Preparing for a class session on Aristotle’s virtue ethics, I came across a passage in Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue that gets to the heart of the idea of my recent post, “Ethics for Exiles.”
It concerns the role of friendship in ethics and in political life.
Friendship of course, on Aristotle’s view, involves affection. But that affection arises within a relationship defined in terms of common allegiance and a common pursuit of goods. The affection is secondary, which is not in the least to say unimportant. In a modern context, affection is often the central issue; our friends are said to be those whom we like, perhaps whom we like very much. ‘Friendship’ has become for the most part the name of a type of emotional state rather than a type of social and political relationship. E.M. Forster once remarked that if it came to a choice between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country.
That’s the wind-up. Here’s the pitch:
In an Aristotelian perspective anyone who can formulate such a contrast has no country, has no polis: he is a citizen of nowhere, an internal exile wherever he lives. Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection. They posses at best that inferior form of friendship which is founded on mutual advantage.
Reference
Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, third edition (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), p. 156.
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