Friends, Enemies and Morality

The Somme 1916, 'mandatory suicide'?

There is a lot to sort out here because there are a number of different issues bound up together here. What follows is of course simply my view. Your response should help you to work out what you agree or disagree with here.


One basic issue here is a possible clash of values. What is more important for us in our lives - treating everyone equally and fairly or should we put friends and their interests before those of people who are strangers and possibly enemies? It is a clash that we not not ever face in our lives or at least not in any serious or life-changing way,  but it might. The novelist E.M. Forster scandalized people back in 1920 when he said, 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' This was not the way an Englishman was supposed to think and certainly it was not something that he should ever say. If he did find himself facing this choice, then his duty was clear - he should put his country first. You can imagine this sort of thing being part of a TV soap like Downton Abbey. We know what the good gentlemen would decide to do after some heart searching. Patriotism is not the same thing as Christian or Kantian morality or Utilitarian highmindedness, but it has something of the same character. It is a similar clash of values. Should I choose my friends and my life or the lives of everybody in the community. The first has traditionally been regarded as intolerably selfish.

E.M.Forster, 1889-1970

But it was not always like that. Aristotle is the philosopher who has most to say about the varieties and value of friendship. He distinguished three varieties - (1) friendships based on the sheer excellence or goodness of the other person, (2) friendships based on the fact that people found their association useful to each other and (3) friendships based on the fact that the other person seems pleasant and agreeable. For the Greeks friendship or philia was a much broader category than our notion of friendship. It included family members and political allies as well as friendship as a close personal relationship. The first variety was much rarer but much more valuable. It is based on a kind of intellectual or spiritual kinship that is easy to recognise but not so easy to define. However, Aristotle did not think that such these friendships should take priority over one's duties to the larger community. The political community is prior to the friendships of individuals within it. We can be fairly sure that he would not have agreed with E.M. Forster.


Putting one's own life and friendships before the demands of one's political community lays one open to the charge of being an egoist - egoism being understood here as a kind of internal decision to maximise pleasures or the attainment of excellence or the plain satisfaction of desires for oneself rather than maximizing the total amount of good in the world. We can make this distinction easily enough, but in practice one's own pursuits will be adding to the total of such goodness or excellence in the world and not necessarily detracting from it. If you become a talented and good person, the world is a better place than if you had lived a life of indolence. It is only when the two notions come into conflict that we would experience that clash of values we mentioned above. Then the choice is plain. Our own interests must give way to those of the larger community.


Or  so says Aristotle but is he right about this? What if your larger community - the state you belong to - is engaged in an unjust war and demands that you sacrifice your life for interests you think entirely wrong? What if you are a German citizen who opposes Hitler, possibly a German citizen of Jewish origin? Must you agree to your own destruction? Or an American who opposes the Vietnam War or the invasion of Iraq? Clearly we want to say that there are allegiances that go beyond the immediate interests of our own political state. We might however still be able to develop Aristotle's thoughts here in a way that is not inconsistent with what he said for we might claim that we are appealing in effect to a larger notion of political society, one that embraces all people everywhere. 


But what if no big issues are involved? What if you just are not interested in the issues between states and simply wish to live your own life undisturbed? Is that so wrong and if so why? Surely that is how the great majority of people see their lives. They are too busy surviving and bringing up children to be much concerned with larger, more general questions. The answer to this objection, I think, must be that a good person, someone we would want to recognise as civilised, would wish to be aware of the longer consequences of his or her life, how they affect others or the sustaining earth around us. It is this kind of impulse that prompts us to take thought for Pakistani or Indian children sewing footballs or the effects of overfishing or disposing of plastics in the seas and many, many other things. 


This is in effect what the philosophical doctrine we call consequentialism is all about. It is the doctrine that one should maximise the general good no matter what that turns out to be. Egoism in contrast is the doctrine that one should maximise one's own good and take no thought for consequences that might adversely affect others or the world. It would follow - or we might argue that it would follow - that pursuing enmities and relishing the discomfiture of one's opponents is in the long run going to produce situations that detract from maximizing the general good. Our lives would become cockpits of conflict. Most of us believe that we should keep such impulses under restraint. 

Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers at its collapse

But then there are people in public life who seem to make the opposite choice. One might think, for example, of Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, or Bob Diamond of BarCap, or Fred-the -Shred of RBS. Adam Smith's doctrine of the 'invisible hand' that produces public benefits out of the pursuit of private gains does not seem to apply, when, as here, leading figures in the worlds of banking and finance resolutely turn their gaze away from the longer-term consequences of their actions. None of us might be able to foresee all the consequences of our all our actions, but it does look as if we should have an intelligent and sympathetic eye to the way our lives might impact on the lives of all those around us, but then people will not be able to do that if they lack a sense of fundamental sympathy and solidarity with others of their kind.  It is this sympathy - eunoia or good-will in Aristotle's terminology - which is the motor that drives the doctrine of consequentialism. It is the same kind of sympathy that Achilles ultimately discovered when he recognised in Priam's grief for his dead son, his own father's grief for a son who was soon to die. We are not far from the notion of a friend as the discovery of 'another self'.