Interview with Philippa Foot

Philippa Foot (1920-2010)

Philosophy Now, Issue 41, May/June 2003

Philippa Foot has for decades been one of Oxford’s best-known and most original ethicists. Her groundbreaking papers won her worldwide recognition but at the dawn of the new century she has finally published her first full-length book. Editor Rick Lewis asked her about goodness, vice, plants and Nietzsche.

Your book Natural Goodness has recently been published. I wonder if you could tell us in a few sentences, what is the main idea that you want to get across in the book?

I’m explaining a notion that I have called ‘natural goodness’. An admired colleague of mine, Michael Thompson, has said of my work that I believe that vice is a form of natural defect. That’s exactly what I believe, and I want to say that we describe defects in human beings in the same way as we do defects in plants and animals. I once began a lecture by saying that in moral philosophy it’s very important to begin by talking about plants. This surprised some people!

What I believe is that there are a whole set of concepts that apply to living things and only to living things, considered in their own right. These would include, for instance, function, welfare, flourishing, interests, the good of something. And I think that all these concepts are a cluster. They belong together.

When we say something is good, say one’s ears or eyes are good, we mean they are as they should be, as human ears ought to be, that they fulfil the function that ears are needed for in human life. Which of course is different from the particular function that, say, the ears of a gull serve, because gulls have to be able to recognise the sound of their chick among thousands of others on a cliffface from some way out to sea, and our ears don’t have to be quite as good as that. Similarly, we don’t have to see well in the dark. There’s nothing wrong with our eyes because we can’t see in the dark. But owls’ eyes are defective if they can’t see in the dark. So there’s this notion of a defect which is species-relevant. Things aren’t just good or bad, they’re good in a certain individual, in relation to the manner of life of his or hers or its species. That’s the basic idea. And I argue that moral defects are just one more example of this kind of defect.

So let’s take plants. A plant needs strong roots, and in the same sort of way human beings need courage. When one is talking about what a human being should do, one says things like, “look, he should be able to face up to danger in certain circumstances, for his own sake and for the sake of others.” But this is like saying, “an owl should be able to see in the dark, should be able to fly” or “a gull should be able to recognize the sound of its chick among all the cacophony of the cliff.” And if you think of it in this way then you’re not going to think that there’s a gap between facts and evaluation – between description of facts, such as ‘owls hunt by night’, that’s a description of fact, and another description, such as ‘that owl’s got weak eyesight; it’s doesn’t seem to be able to manage in the dark’. These are the central notions. And that’s why I thought we should start moral philosophy by talking about plants.

But why say that owls should have good eyes, rather than just saying simply that an owl does have good eyes?

What’s very important, it’s really the centre of the whole thing, is the idea of a certain kind of proposition – unquantified propositions.

What do you mean by that?

Well, the quantifiers are all or some. I mean, you can say all rivers have water in them, or some rivers go down to the sea. But there are also some peculiar propositions, propositions which only apply to living things, which are neither all nor some. And this kind of proposition really is about the standard; it’s about how it should be. It takes one towards what I have called ‘natural goodness’. For example, we say “humans have thirty two teeth.” Not all humans do, in fact, but we have defective teeth if we don’t have thirty two. Either we’ve never had the full complement or we’ve lost some. Elizabeth Anscombe put out a very important article about this kind of proposition, called ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ which was published in Mind I think in the 1950s. She didn’t make a great deal out of it but a lot of people refer to it now.

The thought is, that first of all there is a difference in the way we talk about living things and non-living things. Just leave aside artifacts – they’re a bit like one and a bit like the other. I’ll put that aside.

Rivers are interesting because they’re natural things and they have a pattern of development through the seasons as living things do, and yet you cannot talk about a river as being defective. Of course it can be defective from our point of view, from the point of view of irrigation or animals or something like that but not in its own right, not autonomously as I say.

Does that apply to non-living things like stars, as well? I’m thinking of an astronomer looking at a star and saying “this should have developed into a classic yellow class 2 star but it ran out of hydrogen and that prevented it from doing so.” So surely you can say ‘should’ in relation to them?

In the everyday use of language we do say “it should” meaning “it was about to” or “they usually do” or something like that. But that’s not the same ‘should’; that pattern doesn’t give you the kind of natural defect. This is what I’m identifying here – the difference between the two. That’s why, as I said, I think moral evaluation belongs within a whole set of concepts which apply to living things only. You see, rivers don’t flourish. Of course we can say the river is flourishing, but then it is a sort of jokey use. It doesn’t literally flourish, it doesn’t literally die. You could say the star died but you obviously would mean something different because they’re not members of a species of living things. I’m not in the least fighting the everyday language, but a star being born is very, very different to any member of a species being born. They haven’t got this pattern of one and then another of the same kind coming from it. Rivers don’t spawn rivers. They can’t literally be born or die, and there is in their case no species in which a function could be identified. Of course anything we make can have a function, but the parts of animals and their movements can have function quite apart from anything that we do or want. A spider’s web has a function. What’s the function of it? Is it to keep predators at bay? No, it’s to catch food. That’s a very straightforward, ordinary thing to say. That’s the function of it. Then the function of whatever part of the spider secretes sticky stuff is for making webs; and webs are for getting food. And food is for sustenance, to keep the spider going, and other things it will need in order to reproduce.

Is it only in the case of entities who have interests that you can have the idea of function from the point of view of the entity itself?

‘Interests’ I think is excellent. Rivers particularly, look so much like living things; they have seasonal progressions and so on. But they don’t have interests, as artifacts do not. I like that thought of yours!

This helps me to see how you look at human beings and say ‘well this is a good, well-functioning human being’, or ‘this is a human being who is defective in one way or another’. But if you’re actually talking to a human being who seems to you defective in some way, lacking courage in a situation where courage would be necessary, or lacking compassion, or some other virtue, then does your approach to moral philosophy allow you to cajole them or to give them reasons why they should behave differently? Or is it a purely descriptive kind of philosophy that allows you to say ‘You are a good person or a bad person,’ but then they might say, ‘well yes, such is life, I’m a bad person, there’s nothing to be done about it.’

Well, it’s a description, if I say to this person, “look, you have reason to do this.” That’s a description of his state, an absolutely blunt description. And if he says, “why do you say that?” I reply, “well what do you think having reasons is? What do you think you have reason to do?” And if he says, “well, I think I’ve only got reason to get what I want,” I say, “well, why actually do you think you have reason to do that – how do you establish that reason? And what about something that you don’t care about at the moment – like your own health maybe, like not getting cancer later on? Haven’t you got reason to give up smoking, let’s say, even though it’s not related to your present desires? You’re young, the risks don’t make you tremble but the dangers are still there.”

Now, probably, he will say, this chap, “all right, you’ve shown me that I’ve got a reason to give up smoking, but you haven’t shown me that I should do it.” I’d say, “what on Earth do you think ‘should’ means?” You lose the sense of ‘should’ if you go on saying “why should I?” when you’ve finished the argument about what is rational to do, what you’ve got reason to do. You can’t say “why should I?” Of course, you may very well say, “I’m bloody well not going to,” but that’s another matter.

So to say that you should do something is just to say that you have a reason to do something?

That’s right, certainly. ‘Should’ simply speaks of reasons – it’s not a kind of pushing or a word with an oomph or something for expressing my attitude, is it? If someone’s asking about why he should do something, he’s asking to be shown that he has a reason to do it. And so we have to explore the notion of having a reason.

But what if I say “what is the reason to take good care of children?” and you say “If you don’t look after children they will die.” And I say, “but what do I care about that? I’m so selfish that I don’t care what happens to the next generation.”

It’s like the man who doesn’t care what happens to his later years. The fact that he doesn’t care doesn’t mean that he is rational after all. At least, one would need a very special view, very Humean, about reasons for actions to think he doesn’t have a reason unless he cares. That’s why my old paper ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’ was so wrong, as I did think that then.

Taking again the case of not smoking I don’t know if it’s the influence of your earlier paper on me but I can see those reasons as being rootable in hypothetical imperatives. “If you want to avoid getting cancer, then give up smoking.”

Yes, that’s right. I mean, there are some hypothetical imperatives. “If you want some more tea, then come and get it!”

Is that an example or an actual invitation to get some more tea?

