Current literature has documented the detrimental effects of cyberbullying which include a range of internalising and externalising problems for those involved. Although critical, this research can sometimes ignore social-ecological aspects of a child’s life that can potentially ‘buffer’ the negative psychological effects of such involvement. With this in mind, this cross-sectional investigation of 12-16 year olds [M(SD): 13.5(1) years] in Ireland focused on the role of friendship quality and gender in association with cyberbullying involvement and psychological well-being (N= (...) 2410). The Cyberbullying and Online Aggression Scale was used to measure cyber perpetration and victimisation. A modified version of the Cambridge Friendship Questionnaire was included to investigate peer friendship quality. Finally, the Moods and Feeling Questionnaire and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire were chosen to provide a measurement of psychological well-being. Prevalence rates for various types of cyberbullying roles (cyber bullies, victims and bully/victims) are presented, as well as differences for psychological well-being, friendship quality and cyberbullying involvement. In addition, regression models were used to determine the associations between gender, age, friendship quality and involvement in cyberbullying with psychological well-being. The results are considered in terms of the current literature and directions for future research are suggested. (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)

This article falls into two parts: the first is an analysis, in the light of my earlier discussions of and of the Homeric usage of and the second, an attempt to show that, as in the case of the effects of Homeric usage persist to a considerable degree in the moral philosophy of Aristotle. In the earlier discussions I have argued that the higher value placed upon the competitive in Greek entails that co-operative relationships, even when valued and necessary, take (...) the form dictated by the more valued qualities, the The most general words to denote co-operative relationships in Greek are and its derivatives: my purpose here is to show how the Homeric usage of these words is related to the Homeric standard and to Homeric society, and to sketch in the outline of a wider discussion, which I hope to be able to fill in later. (shrink)

This article falls into two parts: the first is an analysis, in the light of my earlier discussions of and of the Homeric usage of and the second, an attempt to show that, as in the case of the effects of Homeric usage persist to a considerable degree in the moral philosophy of Aristotle. In the earlier discussions I have argued that the higher value placed upon the competitive in Greek entails that co-operative relationships, even when valued and necessary, take (...) the form dictated by the more valued qualities, the The most general words to denote co-operative relationships in Greek are and its derivatives: my purpose here is to show how the Homeric usage of these words is related to the Homeric standard and to Homeric society, and to sketch in the outline of a wider discussion, which I hope to be able to fill in later. (shrink)

This article falls into two parts: the first is an analysis, in the light of my earlier discussions of and of the Homeric usage of and the second, an attempt to show that, as in the case of the effects of Homeric usage persist to a considerable degree in the moral philosophy of Aristotle. In the earlier discussions I have argued that the higher value placed upon the competitive in Greek entails that co-operative relationships, even when valued and necessary, take (...) the form dictated by the more valued qualities, the The most general words to denote co-operative relationships in Greek are and its derivatives: my purpose here is to show how the Homeric usage of these words is related to the Homeric standard and to Homeric society, and to sketch in the outline of a wider discussion, which I hope to be able to fill in later. (shrink)

This chapter, ‘Friendship and the Moral Life in Iris Murdoch’s Novels’ revisits the subject of sexual relationships, not from the problematic perspective brought to them in Anne Rowe’s earlier chapter, but in a positive light. In his analysis of the educational potential of friendship and sexuality Robert Baker contends that sexual intimacy teaches Murdoch’s characters not only about themselves and their own identity but also about the reality of the other person. It thus acts as a force for (...) learning to attend to the world outside the self which is the desideratum of Murdoch’s moral pilgrimage. He surveys the apparent acceptance by Murdoch scholars that such moral development is necessarily a solitary and lonely endeavour before juxtaposing that impression—given prominence in the M and D scenario Murdoch creates in The Sovereignty of Good (1970)—with the relationships she portrays in her novels. Close readings of the friendship of Tom MacCaffrey and Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) and of Harvey Blackett’s relationship with Sefton Anderson in The Green Knight support Baker’s contention that physical affection can be a guide to the good. Borrowing an image from the latter novel he claims that in her fiction ‘Murdoch represents the moral life not as a lonely pilgrimage toward reality, but as a passeggiata with others in which one gives way to a movement larger than and beyond oneself’ (177), a viable interpretation which reads the passeggiata with an interestingly different slant from other current critics such as Rebecca Moden, who regards it as Murdoch’s ‘metaphor for the nature of human existence’ and ‘a troubling image of the impoverished quality of human consciousness in the late twentieth century’. (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)

