Break-up duties and the limits of deliberation: A reply to Betzler

Abstract Leaving a relationship without talking to the other person seems, in principle, morally callous. Monika Betzler argues that people initiating break-ups have duties to explain and to facilitate participation in the decision to end the relationship. This paper questions the scope and content of these obligations, which, I argue, wrongly centre rational deliberation as the main morally salient element in break-ups. Section I introduces Betzler’s duties to explain and to facilitate participation—deliberative break-up duties. In Section II, I argue that deliberative break-up duties are not action-guiding when the divorcer’s only motivation is having fallen out of love. Section III articulates Betzler’s potential response: a weaker duty to make an effort to deliberate presumably applies in those cases. This weaker duty, I argue in Section IV, entails moral risks which ground its rejection. I briefly advance a route to incorporate Betzler’s strengths while avoiding these challenges in Section V.