Both! But there are also other imperatives that are not hypothetical.

And you do explore what it is to have a reason to do something. You talk in your book about practical rationality, and it becomes apparent that you have a broader idea of practical rationality than most philosophers. I wonder if you could tell us what ‘practical rationality’ is for you?

Practical rationality is being as one should be, being a non-defective human being in respect of those things done for reasons, which is a whole enormous area of life of course. I’m saying that practical rationality is goodness in respect of reason for actions, just as speculative rationality, rationality of thinking, is goodness in respect of beliefs on conclusions drawn from premises and so on. That has to do with what one should believe, as practical rationality has to do with what one should do, what one has reason to do. But then, you have to remember animals acting on instinct – and if they haven’t got the right instincts, as a lioness who doesn’t look after her cubs hasn’t got the right instincts, then they are defective. Human beings work on instinct too, of course, but also they’re taught to think. Practical rationality is essential to the life of human beings. It’s the way that they survive. If you couldn’t bring up a child to recognise reasons (and no doubt this is how it is with some severely defective children) you might get him to obey orders but not actually ever to say “So, I’ll do such-and-such.” And that means he would lack practical rationality. Getting “So I’ll do such-and-such” right: saying it when there is a genuine “so”, is related in a particular way to human life.

The first thing you teach your child, after all, is to not hang out of the window, not hold things over the fire, not to go near the fire and so on… “It’ll hurt me so I’ll go away.” “It’s dangerous so I won’t do it.” “It’s alight, so I’ll be careful of it.” “It’s high up so I might fall.” ‘So I won’t go there’ is the first things that children have to learn. All these “so’s”. And this is simply learning part of practical rationality.

But people think that sometimes there is a difficulty reconciling morality with rationality.

They do, but I believe it is a mistake to think you’ve got an independent idea of rationality; that there is one idea of rationality and one idea of morality and somehow you have to reconcile them. They’re not separate. From the beginning, if you like, morality leads rationality and not the other way round.

This is very important, because it’s just there that people think there is a problem. They think that I will be acting irrationally if, say, I lose a great deal through not being willing to cheat or something like that. But I want to ask “What’s your idea of rationality, if you think that you have somehow to reconcile morality with it? You haven’t got a full idea of rationality until you’ve got morality within it, as prudence is within it, going for what you need, looking out for danger and so on. These are all just different parts of practical rationality. Prudence is one part, the part that has to do with getting what you just happen to want is another part, and morality belongs here too. One shouldn’t think so differently about morality and prudence. Prudence should be thought of as one of the virtues. And why should it be thought that while prudence is certainly rational morality isn’t?

So one has to attack the idea that people have of rationality, when they think that rationality is something selfstanding with which it may be difficult to reconcile morality. I don’t think it is like that.

In your book, you devote a whole chapter to discussing the nature of human happiness. Would you like to tell us how that fits in with your overall approach to morality?

Yes, it’s very important indeed. Look at what a plant or an animal needs to do for the sake of its flourishing, so that it will have a good life in the sense that things will go well for it. The owl needs to see in the dark; things don’t go well for it if it can’t see in the dark. It starves, presumably. Because of this, the notion of flourishing is central to the book. What is beneficial to the owl is what allows it to flourish, or makes it more possible for it to flourish. And in the case of human beings that is straightforwardly happiness. You can’t say that human beings flourish if they just survive to a ripe old age and reproduce themselves. In an animal or a plant that may be enough for flourishing, but if a human being just does that with no happiness they must live a wretched life. So what is for a person’s good certainly must have some relation to their happiness. That’s why I had to tackle the problem of happiness, and I found it extremely difficult. It’s an articulated concept, it’s very complex. I tried to describe it, to spread it out, but I was left with a really difficult problem which I couldn’t solve and I indicated in the book that I couldn’t solve it. There is a really deep problem about the relation between virtue and happiness.

Can one describe a wicked person as a happy person? Of course one can, look how the wicked flourish like the bay tree. But there are some examples that make me stick with the idea that someone could say, “I cannot get happiness through wickedness, through acting badly, through selling my friends down the river. That’s not something that I could count as happiness and it’s not just that I wouldn’t be happy afterwards because I would be so ashamed. It would be true even if I was going to be given some drug, or if a happy brick would drop on my head after I’d done this thing so that I’d never remember that I’d done it.” Someone might well say, “nothing that I could get by really wicked actions, by desperate corruption, by betraying my friends, is anything that I would count as happiness, and anything that made me do it I would not count as having benefited me. I think here of the example of those I called the ‘Letter- Writers’ in my book. [see box below]

Such an example really does let us see the problem very clearly. We cannot totally divorce the ideas of virtue and of happiness. There seems to be a necessary conceptual connection between them. And this is suggested by the fact that while one of the Letter Writers might have said, “I’m willing to sacrifice all my future happiness”; they might rather have said, “Happiness is just not possible for me if I can only

avoid death by going along with the Nazis, by betraying my comrades in the Resistance, or by obeying orders to join the SS.”

So they were pursuing happiness by choosing not to co-operate with the Nazis even knowing the terrible consequences of that, through avoiding even greater unhappiness?

No, just that they had to say, it’s too bad. Happiness is not my lot.

I see, yes of course.

I don’t want to say, as some do, that no loss that could only be avoided by acting badly is a loss at all. That seems to be goody-goody in some way and I want to insist might be a terrible loss.

I understand the problem now. It’s crazy to say that they weren’t suffering a loss in that situation.

They were losing everything. They said things that showed how much they were giving up. There were letters to their sweethearts, their children, who they would never see grow up, and their beloved wives. One of them I remember said something like, “How wonderful it would be just to smell the cooking in the kitchen.” You’ve got a vivid sense of this family life which he could have returned to, if he’d simply been willing to do what the Nazis’ wanted. And that’s why the problem is so difficult. I suspect that the answer is somehow in a connection between the concept of my goodness and my good that I haven’t got out. But anyway I haven’t got it out, so I can only say “This is really difficult… I’ll tell you what I can about happiness because flourishing, the human good, is central to this book, but at the moment I have to say that the case of the Letter-Writers shows a real difficulty.”

What is the nature of the problem – is it a question of just getting our concepts straight so that we don’t trip over them in some way?

Well, it is in some way. But it must be that there is some deeper notion of one’s good. I simply can’t do it, that’s all. I’m stuck.

Given that you argue that there is an objective basis for morality, that morality can be rooted in nature and facts about being in nature, how do you deal with the great disagreements that exist over morality between individuals and between cultures? Can your approach to morality settle those disagreements?

That’s a very important question. I wish I’d said more about it in the book. First of all there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be some indisputable moral facts. I’d take for instance one about looking after children. Someone who was cruel to children for fun, for his own pleasure, I think we could say that there was something wrong with that person, that he had a vice. It seems to me that that must be true in any civilisation, at any time that there were human beings. Torture, also, is never morally defensible; it’s something which in no circumstances could be justified. But let’s stick with this one judgement, about someone who is cruel to children, who torments them: that such a one has a defect, has a vice. Vice is a defect of the will, of the human will. And that judgement about those who abuse children seems to me to apply in any circumstances, in any age, in any culture. But, of course, virtues will take very different forms at different times, in different civilisations, different cultures. There’s no question about that. Courage for instance will take different forms, as different things will be needed. There’s so much difference in lifestyles in human beings, much more than there is, I imagine, among owls or any species of animals. And therefore, the moral judgements will not be exactly the same everywhere. What will be good in one culture will be bad in another just because the circumstances are so different. Different things are needed in these circumstances: by nomads, for instance, as opposed to city-dwellers, or people who live in great scarcity, or people surrounded by cruel enemies. What is right and wrong for different societies will often be different. Things will be justifiable in one situation and not in another. And, of course, one of the determining factors will be religion, what people believe the gods will do; will offend them or bring their wrath down on the community. After all, it would be totally wrong to bring the wrath of the gods on your community – so religion comes in too. Likewise what in a certain community is seen as pollution, or as a demeaning task, obviously determines what is for instance cruel or disrespectful. In that sense, a lot of what’s right and wrong will be relative to different cultures, of course. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t the same underlying basis for right and wrong.

So you’re both an objectivist and a cultural relativist about morality?