This article explores the relationship between friendship and morality. Two ideas have been influential in the history of moral philosophy: the impartial standpoint and close friendship. These two perspectives on thought and action can conflict, however, and such a case is presented here. In an attempt to resolve these tensions, and understand the assumption that gives rise to it, I explore an alternative conception of moral conduct and friendship suggested by early Confucian thought. Within this account, moral (...) conduct is that which aims at harmony, understood as the appropriate blending of different elements. This suggests a conception of friendship that realizes harmony through a focus on shared activities, and the quality of interaction achieved between people as they participate in shared social events. This account offers a novel way of conceptualizing friendship, which also avoids the tension between the impartial standpoint and close friendship. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to describe three different attempts, which have been made by philosophers, to define what quality of life is; and to spell out some of the difficulties that faces each definition. One, Perfectionism, focuses on the capacities that human beings possess: capacities for friendship, knowledge and creative activity, for instance. It says that the good life consists in the development and use of these capacities. Another account, the Preference Theory, urges that satisfying (...) one's preferences, or desires, is what improves one's quality of life. And a third account, Hedonism, sees life-quality as consisting in the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The paper describes and evaluates objections to each of these views, thereby displaying their weaknesses and strengths. Since no view comes out as the right one there is a choice to be made. At the end of the paper it is being discussed how well each of the views cohere with different methodologies used in quality of life research. Also it is suggested that considerations about what the research is to be used for are relevant. (shrink)

Friendship is commonly assumed to reduce strategic uncertainty and enhance tacit coordination. However, this assumption has never been tested across two opposite poles of coordination involving either strategic complementarity or substitutability. We had participants interact with friends or strangers in two classic coordination games: the stag-hunt game, which exhibits strategic complementarity and may foster “cooperation”, and the entry game, which exhibits strategic substitutability and may foster “competition”. Both games capture a frequent trade-off between a potentially high paying but uncertain (...) option and a low paying but safe alternative. We find that, relative to strangers, friends are more likely to choose options involving uncertainty in stag-hunt games, but the opposite is true in entry games. Furthermore, in stag-hunt games, friends “tremble” less between options, coordinate better and earn more, but these advantages are largely decreased or lost in entry games. We further investigate how these effects are modulated by risk attitudes, friendship qualities, and interpersonal similarities. (shrink)

What makes a friendship a good friendship? One way of answering that question, taken by Aristotle and many philosophers since, is to describe an ideal friendship, and then say that a friendship is a good friendship insofar as it resembles the ideal. An ideal of friendship, so presented, is intended to capture the qualities that all good friendships share, regardless of who the friends are and regardless of their circumstances. This approach to good (...) class='Hi'>friendship, I argue, fails to capture the variety of good kinds of friendship and the role of friendship in real human lives. I propose an alternative approach, on which a good friendship is one that improves the lives of the friends by bringing to those lives some of the many disparate values especially associated with friendship. On this view, there are many forms of good friendship, often mutually incompatible; no single kind of friendship is a model for all others; and the point of friendship is to improve the lives of humans as they are, with all their distinguishing weaknesses, limitations, and needs. (shrink)

In this analysis of his thought on friendship, I begin first by arguing that for Nietzsche friendship is undesirable or impossible with or between four human types. Insight on this point is valuable, because it provides clear vision of what friendship is not. Second, I will argue that Nietzsche takes superior friendship to be possible but rare, since it requires its participants to balance three pairs of opposing qualities that are difficult to keep in equilibrium. Third, (...) I will show that Nietzsche takes friendship in its highest form to aim at a goal, appropriately named "truth." Here I draw upon both "middle-period" texts and Beyond Good and Evil, the latter to show that a concern for friendship pervades Nietzsche's oeuvre. Fourth, I show that Nietzsche differs most from ancient authors in his uncompromising insistence that if friendship is to serve truth rather than comfort or illusion, it is necessarily agonistic. A final section argues that if true friendship is to be nourished rather than destroyed by opposition, the virtue of "sympathy" must be present. Sympathy in Nietzsche's sense cannot be conflated with pity, since it is related to the "shared joy" that he identifies as the crown of friendship. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this analysis of his thought on friendship, I begin first by arguing that for Nietzsche friendship is undesirableor impossible with or between four human types. Insight on this point is valuable, because it provides clear vision of what friendship is not. Second, I will argue that Nietzsche takes superior friendship to be possible but rare, since itrequires its participants to balance three pairs of opposing qualities that are difficult to keep in equilibrium. Third, I (...) will show that Nietzsche takes friendship in its highest form to aim at a goal, appropriately named “truth.” Here I draw upon both “middle-period” texts and Beyond Good and Evil, the latter to show that a concern for friendship pervadesNietzsche’s oeuvre. Fourth, I show that Nietzsche differs most from ancient authors in his uncompromising insistence that if friendship is to serve truth rather than comfort or illusion, it is necessarily agonistic. A final section argues that if true friendship is to be nourished rather than destroyed by opposition, the virtue of “sympathy” must be present. Sympathy in Nietzsche’s sense cannot be conflated with pity, since it is related to the “shared joy” that he identifies as the crown of friendship. (shrink)

