Epistemic partiality in friendship

Ethics

Volumn 116, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 498-524

  Stroud, Sarah ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33745479865     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/500337     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. See, e.g., David Archard, "Moral Partiality," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 20 (1995): 129-41;
2. Marcia Baron, "Impartiality and Friendship," Ethics 101 (1991): 836-57;
3. Lawrence A. Blum, Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), chaps. 3, 4;
4. John Cottingham, "Ethics and Impartiality," Philosophical Studies 43 (1983): 83-99,
5. and "Partiality, Favouritism, and Morality," Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1986): 357-73;
6. Troy A. Jollimore, Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality (New York: Garland, 2001);
7. Susan Wolf, "Morality and Partiality," Philosophical Perspectives 6 (1992): 243-59.
8. Judith Baker, "Trust and Rationality," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1987): 1-13;
9. Jack W. Meiland, "What Ought We to Believe? or The Ethics of Belief Revisited," American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1980): 15-24;
10. Adam Morton, "Partisanship," in Perspectives on Self-Deception, ed. Brian P. McLaughlin and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 170-82, esp. 176-78;
11. Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 126;
12. and Baron ("Impartiality and Friendship," 854-55)
13. present cases which could be seen as illustrations of the type of partiality to which I draw attention (or make passing remarks supportive of such an idea). None, however, develop these cases or remarks into an argument or theory like my own. By contrast, there is now an admirable paper (Simon Keller, "Friendship and Belief," Philosophical Papers 33 [2004]: 329-51,
14. which appeared while the present article was being reviewed for publication) which develops many of the same themes I highlight here, although without linking them to the general notion of partiality. Keller is concerned in that paper to bring out the doxastic implications of friendship and to consider their epistemic status (as I also do here), and many of his conclusions, I find, anticipate and parallel those I advance in Sec. I. (Keller attributes similar features to patriotism in his "Patriotism as Bad Faith," Ethics 115 [2005]: 563-92.) Section II of the present article diverges more sharply from Keller's treatment, however: see n. 29 below.
15. This worry is borne out by the recent literature on friendship. Those primarily interested in the implications of friendship for partiality and impartiality in morality (see n. 1) have tended to offer relatively thin characterizations of friendship; this is not surprising, given that their main concern is usually the nature of morality, not the nature of friendship. Other writers have offered more purely phenomenological analyses of friendship (e.g., Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett, "Friendship and the Self," Ethics 108 [1998]: 502-27) but have not then sought to relate their results to issues in moral theory. By contrast, the present article aspires to take both an internal and an external perspective on friendship - in that order.
16. Michael Stocker, "The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories," Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 453-66, quote on 461.
17. Michael Stocker, "The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories," Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 453-66, Ibid.
18. "Good" here is attributive; I do not mean by "the good friend" "the person who is good and who is also a friend." Thanks to an associate editor of Ethics for asking for clarification on this point.
19. Thanks to Josh Parsons for raising a worry about this.
20. One might, perhaps, be willing to grant me the term "demand" but insist that 1 cannot speak of something you owe your friend while remaining neutral as to whether the demands of friendship are moral demands. After all, as an associate editor of Ethics pointed out, we wouldn't say the competitive diver owes anything to anybody. I agree with this observation, but don't think it implies that the constitutive elements of friendship generate moral demands. I think the simple fact that friendship - unlike competition diving - is an interpersonal relation makes a wider range of vocabulary for its constitutive features appropriate, even if we are neutral on the moral status or force of those constitutive elements.
21. See, e.g., Baker, "Trust and Rationality."
22. Thanks to Adam Elga for this case.
23. It makes things more vivid to cast the issue in terms of your reaction to one specific story, but it would be misleading to put too much weight on that way of framing the question. The real issue is not so much whether, as a friend, you must react differently to this particular bit of information, but rather whether you are required generally or systematically to exhibit different reactions to reports like these when they concern your friends. There could indeed be such systematic differences in the ways friends and non-friends respond to such reports, even if in a specific case there happens to be no difference in their reactions.
24. I shall use both "epistemic" and "doxastic" to mean "having to do with beliefs, and our ways of forming and updating beliefs."
25. So while I'll often speak in what follows of "what we do" when we hear such stories about our friends, the reader should remember that this is not merely an empirical claim but rather is intended to point toward "what a good friend does" in a more constitutive sense.
26. Annette Baier, "Trusting Ex-Intimates," in Person to Person, ed. George Graham and Hugh LaFollette (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 269-81, quote on 277.
27. Although an attentive friend will be alert, even hypersensitive, to the encroachment of interpretation on to the supposedly raw data being presented by the teller. For instance, she will notice, and query, the "cruelly" and "knowingly" which were included in the little story about Sam.