That’s right, to a certain extent a cultural relativist. How much there is in the way of grey areas, I don’t know. I think it is an advantage of a position like mine, that it could allow for universality where we really find it, as with the case of what we do to children, but that where we really find diversity because of different lifestyles, cultures, religions, or just grey areas where it seems you could say one thing or say the other, that’s what we should be ready to say. In this way we wouldn’t try to tighten everything up or claim to be able to look ahead and see where each conflict of opinions would end. It is one of my objections to the old kind of subjectivism that philosophers thought they could describe the breakdown point ahead of the particular argument, because one person would have one ultimate principle and another person the opposite ultimate principle. I don’t believe in these ultimate principles that must simply be affirmed or denied, but rather in an appeal to the necessities of human life. Arguing on this basis we shall look at the particular conflicts of moral opinion and take what comes in the way of universal truths, cultural relativism or grey areas.

So, given this rather relaxed version of moral objectivity, what would you say to ‘immoralists’ such as Nietzsche?

In my book I take Nietzsche on. I say, “Look, what you’re suggesting might be possible for some race of beings, but not for humans. I know you think that if only people will read you and believe you, human beings will become quite different, but I don’t believe a word of that. You want to judge actions not by their type, by what is done, but by their relation to the nature of the person who does them. And that is poisonous.” When we think of the things that have been done by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, what we have to be horrified at is what was done. We don’t need to inquire into the psychology of these people in order to know the moral quality of what they did. Nietzsche thought that a quite different taxonomy of human action was the only one that really got down to things. Goodness or badness was in the nature of the person who did them: it was this that determined whether the the act was good or bad. But I think it is possible to explain the basis on which you can judge that the oppressive things that Nietzsche would have countenanced – or at least spoke of without disapproval as merely pranksome – cannot be done by a good human being. It’s wrong-headed to leave aside, as he does, the question of what human beings as such need, or what a society needs in the way of justice, fastening instead on the spontaneity, the energy, the passion of the individual agent. Those things are important in their place, but to fasten on them is like fastening on the scent of some flower when it isn’t part of its life. I’m inventing this example on the spur of the moment, maybe the scent of a plant always serves to attract pollinating insects and so is part of its life. But there are other things that are not, so you get the idea.

Nietzsche had, in a way, an aesthetic view of human life. But his isn’t a suitable way of life for human beings as they are, and if Nietzsche is reckoning on being able to change them into something different, he’d better think again.

Thank you for this interview!

This conversation took place at Philippa Foot’s Oxford home in the Autumn of 2001. Due to the extreme decrepitude of the Philosophy Now cassette recorder, the resulting tape was crackly beyond belief, which is why this interview hasn’t appeared sooner. Grateful thanks go to Karen Adler for somehow managing to transcribe it anyway. R.L.

The Letter-Writers

Philippa Foot’s interest in the complicated connection between virtue and the pursuit of happiness was partly inspired by a 1950s book, now unobtainable, called Dying We Live. The book is a collection of prison letters from Germans who defied the Nazis and were executed as a result. The writers were people from a wide variety of social backgrounds, including aristocratic anti-Nazi plotters; a pastor who refused to stop preaching against the persecution of the Jews; farm labourers and many others Their farewell letters to their loved ones sometimes explain why they had chosen a path which would lead to their own destruction. The example below is from a farm boy from the Sudetenland:

February 3, 1944

Dear Parents: I must give you bad news – I have been condemned to death, I and Gustave G. We did not sign up for the SS, and so they condemned us to death.... Both of us would rather die than stain our consciences with such deeds of horror. I know what the SS has to do....

from Dying We Live: The Final Messages and Records of Some Germans Who Defied Hitler ed. by H. Gollwitzer, K. Kuhn & R. Schneider.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics is person rather than action based. It looks at the moral character of the person carrying out an action.


Character-based ethics

• A right act is the action a virtues person would do in the same circumstances.

Virtue ethics is person rather than action based: it looks at the virtue or moral character of the person carrying out an action, rather than at the ethical duties and rules, or the consequences of particular actions.

Virtue ethics not only deals with the rightness or wrongness of individual actions, it provides guidance as to the sort of characteristics and behaviours a good person will seek to achieve.

In that way, virtue ethics is concerned with the whole of a person's life, rather than particular episodes or actions.

• A good person is someone who lives virtuously - who possesses and lives the virtues.

It's a useful theory since human beings are often more interested in assessing the character of another person than they are assessing the goodness or badness of a particular action.

This suggests that the way to build a good society is to help its members to be good people, rather than to use laws and punishments to prevent or deter actions.

But it wouldn't be helpful if a person had to be a saint to count as virtuous. For virtue theory to be really useful it needs to suggest only a minimum set of characteristics that a person needs to possess in order to be regarded as virtuous.

...being virtuous is more than having a particular habit of acting, e.g. generosity. Rather, it means having a fundamental set of related virtues that enable a person to live and act morally well.

James F Keenan, Proposing Cardinal Virtues, Theological Studies, 1995

Principles

Virtue ethics teaches:

• An action is only right if it is an action that a virtuous person would carry out in the same circumstances.
• A virtuous person is a person who acts virtuously
• A person acts virtuously if they "possess and live the virtues"
• A virtue is a moral characteristic that a person needs to live well.

Most virtue theorists would also insist that the virtuous person is one who acts in a virtuous way as the result of rational thought (rather than, say, instinct).

The three questions

The modern philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre proposed three questions as being at the heart of moral thinking:

• Who am I?
• Who ought I to become?
• How ought I to get there?

Lists of the virtues

This poses a problem, since lists of virtues from different times in history and different societies show significant differences.

Most virtue theorists say that there is a common set of virtues that all human beings would benefit from, rather than different sets for different sorts of people, and that these virtues are natural to mature human beings - even if they are hard to acquire.

The traditional list of cardinal virtues was:

• Prudence
• Justice
• Fortitude / Bravery
• Temperance

The modern theologian James F Keenan suggests:

• Justice
  • Justice requires us to treat all human beings equally and impartially.
• Fidelity
  • Fidelity requires that we treat people closer to us with special care.
• Self-care
  • We each have a unique responsibility to care for ourselves, affectively, mentally, physically, and spiritually.
• Prudence
  • The prudent person must always consider Justice, Fidelity and Self-care.
  • The prudent person must always look for opportunities to acquire more of the other three virtues

Good points of virtue ethics

• It centres ethics on the person and what it means to be human
• It includes the whole of a person's life

Bad points of virtue ethics

• it doesn't provide clear guidance on what to do in moral dilemmas
  • although it does provide general guidance on how to be a good person
  • presumably a totally virtuous person would know what to do and we could consider them a suitable role model to guide us
• there is no general agreement on what the virtues are
• and it may be that any list of virtues will be relative to the culture in which it is being drawn up.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk/ethics

Virtue Ethics

Stephen Darwall

From "Virtue Ethics", pp.1-4

Introduction

Consequentialism, contractarianism/contractualism, and deontology are all moral theories. (1) They concern distinctive moral notions of obligations, concern and respect and, ultimately, questions of right conduct: what we can be held morally accountable for doing. The approach called virtue ethics is orthogonal to these theories in both respects. First, virtue is concerned primarily with character rather than conduct – with how we should be rather than what we should do. And second, a virtue ethics can be advanced, not as a moral theory at all, but as an account of other, ethically deep aspects of human life that are, it is sometimes argued, potential rivals to and perhaps replacements for morality and its distinctive forms.

The conception of a set of universal and finally authoritative norms or laws by which all moral agents are categorically obligated is far from the only form that ethical reflection can take. (2) The modern idea of morality derives from a distinctive historical tradition, the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic idea of divinely ordained law, to which it is a secular successor. Some philosophers have argued that this conception of morality is seriously defective in various ways and that our ethical reflections might more profitably take other forms. Several who have made this argument have looked to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for more promising ethical conception. (3) For Aristotle, the fundamental question is not, as for Mill, Hobbes, or Kant, What is the fundamental principle of moral right or duty and how might this be defended philosophically? Aristotle asks, rather, What is the goal of human life? What kind of life is best for human beings?

