Friendship and Social Media

A Philosophical Exploration

Diane Jeske

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351809696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Friendship is regarded as crucial to living a good life. But how does friendship make our lives better? Do all friendships make our lives better? What sorts of interactions are necessary for maintaining valuable friendships?

This book answers these questions via a philosophical exploration of friendship and the ways that it contributes value to our lives. Diane Jeske uses this philosophical analysis to assess the impact of our ever-growing use of social media: Do interactions via social media interfere with our ability to maintain genuine friendships? Do such interactions undermine the contribution of friendship to the value of our lives?

In addressing these topics, Jeske examines the contemporary notion of a 'frenemy, ' the ways in which we deliberately craft our social media personas, the role of the physical body in friendship, and the ways in which social media's exacerbation of our fear of being left out and of comparison-based envy can impact our relationships.

Written in a clear and engaging style, Friendship and Social Media brings philosophical rigor and clarity to the task of determining how we can responsibly use social media in our own lives. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the ethics of interpersonal relationships and the social impact of technology.

What good are friends?

Four

Suppose that you and a companion, Robinson, are hiking in the desert and you come upon a hut inhabited by a hermit named Herman. Herman has lived alone for many years, meditating and contemplating reality. He tells you that he has no friends and in fact does not want any: he left friendship behind when he moved to his hut in the desert. When you ask Herman whether he regrets this decision, he replies that he does not because he is quite happy and thinks that his life is valuable and well worth living. Robinson, impressed with Herman, tells you that he is thinking of emulating him by finding an equally remote spot to build his own hut and live in solitude without friends. When he asks what you think of his plan, what do you say?

I think most of us would respond to Robinson’s plan in the same way: we would tell him that it is a truly lousy plan! When Robinson asks us to explain our judgment, we will point out to him all of the ways that friends enhance our lives. Most obviously, friends provide us with a great deal of pleasure because we enjoy spending time in their company and engaging in various activities, such as going hiking in the desert, with them. They alleviate our pain by providing solace and comfort in difficult times, and they aid us in carrying out both trivial and non-trivial elements of our life plans by, for example, watering our plants when we are out of town and reading drafts of our books or articles. They encourage us to use our talents and they help us to understand ourselves.

Suppose, though, that Robinson points out that what we have shown him is that friendship, at least a good deal of the time, brings us other goods such as pleasure and self-knowledge. But, Robinson points out, Herman has achieved those goods through meditation and reflection. Does Herman, then, and potentially Robinson, have no need for friendship? Is friendship worth having for its own sake or only because there are other things worth having for their own sake, such that most of us, unlike Herman, can only get those other things by having friends? Friendship is clearly, with respect to most of our lives, instrumentally valuable, but is it intrinsically valuable?

In this chapter I will consider how friendship can (and, of course, often does) contribute to living a good life by considering both its instrumental value, i.e. by considering the good things that friendship produces, but also by arguing that friendship is plausibly understood as having intrinsic value. It is important to always keep in mind that the claim that friendship has intrinsic value does not imply either of the necessity claims that we discussed in Chapter One:

Necessity of friends: Necessarily, if a person lacks friends, then that person is not leading a good life.

Better with friends: Necessarily, if a person has at least one friend, then that person has a better life than she would if she lacked friends (holding everything else about her life constant).

If friendship has intrinsic value, then in adding a friend to a life, necessarily, value is added. But something that has intrinsic value may also be instrumentally bad, i.e. it may have intrinsically bad consequences. For example, the pleasure that someone gets from smoking can cause her to continue smoking, which then leads to health issues such as emphysema. However, if friendship has intrinsic value, and it is usually accompanied by good consequences (that may be very difficult to get in any other way) that outweigh its bad consequences, we will be able to conclude that it is generally rational, in the prudential sense (i.e. considering only our own good) to pursue at least some friendships.

In this chapter, after considering in sections 4.1–4.4 the instrumental and intrinsic value of friendship, I will consider the connection between friendship and morality (4.5) and also the connection between friendship and rationality (4.6), considered in the broadest sense as acting on the balance of one’s practical reasons. Even if one can live a good life without friends, I argue, there are other ways that friends contribute to our lives, because what it is rational or moral for us to do goes beyond the pursuit of a valuable life for ourselves. What is important or significant cannot be equated with what is good for us or what makes our lives more valuable. While it is important to consider how friendship makes our lives go better, it is also important to keep in mind other ways in which friendship is relevant to our deliberations about how to feel, to think, and to act.