The dynamic qualities of friendship sometimes require friends to assess their relationship in light of reasons of reciprocity or moral considerations. Friends sustain their relationship partly by assessing the terms of reciprocity. Sometimes friends must also consider how moral reasons bear on their friendship; friends need to resolve occasional clashes between the demands of friendship and rival moral considerations, and friends must sometimes serve as a moral stewards for each other. I discuss how friends may monitor their (...) relationship without undermining the trust and mutual regard appropriate to friends. (shrink)

I take friendship to be a practical and emotional relationship marked by mutual and (more-or-less) equal goodwill, liking, and pleasure. Friendship can exist between siblings, lovers, parent and adult child, as well as between otherwise unrelated people. Some friendships are valued chiefly for their usefulness. Such friendships are instrumental or means friendships. Other friendships are valued chiefly for their own sakes. Such friendships are noninstrumental or end friendships. In this paper I am concerned only with end friendships, and (...) the challenge they pose to consequentialism. In an end friendship, one loves the friend as an essential part of one's system of ends, and not solely, or even primarily, as a means to an independent end - career advancement, amusement, philosophical illumination, or greater happiness in the universe. In such love, one loves the friend for the person she is, i.e., for her essential rather than incidental features. These include both her character traits - the fundamental intellectual, psychological, moral, and aesthetic qualities that constitute an individual's personality - and her unique perspective on herself and others: her view of the important and unimportant, her interest in herself and others. Thus in end friendship the friend cannot be replaced by another, for no other can have her essential features. Nor can she be replaced by a more efficient means to one's ends, or abandoned on their achievement, for it is not as a means that one 2 loves her. It is this necessary irreplaceability that most obviously marks off end friendship from means or instrumental friendship, in which the friend is replaceable.i Hence to love a friend as an end is to place a special value on her - to believe that her value is not outweighed, say, simply by the greater needs of others - or the needs of a greater number of others ("Sorry dear, there are more drowning on this end").ii End friendship (hereafter simply "friendship") is a cardinal human value.. (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 (individual or corporate) 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)

This paper aims to explore challenges of the Aristotelian friendship (philia) in multicultural society and in the specific industrial and organizational contexts. Data was collected from forty-eight participant interviews with managers and employees of four mining companies in Indonesia with twelve informants from each company, both management and employees. The paper found that the virtue of friendship within the mining companies has several drawbacks when an imbalance of power exists between managers and employees. This paper suggests that to (...) understand virtue of friendship in a multi-ethnic and multicultural context, it is essential to ground the conceptual framework in both Aristotle’s views and specific cultural sensitivities, as only then can the full story be grasped. Thus, this paper contributes to bring insights into an under-explored, complex and, at times, paradoxical context, explaining that Aristotelian virtue ethics encounters cultural aspects and a specific context of human relationships which make challenges for business organizations to be virtuous. More importantly, this paper also paves the path towards further discussions and studies on virtue ethics to set a conceptual framework in both virtue ethics and specific cultural sensitivities for business ethics. Practically, this paper provides a valuable insight for business organizations especially business leaders, human resources (HR) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners, as it offers practice on how to avoid moral lapses in their day-to-day working relationships inside the organization as well as their relationships with the community. (shrink)

Ethical care is beginning to be recognised as care that accounts for the views of those at the receiving end of care. However, in the context of palliative and supportive district nursing care, the patients’ and their carers’ views are seldom heard. This qualitative research study explores these views. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 26 patients with palliative and supportive care needs receiving district nursing care, and 13 of their carers. Participants were recruited via community nurses and hospices (...) between September 2010 and October 2011. Post-structural discourse analysis is used to examine how discourses operate on a moral level. One discourse, ‘busyness’, is argued to preclude a moral form of nursing care. The discourse of friendship is presented to contrast this. Discussion explores Gallagher’s ‘slow ethics’ and challenges the currently accepted ways of measuring to improve quality of care concluding that quality cannot be measured. (shrink)

