Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, originally published in 1980, gives an account of "altruistic emotions" and friendship that brings out their moral value. Blum argues that moral theories centered on rationality, universal principle, obligation, and impersonality cannot capture this moral importance. This was one of the first books in contemporary moral philosophy to emphasize the moral significance of emotions, to deal with friendship as a moral phenomenon, and to challenge the rationalism of standard interpretations of Kant, although Blum’s (...) "sentimentalism" owes more to Schopenhauer than to Hume. It was a forerunner to care ethics, and feminist ethics more generally; to virtue ethics; and to subsequent influential interpretations of Kant that attempted to room for altruistic emotion and friendship, and other forms of particularism and partialism. In addition, the work has been widely influential in religious studies, political theory, bioethics, and feminist ethics. (shrink)

I intend to argue that good friendship sometimes requires epistemic irresponsibility. To put it another way, it is not always possible to be both a good friend and a diligent believer.

In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all (...) moral virtues are exactly like friendship in all important respects, but rather to articulate a fruitful model in which to explore the virtues. Section 2 explores the relational nature of friendship, drawing on Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Section 3 catalogues four motivations for taking seriously the friendship model of virtue. Section 4 applies the friendship model in depth to the virtue of trustworthiness. (shrink)

While much has been written on love, the question of how romantic love differs from friendship love has only rarely been addressed. This chapter focuses on shedding some light on this question. I begin by considering goal-oriented approaches to love. These approaches, I argue, have the resources needed to account for the differences between friendship love and romantic love. But purely goal-oriented accounts fail on account of their utilitarian gloss of our loved ones. Even when they circumvent this (...) criticism, they make the mistake of conflating the motivational tendencies of love for its constitutive characteristics. I then turn my attention to David Velleman's account of love as a moral emotion but argue that his view lacks the resources to account for the differences between romantic love and friendship love. I then go on to sketch a socially situated account of love that does better in this respect. I conclude by reflecting on the normativity of love. (shrink)

Contemplating friendship in Aristotle's Ethics -- Teleology, inequality and autonomy -- Moral virtue: possibilities and limits -- Justice: giving to each what is owed -- Intellectual virtue, Akrasia and political philosophy -- Citizens, friends and philosophers -- Happiness and maternal contemplation.

