Neera K. Badhwar

_Emma_ is a novel about the centrality of love and friendship to its heroine’s happiness. Emma’s friendship with Mr. Knightley illustrates Aristotle’s conception of the highest kind of friendship: a friendship of virtuous people who share their lives through conversation and joint activities. Critics who disagree with this claim misunderstand either Emma’s character or Aristotle’s conception of virtue. Some critics reject the Aristotelian-Austenian conception of a good friendship on the grounds that a good friendship is often in conflict with moral and epistemic virtue. Good friends are, and ought to be, epistemically biased, and willing to do immoral things for their friends’ sake. But while there may be moral dilemmas in which whatever one does is wrong, it is only in the friendships of bad or “morally casual” people that there is frequent conflict between friendship and moral and epistemic virtue. Such conflict is not inherent in the nature of friendship.

There has been a marked revival of interest among philosophers in the topic of friendship. This collection of fifteen essays presents an admirable range of the diverse contemporary approaches to friendship within philosophy. The book is divided into three sections. The first centers on the nature of friendship, the difference between friendship and other personal loves, and the importance of friendship in the individual's life. The second section discusses the moral significance of friendship and the response of various ethical theories and theorists (Aristotelian, Christian, Kantian, and consequentialist) to the phenomenon of friendship. The last section deals with the importance of personal and civic friendship in a good society. Badhwar's introduction is a comprehensive critical discussion of the issues raised by the essays: it relates them to each other, as well as to historical and contemporary discussions not included in the anthology, thus providing the reader with an integrated overview of the essays and their place in the larger philosophical picture. Contributors: Robert M. Adams; Julia Annas; Neera Kapur Badhwar; Marcia Baron; Lawrence Blum; Nathaniel Branden; John M. Cooper; Marilyn Friedman; C. S. Lewis; H. J. Paton; Peter Railton; Amelie O. Rorty; Mary Lyndon Shanley; Nancy Sherman; Michael Stocker; Laurence Thomas.

In “ReImagining the Quality of Life,” Lorraine Besser challenges the frameworks typically used for evaluating the quality of people’s lives, especially those with Alzheimer’s disease or those in minimally conscious states (MCS). These frameworks rely on two standards: agency and sentience. The first assumes that the absence of agency makes a life prudentially worthless (worthless to the individual whose life it is), because cognitive activity is prudentially valuable “only when it reflects agency;” whereas the second assumes that the absence of pleasure makes a life prudentially worthless, because pleasure is the only experiential value. Besser argues, however, that cognitive engagement with an activity or experience that a patient finds interesting is also prudentially valuable, even if it doesn’t reflect agency, and even if it isn’t pleasurable. The interesting “describes a qualitative aspect of our experience of a robust form of cognitive engagement, which resonates with us in a fashion similar to pleasure.” Besser’s view is an important contribution to the literature on the quality of life, and to the lives of patients with Alzheimer’s or MCS. However, I challenge Besser’s view that interesting experiences need not have a positive resonance to such patients, even though they are similar to pleasure.

Friendship is a cardinal human value, and requires both the "other-regarding" and the "self-regarding" virtues. Thus an analysis of friendship can illuminate the nature of morality, and provide a test of adequacy of rival moral theories. But even when it is recognized that friendship involves virtue, the role of justice is usually ignored, thanks to the idea that justice is an impersonal, "public" virtue. But justice is crucially important in friendship, and is connected as well with benevolence. The current attempt of certain philosophers to see justice as stemming from reason, and benevolence from sympathy, is an attempt to save something of Kantian rationalism, which sees all of morality as stemming from pure reason. But neither a partial, nor a consistent, rationalism is justified by the relevant facts: our moral consciousness, and our knowledge of moral development and behaviour. Morality must be explained in terms of both reason, and emotion and desire. And only then can the virtues of friendship be properly understood. ;These virtues are best displayed in the friendship that is an end in itself, where friends love each other as unique and irreplaceable persons. The end love of friendship is quite different from agapaic love, which ignores the person by ignoring her qualitative identity; and from Platonic love, which ignores the person by ignoring her numerical identity. A moral theory that cannot accommodate the end love of friendship as an intrinsically moral phenomenon, cannot accommodate the idea of a person as an end in herself. Utilitarianism and Kantian rationalism both suffer from this defect. Again, loving a friend as an end implies loving her as a part of one's own happiness or well-being. Morality too, then, can be an end in itself as well as a part of one's own well-being. This "Aristotelian view" challenges the standard distinction between deontological and teleological theories, where the former holds that morality is an end in itself, unrelated to human good, and the latter holds that it is not an end in itself, but related as a means to an independently definable human good.

Lawrence Haworth's book, Autonomy, discusses “Autonomy as a Psychological Idea”, and “Autonomy as a Normative Idea”. Part 1 discusses autonomy in relation to rationality, agency, and responsibility, defends it against Skinnerian sceptics, and outlines a theory of autonomous decision-making and the autonomous task environment. Haworth's conception of autonomy integrates and builds on the concepts of S. I. Benn, G. Dworkin, H. Frankfurt, and R. W. White. Part 2 centres on social/political theory, and not, despite the book's subtitle, on ethics as such. Haworth argues that only autonomy, and not liberty or happiness, is an intrinsic value, and fundamental right. His “autonomist” theory of liberty rights, a form of revisionary liberalism derived from the later idealists, is opposed to the classical liberal/libertarian theory. The arguments prompt a re-examination of the role of autonomy in the arguments for liberty, but do not, in my view, make a persuasive case for “autonomism” against classical liberalism. The book is chiefly noteworthy for its success in covering many important topics connected with autonomy, in an impressively short space, and in an always clear and often very insightful way.

