Most contemporary discussions of ethics in public assume one of two modes of reasoning: 1) the right thing to do is something we’ve been commanded to do, or 2) the right thing to do is what gives us the best outcome. Pandemic arguments have raged where this is the framework: we feel caught between loving our neighbor (a command) or avoiding our neighbor, because really, who knows where they’ve been (consequentialism). When I teach, I try to show how, most of the time—indeed, nearly all the time—these two forms of reasoning come into play together, and don’t actually exist in isolation in the ways the stereotypes depict them.
But this isn’t a post about that: it’s a post about friendship.
The tragedy about both of these modes of reasoning is that others exist incidentally to moral reasoning: we do something because it’s been commanded, or we do something because it gives the best end (however ill defined). In both cases, other people wind up either being the object of our actions (command), or what we’re considering on the way to considering something else. How I get to the best answer likewise doesn’t really need others as well, except maybe as the one who commands, or as a consideration to be weighed in the balance about how to best act.
But in a different mode of reasoning, friends are absolutely essential to ethics. Without getting too into the weeds, ethics from Aristotle through Aquinas through modern folks like Alidsair MacIntyre, Paul Waddell, and Gilbert Meilaender have emphasized the ways in which we become moral agents through friendships. This isn’t because friends are merely useful—though friends are useful to us in all kinds of ways. It’s because the friend is someone who identifies the same moral good as you, and as such, is bound together in the pursuit of that moral good. At the risk of being a stereotype in my book recommendations, this is why, I think, the story of the Lord of the Rings is a way compelling story than some other sagas: it’s not the lone hero who succeeds, but a a company of friends who travel together.
One of the costs of trying to be safe during a pandemic for my little family is that our family dinner table has been pretty quiet for most of the last two years, minus the respite of this past summer before Delta kicked in. Prior to that, we loved having people over until the kids needed to be put to bed; we relished the dinner out we did for Sarah’s birthday where we sat and had dinner with our friends and laughed and ate and drank for over three hours. It was if we had been starving to death, and our food was friendship.
The decline in empathy with strangers which we’ve noted is related in this way: we learn to empathize with strangers because friendship—when it’s good—makes us want to expand our circle of friendship. But when the days feel interminable, exhausting, and rife with panic, the last thing you want to do is tend to all the friends we could have, and to hang on for dear life to enough friends to make life a little less meager. We’re not anywhere close to the “friendship as moral formation” vision; at this juncture, time with friends just feels like a break in the endless drone of survival.
This is not an appeal to go make friends, unless during this pandemic, you have been faced with the hard truth that most adults in America realize eventually: that you have either a few or no real friends. This is an appeal to make the recovery of friendship a priority of rebuilding the world in the long shadow of COVID. For without friends, all the moral insight and clarity in the world will come to naught: we will become as exhausted as ever, dragging ourselves by sheer duty through the world. Better to share that suffering, and that vision of goodness, with the ones who want to do that while also splitting cheap pizza.