28. I focus here only on the second locus of the good friend's doxastic shifts, namely, the actual set of beliefs she ends up with. As we noted earlier, her epistemic responses will also likely differ in terms of the degree of scrutiny to which she subjects this new information. See, e.g., previous note.
29. What is true is that her set of beliefs about her friend will tend not to include conclusions which might seem natural to others. That is, one way in which her doxastic set is distinctive is that it is characterized by the absence of certain beliefs which other people would probably have formed.
30. Thanks to Alex Rajczi and especially to Sonja Lyubomirsky for pointing me toward relevant literature in this area. That literature is abundant, and I cite only some of the main parallels with the themes I am pressing here.
31. See Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991), chap. 5,
32. for a popular-science overview of such results. Ziva Kunda, "The Case for Motivated Reasoning," Psychological Bulletin 108 (1990): 480-98;
33. and Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathan D. Brown, "Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health," Psychological Bulletin 103 (1988): 193-210, offer more in-depth and scholarly discussions of these phenomena. The latter argue that such "positive illusions" about the self promote mental health: "the mentally healthy person," they say, "appears to have an enviable capacity to distort reality" (204).
34. See esp. Kunda, "Case for Motivated Reasoning," on this.
35. David Dunning, Judith A. Meyerowitz, and Amy D. Holzberg, "Ambiguity and Self-Evaluation: The Role of Idiosyncratic Trait Definitions in Self-Serving Assessments of Ability," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989): 1082-90.
36. Jonathon D. Brown, "Evaluations of Self and Others: Self-Enhancement Biases in Social Judgments," Social Cognition 4 (1986): 353-76.
37. The psychologist Sandra Murray is the leading figure in the study of "positive illusions" in romantic relationships and marriages. Murray and Holmes describe in detail the techniques we use to "weav[e] cogent stories that depict potential faults or imperfections in [our] partners in the best possible light" (Sandra L. Murray and John G. Holmes, "Seeing Virtues in Faults: Negativity and the Transformation of Interpersonal Narratives in Close Relationships," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 [1993]: 707-22, quote on 707).
38. They note, in particular, two techniques which parallel stratagems described in the last paragraph: interpreting faults "in the light of surrounding virtues" (Sandra L. Murray and John G. Holmes, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ibid., 708)
39. and downplaying or minimizing the significance of those faults, assigning them only a tangential role in one's narrative. Similar to Taylor and Brown, "Illusion and Well-Being," Murray and her colleagues (see also Sandra L. Murray, John G. Holmes, and Dale W. Griffin, "The Benefits of Positive Illusions: Idealization and the Construction of Satisfaction in Close Relationships," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 [1996]: 79-98;
40. Sandra L. Murray and John G. Holmes, "A Leap of Faith? Positive Illusions in Romantic Relationships," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23 [1997]: 586-604) hold that these "positive illusions" yield greater relationship satisfaction.
41. The subjunctive "should" can do double duty as a kind of normative "should" here, for I want to make sense not just of our in fact adopting these practices but of its being a part of friendship, i.e., a "demand" of friendship in my sense, that we do so.
42. Keller develops in a rather different way (and at somewhat greater length, in secs. 6 and 7 of "Friendship and Belief) the connections between the doxastic behavior of the good friend, the nature of friendship, and the goods friendship characteristically provides.
43. See Nicomachean Ethics, bks. 8 and 9.
44. Jennifer Whiting is perhaps the most uncompromising defender in the contemporary literature of the Aristotelian idea of character friendship: see her impressive and ambitious "Impersonal Friends," Monist74 (1991): 3-29.
45. See Neera Kapur Badhwar, "Friends as Ends in Themselves," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (1987): 1-23, on these themes. Badhwar sharply distinguishes end friendship from unconditional love, which precisely is not premised on your particular qualities.
46. Note that friendship can still be said to be based on esteem for your friend's merits even when that esteem is to some degree artificially maintained through biased shading. For your original perception of A's merits - part of the basis for your becoming friends with A - may have been objective, impartial, and unbiased. We could thus see in friendship the operation of the "halo effect" studied by psychologists, in which an initial positive impression colors subsequent attributions of specific traits (see Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson, "The Halo Effect: Evidence for Unconscious Alteration of Judgments," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 [1977]: 250-56).
47. It is especially in connection with this second question that my treatment diverges from Keller's, or - at least - that our discussions head off in different directions. Compare the last quarter of the present article with his "Friendship and Belief," sec. 8.
