedback on the first three chapters of the manuscript from participants in another workshop, in June 2017, organized in Frank- furt by the editorial board of the European Journal of Philosophy. Participants included Dina Emundts, Andrew Huddleston, Christoph Menke, Frederick Neuhauser, Beate Rössler, and Joseph K. Schear. In addition, I have benefited enormously from detailed and astute written comments on the complete first draft of the manuscript from Niko Kolodny, Arthur Ripstein (who identified himself as one of the readers of the manuscript for Princeton University Press), Robert Stern, Bart Streumer, and a sec- ond reader for the Press. I have done my best to respond constructively to the feedback I have received from all of these patient and kind readers, though I am keenly aware that my revisions sometimes serve more to evade their objec- tions than to answer them. The Moral Nexus touches on issues in all parts of moral philosophy, very broadly conceived. As a result, its argument inevitably reflects influences that

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have shaped my thinking since I began the study of philosophy. I hope it will not seem presumptuous to mention here the senior figures whose work has been most inspirational to me. I still remember very vividly the feeling of ex- hilaration that came over me when I first worked through Thomas Nagel’sThe Possibility of Altruism during a brilliant summer week in Oxford; this book showed me that ethics could be a subject of serious philosophical study, and set me on my subsequent intellectual path. Though it took me somewhat longer to appreciate and come to terms with them, I have also been deeply influenced by the contributions to philosophical ethics of Joseph Raz, T. M. Scanlon, and Bernard Williams, which in their very different ways exemplify the capacity of philosophy to illuminate fundamental issues in this area. As I have made my way through the stages of an academic career, I have been sustained by the loyal companionship of several extraordinary individu- als who also happen to be significant contributors to contemporary moral and political philosophy, and whose influence no doubt shows up in the book that follows, if only in ways that I am no longer able to trace very precisely. I would like to mention in particular Jonathan Dancy, Samuel Freeman, Stefan Gose- path, Logi Gunnarsson, Niko Kolodny, Erasmus Mayr, Véronique Munoz- Dardé, Samuel Scheffler, Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Michael Smith, Gary -Wat son, and Susan Wolf. My life in philosophy has been an extremely fortunate one, but among the best things in it are philosophical friendships such as these, which have had a much more profound effect on my intellectual development than my formal education in the subject. Rob Tempio, Matt Rohal, and Kathleen Cioffi of Princeton University Press have guided this project expertly through the process of editorial review and production. Hank Southgate’s copyediting was both meticulous and unobtru- sive, resulting in many improvements, and Nancy Gerth prepared the excellent index. I am grateful to all of them for their interest in my work and for the considerable efforts they have undertaken to ensure that my manuscript would become an attractive and successful book. All these debts pale in comparison to the one I owe to Katharina Kaiser, who has not only tolerated graciously my obsessions and eccentricities and moods, but provided, in addition, an inspiring example of scholarly integrity and pedagogical commitment. Another dedication in the front of an obscure book can scarcely repay her for her many contributions to my philosophical life; but perhaps it is not nothing.

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