I take friendship to be a practical and emotional relationship marked by mutual and (more-or-less) equal goodwill, liking, and pleasure. Friendship can exist between siblings, lovers, parent and adult child, as well as between otherwise unrelated people. Some friendships are valued chiefly for their usefulness. Such friendships are instrumental or means friendships. Other friendships are valued chiefly for their own sakes. Such friendships are noninstrumental or end friendships. In this paper I am concerned only with end friendships, and the challenge they pose to consequentialism. In an end friendship, one loves the friend as an essential part of one's system of ends, and not solely, or even primarily, as a means to an independent end - career advancement, amusement, philosophical illumination, or greater happiness in the universe. In such love, one loves the friend for the person she is, i.e., for her essential rather than incidental features. These include both her character traits - the fundamental intellectual, psychological, moral, and aesthetic qualities that constitute an individual's personality - and her unique perspective on herself and others: her view of the important and unimportant, her interest in herself and others. Thus in end friendship the friend cannot be replaced by another, for no other can have her essential features. Nor can she be replaced by a more efficient means to one's ends, or abandoned on their achievement, for it is not as a means that one 2 loves her. It is this necessary irreplaceability that most obviously marks off end friendship from means or instrumental friendship, in which the friend is replaceable.i Hence to love a friend as an end is to place a special value on her - to believe that her value is not outweighed, say, simply by the greater needs of others - or the needs of a greater number of others ("Sorry dear, there are more drowning on this end").ii End friendship (hereafter simply "friendship") is a cardinal human value..

Liberal political theory sees justice as the "first virtue" of a good society, the virtue that guides individuals' conceptions of their own good, and protects the equal liberty of all to pursue their ends, so long as these ends and pursuits are just. But ever since Marx's declaration that "liberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man...,"i liberal society has been frequently criticized for falling seriously short of the conditions of a good society.ii A prominent recent criticism of this sort has been voiced by "communitarians," who charge that the primacy of rights in liberalism reveals a failure to appreciate the value of friendship and community, and tends to undermine their possibility.iii My aim in this paper is to defend liberal political theory, understood as the theory that justifies a polity of individual rights and justice, against this charge.iv My main argument will be directed at the assumption that there is an inherent tension between rights and justice on the one hand, and familial love and friendship on the other. According to the communitarian, two or more individuals constitute a community when they share a common conception of the good, and see this good as partly constitutive of their identities or selves.v Such "constitutive community," in Michael Sandel's words, may be a close friendship or family relationship, or an intermediate association such as a neighborhood organization, or a comprehensive political community. The communitarian charges that in making justice the first virtue of social institutions, liberalism undermines community at all levels, and this for two reasons. First, liberalism demands that we revise or surrender our conceptions of the good - including our attachments and commitments to family and friends - if they should turn out to be unjust. But this demand, the communitarian claims, requires attitudes 2 that are inconsistent with these attachments and commitments..

I. Introduction Sex has been thought to reveal the most profound truths about individuals, laying bare their deepest desires and fears to their partners and themselves. In ‘Carnal Knowledge,’ Wendy Doniger states that this view is to be found in the texts of ancient India, in the Hebrew Bible, in Renaissance England and Europe, as well as in contemporary culture, including Hollywood films.1 Indeed, according to Josef Pieper, the original, Hebrew, meaning of `carnal knowledge’ was `immediate togetherness, intimate presence.’ 10 But equally prevalent in both ancient and contemporary culture is the view that sex generates the deepest illusions, hiding people’s true selves behind layers of deception, blindness, deception, or self-deception.2 Tthere is, however, no contradiction in holding both that sexual deception and illusion blindness are widespread, and that sex reveals some profound truths about us. Indeed, if deception or illusion blindness about our sexual desires and fantasies is widespread, one likely explanation is surely that many of us implicitly or explicitly believe that our desires and fantasies say something important about us – or at least that we believe that others believe that they do. There is little reason to hide from ourselves or others that which we regard as unimportant. But while such blindness to or pretence about one’s own or partner’s sexual needs and desires saves one from embarrassment or from the effort to understand and satisfy one’s partner or oneself, it also subverts a central value of any fulfilling personal..

The Aristotelian view that the moral virtues–the virtues of character informed by practical wisdom–are essential to an individual's happiness, and are thus in an individual's self-interest, has been little discussed outside of purely scholarly contexts. With a few exceptions, contemporary philosophers have tended to be suspicious of Aristotle's claims about human nature and the nature of rationality and happiness. But recent scholarship has offered an interpretation of the basic elements of Aristotle's views of human nature and happiness, and of reason and virtue, that brings them more into line with common-sense thinking and with contemporary philosophical and empirical psychology. This makes it fruitful to reexamine the question of the role of virtue in self-interest.