We argue that companion friendship is not importantly marked by self-disclosure as understood in either of these two ways. One's close friends need not be markedly similar to oneself, as is claimed by the mirror account, nor is the role of private information in establishing and maintaining intimacy important in the way claimed by the secrets view. Our claim will be that the mirror and secrets views not only fail to identify features that are in part constitutive of close (...) or companion friendship, but that they miss the mark quite broadly and fail to capture anything significant and distinctive about the ways in which friendship has an impact on the self. The article will proceed as follows. In the first section we outline our account of the self in friendship. In the next two sections we examine the mirror and secrets views and develop our own view in counterpoint to these. In the final section we defend our own account by showing how it provides the governing conditions which do distinguish friendship from other kinds of relations between persons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift by Claudia BaracchiJoseph GamacheBARACCHI, Claudia. Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift. Translated by Elena Bartolini and Catherine Fullarton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 146 pp. Paper, $30.00Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift offers a series of reflections on friendship that "outline thoughts, visions, stories." It is well to bear this in mind. There is no sustained (...) discussion of (and not many references to) other commentators or interpreters of the ancient Greeks. Nor is there, despite the title, a sustained philosophical treatment of friendship or its future. It is a series of reflections on ancient Greek texts. These reflections are unified by the theme of friendship, even when friendship seems to recede into the background. Each chapter is organized around a specific text, the reading of which is interspersed with the aforementioned thoughts, visions, and stories.The first chapter focuses on Plato's Timaeus. Friendship in its "most elementary sense" is "looking at the sky" and seeing not only myself, but "myself as us." This sort of cosmic friendship is a look, a "unitive force, a capacity for seeing the bonds and holding together the elements that form every living organism." The second chapter takes up the analogy of the soul and the city in the Republic. I am a friend to myself when the parts of my soul are in harmony.In the third and longest chapter, Baracchi takes up friendship between equals as discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics. The thematic focus is now friendship between persons, and we read that friendship is a "privileged place in which to be," that it "corroborates, strengthens, amplifies, and emphasizes" the friends, that it is the "condition and context for the utmost explication of human dynamis." Friends resemble each other like poetic images "that illuminate and elucidate one another." The third chapter also takes a swipe at "us moderns," whose notions of liberty undermine our ability to appreciate friendship. We moderns "struggle to contemplate seriousness, fidelity, and the depth they entail, without cynicism." The critique is familiar, and trades, at times, on what seems to be a conflation of Hobbes with the entirety of early modern philosophical anthropology. [End Page 535]Chapters 4 through 6 return to Plato, first with a reflection on the Apology and Symposium, and then with a discussion of Aristotle's friendship with Plato. The fifth chapter takes up the tension between the pursuit of truth and the love of one's friends, as that dilemma manifests in the life of a philosopher. Baracchi convincingly argues that Aristotle should be read as honoring the deeper teachings of Plato, and Socrates before him, that one should care about not who holds a belief but only whether the belief is true. Thus did Aristotle resolve the dilemma between truth and friendship. His pursuit of the truth, even when it caused disagreement with Plato, was an act of friendship.Chapter 6 focuses on the origin of the polis as described in the Republic. Baracchi shows how Socrates tries in the Republic to widen the circle of those who count as one's friends, from select others within the polis, to everyone within the polis, to the entire Greek world, as well as to push back against those who argue that enmity is the necessary foundation of the polis. The last three chapters of the book return to Aristotle's views about friendship: first, about the relationship between friendship and justice, second, about friendships between unequals, and lastly, about the embodied aspects of friendship, its sweetness, and pleasure.There are limits, however, to how helpful the work might be to philosophers interested in friendship. The language is often too abstract, as in the recommendation, "to learn to think human community in its entirety, without this entailing the elimination of differences, and without reducing the differences to identity-related and localistic velleities." Or in the claim that the difference between complete and derivative friendship is the former's ability to "to grasp the broader reasons in the finite, and thus to place the contingent in an otherwise articulated context." Too often there are exaggerations that obscure whatever point is... (shrink)

Love, Friendship, and the Self presents a reexamination of our common understanding of ourselves as persons in light of the phenomena of love and friendship. It argues that the individualism that is implicit in that understanding cannot be sustained if we are to understand the kind of distinctively personal intimacy that love and friendship essentially involve. For love is a matter of identifying with someone: sharing for his sake the concerns and values that make up his identity (...) as the person he is. Moreover, in friendship the friends share not only a concern for each other but also their activity, their lives, and even potentially their selves. By providing a detailed analysis of these notions, Bennett Helm argues for an understanding of persons as essentially social. (shrink)

Simon Keller and Sarah Stroud have both argued that the demands of being a good friend can conflict with the demands of standard epistemic norms. Intuitively, good friends will tend to seek favorable interpretations of their friends’ behaviors, interpretations that they would not apply to strangers; as such they seem prone to form unjustified beliefs. I argue that there is no such clash of norms. In particular, I argue that friendship does not require us to form beliefs about our (...) friends in the biased fashion suggested by Stroud and Keller. I further argue that while some slight bias in belief-formation might be permitted by friendship, any such bias would fall within the bounds of epistemic propriety. (shrink)

