A Good Friend Will Help You Move a Body: Friendship and the Problem of Moral Disagreement

Abstract

On the shared-ends account of close friendship, proper care for a friend as an agent requires seeing yourself as having important reasons to accommodate and promote the friend's valuable ends for the friend's own sake. However, that friends share ends doesn't inoculate them against disagreements about how to pursue those ends. This essay defends the claim that, in certain circumstances of reasonable disagreement, proper care for a friend as a practical and moral agent requires allowing your friend's judgment to decide what you are to do, even when you disagree with that judgment (and even when the judgment is in fact mistaken). In these instances, your friendship can make it the case that you may not act on your own practical and even moral judgments because, at those times, you have a duty as their close friend to defer to their judgments. As a result, treating your friend properly as a responsible agent can require that you assist them in committing what may in fact be serious moral wrongs.

Loneliness and the Emotional Experience of Absence

“…There is no expectation that one's friend will forgive grave moral transgressions, for instance. See Koltonski (2016) for a discussion of the idea that good friends are those who would help you move a body. For Aristotle (2009, book VIII), virtue-based philia-friendship that is grounded in the mutual pursuit of moral excellence-must be abandoned when one party falls short of virtue and cannot be reformed (for discussion see, e.g., McCoy 2013).…”

Love, friendship, and moral motivation.

“…The so-called moral obligations might be at odds with the demands that emerge from friendship. In some occasions, we might feel motivated to commit a moral transgression to help a friend (Cocking & Kennett, 2000; Koltonski, 2016; Trujillo, 2020). However, as we have emphasized, what makes obligations “moral,” in our view, is not their content, neither the action that they command; rather the fact that they come with a feeling of obligation that comes from the psychological mechanism of internalization (Sznycer et al, 2018).…”

What’s Bad about Friendship with Bad People?

“…Though little-discussed in the literature, the idea that ideal friendship involves some kind of equality between the participants has been unanimously endorsed by those who mention it. See Marilyn Friedman (1989Friedman ( , 1993, Joseph Kupfer (1990), Daniel Koltonski (2016), and Uri Leibowitz (2018). 17 Of course, respect for others' choices and projects should be extended to all regardless of our relationships with them.…”

“… 15 Koltonski also suggests something similar with his discussion of caring about friends as agents (2016, 475) and sharing friends’ ends (2016, 476). Cocking and Kennett, whose work on friendship has been very influential, also write:The interests of the other in friendship, whether serious or slight, are not, in general, filtered through one’s antecedent tastes and interests or subjected to rational or moral scrutiny before they acquire action-guiding force.(2000, 285)Though their focus is on how friendship affects the friends’ behaviour, this also seems like an affirmation of the idea that friendship involves taking one’s friends seriously and lending a special weight to their perspective that it would not otherwise have.…”