For ten years, between 1903 and 1913, Gertrude Stein saw human relationships as painful mathematical puzzles in need of solutions. Again and again, she converted the predicaments of her personal life into literary material, the better to solve and to exorcise them. The revelation that relationships had a structural quality came to her during the composition of Q.E.D. , when she grasped the almost mathematical nature of her characters' emotional impasse. Stein's persona in the novel comments on their triangular (...) affair, "Why it's like a piece of mathematics. Suddenly it does itself and you begin to see."1 The theory encouraged her to examine such situations as if they were case histories: she continued to study the same piece of mathematics from different angles in Fernhurst , Three Lives , and The Making of Americans . But whatever the sexual arrangements in these triangles, the powerful generally managed to impose their wills upon the less powerful, and the triangles resolved themselves into oppositional structures, pitting two against one. Gradually, when the couple began to replace the triangle as her structural model, Stein composed numerous verbal portraits of couples and their relationships. In two of these, "Ada" and "Two Women," Stein applied her general theory of relationships to the particular puzzle of female friendships because, I think, she felt that women's characters were most intensely molded in same-sex involvements. Although she attempted to "prove" these theories in distanced, deliberately depersonalized prose, we as readers must examine "the complex interplay of self-discovery and writing" from which her portraits emerged.2Stein's portraits of women entangled in familial and erotic bonds seem to invite us into "the process whereby the self creates itself in the experience of creating art"; to read them, we must "join the narrator in reconstructing the other woman by whom we know ourselves."3 This task of reconstruction implies that we must also rethink the place of biography—generally dismissed by New Criticism and its subsequent post-structuralist permutations as "mere" biography—in feminist critical projects. If it is true that "in reading as in writing, it is ourselves that we remake," then feminist critics have a special stake in understanding the biographical, and autobiographical, impulses at work in these activities.4 Stein's portraits, which hover between fiction and biography, raise important questions about the ways in which biographical information can justify our suspicion that female writers may be "closer to their fictional creations than male writers are."5 Recently, feminist critics have adapted psychoanalytic theory to examine the particular closeness of female characters in women's writing or to suggest a related closeness between the female author and her characters. We find it useful to speak of the pre-Oedipal structures and permeable ego boundaries that seem to shape women's relationships. Although Stein used very different psychological paradigms, she approached these same issues in her own studies of female friendships. Realizing that she preferred to write about women, she observed, "It is clearer…I know it better, a little, not very much better."6 In spite of her qualifications, she knew that she could see the structuring principles of relationships with greater clarity when writing from her own perspective.1. Stein, "Fernhurst," "Q.E.D.," and Other Early Writings, ed. Leon Katz , p. 67.2. Elizabeth Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," Signs 6 : 444. For a very useful critical discussion of this complex issue, see Abel, "Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women," and Judith Kegan Gardiner, "The es of dentity: a Response to Abel on 'Merging Identities,'" in the same issue of Signs .3. Gardiner, "The es of dentity," p. 442.4. Jonathan Morse, "Memory, Desire, and the Need for Biography: The Case of Emily Dickinson," The Georgia Review 35 : 271. See also J. Gerald Kennedy's suggestive remarks on the "tension between personal confession and implacable theory" in Barthes' later work .5. Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," p. 444.6. Stein, The Making of Americans, cited in Richard Bridgeman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces , p. 78.Carolyn Burke, an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Research on Women, Stanford University, has published articles on French feminist writing and on Mina Loy, whose biography she is now completing. The theoretical implications of this essay will be explored in her related study in progress on feminist biography. (shrink)

In The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought, Dennis Rasmussen reminds us that ‘Hume believed that “the first Quality of an Historian is to be true & impartial; the next to be interesting”’ (p. 72). Rasmussen meets both criteria in his history of the friendship of Hume and Smith, two luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Infidel and the Professor lays out the facts carefully, showing both the depth (...) of Hume and Smith’s warmth and respect for each other as well as the extent of their shared intellectual interests and mutual influence. But while he is ‘true & impartial,’ just as Hume would want, Rasmussen also tells a lively and engrossing story. In a well-paced and beautifully written narrative, he demonstrates the same wit and genuine affection for his subjects that he proves characterized their relationship. (shrink)

I. Introduction: Political Friendship Proverbial wisdom has bequeathed us the dictum “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Contained within this adage is a progression of oppositional distinctions resulting in an emergent complicity. Two actors are identified in addition to the subject—my enemy, and my enemy's enemy. The latter actor takes on a new meaning for me by the mere coincidence of exact formal similitude exhibited by the relationships existing between each of ourselves and our common enemy. But (...) is this all that is needed for the engendering of friendship? It seems that it is…. (shrink)

I began this project with a few thoughts on one topic, and they grew into many on a larger one. I wanted to say something about vulnerability and discovered that there was much to say about human dignity. Once a rather die-hard Kantian, I have made over the last decade or so a fairly radical transition to a basically Aristotelian way of thinking. Persistent thoughts over the status of personal ties in the moral life first led me away from Kant (...) and toward Aristotle. Though I think some of the criticisms of Kant regarding friendship, for example, are misguided, in the end I do not think Kant gives us a very satisfactory way of thinking about what is most important to us in personal relationships. What Kant is supposed to give us, however, is an insightful way of thinking about human dignity and the worth of persons. I do not believe he does. In fact, I think that Kant and his predecessors, the Christians and the Stoics, deeply mislead us about our dignity. In this sense, this book is an attack on a certain tradition and what is thought to be its greatest strength. I hope, however, that what emerges is more positive than negative, that what I say provides some insight into what we actually do value in ourselves and others. (shrink)

