Communities of Respect

Zoe Walker, Journal of Moral Philosophy ...valuable insight...

Olle Blomberg, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice I found Communities of Respect to be a very rewarding read. Taken as an account of communities or respect and communal responsibility, Helm's position and arguments are both novel and interesting. I recommend it to philosophers interested in communal and moral responsibility, moral psychology, social ontology, or the philosophy of emotions.

Caroline T. Arruda, Notre Dame Philosophical Review Philosophers interested in topics as wide-ranging as respect, the reactive attitudes, the sentimentalist account of emotions, practical rationality, shared agency and metaethics will find rich arguments with which to engage in this book. Although the idea that respect is fundamentally interpersonal (and grounded in interpersonal relationships) has a long history, Helm's account of the sense in which it is interpersonal, the way it is grounded (and thereby justified) and the subsequent grounding (but not viciously circular) role it plays is ambitious, innovative and challenging.

Bennett Helm is the Elijah E. Kresge Professor of Philosophy at Franklin & Marshall College, Pennsylvania. His work focuses on understanding what it is to be a person and, in particular, the role the emotions and various forms of caring play in making us persons be moral creatures. He has received fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Templeton Foundation, and Princeton's Center for Human Values. He is the author of Emotional Reason: Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Love, Friendship, and the Self: Intimacy, Identification, and the Social Nature of Persons (Oxford University Press, 2010).