Based on a decade of direct diplomatic engagement with the United Nations, a decade of teaching on international relations, and another decade of research and teaching on Islamic and comparative peace studies, this book offers a friendship-related academic framework that examines shared moral concepts, philosophical paradigms and political experiences that can help developing and expanding multi-disciplinary conversations between the Christian West and the Muslim East. By advancing multicultural and inter-religious discourses on friendship, this book helps promoting actual friendships (...) among diverse cultures and peoples. This book has no published parallels, so far, in the current century. Most important, it is not a monologue. Rather, it provides a model of conversations among scholars and political actors who come from diverse international and inter-religious backgrounds. The word "Islamic" should not mislead the reader to suspect that this edited volume delves only into religious discourses. On the contrary, it provides a forum for conversations both within and between religious as well as philosophical perspectives. In short, the book is a forum for friendship conversations both thematically and also in terms of disciplinary and cultural diversity. This volume presents a model for intellectual conversations about friendship. The result of the work of many prominent international scholars and diplomats over many years, it conveys at least one message clearly: friendship matters for not only our happiness but also for our survival. (shrink)

This book tells a compelling story about love, friendship, and the Divine that took over a thousand years to unfold. It argues that mind and feeling are intrinsically connected in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus; that Aristotle developed his theology and physics primarily from Plato’s Symposium (from the “Greater” and “Lesser Mysteries” of Diotima-Socrates’ speech); and that the Beautiful and the Good are not coincident classes, but irreducible Forms, and the loving ascent of the Symposium must be (...) interpreted in the light of the Republic, as the later tradition up to Ficino saw. Against the view that Platonism is an escape from the ambiguities of ordinary experience or opposed to loving individuals for their own sakes, this book argues that Plato dramatizes the ambiguities of ordinary experience, confronts the possibility of failure, and bequeaths erotic models for the loving of individuals to later thought. Finally, it examines the Platonic-Aristotelian heritage on the Divine to discover whether God can love us back, and situates the dramatic development of this legacy in Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Dionysius the Areopagite. (shrink)

My friendship with Martin Buber begins -- The cost of my commitment -- On the suspension of the ethical -- Martin Buber's first visit to America -- Sartre, Heidegger, Jung, and Scholem -- The life of dialogue: letters following Buber's first visit -- Personal direction: letters, 1954-1957 -- The Washington School of Psychiatry and the Buber-Rogers dialogue -- Postscript to I and thou: letters following Buber's second visit -- Buber's last visit to America -- Interrogations and responses: letters following (...) Buber's last visit -- Our stay in Jerusalem and Buber's last years -- Epilogue: memorial address. (shrink)

In Solo: A Star Wars Story, the debonair Lando Calrissian is clearly in love with the artificially intelligent droid L3‐37. There are lots of friendships between droids and humans in Star Wars. This chapter looks at the relationship between Lando and L3‐37 in Solo and argues that they exhibit all the hallmarks not just of friendship, but of love. A friendship between people who both seek to gain from the relationship is one of utility, while a friendship (...) between people who simply enjoy each other's company is one of pleasure. Droids are the kinds of beings that can be good friends, as is clearly supported throughout the Star Wars canon. One potential concern is that droids smarter than humans might take advantage of an inferior organic life form by having a sexual relationship with them. (shrink)

We focus here on some familiar kinds of cases of conflict between friendship and morality, and, on the basis of our account of the nature of friendship, argue for the following two claims: first, that in some cases where we are led morally astray by virtue of a relationship that makes its own demands on us, the relationship in question is properly called a friendship; second, that relationships of this kind are valuable in their own right.

Introduction: The Nature and Signif1cance of Friendship Neera Kapur Badhwar Philosophers have long recognized that friendship plays a central role in a ...

