Friendship, Trust and Moral Self-Perfection

Philosophers' Imprint 19 (2019)
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Abstract

This paper develops an account of moral friendship that both draws on and revises Kant’s conception of moral friendship for the purpose of explaining how trusting and being trusted in the way that Kant describes supports moral self-perfection beyond increased self-knowledge and refinement of judgment. I will argue that cultivation of the virtues of friendship is important to the pursuit of moral self-perfection, specifically with respect to combatting the unsociable side of our unsociable sociability. Reciprocal trust shelters the individual’s predisposition to goodness, which comes under attack by the passions in social relations wherein distrust is the default. Reciprocal trust also enables communion, the importance of which has been undervalued in analyses of moral self-perfection.

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Mavis Biss
Loyola University Maryland

Citations of this work

Friendship.Bennett W. Helm - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Kant on education and improvement: Themes and problems.Martin Sticker & David Bakhurst - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 55 (6):909-920.
A particularistic moral mind.Pierpaolo Marrone - 2021 - Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 12 (2):110-124.

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