The aim of the current study was to investigate important pathways of the Environmental Stress Hypothesis concerning the role of peer relations. First, we examined (1) the mediating role of peer problems in the association between the motor performance in daily activities and internalizing problems as a main pathway of the Environmental Stress Hypothesis. Furthermore, we explored the role of (2) children’s popularity as a mediator and (3) best friendship quality as a moderator path of the effect of (...) motor performance on both peer problems and internalizing problems. The non-clinical sample of the present study consisted of 189 children (48.6% females) aged nine to eleven years (Mage = 9.69, SDage = 0.46). Parents reported on their child’s motor performance in daily activities by completing the Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire. In addition, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire was used to assess peer problems as well as internalizing problems. The Self Description Questionnaire provided a measure of children’s self-reported popularity. Finally, the Friendship Quality Questionnaire was used to investigate children’s best friendship quality. Results of a structural equation model suggest that peer problems fully mediated the association between the motor performance in daily activities and both popularity and internalizing problems. However, no evidence for the mediating effect of popularity in the association between peer problems and internalizing problems was found. Further, best friendship quality had small but non-significant positive moderating effect on the relation between peer problems and internalizing problems. The mediating role of peer problems highlights the importance of peer relations in the motor performance of daily activities. Possible reasons for the lack of some of the expected mediating and moderating effects as well as practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

The present study investigated the mediating role of negative emotion in the relationship between cybervictimization and non-suicidal self-injury, and the moderating role of friendship quality in the indirect relationship. This model was tested with 1,326 Chinese adolescents who suffered from cyberbullying in the last 1 year; 727 were boys and 591 were girls, and their mean age was 13.67 years. Participants filled out questionnaires regarding cybervictimization, negative emotion, friendship quality, and non-suicidal self-injury. After demographic variables were (...) controlled, cybervictimization was significantly positively associated with non-suicidal self-injury. Mediation analysis revealed that negative emotion partially mediated the association between cybervictimization and non-suicidal self-injury. Moderated mediation analysis further indicated that the mediated path was weaker for adolescents with higher levels of friendship quality. These findings underscore the importance of identifying the mechanisms that moderate the mediated path between cybervictimization and non-suicidal self-injury among adolescents. (shrink)

According to an attractive conception of love as attention, discussed by Iris Murdoch, one strives to see one’s beloved accurately and justly. A puzzle for understanding how to love another in this way emerges in cases where more accurate and just perception of the beloved only reveals his flaws and vices, and where the beloved, in awareness of this, strives to escape the gaze of others - including, or perhaps especially, of his loved ones. Though less attentive forms of love (...) may be able to render one’s continued love coherent and justifiable in these cases, they risk further alienating the beloved precisely because they are less attentive and because of the operations of the beloved’s shame. I argue that attentive love is well-suited to alleviate this problem of alienation, but that in order to do so, it must be supplemented with grace. I propose a conception of gracious love as an affectionate love for the qualities of human nature, distinguishing this from a love of humanity, and show how this complex emotion, in being responsive to the complexities of shame, is able to alleviate the problem of alienation. (shrink)

Friendship is the foremost form of human individual relation, a demanding community of ethical courage and reciprocation of the measure of life in the ethico-existential dimension. The said relation is of autotelic nature, being no substitute for other forms of human co-existence, however it contributes to solving issues insurmountable in other forms of human relations. It opens up the human’s existence to wider dimensions of co-existence and cofeeling. In the human community a man’s development – of an individual and (...) that of a member of the society – is determined by their gradual realization of stable humanistic values, constituting the fundamental criterion of their attitude towards reality. The human closeness and reciprocating the measure of life are the basic features of friendship and community. That makes those qualities compatible both existentially and practically. The abovementioned forms of human existence have to be clearly distinguished from the passing conventional reciprocity, founded on the societally-accepted concept of “the idol of the market”. The relevance of the will to authenticity of the co-existing human beings, finding its expression in practicing equivalency in acts of reciprocity and shaping a mutually adequate measure of life, has to be strongly emphasized. (shrink)

This book comprises essays centered on Aristotle’s objectivist conception of eudaimonia, especially the roles played in it by activities of theoretical and practical intellect and the quality of our relationships with one another. Common objections to grounding this conception in the “proper function” of a human being are answered by appeal to the role played by Aristotle’s teleologically driven essentialism. His struggle to reconcile living in accordance with distinctively human virtues with the ideal of living a “divine” contemplative life (...) is explored, along with puzzles about how to reconcile his conception of eudaimonia as the ultimate end of human action with the parallel requirements that virtuous agents choose to engage in virtuous action “for itself” and that friends love their friends “for themselves.” Readings of Aristotle’s “eudaimonism” as a form of rational egoism are challenged by appeal to an original account of the ideal friend as an “other self,” one that stresses appreciation of the friend’s character “for itself” (apart from any relationships in which it happens to stand to the agent’s own needs and/or tastes) but acknowledges the role played by pleasure in “character friendship.” The friend’s good is not, as on “colonizing ego” readings, part of the agent’s own. Rather, the ideal friend recognizes the value her friend’s activity has for him and she take pleasure in his activity as such. This explains why even the maximally self-sufficient (and so most godlike) agent, who needs nothing from a friend, will nevertheless want to have at least one. (shrink)

