Recorded in Ithaca, NY by Cornell University., Sponsored by: Andrew D. White Professors-At-Large Program., Speaker: Professor of the History of Philosophy, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large., Lecture, October 3, 1988.

Some philosophers argue that friendship can normatively require us to have certain beliefs about our friends that epistemic norms would prohibit. On this view, we ought to exhibit some degree of doxastic partiality toward our friends, by having certain generally favorable beliefs and doxastic dispositions that concern our friends that we would not have concerning relevantly similar non-friends. Can friendship genuinely make these normative demands on our beliefs, in ways that would conflict with what we epistemically ought to (...) believe? On a widely influential evidentialist approach to thinking about epistemic norms, friendship cannot normatively require things of our beliefs, because friendship cannot generate reasons for belief. And this is due, in part, to the alleged fact that we are incapable of forming beliefs directly in response to, or on the basis of, non-epistemic reasons. In this paper, I argue that this evidentialist response to alleged cases of conflict between friendship and epistemic norms fails. Instead, I argue that friendship cannot generate reasons for belief due to an underappreciated feature of friendship: that being a good friend constitutively involves forming attitudes about one’s friends that are appropriately responsive to the features that one’s friends have that appear to warrant those attitudes. I argue that this feature of friendship helps explain why friendship cannot give us reasons to have beliefs that are doxastically partial. (shrink)

Hayek on Mill is a collection of decades worth of correspondence between John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor-Mill, gathered by F. A. Hayek. It showcases the intersections between Hayek and Mill and also brings together Hayek's related writings, which were widely credited with beginning a new era of Mill scholarship.

It has been claimed that friendship not only involves partial treatment of one's friends but that it also involves some degree of doxastic partiality towards them. Taking these claims as their starting points, some philosophers have argued that friendship not only involves such partiality but that this is also what is normatively required. This gives rise to the possibility of conflict between the demands of friendship on the one hand and the demands of epistemic norms on the (...) other. In this paper, I consider some of the responses to this claim and show why they fail. I distinguish between different grades of doxastic partiality and explain why, although low grades of doxastic partiality fall within the bounds of the standard epistemic norm, the higher grades might infringe such norms. I conclude with an explanation of a fundamental intuition that seems to lie at the heart of the thesis of epistemic partiality. (shrink)

I take friendship to be a practical and emotional relationship marked by mutual and (more-or-less) equal goodwill, liking, and pleasure. Friendship can exist between siblings, lovers, parent and adult child, as well as between otherwise unrelated people. Some friendships are valued chiefly for their usefulness. Such friendships are instrumental or means friendships. Other friendships are valued chiefly for their own sakes. Such friendships are noninstrumental or end friendships. In this paper I am concerned only with end friendships, and (...) the challenge they pose to consequentialism. In an end friendship, one loves the friend as an essential part of one's system of ends, and not solely, or even primarily, as a means to an independent end - career advancement, amusement, philosophical illumination, or greater happiness in the universe. In such love, one loves the friend for the person she is, i.e., for her essential rather than incidental features. These include both her character traits - the fundamental intellectual, psychological, moral, and aesthetic qualities that constitute an individual's personality - and her unique perspective on herself and others: her view of the important and unimportant, her interest in herself and others. Thus in end friendship the friend cannot be replaced by another, for no other can have her essential features. Nor can she be replaced by a more efficient means to one's ends, or abandoned on their achievement, for it is not as a means that one 2 loves her. It is this necessary irreplaceability that most obviously marks off end friendship from means or instrumental friendship, in which the friend is replaceable.i Hence to love a friend as an end is to place a special value on her - to believe that her value is not outweighed, say, simply by the greater needs of others - or the needs of a greater number of others ("Sorry dear, there are more drowning on this end").ii End friendship (hereafter simply "friendship") is a cardinal human value.. (shrink)

I intend to argue that good friendship sometimes requires epistemic irresponsibility. To put it another way, it is not always possible to be both a good friend and a diligent believer.

Love, Friendship, and the Self presents a reexamination of our common understanding of ourselves as persons in light of the phenomena of love and friendship. It argues that the individualism that is implicit in that understanding cannot be sustained if we are to understand the kind of distinctively personal intimacy that love and friendship essentially involve. For love is a matter of identifying with someone: sharing for his sake the concerns and values that make up his identity (...) as the person he is. Moreover, in friendship the friends share not only a concern for each other but also their activity, their lives, and even potentially their selves. By providing a detailed analysis of these notions, Bennett Helm argues for an understanding of persons as essentially social. (shrink)

Ethical dimensions of friendship have rarely been explicitly addressed as aspects of friendship quality in studies of children's peer relationships. This study identifies aspects of moral virtue significant for friendship, as a basis for empirically investigating the role of ethical qualities in children's friendship assessments and aspirations. We introduce a eudaimonic conception of friendship quality, identify aspects of moral virtue foundational to such quality, review and contest some grounds on which children have been regarded as (...) not mature enough to have friendships that require virtue, and report a qualitative study of the friendship assessments and aspirations of children aged nine and ten. In focus group sessions conducted in ten schools across Great Britain, moral qualities figured prominently in children's assessments of friendship quality. The findings provide evidence of children having friendships exhibiting mutual respect, support, and valuing of each other's good character. (shrink)