Nonmoral Virtue Ethics

Aristotle provides a distinctive example – a paradigm, really – of a nonmoral virtue ethics. (“Nonmoral”, again, because, although his translators frequently use “moral virtue” to signal that he means excellences of character concerned with choice, Aristotle does not relate these to any conception of a moral law under which all are accountable as equals.) Virtues, for Aristotle, are dispositions to choose what is fine or noble (kalon) for its own sake, and to avoid what is base. The operative notion is what Nietzsche called a “rank-ordering” ideal with respect to which one can be better or worse, not a norm or law that one complies with or violates. For Aristotle, the operative ethical emotions are shame, esteem, pride and disdain or contempt, not guilt, respect, self-respect, and moral indignation.

Virtues are excellences, traits, that is, that make something an excellent instance of its kind. In this way, Aristotle’s theory is a kind of perfectionism. It is a virtue in a knife, for example, that it have a sharp edge so that it can cut well. In general, we reckon which traits are excellences (excellent-making) in relation to a thing’s function (ergon) or characteristic activity.(4) As Aristotle believes that the characteristic activity of human beings is action (praxis) that expresses a distinctively human form of choice, namely, of actions valued in themselves as noble or fine (kalon), he concludes that the virtues are traits of character, that is, settled dispositions to choose certain actions and avoid others as intrinsically noble or base. We might put his point by saying that human excellences are states of character concerned with choices that are themselves guided by an ideal of human excellence.

In general, any such (nonmoral) human ideal can be a nonmoral virtue ethics. Although it might involve a teleological or perfectionist view of human nature, like Aristotle’s (according to which there is something human beings are inherently for or to be), it need not. A nonmoral virtue ethics may be advanced simply as a normative view about which traits in human beings are worthy of esteem (or disdain).

Moral Virtue Ethics

Analogously, a moral virtue ethics is a theory of what is worthy of distinctively moral esteem, that is, worthy of esteem in a moral agent. The best example of such a view is the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheston. Hutcheston argued that the basic moral phenomenon is a distinctively moral esteem for benevolence, the desire to benefit others and make them happy. Moral esteem, he held, is not primarily for any outcome, but for a motive or trait of character, namely, the desire to produce good outcomes for human beings and other sentient beings.

Virtue and Conduct

How, then, do virtue ethics bear on what to do? First, nonmoral virtue ethics remind us that questions of right and wrong are far from the only, or perhaps even the most important, ethical questions we can ask, even about what to do. Thus, it might be that failing to do significantly more to relieve world hunger, although famine relief is not morally obligatory, nonetheless manifests vices of complacency and self-satisfaction. Or, for another example, even if the environment cannot be wronged or unjustly treated, clear-cutting may still manifest an inappropriate attitude towards the environment or unlovely traits that are at odds with living a fully satisfying human life.

Second, in considering what to do, it can be helpful to ask what a virtuous person, or someone with a specific virtue (say, generosity), would do. This may simply be a useful heuristic, but it may also reflect the Aristotelian view that there is no way of formulating ethical insight that can be grasped and applied by someone who lacks the wisdom or “sense” of the virtuous person. As Lois Armstrong is reputed to have said about jazz, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Third, virtue ethicists sometimes put forward conceptions of virtue, not simply as guides to appropriate (or morally right) action, but as accounts of what makes an action appropriate or morally right. Thus, it can be held that an action is the right or appropriate thing to do in some case or circumstance just in case it is what the virtuous person would (characteristically) do in that circumstance.(5) Such a view might depart from the letter of Aristotle’s position, since he identified virtues as settled dispositions to choose specific actions for their own sake (as noble). This would seem to make which traits are virtuous depend on which actions are noble, not vice versa. Nevertheless, since it would hold that no access to the appropriateness of action is possible save through the wisdom or conduct of a virtuous person, such a view would remain quite close to Aristotle’s in fundamental spirit. What is common to any virtue ethics is the idea that guidance on controversial questions of case ethics can be gained only by looking to the virtues or the virtuous person as a model.

Stephen Darwall, Virtue Ethics, Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Notes

(1) For classical and contemporary readings on these theories, see the following Blackwell anthologies (detailed on p. ii): Consequentialism, Contractarianism/Contractualism, and Deontology.

(2) G. E. M. Anscombe argued that since, as she claimed, the conception of morality is unintelligible without the idea of divine sanction, it cannot be secularized (“Modern Moral Philosophy”). Alasdair MacIntyre also advanced a very influential critique of orthodox moral philosophy (After Virtue [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981]). Bernard Williams also influentially criticized the idea of morality and its distinctive form of obligation (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985]). These writers all pointed toward Aristotle as an alternative model. See also Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

(3) For a discussion of Aristotle’s ethics, see my Philosophical Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).

(4) See pp. 8-9 of this volume.

(5) For an example of such view, see Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Aristotle on Making Other Selves *

[Aristotle's view on friendship]

By Elijah Millgram / Philosophy Department
University of Utah
From Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (2), June 1987: 361-376.

I

There is still a relative paucity of discussion of the views on friendship that Aristotle presents in the Nicomachean Ethics,¹ although some recent work may indicate a new trend. One suspects that this paucity reflects a belief that those views are not very interesting; if true, this witnesses to an unfortunate underestimation of Aristotle's account. This account is in fact quite surprising, for -- I shall argue -- Aristotle believes that one makes one's friends in the most literal sense of the verb.

Aristotle takes virtue-friendship, i.e., the friendship of virtuous people who are friends for virtue, as 'friendship in the primary way.' Other 'friendships' -- for utility and for pleasure -- are only so-called by way of similarity to friendship proper, i.e., virtue-friendship (1157a30ff). Accordingly, proper friendship must be non-instrumental, or, more carefully, not essentially instrumental, unlike the friendship-analogs that fall outside the scope of friendship proper (1157a17-20). While 'friends of utility... were never friends of each other, but of what was expedient for them' (1157a14ff), a true 'friend is taken to be someone who wishes and does goods or apparent goods to his friend for the friend's own sake' (1166a3). The theme of desiring and acting for the friend's own sake is repeated many times in the Ethics;² in the Rhetoric it is explicitly taken as definitive of friendship (1361b35-40). Since the contrast between true friendship and mere friendship-analogs is that between the not essentially instrumental (for the sake of the friend) and the essentially instrumental (using the friend as a means to pleasure or utility), a successful account of Aristotle's views on friendship must preserve and explain this contrast in all its centrality.³

In doing so, one must be careful not to take friendship for virtue in such a way as to render friends a fungible commodity.⁴ The problem is this. Aristotle believes that one loves a friend for his virtue (cf., e.g., 1171a20, 1156b6ff). But there are (one hopes) many virtuous people, and, indeed, many persons who are more virtuous than the friends one actually has. If the friend's virtue provides the reason for the friendship, it would seem that one has identical reason to love all virtuous persons, or, if this is not possible, to replace one's virtuous friends with still more virtuous persons. But it is something like a conceptual truth about friendship that one has relatively few friends (according to Aristotle, roughly the number that one can live with -- 1171a1-3). A similar truth is that one does not rush off to replace one's somewhat virtuous friends with still more virtuous acquaintances. Friends are not replaceable: even when one loses old friends and makes new ones, it is not accurate to think of the new as replacing the old; moreover Aristotle takes virtuous friendship to be (pretty much) permanent (1156b18). There are many individuals who cannot claim the prerogatives of one's friendship, even though they may share in the admirable properties of those who can. This requires explanation. Why does one (appropriately) love one virtuous acquaintance rather than another? And why can one not simply replace a virtuous friend with some other, equally virtuous person?

II

With these constraints in mind, let's turn to Aristotle's account of friendship. Certain Aristotelian expressions -- to the effect that one wishes goods to one's friend for his own sake, and that the friend is another self -- appear too many times to be dismissed as less than central.⁵ It is worth trying to take them seriously, which -- at the risk of sticking to a stuffy notion of seriousness -- suggests taking them as literally as possible.

