Are Friendships Limited to Good People?
By Gary Chartier

Commentary on the Sabbath School Lesson for July 24–30, 2004, "Friendship"

Aristotle famously distinguished three ideal-types of friendship—friendships of pleasure, utility, and character. Some people, including some overly moralistic Christians, might be inclined to think that only friendships of character, friendships between good people focused on moral improvement, were worthwhile.

It’s easy to see why: if my friends only desire some service from me, or if we only enjoy superficial pleasure in and through each other’s company, then our relationships are hardly worth celebrating. We sense that friendship must be concerned with something deeper and more stable, with the whole person. And so the idea of a friendship focused on and sustained by the morally good characters of the partners is attractive.

But character-friendship as it is often presented seems to be a preserve of good people. Only those who can enrich the characters of others are, it often appears, to be sought as friends. This seems objectionable on at least five counts.

1. It introduces an element of calculation into the process of friendship formation that we sense is foreign to the spontaneity and freedom that ought to mark the relationship.

2. It requires limitations on friendship that do not seem precisely appropriate; as Mary Elizabeth Hunt puts it, "people I want to be around do not subject their relationships to a standard of political correctness."1

3. This model seems to require that we find friends only among those at essentially the same level of character development. For by adopting it we have foresworn the possibility of finding friends among those we judge less morally sensitive or responsible; and those with greater moral resources would be prohibited from seeking us as character-friends.

4. It is not obvious that it is possible to compare characters in the required way. Different persons are likely to have progressed at different rates with respect to different portions of their characters. Someone might, for instance, be exceptionally sensitive to the plight of persecuted ethnic minorities while inattentive to the claims of her own spouse and children. A man can abhor media violence without thinking responsibly about his use of natural resources. How are comparisons in such cases to be made?

5. Even morally serious people can have significantly divergent conceptions of the good life. A liberal Anglican and a conservative Shi’ah Muslim would likely have different tables of the virtues. Would not an understanding of friendship that stressed its contribution to character-formation preclude friendships between representatives of different traditions?

Suppose, instead of focusing on virtue-in-general, we focus instead on those virtues needed to sustain friendship itself. The nature of friendship necessarily imposes certain constraints upon the kind of person one must be if one is to be a friend. John Casey suggests that it "is not difficult to think of the vices which damage friendship: envy, wrath, incapacity for proper anger, vanity, lack of proper pride, cowardice, disloyalty, lack of affection," lack of generosity, and lack of self-respect;2 and a list of corresponding virtues—commitment (compare 1 Sam. 20), fairness, truthfulness, and so forth—would be easy enough to assemble. Thus, while friendship’s intimacy makes it seem special and distinctive, successful friendship may properly be seen as a school for social life generally.

The structure of our relationships influences the content of the beliefs and practices that emerge from them. The nurturing, accepting family, for instance, whatever the explicit religious avowals of the parents, is evidently far more likely to produce children with religiously healthy attitudes than is the family—even the doctrinally correct one—that instills fear, guilt, and repression, or that accepts without offering any structure at all.3 The form or structure of a group of intimate friends, the moral demands imposed on one by existence within such a group, would seem to be friendship’s principal contribution to the moral life.

The fact that such moral dispositions are cultivated in the context of the friendship group is what renders it "difficult or impossible" for "evil men … to be friends."4 Those unwilling to acquire or develop certain basic virtues cannot be friends, not because of some arbitrary exclusion from friendship by others but because they simply are not capable of friendship. This does not mean that there will necessarily be any congruity of character beyond the virtues required to sustain friendship itself. However, these virtues are not unimportant ones. The kind of person who can be a genuine friend is significantly limited as regards the ideals she can pursue while remaining a friend, even if there is still a wide variety of accounts of human flourishing to which she can subscribe, whatever the convictions of her friends.

In particular, friendship (especially, of course, intimate friendships between close friends, lovers, and spouses, but also more casual ones) helps to shape the self in such a way that it is open to the other. By contrast with impersonal and superficial relationships, friendship forces me to grant both that I have to do with another self and that that other self is irreducibly different from me. One of the most important virtues I learn in friendship is precisely how to cherish those who differ from me, perhaps profoundly, in all sorts of ways regarding moral, political, religious, and other questions.

Thus, in friendship I discover that my own perspectives are not absolute, and I learn to coexist in church and society with people who are not simple clones of myself. Friendship is a school for virtue, then, not because friends reinforce each other’s preconceived notions, but because in friendship we learn to love those who are alien, who are not ourselves.

Notes and References

1. Mary E. Hunt, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 170.
2. John Casey, Pagan Virtue: An Essay in Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 186–67.
3. Ray S. Anderson and Dennis Guernsey, On Being Family: A Socio-Theology of the Family (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985), 132–26.
4. Casey, Pagan Virtue, 187.

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