Friendship with a Filter

Abstract An adequate moral theory must arguably be compatible with the attitudes and practical requirements of deep friendship. Bernard Williams suggested that the decision procedure required by both deontology and consequentialism inserts a fetishising filter between the natural moral motivation of any normal person to prioritise friends and the decision to act on it. But this interjects ‘one thought too many’ into the moral reaction mechanism. It is standardly assumed that virtue ethics is somehow immune to this objection. This chapter explores this assumption and finds it wanting. Virtue ethics filters friendship through phronesis and thus inserts an extra thought into the mechanism in question. To escape Williams’s curse, the only way is to argue that the extra thought required by virtue ethics is not ‘one thought too many’. The chapter closes with an attempt to show that, contra deontology, the friendship motivation in virtue ethics is derived from the moral virtue, not the intellectual filter, and, contra consequentialism, Aristotelian phronesis does not require the maximisation of value.