How are we to understand these expressions? The claim that the friend is another self suggests that the right way to do so is to think about one's own self. In one's own case, one has that special concern for one's projects and one's future that expresses itself in, among other things, prudence. This special concern is often felt to be one that terminates justification: 'Why do X?' can be answered by 'X is good for me,' whereas 'Why do what's good for you?' seems like a non-question. One way of putting this fact about us is to say that one desires the good for oneself for one's own sake (rather than for the sake of anything else). When Aristotle says that the friend is another self, that one desires the good for one's friend for the friend's sake, Aristotle is at least saying that one has for one's friend the same kind of special concern that one has for oneself, that the concern for the friend is justification-terminating in the same way that one's concern for oneself is justification-terminating.

The reading that takes concern for the friend, like self-concern, to be justification-terminating is supported by Aristotle's description of one's relation to oneself as the paradigmatic case of friendship: 'one is a friend to himself most of all' (1168b9). Aristotle thinks that the defining features of friendships with others are derived from friendship with oneself, and takes as the central instance of this the desire one has for goods and apparent goods for one's own sake (1166a1-5, 15-17). '[A]n extreme degree of friendship resembles one's friendship to oneself' (1166b1; see also 1171b33). On this interpretation, friendships are not essentially instrumental, any more than one's relation to oneself is merely or essentially instrumental. Part of what it is for a tool to be (solely) a tool is that it is always used for something: there is always a reason extrinsic to the tool for what one does to and with it. This is precisely what justification-termination in the friend does not permit.⁶

We have here two apparently distinct notions: that of wanting the good for one's friend for his own sake, and that of the friend's being another self. How are they related? One might think that the fact that one desires the good for one's friend for the friend's own sake is constitutive, perhaps exhaustively constitutive, of the friend's being another self: to say that the friend is another self is just to say that one desires the good for one's friend for his own sake.⁷ As a treatment of friendship, I think this approach to have many merits; however, I doubt that it can be successfully imported into Aristotle exegesis.

There are two reasons for thinking this. Recall that we are trying to take the Aristotelian locutions as seriously (and as literally) as possible. If the friend is another self, then what makes one's friend, one's friend is the same thing that makes oneself, oneself. This can be maintained together with the reading that takes other-self-dom to be constituted by special concern provided that one believes⁸ that one's own self is (at least partially) constituted by self-concern. But whatever the merits of this position, it is implausibly attributed to Aristotle, whose account of what makes oneself, oneself, will be a far more metaphysical story. This story is likely to have to do with species form and matter, and possibly with individual forms; the issue is controversial.⁹ In any case, it is very unlikely to have much to do with concern. That's one reason.

Here's the other. If 'one's friend is another self' and 'one desires the good for one's friend for his own sake' are just different ways of saying the same thing (or if 'the friend is another self' merely abbreviates 'one desires the good for one's friend for his own sake' and some other statements about other-self-dom), then the fact that the friend is another self can no more cause, explain or justify one's desiring the good for one's friend for his own sake than synonyms can cause, explain or justify one another. Aristotle, however, thinks that the friend's being another self at least explains desiring the good for him for his own sake: 'The decent person, then, has each of these features (which include desiring goods for one's own sake) in relation to himself, and is related to his friend as he is to himself, since [gar] the friend is another self' (1166a30-32; cf. 1166a3, 15-17).

The suggestion that one desires the good for one's friend because he is another self¹⁰ raises anew the question of where justification terminates. There does seem to be an answer to the question 'Why do what's good for your friend?' -- namely, that he is another self. However, the analogy between friendship and self-love is preserved if we hear such an answer as spoken in the same tone of voice that the first-person question would elicit: 'I do what's good for me because I'm myself.' And it may be that these explanations do not provide additional justification -- in the sense of adducing a further end for which the explanandum is an instrumental means -- but rather explanation of another kind. At any rate, Aristotle seems to agree that we do desire the good for our own sakes because we are ourselves, although just what this comes to is a tricky question.¹¹ This leaves us the tasks of elucidating the 'because,' and of saying what it is for the friend to be another self.

III

Elucidating the 'because' must wait on elucidating other-self-dom, and to do this, a detour is necessary. The 'friendship of kindred and that of companions' constitute a separate class, different from other kinds of friendship (1161b11f).¹² Kinship-friendship is uniformly derivative from the love of parents for their children (1161b16f), and importantly, parental love shares with comradely friendship the feature we are trying to understand: 'A parent loves his children as [he loves] himself. For what has come from him is a sort of other himself' (1161b27-30; cf. 1161b18f). By transitivity of identity, as it were, brothers are 'identical with each other,' since they are identical with their parents. They are 'in a sense the same thing, although in separate individuals' (1161b30-35). Since kinship-friendship and companion-friendship belong together, and share the features that we are trying to explain, and since kinship-friendship derives from parental friendship, we may be able to understand companion-friendship by way of parental friendship.

One can abstract from the parent-child relation to a relation that we shall call procreation. If A is a procreator of B, then (i) A is a creator of B in the sense that A is causally responsible for B's being,¹³ and (ii) B has the same being that A does. Now before arguing that the friend-friend relation is an instance of the procreation relation, I will argue that procreation is well-suited to explain the link between other-self-dom and special concern.

Procreation -- indeed, even its creation component -- seems to cause the kind of special concern we have been considering. '[E]veryone likes his own products more than (other people's), as parents and poets do' (1120b13). In the parent-child case, this is especially clear: the parent comes to love his children as a causal consequence -- perhaps even as a side-effect -- of their being his children. Craftsmen also have this preferential attitude towards their products (1167b34f; cf. 1168a1-3). The procreative relation underlies the love of the benefactor for his beneficiary: 'the beneficiary is his product and hence he likes him...' (1168a4-6, my italics).

The explanation of this phenomenon is worth quoting in full:

1. Being is choiceworthy and lovable for all.
2. We are insofar as we are actualized, since we are insofar as we live and act.
3. The product is, in a way, the producer in his actualization.
4. Hence the producer is fond of the product, because he loves his own being. And this is natural, since what he is potentially is what the product indicates in actualization. (1168a5-10)

So far, this explains both the parent's love for his children and the potter's preferential fondness for his own pots. The difference between these can be accounted for by our second condition on procreation: The producer loves his own being, and in procreation the creator has the same being as the creature. The potter is not himself a pot, so that pot and potter do not fully share the same being (except insofar as the pot is an actualization of the potter); but parent and child are both human beings, and share the (appropriate kind of) same being.

Now I don't want to try to reconstruct here the metaphysics that makes this way of thinking about these things plausible to Aristotle; suffice it that Aristotle does find it plausible. (At Physics 202b5 he explicitly states that '[i]t is not absurd that the actualization of one thing should be in another,' giving as example the actualization of the teacher in the student. Compare Metaphysics 1058a28-32.) For now, let's just say that the creature is the procreator's 'other self' because the procreator is responsible for the creature's having the being that they share, and it is natural for the procreator to have a special concern for his creature as an actualization of his being.

IV

The next item on our agenda is the claim that one is a procreator of one's friend. To be sure, one is not one's friend's procreator in the same way that a parent is his child's procreator: generally one's friends are living flesh and blood before they are one's friends. The force of the claim is rather that, over the course of a friendship, one becomes (causally) responsible for the friend's being who he is. Now Aristotle thinks that friendships are because of or for virtue. These positions coincide if virtue is (part of) what makes the virtuous man who he is. The being of a child for which his parent is causally responsible is, we can say, his human being; the being of one's friend for which one is responsible is his virtuous being. The former is, if you like, what he is; the latter is who he is.

This line of argument involves two subsidiary tasks. We must convince ourselves that Aristotle takes virtue to be (part of) what makes the virtuous man who he is. (I'll defer this to section V.) And we should say something about the causal role that the virtuous man plays in bringing about or maintaining his friend's virtue. A partial description can be appropriated from Cooper, who provides the following account of Aristotle's 'arguments to show that friendship is an essential constituent of a flourishing human life':

[F]irst... to know the goodness of one's life, which [Aristotle] reasonably assumes to be a necessary condition of flourishing, one needs to have intimate friends whose lives are similarly good, since one is better able to reach a sound and secure estimate of the quality of a life when it is not one's own. Second,... the fundamental moral and intellectual activities that go to make up a flourishing life cannot be continuously engaged in with pleasure and interest, as they must be if the life is to be a flourishing one, unless they are engaged in as parts of shared activities rather than pursued merely in private; and given the nature of the activities that are in question, this sharing is possible only with intimate friends who are themselves morally good persons.¹⁴

To paraphrase the suggestions as crudely as possible, one's friends serve as human mirrors in which one can better see one's own virtue;¹⁵ and one's friends are the teammates one needs to play the game of a virtuous life. I agree with Cooper that these are some of the ways in which we influence our friends' virtue, although there are surely others; moral education is another prominent possibility.¹⁶ This influence plays an important role in my account, but this role is causal rather than justificatory. Our current task is to elucidate the 'because' in 'One desires the friend's good for his own sake because he is another self'; we already know that the 'because' cannot represent a means-end relation, because friendships are essentially non-instrumental.¹⁷ So these considerations cannot be instrumental reasons for having friends. But what are they, if not instrumental reasons?