48. As an associate editor of Ethics helpfully observed, there is a parallel here with what Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, "The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-attitudes and Value," Ethics 114 (2004): 391-423,
49. call the "Wrong Kind of Reasons" problem. (See also Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson, "The Moralistic Fallacy: On the 'Appropriateness' of Emotions," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 [2000]: 65-90;
50. and Derek Parfit, "Rationality and Reasons," in Exploring Practical Philosophy: From Action to Values, ed. Dan Egonsson, Björn Petersson, Jonas Josefsson, and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001], 17-39,
51. to whom Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen are, in part, responding.) Their paper has generated lively subsequent discussion; for a recent response in these pages, see Philip Stratton-Lake, "How to Deal with Evil Demons: Comment on Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen," Ethics 115 (2005): 788-98.
52. This is particularly true if we focus on the differential doxastic outcomes characteristic of the good friend. If, e.g., one considered only the heightened scrutiny to which the good friend subjects new information about her friend, one might be tempted to say that this change is an improvement from an epistemic point of view. (I have no wish to commend the unseemly hastiness with which we form negative global judgments about people who are not our friends simply on the basis of gossip. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.) But it is much harder to maintain that the good friend displays enhanced epistemic virtue if one considers the total package of differential epistemic practices and beliefs which she will tend to manifest.
53. To take but one example, Feldman and Conee's statement of evidentialism reads: "Doxastic attitude D toward proposition p is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward p fits the evidence S has at t" (Richard Feldman and Earl Conee, "Evidentialism," Philosophical Studies 48 [1985]: 15-34, quote on 15). There is no limitation here on the subject matter of the propositions over which this principle ranges - and, even more obviously, no exception of the form "except when p concerns your friends." Note that the ethics of belief, as distinct from the epistemic evaluation of beliefs, might not be subject matter invariable. (Baker, "Trust and Rationality," and Meiland, "What Ought We to Believe?" in effect argue that different ethical standards apply to forming beliefs about friends and loved ones.) This point is not germane to the present discussion, which concerns specifically epistemic assessment. The ethics of belief is part of ethics, not part of epistemology narrowly construed (our concern here).
54. Thanks to Jerrold Levinson and Kris McDaniel for this suggestion.
55. I myself have some difficulty embracing these suppositions: we still tend to consider ourselves friends of people with whom we were friends in the past but with whom we have lost touch due to moving away. It is perhaps easier if we imagine that a great deal of time has passed since the days you were friends.
56. Luckily, there's no implication that we should be epistemically irrational all the time, for the argument in favor of epistemic irrationality turns centrally on the indispensability of friendship in particular to a good life.
57. Indeed, I take this to have been more or less Bernard Williams's attitude. See, e.g., "Persons, Character, and Morality," in his Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1-19.
58. Henry Sidgwick, "Concluding Chapter," in his The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 496-509.
59. For arguments of this kind that turn on friendship in particular, see, e.g., Dean Cocking and Justin Oakley, "Indirect Consequentialism, Friendship, and the Problem of Alienation," Ethics 106 (1995): 86-111;
60. Neera Badhwar Kapur, "Why It Is Wrong to Be Always Guided by the Best: Consequentialism and Friendship," Ethics 101 (1991): 483-504;
61. Jollimore (Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality) ;
62. William H. Wilcox, "Egoists, Consequentialists, and Their Friends," Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 73-84.
63. Frank Jackson, "Decision-Theoretic Consequentialism and the Nearest and Dearest Objection," Ethics 101 (1991): 461-82, quote on 461.
64. Frank Jackson, Ethics Ibid., 482.
65. Stocker, "Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories," 455-56.
66. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 195.
67. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere Ibid., 193.
68. David O. Brink, "Utilitarian Morality and the Personal Point of View," Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 417-38.
69. Samuel Scheffler, Human Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 101.
70. Peter Railton could perhaps be cited as one of the rare exceptions to this consensus. "I am insisting that questions about what it would be rational to believe belong to practical rather than theoretical reason," he writes. "What it would be rational for an individual to believe on the basis of a given experience will vary . . . with respect to what he desires" ("Moral Realism," Philosophical Review 95 [1986]: 163-207, quote on 167).
71. Gilbert Harman has also been attentive to the role of pragmatic considerations in theoretical reasoning, while being careful to preserve some respects in which practical considerations are, as he pub it in a recent treatment, "not properly relevant to your theoretical reasoning" ("Practical Aspects of Theoretical Reasoning," in The Oxford Handbook of Rationality, ed. Alfred R. Mele and Piers Rawling [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 45-56, quote on 49).
72. See sees. 1.2 and 1.8 of his "Rationality," and his "Pragmatism and Reasons for Belief," in his Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 9-45, 93-116, for more discussion.
73. I discussed how best to formulate and defend overridingness claims in the moral context in my "Moral Overridingness and Moral Theory," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1998): 170-89.
74. Peter Railton suggested this possibility to me in conversation.