Epistemic Partiality in Friendship

Abstract

Analytic moral philosophers have been taking a renewed interest in friendship in recent years. They have been especially liable to consider friendship in connection with debates over partiality and impartiality in ethics. Many important styles of ethical theory hold up impartiality and equal treatment—under one or another interpretation—as central moral concepts and ideals. Yet friendship and other close relations between persons seem to involve partiality and differential treatment. We care more about what befalls our friends than about what happens to strangers, and we are more motivated to advance our friends’ interests than those of strangers. We seem even to have special responsibilities toward our friends which we don’t have toward strangers. If friendship necessarily involves such partiality, then there is a tension, at least, between the constitutive elements and dispositions of friendship and those of morality: they seem to pull in opposite directions. Contemporary moral theorists have responded to this tension in a variety of ways. Some have sought to bring the apparent partiality of friendship under the wing of a more fundamental impartiality, thus reconciling friendship and the moral. Others have insisted on the primacy of friendship, and partiality, over impartial moral conceptions—