My suggestion is, causes. Let A and B be friends, and let B be (partly) responsible for (at least the maintenance of) A's virtue, in that B serves as a human mirror, and is a team-mate in A's virtuous activities. Cooper takes these facts to provide A with (instrumental) reasons for befriending B. But Cooper has things backwards. The causal facts, rather than providing A with instrumental reasons to befriend B, explain B's love for A. B loves A because he is a procreator of A, and procreators love their creatures. These causal interactions make each friend the other's 'other self,' and bring about the love of the friend for his own sake. (In like manner, the symmetrical facts explain A's love for B; just as B is a procreator of A, so A is a procreator of B.)¹⁸

It might be objected that one assists one's friends in being virtuous because they already are one's friends; so that they cannot be one's friends because one assists them in being virtuous. The appearance of circularity here can be dealt with by pointing out that the instances of assistance may be distinct: a present or future favor to a friend is prompted by his being a friend now; his being my friend now may be a result of past favors to one another's virtue. These in turn may have been prompted by the friendship of a still earlier time. To this it might be objected that a regress has been substituted for vicious circularity. But it need not be the case that all my actions that assist others in being virtuous be prompted by prior friendship. Some may be due to spontaneous good will (1155b35ff, 1167a3-13; cf. 1156b26-30), and some may be the virtuous actions that one is bound to perform in the course of leading a virtuous life.

Let me review the merits of this account. It is explicitly non-instrumental. It explains why one loves the particular virtuous people that one in fact does love, and in so doing, explains the numerical constraint Aristotle imposes on the size of one's circle of friends: while there are many virtuous people, one is only causally responsible (in the appropriate way) for the virtue of a few. The self-perpetuating character of the causal relations explains the permanence of friendship (cf. 1156b18): virtuous friends assist one another in remaining virtuous, and this mutual assistance keeps them friends. While friends can be corrupted, and while long separation can sever the causal links (1157b10-14), in general friends do not cease to be one another's procreators.¹⁹ Finally, the account rules out the interchangeability and replacement of virtuous friends: A and B may be equally virtuous, but if one is causally responsible for A's virtue but not for B's, then one will love A and not B.

V

The most important piece of unfinished business is the job of attributing to Aristotle the claim that virtue is (a part of) what makes the virtuous man who he is. This claim deserves a paper unto itself, so I'm going to suffice with reviewing reasons for thinking that Aristotle did endorse it. The claim can be taken in two ways, corresponding to a stronger and weaker way of understanding the expression 'who someone is.' The question 'Who are you?' can prompt on the one hand, an answer like, 'My name's Horatio Alger,' or 'I'm the president of Alger Enterprises,' and on the other, an answer like 'I'm a Young Republican,' or 'I'm someone who clawed his way up from poverty to the pinnacle of financial success.' That is, it can elicit a response that picks out the individual himself (by name or definite description) -- this is what I am calling the strong sense -- or it can elicit a certain kind of characterization of the individual which does not necessarily apply only to him. There is strong textual evidence for the weaker version, which is the version of the claim for which I shall argue.²⁰ First, though, it is necessary to say something, however, briefly, about the force of the weak version of the claim.

Clearly, not just any characterization of an individual will do as an answer to the question, 'Who are you?' Consider the examples just given: to answer with one's party affiliation or with one's financial history is to indicate that one identifies oneself very strongly with one's political position or with the abilities and aspects of one's personality that brought one to the top of the heap. It is appropriate to answer with traits that one believes to be central to one's character, the kind of traits that someone who wants to be loved for him- or herself might regard as traits that it would be appropriate to be loved for. Of course, what one believes one's characteristic traits to be and what they in fact are may well be two very different stories. Still, who one is is largely a matter of one's character, and some traits are more central to one's character than others. To claim that virtue is part of what makes the virtuous man who he is is to say that his virtues exhibit this kind of centrality relative to his character.

This is very much Aristotle's view. At 1156a10, he says that '[t]hose who love each other for utility love not the other in himself'; and at line 17 that utility- and pleasure-friendships 'are coincidental, since the beloved is loved not in so far as he is who he is.' Utility- and pleasure-friendships are here being contrasted with virtue-friendships, so the implication is that those who love another for his virtue love him in himself, and that the virtue-beloved is loved insofar as he is who he is.²¹ If loving someone for his virtues is loving him for who he is, then his virtues must be a large part of who he is.

We can complement these inferences from contrasting cases with positive evidence. Good people, we are told, 'will be friends because of themselves, since they are friends insofar as they are good' (1157b2-3; compare 1156b8, 1157a17-20). More tenuously, 1171a19f (which speaks of being the friend of people 'for their virtue and for themselves') suggests that being someone's friend for his virtue is the same thing as being his friend for himself. And at 1112a2-3 Aristotle states that our ethical decisions -- which are either partly constitutive or symptomatic of our virtues -- make us the sort of persons we are.

If virtues are a central part of who their possessor is, we should expect them to be among the most stable of character traits; and this is how Aristotle regards them. Virtuous characters are stable (1100b13-20, 1167b5-10, 1156b13), unlike those of the vicious, who 'do not even remain similar to what they were' (1159b9; cf. 1156a20). '[V]irtuous people are enduringly [virtuous] in themselves, and enduring [friends] to each other' (1159b3f). Aristotle does admit that the virtuous can become corrupted (1165b1, 13ff). But his discussion of such cases supports the claim for which we are arguing. In justifying one's ceasing to associate with a once-virtuous but corrupted friend, Aristotle states that one 'was not the friend of a person of this sort' (1165b22f). If losing one's virtue makes one a different kind of person, then one's virtue is central to making one the kind of person one is, and is a character trait of the appropriate centrality.²²

Earlier on we said that Aristotle takes virtue-friendship to be the sole genuine form of friendship. We can now explain why. While it is plausible to think that I have causal effects on my pleasure- and utility-'friends,' and that I am responsible for maintaining certain features or properties of theirs (probably those features and properties that make them pleasurable and useful to me), these properties and features -- unlike virtues -- are not, on Aristotle's view, among those that make persons (and in particular, my pleasure- and utility-'friends') who they are. Being virtuous is a large part of what it is to be a human being, whence of what it is to be the virtuous person that one is. On the other hand, being useful to me and being pleasant to me are not a part of being who one is.²³ This is why, despite superficial similarities, virtuous friendships turn out to be related to pleasure- and utility-'friendships' in much the way that ducks turn out to be related to toy ducks.

VI

An additional strength of my view is that it allows us to reconcile Aristotle's account of friendship with his commitment to what Vlastos calls 'the Eudaemonist Axiom' (EA), i.e., with the claim that all one's actions are done for the sake of one's own eudaemonia (roughly, happiness or well-living);²⁴ and to do so without sacrificing the motivational plausibility of the EA. The difficulty is that the EA seems to conflict with Aristotle's strongly held view that one desires the friend's good for his own sake. It suggests that while 'Why do what's good for you?' may be a non-question, the parallel question, i.e., 'Why do what's good for your friend?' cannot be.