In Friendship, Italian philosopher Claudia Baracchi explores the philosophical underpinnings of friendship. Tackling the issue of friendship in the era of Facebook and online social networks requires courage and even a certain impertinence. The friendship relationship involves trust, fidelity, and availability for profound sharing. Sociologists assure us this attitude was never more improbable than in our time of dramatic anthropological reconfiguration. Research on friendship cannot therefore ignore ancient thought: with unparalleled depth, Friendship examines the (...) broader implications of relationship, both emotional and political. Today, the grand socio-political structures of the world are trembling. The hold of valued paradigms that traditionally positioned individuals, determined their destinies, and assigned them their roles and reciprocal responsibilities is becoming uncertain. In these many global shifts, previously unforeseen possibilities for individual and collective becoming are unleashed. Perhaps friendship has to do with worlds that are not: that are not yet, and that should be desired all the more. Focusing on the works of Aristotle, Baracchi explores ancient reflections on friendship, in the belief that they have much to teach us about our relationships in the present day. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate about the value of virtual friendship. In contrast to previous authorships, this paper argues that virtual friendship can have independent value. It is argued that within an Aristotelian framework, some friendships that are perhaps impossible offline can exist online, i.e., some offline unequals can be online equals and thus form online friendships of independent value.

Philosophers have tended to construe friendship as an intimate relationship involving mutual love, and have focused their discussions on this ‘true’ form of friendship. However, everyone recognizes that we use the word ‘friend’ and its cognates to refer, non-ironically, to those with whom we share various relationships that are not terribly intimate or which do not involve mutual love. I argue that there exists no general reason to restrict our philosophical focus to ‘true’ friendships, and allege that we (...) can gain important insights if we broaden our perspective to include lesser friends. I contend that friendships, in the broad sense (encompassing both ‘true’ and lesser forms), are necessarily relationships that are the product of significant collaborative norm manipulation. And I argue that understanding friendship in this way helps explain important features, including the difference between friendships and familiar relations, the non-fungibility of friends, and why friendships are often in flux. (shrink)

Ethical dimensions of friendship have rarely been explicitly addressed as aspects of friendship quality in studies of children's peer relationships. This study identifies aspects of moral virtue significant for friendship, as a basis for empirically investigating the role of ethical qualities in children's friendship assessments and aspirations. We introduce a eudaimonic conception of friendship quality, identify aspects of moral virtue foundational to such quality, review and contest some grounds on which children have been regarded as (...) not mature enough to have friendships that require virtue, and report a qualitative study of the friendship assessments and aspirations of children aged nine and ten. In focus group sessions conducted in ten schools across Great Britain, moral qualities figured prominently in children's assessments of friendship quality. The findings provide evidence of children having friendships exhibiting mutual respect, support, and valuing of each other's good character. (shrink)

Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help (...) shape who we are as persons. Given this centrality, important questions arise concerning the justification of friendship and, in this context, whether it is permissible to “trade up” when someone new comes along, as well as concerning the possibility of reconciling the demands of friendship with the demands of morality in cases in which the two seem to conflict. (shrink)

When considering the value of friendship, most philosophers ignore the negatives. Most assume that humans need friends to flourish, and some argue that friendships can be good, no matter the risks entailed. This makes conversations about the value of friendship one-sided. Here, I argue that Cynics and Pessimists have an important view on friendship, despite it being ignored. They hold that: (a) friendship is unnecessary for flourishing, and (b) friendship presents ethical risks, especially to one’s (...) own self-sufficiency. I defend these views. Then I conclude with reflections on why Cynics and Pessimists actually make great friends. By helping people to focus on vulgar human nature and the flaws that humans have, they create an unpretentious basis for friendship. (shrink)

This paper examines Kant's accounts of friendship and marriage, and argues for what can be called an ideal of “moral marriage” based on Kant's notion of moral friendship. After explaining why Kant values friendship so highly, it gives an account of the ways in which marriage falls far short, according to Kant, of what friendship has to offer. The paper then argues that many of Kant's reasons for finding marriage morally impoverished compared with friendship are (...) wrong‐headed. The paper further argues that a few of Kant's views about friendship are false. The main point is that, when we slightly revise Kant's account of friendship and jettison Kant's misguided notions about marriage, we see that marriages can aspire to much of the same moral richness as friendships. Finally, the paper argues that this friendship model of marriage does not obscure the important ways in which marriages and friendships differ. (shrink)

While for centuries friendship has fascinated and puzzled philosophers, they haven't always been able to fit it into their theories. The author explores friendship as something hard to deal with in the neat and tidy ways of philosophical theory - but nevertheless as one of the central goods of human experience.

