Friendship and Moral Danger

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 139.184.14.159 on Wed, 19 Aug 2015 18:49:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions * We are grateful to audiences at numerous philosophy departments and conferences for helpful discussions of earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks are owed toJohn Campbell, Steve MatthewsJustin Oakley, and Michael Smith for their insightful comments and suggestions. FRIENDSHIP AND MORAL DANGER 279 the good of friendship and everyday experience seems especially striking. I. INTRODUCTIONWe 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.3 In our view, then, efforts to locate the good of friendship wholly within the moral framework are misguided. Much of the good of friendship itself, and of what we have reason to do within it, has little, if anything, to do with morality. Indeed, the reasons that arise out of friendship may well conflict with moral considerations and may at times override such considerations. In order to argue our case that it is part of both the nature and value of friendship that it can lead us morally astray, let us begin by considering a contrast between an example from fiction of acting as a true and good friend, and a current, influential philosophical view of true and good friendship.Death In Brunswick4: Carl, the main character of the film Death in Brunswick, is no saint. Weak, vain, and disorganized, he is a severe disappointment to his mother. He drinks too much, and he works as a cook at a seedy nightclub in Brunswick where he falls foul of the owners by falling in love with a young barmaid. One night, Mustapha, his drug-dealing kitchen hand is badly beaten up in the back alley by the nightclub heavies. Carl is warned to keep his mouth shut; Mustapha is told that Carl is responsible for the beating. So late that night, Mustapha staggers into the kitchen and lunges at Carl, who is holding a long-pronged fork. Mustapha impales himself on the fork and dies. In a panic, Carl calls his best friend Dave, an easy-going family man. Against the protests of his wife, June, Dave dresses and drives to the nightclub to see what is up. His initial response when shown the body is that the police must be called. Carl begs him not to, saying that he could not cope with going to jail. Faced with Carl's fear, Dave takes charge and helps Carl move the body. The...

Civic Friendship

“…Thirdly, and perhaps more persuasively, there is the sense that within the public sphere, impartiality is more appropriate (Baron 1991;Cocking and Kennett 2000;Jeske 1997). An example: a politician is in a position to influence the appointment of someone to a committee.…”

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

“…The judgment is rather that even though the end is certainly a permissible one, it is impermissible to pursue it by hiding Mustapha's body. 37 Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett (2000) offer a sustained defense of this "moral danger" explanation. question of weighing the odds of those harms; and the result seems to be a genuinely hard moral case.…”

“…This is the view defended by DeanCocking and Jeanette Kennett (2000). SeeCocking and Kennett 2000, 279, 292, 296.…”

“…My aim in this essay is to refine and defend this thought that the decision ought to be left to the friend whose end it is. In certain circumstances of disagreement between friends, doing what one judges right or best will count as Cocking and Kennett 1998, Frankfurt 1999, Kolodny 2003, Raz 1989, Scheffler 2001, and Westlund 2009 There is a dispute in the literature about the practical reasons close friendship gives rise to: Frankfurt (1999) argues that they are reasons to promote the friend's well-being, while Ebels-Duggan (2008) argues that they arise out of sharing in your friend's ends. Though I side with Ebels-Duggan, I expect that these views are not very far apart, once we understand a person's well-being as including, in large part, the realization of their ends.…”

After Friendship

“…There is considerable philosophical precedent for taking such a stance: for example, Aristotle claimed that lying, cheating or deceiving are all somehow worse if done to a friend (Aristotle, ). This line of argument has notably been developed in the work of Cocking and Kennett, who suggest that friendship can serve more to exclude certain types of behaviour rather that to promote particular actions (Cocking and Kennett, ). In a similar vein, Hurka has argued that alongside positive duties to promote the wellbeing of our friends are also found negative duties: that we also have duties not to hurt, lie or break promises to our friends going beyond those of duties to strangers (Hurka, ).…”