One response is to suggest that Aristotle's conception of eudaemonia is such as to reconcile the two claims. Eudaemonia is not be understood as restricted to a person's narrowly conceived interests; it is not, for instance, a hedonist's conception of happiness. Rather, it may include such things as the happiness of others. On such a construal, I can desire the good for my friend for his own sake while adhering to the EA because my friend's good is part of my own eudaemonia; whenever I act for my friend's sake I am also acting for my sake.²⁵

While I do endorse this move, it is important to see why it must be made with caution. For it seems to threaten the psychological plausibility and motivational force of the EA. The claim that one does (and should) act for the sake of one's own eudaemonia loses much of its persuasive power when eudaemonia is construed not as something like the personal happiness in which an egoist would take a healthy interest but rather as a collection containing one's own (narrowly conceived) happiness, the (narrowly conceived) happiness of others, and possibly additional unrelated items. That is, while the conflict can be resolved by broadening one's reading of eudaemonia to include the eudaemonia of one's friends, if this leaves one's eudaemonia broader than oneself, the EA will be undercut.

The doctrine of the friend being another self resolves the difficulty by giving selfhood as broad a scope as eudaemonia. In the paradigm of the procreative relation, 'a parent is fond of his children because he regards them as something of himself' (1161b18f). In a way, the relation resembles that which one has to one's parts: '[A] person regards what comes from him as his own, as the owner regards his tooth or hair or anything' (1161b23f) -- and, 'what is our own is pleasant' (1169b33). The eudaemonia of one's friends is part of one's own because, and in the same way that, one's friends are parts of oneself.

One might be troubled by the fact that this reading seems to leave little room for what we might want to call genuine altruism. There is truth in this, but the responsibility for our discomfort is Aristotle's. Aristotle's explanations of friendship are uniformly self-oriented: since 'we are insofar as we are actualized,' loving one's own being involves loving the actualizations of one's own being (1168a5ff) -- and these include one's friends.²⁶

By way of a last word, perhaps I should point out that in attributing to Aristotle the account of friendship set forth in this paper I am -- I hope not too uncharitably -- ascribing to him opinions that I myself would not care to endorse. It seems to me that self-love is playing too great, and the wrong kind of, a role. As Robert Frost puts it in his poem, 'Hyla Brook': 'We love the things we love for what they are' -- not for what we have made them.²⁷

Notes

(*) I'm grateful to Richard Kraut, Gregory Vlastos, and -- especially -- Jennifer Whiting for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as to the anonymous readers provided by this Journal.

