Relational and transcendental morality
In an exchange on the PEA Soup blog, R. Jay Wallace summarizes a challenge to relational views of morality, based on the fact that it is sometimes morally acceptable to violate an interpersonal obligation. The challenge is presented a bit elliptically so I thought I would try to spell it out more explicitly.
In brief, relational views of morality hold that moral obligations are fundamentally constituted by relations between people: things like expectations, claims, or demands; dispositions or entitlements to praise and blame; etc. Thus morality is interpersonal rather than impersonal. Wallace gives us this for a broad outline:
[T]he idea [is] that morality is fundamentally interpersonal—a matter not of the internal consistency of the agent’s will, or of the impersonal goods that might be advanced through the agent’s conduct, but of how the agent relates to other (moral) persons. ... We are subject to obligations to comply with moral norms, in some sense, because other parties are entitled to address moral demands to us in the way that is characteristic of interpersonal accountability.
How to fill in the details of a picture like this is a subject of ongoing debate, for example in the linked post between Wallace and Stephen Darwall. See also Scanlon.
In general, though, relational views of morality seem to be subject to the worry that morality seems to transcend circumstances -- I can have a moral obligation to you even if neither of us think I do, even if you will never claim it from me or reproach me for not fulfilling it. Wallace considers a challenge that seems to me to be in this genre of worry:
Against this, it might be thought that we need a different model of moral obligation to make sense of the fact that it is sometimes okay not to live up to the literal terms of what we seem to owe to each other; we can permissibly break a promissory commitment, for instance, if a medical emergency arises that couldn’t have been anticipated in advance. Philosophers sometimes speak of situations of this kind as ones in which a moral right or claim is permissibly infringed, and that way of talking implicitly invokes a fundamentally non-relational notion of moral obligation and permission.
Here is my interpretation of the challenge. On the one hand, it is never morally acceptable to violate the genuine demand of morality. But, in a medical emergency, it is morally acceptable to violate the interpersonal promissory obligation. Accordingly, the interpersonal promissory obligation can't be identified with the genuine demand of morality. There must be more to it -- something that takes as given all the immanent interpersonal obligations and then determines which are genuine moral requirements. (Wallace's reply to the challenge is that the morally acceptable emergency exceptions to the obligation are built into it -- they are part of the interpersonal relation, too. Accordingly, there is no wedge between the interpersonal-relational and the properly moral.)