Deep Friendship, Virtue and Fulfilment: Retrieving and Exploring the Place of Friendship in Eudaimonistic Virtue Ethics

Abstract

Over the past fifty years, neo-Aristotelian eudaimonistic virtue ethics has emerged in the ethical landscape as a viable alternative to the twin towers of utilitarianism or deontology. Yet the experience of deep friendship has been largely neglected, despite occupying about a fifth of Aristotle’s ethical output. Also missing is the role of the final cause as the principal cause governing the ethical life. These neglected insights feature prominently in the writing of a philosopher who is little known outside French Catholic circles, namely, Marie Dominique Philippe O.P., who used the experience of deep friendship as the foundation for ethical exploration. Part One of this thesis seeks to retrieve these insights, which are only hinted at in modern virtue ethics literature, showing how the logic of final causality governs the unfolding of Aristotle’s ethical writing. By means of an initial exposé of the specific relation between final causality and deep friendship, three significant aspects from Philippe’s analysis of friendship are outlined and explained, namely, the experience of ‘spiritual love’, the ‘intention of life’ and the ongoing ‘amical choice’. I furnish these insights with examples of my own. This culminates in an original integration of these insights as a way to clarify why ‘virtuous friends’ become ‘other selves’, where utility or pleasure friends do not. At the core of this thesis, is an analysis of the close relationship between virtue, practical wisdom and deep friendship, which I argue are co-constitutive. I employ an original musical analogy to evoke the strong links between them. From here I explore and develop the contribution that deep friendship makes to the maturation of both practical wisdom and, by way of example, the virtue of fortitude. Part Three of this thesis applies these insights to wider questions, including the perennial egoist objection to eudaimonistic virtue ethics. I then explore ways that deep friendship opens those involved outward toward a wider ethics, beyond the immediate scope of the friendship itself. Finally, I offer future avenues of enquiry for both natural theology and metaethics from the final causality implied in deep friendship.