In the Lysis, Socrates claims to be looking for an account of what kind of quality in another person or object stimulates friendship or love (philia). He goes through a series of proposals, refuting each in turn. In the end, he throws us back to the point from where the arguments started, declaring an aporetic outcome. What is the purpose of this apparently futile and circular inquiry? Most interpreters try to reconstruct a theory of friendship or love (...) from the arguments of this dialogue. Against such a doctrinal reading, this essay defends an “aporetic reading” of the dialogue and connects it to its protreptic function. Starting with a preliminary discussion of what defines an aporetic dialogue and what distinguishes indirect protreptic from explicit protreptic discourse, the essay then analyzes the aporetic method of the Lysis, distinguishing it from aporetic discourse in some of his earlier dialogues. Finally, it analyzes how, and for what kind of audience, the Lysisfunctions as an indirect protreptic. This includes a comparison with the protreptic use of aporetic argumentation in the Euthydemus. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in Cambridge in 1951, is one of the most powerful influences on contemporary philosophy, yet he shunned publicity and was essentially a private man. His friend Norman Malcolm (himself an eminent philosopher) wrote this remarkably vivid personal memoir ofWittgenstein, which was published in 1958 and was immediately recognized as a moving and truthful portrait of this gifted, difficult man.This edition includes also the complete text of the fifty-seven letters which Wittgenstein wrote to Malcolm over a period (...) of eleven years. Apart from the quotations in the Memoir these letters are previously unpublished. They reveal how much friendships mattered to Wittgenstein, and how concerned hewas for the health and well-being of his friends. His human qualities become evident; he advises, warns, jokes. and is grateful and affectionate.The volume also features a concise biographical sketch by another leading philosopher who was a friend of Wittgenstein, Georg Henrik von Wright.Much has been published about Wittgenstein since his death, but nothing brings us closer to the man himself than this modest classic of philosophical biography. (shrink)

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet (...) it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently revived the study of the ancient Greek topics of virtue and the virtues—justice, honesty, temperance, friendship, courage, and so on as qualities of mind and character belonging to individual people. But one issue at the center of Greek moral theory seems to have dropped out of consideration. This is the question of the unity of virtue, the unity of the virtues. Must anyone who has one of these qualities have others of them as well, indeed all (...) of them—all the ones that really do deserve to be counted as virtues? Even further, is there really no set of distinct and separate virtuous qualities at all, but at bottom only a single one—so that the person who has this single condition of “virtue” is entitled also to the further descriptions “honest” and “well-controlled” and “just” and “friendly” and “courageous” and “fostering” and “supportive,” and so on, as distinguishable aspects or immediate effects of his unitary “virtue”? (shrink)

This paper argues that environmental virtue ethics requires the adoption of an ethical ideal in order to guide the identification and practice of virtues. I recommend friendship as one such ideal due to emphasis such an ideal places upon the quality of the relationship with nature rather than the evaluation of individual actions. After describing the value of friendship as an ethical ideal, I respond to some of the objections that have been raised against it in the (...) context of environmental virtue. (shrink)

Why and under what conditions are individuals altruistic to family and friends in their social networks? Evolutionary psychology suggests that such behaviour is primarily the product of adaptations for kin- and reciprocal altruism, dependent on the degree of genetic relatedness and exchange of benefits, respectively. For this reason, individuals are expected to be more altruistic to family members than to friends: whereas family members can be the recipients of kin and reciprocal altruism, friends can be the recipients of reciprocal altruism (...) only. However, there is a question about how the effect of kinship is implemented at the proximate psychological level. One possibility is that kinship contributes to some general measure of relationship quality (such as ‘emotional closeness’), which in turn explains altruism. Another possibility is that the effect of kinship is independent of relationship quality. The present study tests between these two possibilities. Participants (N= 111) completed a self-report questionnaire about their willingness to be altruistic, and their emotional closeness, to 12 family members and friends at different positions in their extended social networks. As expected, altruism was greater for family than friends, and greater for more central layers of the network. Crucially, the results showed that kinship made a significant unique contribution to altruism, even when controlling for the effects of emotional closeness. Thus, participants were more altruistic towards kin than would be expected if altruism was dependent on emotional closeness alone – a phenomenon we label a ‘kinship premium’. These results have implications for the ongoing debate about the extent to which kin relations and friendships are distinct kinds of social relationships, and how to measure the ‘strength of ties’ in social networks. (shrink)