It is sometimes held that modern institutionally-focussed conceptions of social justice are lacking in one essential respect: they ignore the importance of civic friendship or solidarity. It is also, typically simultaneously, held that Aristotle’s thought provides a fertile ground for elucidating an account of civic friendship. I argue, first, that Aristotle is no help on this score: he has no conception of distinctively civic friendship. I then go on to argue that the Kantian distinction between perfect and (...) imperfect duties is more useful than talk of civic friendship in capturing the non-institutional demands of social justice. (shrink)

Are the members of echo chambers blameworthy for their beliefs? If we follow Sarah Stroud's account of friendship, we end up with the following conclusion: if echo chambers involve friendship, then the individuals have strong reasons not to live up to epistemic demands or ideals when the friendships are formed in the echo chambers they are members of. This result stands in striking contrast with the received view, according to which the members of echo chambers are blameworthy for (...) their epistemic vices and faulty beliefs. The received view uses individual epistemic vices to propose individualistic solutions for the problem of echo chambers. I argue that this is misleading, simply because the members of echo chambers are not blameworthy due to the friendships cultivated in the echo chambers. (shrink)

Love and Friendship in the Western Tradition comprises a collection of essays written over a 25 year period by the late Rev. Professor James McEvoy on the theme of friendship. The book traces the genesis and development of philosophical treatments of friendship from Greek philosophy, through the Middle Ages, to modern and postmodern philosophy. The collection's three major concerns are: (1) the history of philosophical discussions of friendship; (2) the role of friendship in the cultivation (...) of the philosophical life; (3) the marginalization of friendship as a theme for philosophical reflection and practice in the modern period. As the author was primarily a medievalist, a great deal of the focus of the essays is on the development of the theme of friendship in the Middle Ages (in the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Aelred of Rievaulx, Henry of Ghent, Robert Grosseteste, etc.). However, this focus, while a value in itself, also serves to connect philosophical perspectives on friendship from before and after the middle ages. It connects to the time before inasmuch as much of the work done on friendship in the Middle Ages is anchored in interpretations of Aristotle and Plato, and it connects to the time after by providing a counterpoint to the modern paradigm of what constitutes the philosophical life. The collection combines historical with thematic approaches to scholarship on this issue and is one of the only books of its kind to do so. It is, perhaps, unique in its historical sweep and will prove to be a canonical source for further research on this topic. (shrink)

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies. In the first part of the book Elder develops (...) a robust and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots currently being developed for consumer markets. Elder articulates the moral hazards presented by these robots, while at the same time acknowledging their real and measurable benefits. In the final section she shifts her focus to connections between real people, especially those enabled by social media. Arguing against critics who have charged that these new communication technologies are weakening our social connections, Elder explores ways in which text messaging, video chats, Facebook, and Snapchat are enabling us to develop, sustain, and enrich our friendship in new and meaningful ways. (shrink)

Friendship in an Age of Economics is the first book not only to detail the relationships neoliberalism encourages us to have, but also to see how friendship can provide a bulwark of resistance to them. Written in an engaging style, it will be understandable to political theorists, philosophers, social scientists, and cultural theorists.

An overview of how friendship has been represented and assessed in the Confucian tradition, and particularly in classical Confucian texts such as the Analects and the Mencius. Themes covered include the relationship between the family and friendship, the ambivalence towards friendship in imperial China, and the connection between friendship and the Confucian ideal of personal cultivation. The chapter finishes by exploring novel conceptions of friendship and human relatedness suggested by the Confucian tradition.