1. References, unless otherwise indicated, are to the Nicomachean Ethics (NE); the translations are generally those of Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett 1985). Throughout this paper, 'friendship,' 'love' and their cognates will be used to translate 'philia' and its relatives. A review of the difficulties in translating the term can be found in John Cooper, 'Aristotle on Friendship,' in A. Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1980) 301-40.
2. 1155b31, 1156b7-10, 1159a10, 1164a34, 1166a3, 1168a34, 1168b3; cf. also 1156a13.
3. Cooper, 'Aristotle on Friendship,' argues that pleasure- and utility-friendships have a substantial non-instrumental component. This is the point of distinguishing between essentially instrumental friendships (that have non-instrumental features, as in Cooper's example of the businessman who becomes willing to do small favors for a regular customer) and friendships that are essentially non-instrumental. Although Cooper's treatment tends to assimilate the different kinds of friendships to one another (on this point, see also note 17), it is clear that utility- and pleasure-friendships fall on the essentially instrumental side of the divide. In section V we will see a more principled way of spelling out the distinction between these and friendship for the sake of the friend.
So this is not to say that (true) friends don't have their uses. Aristotle is aware that friends have instrumental value (most notably at 1099a31-b2). The friend is a benefactor in the hour of need, and an opportunity for the exercise of virtue when fortune is generous (1155a5ff, 1169b11-16). At one point, Aristotle describes having friends as 'the greatest external good' (1169b10), a characterization that may suggest to some instrumental rather than intrinsic value. It is thus worth recalling that Aristotle thinks that external goods (such as health) can have both intrinsic and instrumental value, and that the latter need not preclude the former. See note 6.
4. Now it might be objected that while this is a natural way for us to understand friendship, it is not obviously so for Aristotle. Aristotle takes friends to love one another for virtue, and since one virtuous person is, qua virtuous person, like another, friends must be, as it were, a fungible commodity. Such a position conflicts so strongly with our pretheoretical understanding of friendship and with the general tone of Aristotle's discussion of it that its only support can be our inability to find a preferred construal of the claim that one loves a friend for his virtue. As we shall see, an alternative is available. Moreover, this reading will be extremely hard put to solve the puzzle I am about to pose, i.e., to explain why one loves just those virtuous people that one does love out of the many that one might.
5. For the former, see note 2. For the latter, 1166a30-33, 1166b1, 1169b6, 1170b6f, 1171b33; cf. also 1171a20.
6. To be sure, there do appear to be instrumental uses of one's friends: Aristotle states (to translate as literally as possible) that 'many things are done just as through instruments also as through friends and political power' (1099b1f), and that 'your friend, since he is another yourself, supplies what your own efforts cannot supply' (1169b6). But in the same, somewhat stilted way, one can make instrumental use of oneself (as in 'the movement of limbs that are the instruments' -- 1110a16). It is probably more appropriate to regard this kind of instrumentality as a sort of extended agency: 'what our friends achieve is, in a way, achieved through our agency, since the origin is in us' (1112b28). See note 3.
7. Jennifer Whiting presents such a view -- although not as an interpretation of Aristotle -- in 'Friends and Future Selves,' Philosophical Review 45 (1986), 547-80.
8. As does Whiting, ibid.
9. Cf. Edwin Hartman, Substance, Body and Soul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1977) 10-56; Jennifer Whiting, 'Form and Individuation in Aristotle,' History of Philosophy Quarterly 3 (1986), 359-77.
10. I'm not claiming that one desires the good for one's friend for his own sake only because he is another self. One might, for example, feel good will towards Masons, and so also to one's Masonic friends.
11. Before mentioning the tricky question, a caveat: Actually, we desire apparent goods for our apparent selves, and the base, Aristotle recognizes, may, in addition to mistaking apparent goods for goods, mistake their apparent selves for their real selves, as when they try to 'gratify their appetites and in general their feelings and the non-rational parts of the soul' rather than reason (1168b20; cf. 1168b30-1169a3). Moreover, the very base may not even desire goods for themselves at all -- partly because they find themselves unbearable, and partly because they may lack coherently organized personalities, i.e., full-fledged selves (1166b2-27). So, more precisely, when we desire the good for our own sakes, we do so because we are ourselves.
Now while Aristotle often enough seems to commit himself to the view that we desire the good for our own sakes because we are ourselves, other remarks indicate that we desire the good for ourselves for our own sakes on account of our own virtue. These views need not be taken as contradicting one another if the latter can be taken as sketching the internal structure of the former. Such a construal would also be convenient for the line of exegesis I am advocating in another way, since I am about to argue that it is causing the friend's virtues that makes him my friend. My attempt to be literal about the 'another self' locution should then make me want to say that it is causing my own virtues that makes me myself; and the kind of account of the relation between one's virtues and one's selfhood I have in mind would allow me to say something sufficiently like this. Providing a full-fledged account of this kind would take me too far afield, so I will not do it here. However, I'll defend a more modest version of the claim in section V.
12. Aristotle seems to be contrasting companionly friendship with that of relatives and possibly with the political friendships of the immediately preceding passages, so I take the scope of 'companionly friendship' to be what we ordinarily take as friendship, with the proviso that Aristotle would have in mind genuine, i.e., virtue-friendship.
13. After comparing the relation between parents and children to that between gods and men, Aristotle brings to our attention the crucial fact that gods and parents are respectively 'the causes of [the] being' of men and children (1162a4-7). And at 1161a17 Aristotle describes the father as 'the cause of his children's being.'
14. Cooper, 330f.
15. The phrase 'human mirror' is Cooper's, adapted from the Magna Moralia (MM). The 'human mirror' argument seems to me the more dubious of the two. First, in making it out Cooper draws heavily on the MM (1213a10-26), which should be used with caution when trying to establish the views of the NE. For even if, as some deny, the MM is authentic, it may represent a stage in the development of Aristotle's thought distinct from that of the NE. Cooper appears to regard the MM passage as a more straightforward form of the argument of NE 1169b27-1170a4 and of 1170a15-b7. But it is not clear to me 1) that the two just-mentioned passages both contain the same argument or 2) that either NE passage contains the argument of the MM passage. Indeed, the contrast between the generally admitted obscurity of the NE passages and the relative clarity of the MM passage casts doubt on the claim.
Second, Cooper prefers his view to Ross's alternative construal of 1169b27-1170a4, which he regards as circular. But it is not clear that the argument, properly understood, is circular. Cooper points out that, on Ross's construal, 'Aristotle simply assumes, altogether without explicit warrant, that the good man will have friends' (318) -- and this is an inappropriate assumption in an argument for having friends. But Cooper conflates the project of demonstrating 'the value to a person of his having friends' (318), with the distinct project of providing someone who has no friends with reasons to acquire them. Were Aristotle's aim the latter, rather than that of explaining to the virtuous person why his friends are valuable, the argument would indeed be circular. But notice that the argument, construed in this way, renders friendship essentially instrumental: a friendship formed in order to attain the pleasure promised by the argument would be one of the friendship-analogs, rather than true friendship.
If, instead, part of being virtuous is contributing to the virtue of others, and if -- as we shall see -- this has as a causal consequence that the virtuous man acquires friends, then the alleged circularity disappears. For then it is simply a fact that the virtuous man does have friends. Raising the question of the value of these friends is in such a case not at all the same as asking for reasons to make friends. So Ross-like interpretations, which do not require excursions to the MM and are thus to be preferred, remain open.
Given the foregoing, one might wonder why I adopt the 'human mirror' story at all. The reason is that even if these views were not in the foreground when the NE was composed, Aristotle may still have had 'human mirrors' in mind when thinking of the ways in which friends affect each other's virtue. There are undoubtedly many ways in which this happens, and Aristotle need not have enumerated in the NE all those he had discovered. For our purposes it suffices to supply plausibly Aristotelian examples of such causal relations.
16. Recall Physics 202b5, and see note 18 below.
17. When Cooper takes the function of these arguments to be that of 'defend[ing] the value of friendship only by showing that for human beings it is a necessary means to attaining certain broadly valuable psychological benefits' (Cooper, 332, italics mine) he is providing an unsatisfactory, because (solely) instrumental, account of friendship. And, not incidentally, an account that cannot explain the non-interchangeability of friends. Cooper's position in 'Aristotle on Friendship' seems to me schizophrenic: he denies that he is producing an essentially instrumental account of friendship, and in the first part of the paper seems more or less successful; but the latter half produces what is, denials notwithstanding, just such an account. Since the two parts of the paper were originally separately published papers (see Cooper's note 1), there may be an historical explanation for the final version's split personality. I will confine myself here to explaining why the story that Cooper gives is in fact essentially instrumental.
Mirrors - even human mirrors -- are tools used for a specified purpose; this is true despite Cooper's flat denial on p. 333. Those who cooperate with one in a shared activity are, on the account presented, instruments towards one's performance of that activity. Cooper distinguishes between shared activities like chess, in which co-participants need have solely instrumental value, and shared virtuous activities, which require intimate acquaintance in order to ascertain and apprehend the co-participant's virtue; such intimate acquaintance is, Cooper thinks, sufficient for friendship. A similar line is taken regarding 'human mirrors.'
This is an interesting argument, but its links will not bear the strain that Cooper puts on them. For one thing, intimate acquaintance is by no means sufficient for friendship (as anyone who has ever shared his living quarters will testify). For another, ascertaining the virtue of another need not require intimate acquaintance. Virtues are something like dispositional psychological states. We can imagine that psychologists discover ways of reading these states off of a person's nervous system. They then build virtuometers, which quickly and reliably evaluate a person's virtue index. (If we want to make the story less anachronistic, we can imagine that the gods, who see into the souls of men, sponsor Virtue Evaluation Oracles in downtown Athens.) Under such circumstances it is very easy for virtuous persons to find guaranteed-to-be-virtuous co-participants in virtuous activities. But it would be unreasonable to describe such people -- people like the stranger with whom I have agreed, on the basis of his 98.7 Composite Virtue Index, to cooperate in building a temple -- as friends. Such devices could also, with a little more story-telling, be made to take the place of 'human mirrors'; instead of using one's friend to study one's own virtue, one could take virtuometer readings. Stories like this one show that 'human mirrors' and co-participants in virtuous activities are, qua occupiers of these roles, simply instrumental means to an end; they can be replaced by gadgets like virtuometers or by virtuometer-certified strangers because they are already no more than tools, and any tool, qua tool, is replaceable by anything else that serves the same purpose. Cooper's account, then construes friends as essentially instrumental, and as a fungible commodity.
18. A question that might be raised is whether my account can be extended to 'civic friendship' -- the somewhat weaker form of philia that is found between fellow citizens. (Even if it cannot, this is not an objection to the account; for Aristotle thinks that 'we should set apart the friendship of families and that of companions' [1161b11f].) Now, the citizens of the Greek polis took one of its primary functions to be that of educating its citizens. This education involved not merely the transmission of skills and information but a broader mission, involving the inculcation of virtues, that we can call the shaping of character. This widely shared opinion was also held by Aristotle. (Cf. e.g., 1099b29-32, 1102a7-10, 1103b2-7, 1155a23, 1179b32-1180a15, 1180a35-b7.) If, as I have suggested, one's character, constituted at least partly by one's virtues, is at least part of what makes one who one is, then the polis is (partly) responsible for its citizens being who they are.
Of course the polis is not a person. To say that the polis is responsible for a person's virtues and character is to say that the responsibility is shared by his fellow citizens who, with him, constitute the polis. Each of this person's fellow citizens is (in a small degree) responsible for his virtues, and thus (to a similar degree) for his being who he is. If so, then each citizen is a procreator of his fellow citizens, and this will lead him to exhibit (a suitably weak form of) love towards them. Civic friendship, it turns out, can also be understood as derivative from the relation between a procreator and his creature.
19. And they do not -- barring the possibility that the corrupted friend has become another person (see note 22) -- cease to have been one another's procreators. This may explain one's residual goodwill towards an (uncorrupted) ex-friend (1165b31-35).
20. It may be possible to substantiate the claim on its second, stronger reading. While I won't attempt to do so here, it seems possible to defend the view that virtues are not merely characterizing but also individuating features, perhaps in the context of a reading that commits Aristotle to individual forms.
21. A similar implication is possibly carried by 1157a15, which describes friends for utility as persons who 'were never friends of each other, but of what was expedient for them'; one who befriends another for his virtue is, we may suppose, a friend of the other. Cf. also 1164a10.
22. If one were to argue for the stronger version of the claim (see note 20, above), one might want to treat this case as one in which the corrupted friend has become a different person, reading the passage against Aristotle's discussions of still-more-radical transformations that fail to preserve identity at 1159a9ff and 1166a20-24.
23. This may not always be true if these descriptions are given a 'rigid reading': what makes someone useful to me may be his virtues. A non-rigid reading is intended.
24. 1102a3; 1140a27 is seen as supporting the claim that the eudaemonia in question is one's own.
25. This is, if I correctly understand him, Vlastos's view. (Personal communication and unpublished notes.)
26. This reconciliation of Aristotle's theory of friendship with his eudaemonism may help to resolve an ambiguity I have been leaving open. We said that the procreator has the same being as his creature; and this is likely to prompt the reader familiar with Aristotle to ask whether the being they share is species being or individual being, i.e., whether the procreator and his creature are the same in kind or the same in number. Our discussion suggests that the more strongly one reads eudaemonism as a form of psychological egoism, the more one will be motivated to adopt the latter construal. Diogenes Laertius ascribes to Aristotle the saying that friends are 'one soul inhabiting two bodies' (V.20); on such a reading, this would literally be Aristotle's view.
27. It has occurred to me that Frost may have had Aristotle's views of friendship in mind when he wrote this poem. Frost would have shared the exegetical orthodoxy of his time in taking Aristotle to hold that things of a kind have their form in common but are individuated by their matter. Virtues are specified by the form: if brooks had forms, a brook's virtues might include being full of clear, flowing water. Frost seems to be saying that he loves Hyla Brook not for its brookish virtues (which it possesses scantily, if at all) but for the matter that makes it differ from other brooks: its dried mud and dead leaves. What we love is not the form, and the virtues specified by it, but the individuating matter (hule). (The pun on hyla and hule has been thought of by others -- e.g., Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1979], 40, 45, 64f -- and it is not extravagant to suppose that it may have occurred to Frost as well.)