Why do people in more unequal societies have worse health and shorter lives than those in less unequal ones? Why do more unequal societies tend to have more violence and weaker community life? This paper discusses the research evidence on the psychosocial pathways which suggest how and why we are affected by inequality.How big income differences are in any society seems to serve as an indicator of the scale of social differentiation and social distances within it. The evidence shows that (...) more hierarchical societies incur a wide range of social costs reflecting the corrosive effects of inequality. But why are we so sensitive to inequality? Epidemiological research on health inequalities and the social determinants of health has demonstrated that the quality of the social environment has powerful effects on health. Particularly important are social status, friendship and early childhood experience. The indications are that poor health may share causal pathways with many other social problems associated with relative deprivation - including violence.Summarizing my recent book, The Impact of Inequality , this paper provides an account of how inequality gets under the skin to affect both health and wellbeing. Rather than making comparisons with some impractical state of complete equality, all the evidence presented shows the importance of the differences in inequality between different states of the USA or between different developed market democracies: it shows that even small increases in equality matter. (shrink)

This article studies Madame de Lambert's early eighteenth-century views on aging, and especially the aging of women, by contextualizing them in a twofold way: It understands them as a response to La Rochefoucauld's skepticism concerning aging, women, and the aging of women; It understands them as being closely connected to a long series of scattered remarks concerning esteem, self-esteem, and honnêteté in Lambert's moral essays. Whereas La Rochefoucauld describes aging as a decline of intellectual, emotional, and physical powers and is (...) suspicious of the mechanisms of esteem and self-esteem, Lambert develops a view of aging as offering the chance to become more independent of the judgment of others, especially the chance for women to become more independent of the judgment of men. As she argues, aging offers women the possibility of cultivating genuinely estimable intellectual and emotional qualities that attract the justified esteem essential for a stable friendship, as well as the opportunity to develop a form of self-esteem that is based on respect for one's own capacities of judgment. (shrink)

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet (...) it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. (shrink)

Philosophers have turned their attention in recent years to many previously unmined topics, among them love and friendship. In this collection of new essays in philosophical and moral psychology, philosophers turn their analytic tools to a topic perhaps most resistant to reasoned analysis: erotic love. Also included is one previously published paper by Martha Nussbaum.Among the problems discussed are the role that qualities of the beloved play in love, the so-called union theory of love, intentionality and autonomy in love, (...) and traditional issues surrounding jealousy and morality. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently revived the study of the ancient Greek topics of virtue and the virtues—justice, honesty, temperance, friendship, courage, and so on as qualities of mind and character belonging to individual people. But one issue at the center of Greek moral theory seems to have dropped out of consideration. This is the question of the unity of virtue, the unity of the virtues. Must anyone who has one of these qualities have others of them as well, indeed all (...) of them—all the ones that really do deserve to be counted as virtues? Even further, is there really no set of distinct and separate virtuous qualities at all, but at bottom only a single one—so that the person who has this single condition of “virtue” is entitled also to the further descriptions “honest” and “well-controlled” and “just” and “friendly” and “courageous” and “fostering” and “supportive,” and so on, as distinguishable aspects or immediate effects of his unitary “virtue”? (shrink)

Cicero, Lucullus 38: ‘…non potest animal ullum non adpetere id quod accommodatum ad naturam adpareat …’ From earliest childhood every man wants to possess something. One man collects horses. Another wants gold. Socrates has a passion for companions. He would rather have a good friend than a quail or a rooster. In this way, Socrates begins his interrogation of Menexenus. He then congratulates Menexenus and Lysis for each having what he himself still does not possess. How is it that one (...) gets a friend, Socrates asks? Since the nineteenth century many who have read these lines have found them repulsive. Scholars have damned the Lysis for its selfish egoism, for regarding persons as personal belongings. At the turn of the century some sought to discredit the dialogue as a forgery and a calumny. Others debated the dating of the dialogue as Socratic or Platonic, seeking whom to blame rather than whom to credit. And those who have regarded the dialogue as Platonic have tried to redeem it by detecting hints of Plato's theory of Forms. A few have attempted to salvage reputations by understanding the argument of the Lysis as a reductio of egoism, or else by invoking the loyalty of Socrates' friends and the history of Plato's friendship for Dion of Syracuse to speak up for their defence. Guthrie has condemned the dialogue as a failure of method and presentation , and Vlastos has pronounced it a failure of love: ‘The lover Socrates has in view seems positively incapable of loving others for their own sake, else why must he feel no affection for anyone whose good-producing qualities he did not happen to need?’ The Lysis appears to make no positive contribution to the Greek tradition on friendship when compared to the Symposium or the Phaedrus. And in the subsequent tradition, whatever Aristotle might have borrowed from the dialogue he uses for his own purposes. Aristotle too is quite critical of specific points raised in the Lysis. Now it might seem that Aristotle made a place for the selfish love of the Lysis in his own theory, as an inferior grade of utility love. But even this cannot be so, if we are to agree with recent studies of Aristotle's ethics. According to Aristotle, if a client is friendly to his benefactor because of the latter's usefulness, this utilitarian motive must accompany a genuine concern for the benefactor's own interest in that relation, if they are to be friends. Inferior and genuine friendship may differ in purpose but not in regard for the well-being of the beloved. This respect for the object of one's love has no parallel in the Lysis, according to the standard reading of the dialogue. (shrink)

