Friendship: Liberty, Equality, and Utility

1. Preference for Friends

One Preference for Friends I N T R O D U C T I O N A PREFERENCE FOR FRIENDS over nonfriends is at the core of friendship.1 For example, someone who professes friendship for another person but who acts in no special way toward her in comparison to others or who acts toward her only with what morality requires, but no more, is not considered her friend. Friendship must involve some special preference between friends. Friends preferring each other has been understood as a description of behavior , as a moral prescription, and as a defining characteristic. Two people who treat each other no differently from the way they treat all others would not be considered friends. Preferring friends to nonfriends is something that friends naturally desire. They prefer spending time together, engaged in the activities of friendship, to spending time with those who are not their friends. Time spent with nonfriends can be boring and a chore. That friends also have an obligation to prefer each other to nonfriends is thought to be morally correct by most individuals and cultures. Not only should friends do more good for each other, but stronger moral prohibitions often exist against harming friends than harming nonfriends. The friendship relation is partial, specific, and particular. By definition, persons who are friends participate in a relationship that they 1 do not and cannot share with everyone else. Friendship, like kinship, marks off a difference and a specialness that differentiates friendship from moral relations that can universally apply to everyone. Is preferring friends to nonfriends morally justifiable? A number of philosophers, including Michael Stocker, Martha Nussbaum, and Lawrence A. Blum, among others, have noticed a prima facie conflict between friendship and objective, universal, egalitarian, impersonal, or impartial moral principles . They have used this conflict as a reason for questioning not only the legitimacy of friendship but also the justifiability of morality itself and its specific principles. A radically different view is advocated by Jacques Derrida .2 For friends to benefit each other, either at the expense of, or by ignoring , nonfriends, they claim, is in conflict with these moral principles and the morality they reflect. Other philosophers, such as Bernard Williams, resolve the conflict by claiming that preferring friends is obviously morally right.3 This “obvious” and perhaps ultimately correct position can obscure many vital philosophical issues. Suppose it is obviously true that friends sometimes should be treated with preference in comparison to nonfriends; it is equally obviously true that at other times friends should not be treated with preference in comparison to nonfriends. Philosophically important questions need to be answered: When is preferential treatment of friends justifiable? When is it not justifiable? Precisely, what kinds of reasons morally justify any preference and set its limit? There may be reasons internal to the concept of friendship that provide moral justification for preferring friends, perhaps resembling the way that moral obligations are internal to promising. In addition to internal justifications , moral principles external to friendship provide a variety of reasons specifying divergent limits of preferring friends to nonfriends. Yet both internal and external moral justifications of preference in friendship are dependent upon an answer to the most elementary philosophical question: What is friendship? A number of related but nonequivalent conceptions of friendship exist within and without our Western philosophical tradition that give different “obvious” answers to the question, should friends prefer each other to nonfriends, so that a plurality of morally correct answers is possible. A good deal of philosophical analysis must be undertaken to supply a coherent understanding of preference for friends. Most importantly, a critical schema for comparing and contrasting various different conceptions of friendship needs to be developed. Only through this schema can conceptions 2 F r i e n d s h i p of friendship be clearly distinguished and compared, so that it is possible to discover internal justifications for preferring friends to others and to apply external moral principles to determine when and how much preference is justifiable . While conceptions of friendship differ from each other, they all, nevertheless, possess a similar structure that is essential in understanding their resemblances and differences. The remainder of this chapter sets the stage by refining issues of rights and duties in friendship, by contrasting two of the more important Western conceptions of friendship, Aristotle’s and Kant’s ideals, and then by briefly introducing other diverse friendship conceptions. Chapter 2 explains...