Alexis Elder
Good friendships seem worth celebrating. But for many of us, tensions can appear from time to time between being a good friend and doing “the right thing.” When faced with, for example, a situation where it’s tempting to lie to cover for a friend, it can seem as though friendship and morality are on a collision course.
It can be tempting to say that bad people are likely to treat their friends badly: For example, they could lie, cheat or steal from their friends. But it seems logically possible for a person to be bad to some people but good to others. So are there other, more fundamental reasons to think being a good person is necessary for a good friendship? Let’s begin by looking at cases where morality and the demands of friendship are in conflict. Friendship seems to require that we be open to our friends’ ways of seeing things, even when they differ from our own. It also seems to require that we be concerned for our friends’ well-being. It’s not just that we desire good things for them. We also want to be involved ourselves in providing at least some of those goods. This is one thing that distinguishes the care of friends from that of mere well-wishers. But we also need to remain open to our friends’ beliefs about what is good for them: In some circumstances, like hiding a friend’s keys when he’s been drinking, a little paternalism might be permitted. But it seems a poor general feature of friendship. It is helpful to review what Aristotle says about friendship and being a good person. It seems reasonably clear then why valuing someone for their virtues is characteristic of good friendship. It involves valuing friends for themselves, not just for what they can do for you. Furthermore, it involves thinking their character and values have worth. Aristotelian scholar John Cooper argues that we can just take this to mean that the quality of a friendship varies with the quality of the friends’ characters. Mediocre people will tend to have mediocre friendships, while better people will have better friendships, all else being equal. Good friendship, it turns out, isn’t even possible unless both friends are reasonably good.
(The writer is assistant
prof of Philosophy, University of
Minnesota Dulut)