Invaluable wisdom on living a good life from the founder of modern economics Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life. Our Great Purpose is a short and illuminating guide to Smith's incomparable wisdom on how to live well, written by one of today's leading Smith scholars. In this inspiring and entertaining book, Ryan (...) Patrick Hanley describes Smith's vision of "the excellent and praiseworthy character," and draws on the philosopher's writings to show how each of us can go about developing one. For Smith, an excellent character is distinguished by qualities such as prudence, self-command, justice, and benevolence—virtues that have been extolled since antiquity. Yet Smith wrote not for the ancient polis but for the world of market society—our world—which rewards self-interest more than virtue. Hanley shows how Smith set forth a vision of the worthy life that is uniquely suited to us today. Full of invaluable insights on topics ranging from happiness and moderation to love and friendship, Our Great Purpose enables modern readers to see Smith in an entirely new light—and along the way, learn what it truly means to live a good life. (shrink)

Background:Promoting patients’ rights is essential for defining the standards of clinical services within a country. Given their responsibilities, nurses can be the primary target for research to investigate the issue of patients’ rights within a healthcare system. As such, assessing the knowledge of nurses about patients’ rights is an essential step toward improving the quality of healthcare in limited resource settings like Sudan.Objectives:We aimed to assess the level of knowledge about patients’ rights among the nursing staff at Friendship (...) Teaching Hospital in Sudan.Methods:This hospital-based cross-sectional study was carried out at the Friendship Teaching Hospital in Sudan. We surveyed the totality of nurses (95) at the hospital using an amended survey. The data were analyzed in SPSS software using descriptive and inferential statistics.Ethical consideration:The study was approved by the Research Unit of Khartoum Ministry of Health and the Hospital administration. All respondents gave verbal consent prior to participating in the study.Results:Only 48.4% of the participants knew about the existence of the Sudanese Charter of patients’ rights. Nonetheless, our analysis found that 65.8% of nurses had acceptable level of knowledge (scored more than 75% of the total knowledge score) of patients’ rights, and none of the participant scored less than 50% of the total knowledge score. Finally, we found no statistical association between the knowledge score and demographic data, educational level, whether the participant knows about the existence of the Charter or not and a number of other factors.Conclusion:Nurses’ lack of knowledge about the existence of the Sudanese Charter of patients’ rights adopted in 2009 rights confirms the need for further efforts by Ministry of Health to promote the document. Furthermore, further research is needed to investigate the disconnect between nurses’ lack of knowledge about the existence of the charter and their awareness of the rights within the charter as well as the actual implementation of rights. (shrink)

Adolescence is a valuable phase of life, not just because it is the phase of learning in school and preparing for a working life. During the COVID-19 pandemic it became clear that the rights, experiences, and lifeworlds of adolescents are considered less important than the needs of school, work, and productivity. However, there is an ethical claim for people to have a good adolescence, and this means that the losses of social contact, experiences, time, and space demanded of adolescents, in (...) order to protect older and vulnerable groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, should be taken seriously. A distinctive quality of adolescence is that it cannot be repeated, nor can these experiences be replicated as adults. First experiences of independence, friendship, love, informality, recklessness, and youthful exuberance are intrinsically valuable and cannot be substituted for later in life. It is therefore not surprising that adolescents have sought and found their own spaces during the pandemic, some of them forbidden, because lock downs and closed social spaces have relegated them to the confines of their childhood bedrooms. In this paper, I explore an ethic of a good adolescence, which was impacted on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and consider what can be learned from this situation. Adolescents are to be taken seriously, their experiences are no less valuable than those of adults, and the losses they have suffered for the benefit of others should be honored. As far as possible, young people should be supported to have a voice in public discourse and in finding spaces to be adolescents. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I argue that, contrary to popular opinion, there is good reason to think that the qualities that make people good reasoners also make them better off. I will focus specifically on epistemic virtue: roughly, the kind of character in virtue of which one is excellently oriented towards epistemic goods. I propose that epistemic virtue is importantly implicated in the realization of some of the goods that are widely believed to be instrumental to, or even constitutive of, well-being. (...) Here I focus on one such good: friendship. (shrink)