Part one of this article introduces the conception of friendship and its connection with forgetfulness in Derrida and the Zhuangzi. Part two deals with the ethical focus of the discourse of friendship in Derrida and the Zhuangzi, which addresses the underlying relationship of oneself-other. Part three reveals how temporality and fleetingness are recognized as elements of friendship by Derrida and the Zhuangzi. While the Zhuangzi lacks the Derridean melancholic tone, this recognition helps both take the disruption, otherness (...) and mourning of friendship into account. Part four relates the Zhuangzian mutual forgetfulness of friends through effortless action (wuwei) to the Derridean criticism of classical friendship as ‘the second self’ and his assumption of difference, distance and disruption for friendship. Embracing these three ‘D’s’ leads Derrida to the structural ineluctability of forgetting to friendship. However, the Zhuangzi characterizes its ideal friendship in a style of simplicity, calmness, openness, desiring less and avoiding extremity, to emphasize naturalist suitability. (shrink)

Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, originally published in 1980, gives an account of "altruistic emotions" and friendship that brings out their moral value. Blum argues that moral theories centered on rationality, universal principle, obligation, and impersonality cannot capture this moral importance. This was one of the first books in contemporary moral philosophy to emphasize the moral significance of emotions, to deal with friendship as a moral phenomenon, and to challenge the rationalism of standard interpretations of Kant, although Blum’s (...) "sentimentalism" owes more to Schopenhauer than to Hume. It was a forerunner to care ethics, and feminist ethics more generally; to virtue ethics; and to subsequent influential interpretations of Kant that attempted to room for altruistic emotion and friendship, and other forms of particularism and partialism. In addition, the work has been widely influential in religious studies, political theory, bioethics, and feminist ethics. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is a statement that Benjamin makes in a group of notes he writes for his project of a detective novel. Benjamin writes here that «criminal and detective could be so friends [so befreundet sein] as Sherlock Holmes and Watson». We’ll try to understand the meaning of this statement through the investigation of the detective topic in two moments of its fore and afterlife: its fore life in Benjamin’s meditation on the baroque and its after (...) life in Sherlock Holmes’s most recent apparition, in the BBC series Sherlock. One of the most interesting elements of this series is in fact the relationship – which is barely sketched in Conan Doyle’s stories – between Sherlock Holmes and his antagonist, the maths professor Jim Moriarty. We’ll see that in Benjamin’s notes for a detective novel the criminal is not a maths professor but a psychoanalyst. What is the difference, anyway, between professor Moriarty’s knowledge and Sherlock’s knowledge? In fact, we will find out that criminal and detective are closer to one other than what we may be induced to think – close but not coincident. (shrink)

Any sexual offer by a professor to a student is morally problematic. An explicit disclaimer about grading issues will not change the fact that the professor has power over the student’s grades, and no assurance that the student can offer can evade the communicative difficulties created by the power differential. It is possible that there will be a sufficient development of trust that these communication problems are superseded, but it is again extremely difficult to be sure that this is so. (...) Given this difficulty, the criterion for whether the sexual offer is permissible should be whether it is in fact misinterpreted, and the risk that it will be is entirely assumed by the offeror. Even if a fully voluntary sexual relationship is possible, duties to third parties make it improper to enter into such a relationship where the professor has power over a student’s grades or career prospects. (shrink)

Women often seek midwifery care as an alternative to the maternity services that are readily available within the insured health care system in Alberta. Some aspects of community-based, primary care midwifery in Alberta that characterize this alternative are the use of story-telling as a form of knowledge, the development of social con nections among women seeking midwifery care, and nonauthoritarian relationships between midwives and women. In this paper, the concept of confidentiality, as it relates to these aspects of midwifery practice, (...) is explored, using traditional, caring and feminist models of ethics. (shrink)

Of the many illustrious figures of the Buyid period none is perhaps as intriguing, or as enigmatic, as Abū Hayyān al-Tawhīdī. We know all too little of his biography. He was probably born between 310/922 and 932 but whether in Baghdad, Shiraz, or Nishapur remains uncertain. From his works we know that he studied in Baghdad under such renowned scholars as the jurist and qādī Abū Hāmid al-Marwazī. He tells us that he was in Mecca in 353/964 and, in 366/976, (...) at the court of the vizier Abū al-Fath Ibn al-'Amīd in Rayy—an unhappy experience that informs his scathing portrayal of that vizier, as of the Sāhib Ibn 'Abbād, in his Akhlāq al-Wazīrayn, one of his literary masterpieces. More significantly for the book under... (shrink)

In both Being and Nothingness and the Notebooks for an Ethics we are told how one needs the Ego to get along in the everyday world, but yet at the same time that it is a psychic phenomenon that easily distorts everyday experience. In this paper, it is shown how, for Sartre, friends can play an important role by helping each other overcome the vested interest in maintaining the experience of a false, set identity that is engendered by the Ego. (...) In addition, reference to the Notebooks will make it clear that support per se is insufficient to enable one to transcend the constraints of an entrenched Ego, and that instead this form of aid must be taken in conjunction with challenge, or a type of positive conflict, if one is going to be able effectively to help a friend for the task in question. (shrink)