Excellent online friendships: an Aristotelian defense of social media

Ethics and Information Technology 16 (4):287-297 (2014)
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Abstract

I defend social media’s potential to support Aristotelian virtue friendship against a variety of objections. I begin with Aristotle’s claim that the foundation of the best friendships is a shared life. Friends share the distinctively human and valuable components of their lives, especially reasoning together by sharing conversation and thoughts, and communal engagement in valued activities. Although some have charged that shared living is not possible between friends who interact through digital social media, I argue that social media preserves the relevantly human and valuable portions of life, especially reasoning, play, and exchange of ideas. I then consider several criticisms of social media’s potential to host friendships, and refute or weaken the force of these objections, using this conception of a distinctively human shared life. I conclude that we should use the shared life to evaluate features of specific social media and norms for users’ conduct.

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Alexis Elder
University of Minnesota, Duluth

Citations of this work

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References found in this work

Flourishing on facebook: virtue friendship & new social media.Shannon Vallor - 2012 - Ethics and Information Technology 14 (3):185-199.
Unreal friends.Dean Cocking & Steve Matthews - 2000 - Ethics and Information Technology 2 (4):223-231.
Why virtual friendship is no genuine friendship.Barbro Fröding & Martin Peterson - 2012 - Ethics and Information Technology 14 (3):201-207.
Friendship.Laurence Thomas - 1987 - Synthese 72 (2):217 - 236.

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