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. (shrink)

Elizabeth Telfer; XIII*—Friendship, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 223–242, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

This paper seeks to examine the plausibility of the concept of ‘Civic Friendship’ as a philosophical model for a conceptualisation of ‘belonging’. Such a concept, would hold enormous interest for educators in enabling the identification of particular virtues, attitudes and values that would need to be taught and nurtured to enable the civic relationship to be passed on from generation to generation. I consider both of the standard arguments for civic friendship: that it can be understood within the (...) Aristotelian typology as either a form of utility friendship or as a form of virtue friendship. I argue that civic friendship may not be the most appropriate model and that attempts to resolve the problems through looking on it as a political metaphor leave it unable to fulfil the function for which it was originally designed in Ancient Greece. Finally, I emphasize the need to carefully consider which particular metaphors we choose for civic relationships and how we subsequently use them. (shrink)

This article examines Derrida’s insistence on the contretemps that breaks open time, paying particular attention to Politics of Friendship and the way in which this book envisages the ‘untimely’ as both interrupting, and making possible, friendship. Although I suggest that Derrida’s temporal deconstruction of the Aristotelian distinction between utility and ‘perfect’ friendships is convincing, I also argue that Derrida’s own account of friendship is itself touched by time, in the peculiar sense of ‘touched’ that connotes affected and (...) wounded. Derrida’s work instantiates what Husserl might call a transcendental pathology, in that it intermittently instantiates an ethics of non-presentist time (the time which is also the transcendental condition for the event of friendship), and, by contrast, disparages the significance of what we might call an ethics of phronesis, a ‘lived’ friendship of ‘omni-temporal’ dispositions, and embodied and habitual patterns. I end this article by proposing a dialectic between the disjunctive and conjunctive aspects of time that does not accord any kind of a priori privilege to the one over the other. (shrink)

Digeser contends that our rich and varied practices of friendship multiply and moderate connections to politics. Along the way, she sets forth a series of ideals that appreciates friendship's many forms and its dynamic relationship to individuality, citizenship, political and legal institutions, and international relations.

A rich exploration of the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future, by the most influential of contemporary philosophers. Until relatively recently, Jacques Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating and fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. Derrida's "political turn," marked especially by the appearance of Specters of Marx, has surprised some and delighted others. In (...) The Politics of Friendship Derrida renews and enriches this orientation through an examination of the political history of the idea of friendship pursued down the ages. Derrida's thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, "my friends, there is no friend" and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. The exploration allows Derrida to recall and restage the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought—friendship and enmity, private and public life—have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar and male-centered notion of fraternity and the virile virtue whose authority has gone unquestioned in our culture of friendship and our models of democracy The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy. This remarkable book, his most profoundly important for many years, offers a challenging and inspiring vision of that future. (shrink)

This book explores for the first time an idea common to both Plato and Aristotle: although people are separate, their lives need not be; one person's life may overflow into another's, so that helping someone else is a way of serving oneself. Price considers how this idea unites the philosophers' treatments of love and friendship (which are otherwise very different), and demonstrates that this view of love and friendship, applied not only to personal relationships, but also to the (...) household and even the city-state, promises to resolve the old dichotomy between egoism and altruism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper [1] is a defence of a modified version of Jane English's model of filial obligations based on adult children's friendship with their parents. Unlike the more traditional view that filial obligations are a repayment for parental sacrifices, the friendship model puts filial duties in the appealing context of voluntary, loving relationships. Contrary to English's original statement of this view, which is open to the charge of tolerating filial ingratitude, the friendship model can generate obligations (...) to help our parents even if we are no longer friendly with them. Joseph Kupfer has pointed out several ways in which parent‐child relationships differ from peer friendships; but his arguments do not preclude our enjoying a type of friendship with our parents. In response to Christina Hoff Sommers, who objects that feelings of friendship toward our parents are too flimsy a ground for filial duties, the friendship model can provide a plausible, robust account of filial obligations. As for adult children who have never formed friendships with their loving, caring parents, and refuse to give them much‐needed assistance, they can be criticised by moral considerations independent of but compatible with the friendship model. (shrink)

In this article I demonstrate how Hannah Arendt both appropriates and transforms Aristotle’s view of political friendship. I argue that the brief discussion of Aristotelian political friendship in The Human Condition relies on an earlier de-materialization of Aristotle’s work on friendship. This de-materialization of Aristotle’s view of friendship allows Arendt to discuss Aristotelian friendship as a kind of ‘respect’, where ‘respect’ is a philosophical notion unavailable to Aristotle. Ultimately, for Arendt, the experience of friendship (...) opens up a space for human beings to begin to practice a distinct way of seeing one another – a ‘respect’ – that can in turn be practiced in public, making the experience of friendship an important precursor to action. (shrink)

This article explores a particular connection between friendship and social solidarity and seeks to contribute to understanding the societal significance of non-institutionalised relationships. Commonly the benefits of friendship are assumed to accrue to friends only. But this is only part of the story. Friendship, as instantiation of intimacy and site of moral learning, is conducive to solidarity understood as felt concern for unknown others. That potentiality rests on a specific characteristic: friendship’s loose institutional anchorage. Beginning with (...) an explanation of friendship’s institutional deficit, the article elaborates Durkheim’s ‘positive solidarity’ juxtaposed with Honneth’s recent take on solidarity. It then discusses the contribution personal relationships make to morality, before turning to the specifics of moral learning in friendship. Finally, the article argues that although undesirable as social organising principle, friendship’s institutional deficit renders it conducive to the relational acquisition of a comprehensive understanding of solidarity. (shrink)

What unites friends and distinguishes them from others? Is the preference we give to friends rationally and morally justifiable? This collection of new essays on the philosophy of friendship considers such questions.

Recently, there has been much discussion of two challenging arguments that suggest that if we were to lack free will of the sort required for moral responsibility we would lose one of the most important things that give our lives meaning, namely, valuable human relationships such as friendship. One line of argument, defended by Robert Kane, suggests that freely chosen relationships have an irreplaceable value, and the other, defended by Peter Strawson and recently taken up in a new form (...) by Seth Shabo and others, suggests that the most valuable relationships are ones that require susceptibility to the emotions of resentment and indignation that presuppose freedom and responsibility. These arguments have been ably challenged (see, for example, Pereboom 2014). But even if these arguments are unsound, their conclusion might still be true. In this paper, I aim to defend a distinctive third kind of approach. It appeals to the nature of friendship as requiring a special kind of obligations, and in this way draws a closer connection between the aspects of friendship that require free will and moral responsibility itself. The reasoning rests on two main premises. The first is that genuine friendship entails special obligations. Two people are not friends unless they have obligations toward one another that are partially defining of friendship. The second premise is that one has obligations only if one has the freedom to meet them. This idea is closely related to a principle taken to be axiomatic in various ethical and even deontic logical systems: Ought Implies Can. Putting these premises together, we can conclude that friendship (as well as other special relationships) require freedom. Defending these two premises takes us into two entirely separate debates, one in ethical theory and one in free will and responsibility, and a secondary aim of the paper is to bring these two vibrant discussions together. (shrink)

It has been claimed that friendship not only involves partial treatment of one's friends but that it also involves some degree of doxastic partiality towards them. Taking these claims as their starting points, some philosophers have argued that friendship not only involves such partiality but that this is also what is normatively required. This gives rise to the possibility of conflict between the demands of friendship on the one hand and the demands of epistemic norms on the (...) other. In this paper, I consider some of the responses to this claim and show why they fail. I distinguish between different grades of doxastic partiality and explain why, although low grades of doxastic partiality fall within the bounds of the standard epistemic norm, the higher grades might infringe such norms. I conclude with an explanation of a fundamental intuition that seems to lie at the heart of the thesis of epistemic partiality. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)