4.1 Value and its incarnations

4.1.1 Intrinsic vs instrumental value

Before considering the ways in which friendship contributes to a valuable life, we need to equip ourselves with some important distinctions that philosophers have employed in theorizing about the nature of value. In Chapter One I introduced the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value:

Intrinsic value and instrumental value: To say that X has intrinsic value is to say that X is valuable for its own sake, or as an end. To say that X has instrumental value is to say that X is a means to the production of something that has intrinsic value.

In considering the ways in which friendship might make our lives more valuable, we need to consider both its instrumental and its intrinsic value. Friendship, it seems obvious, often has good consequences, and in section 4.2 we will examine three of the potentially many such that friendship can, and often does, produce: pleasure, self-knowledge, and self-development. For each of these goods that friendship produces, there will arise the question: is it intrinsically or instrumentally valuable? In order for friendship to be instrumentally valuable, it does not matter what the answer to that question is: as long as friendship leads ultimately, either directly or indirectly, to something of intrinsic value, then it is instrumentally valuable.

Does friendship itself have intrinsic value? Does it have value regardless of whether it produces pleasure, self-knowledge, self-development, or anything else of either intrinsic or instrumental value? It is, I think, always difficult to defend any claim to the effect that something has intrinsic value. First, we need to be able to isolate the thing that we are considering, in this case friendship, from all of its standard consequences, and this is often quite challenging: when I think about my friendships, I almost inevitably think about how much I enjoy the company of my friends, how they have supported me in my career, how they have offered comfort in hard times, etc. How can I think about a friendship apart from all of the effects, distinct from itself, that it has on my life? We can try to employ the so-called ‘isolation test’ in order to determine whether something, X, has intrinsic value: consider a world in which X does not exist, and then compare that with a world that is exactly the same as the first world except in so far as X is now added to the world. As we noted in Chapter One, however, it is extraordinarily difficult to add a friendship to a world and still leave everything else constant, but I think we have to try to accomplish this task in order to decide for ourselves whether friendship has intrinsic value.

Second, even if I manage this task, what sort of argument can I give to someone else in order to convince her that friendship is (or is not) intrinsically valuable? We can encourage her to perform the isolation test, but what if she claims that the addition of X makes the world no more valuable while, after engaging in the test, we claim that it does? I am not sure that there is anything else that we can do at this point, except to reconsider the two worlds and to encourage our disputant to do the same. After all, something’s having intrinsic value is a matter of the nature of the thing, considered in and of itself, and so pointing to something beyond that thing is irrelevant.

However, one way in which philosophers have attempted to argue for the claim that a certain activity, object, or relationship is an intrinsic part of a good life for a human person is to examine the nature of the human person and attempt to somehow link up the proposed activity, etc., to what seems plausibly an excellent or worthwhile life for a being of that nature. This approach is famously used by Aristotle and, at least to an extent, by John Stuart Mill. Of course, in order to convince ourselves or another that friendship is intrinsically good using this approach, we need to have some prior understanding not only of the ‘nature of the human person’ but also of what it would be for such a being to live a worthwhile life. But a worthwhile life is a good life, so how can we have a prior understanding of a good life, i.e. prior to knowing what has intrinsic value? So, I think, the best that we can likely do is to reflect on whatever is proposed as having intrinsic value and do our best to carry out the isolation test, difficult as that inevitably is.

In so far as some particular friendship has good consequences, we can say that it is a good friendship. Of course, this sense of ‘good friendship’ is different from a more common usage of that term: we often mean by ‘good friend’ a ‘close friend.’ Often, I think, those that we think of as good friends in one sense of the term are also good friends in the other sense of the term, but the two can come apart: I may really enjoy spending time with, say, Sally, but not feel as close to her as I feel to Linus or to Lucy. Similarly, I might be very close to Linus but, because Linus is often depressed, not always enjoy spending time with him. Or perhaps Linus is quite ill, so is not well placed to provide much in the way of emotional comfort or support to me. So the most instrumentally valuable friendships may not be the closest friendships, and vice versa.

On the other hand, it is probably more likely that if by ‘good friendship’ we mean to be talking about an intrinsically good friendship, then this sense of good friendship will overlap with our notion of ‘good friend’ in the sense of a ‘close friend.’ Close friends are ones with whom we are particularly intimate and with whom there is the most mutual concern; in other words, the components of the friendship relation are exemplified in a close friendship to a greater degree than in a less close one, and it is plausible to think that the greater the intimacy and concern, the greater the intrinsic value of friendship. After all, if friendship is intrinsically valuable, then that value is in some way determined by the value of the components.¹ So it is plausible to think that a closer friendship – in the sense of a more deeply caring and intimate friendship – is a more intrinsically valuable one than a less close friendship.

4.1.2 Subjective vs objective value

In discussions of value, one will often hear the claim, “Well, that might be good for you, but that doesn’t mean that it is good for me.” This claim is ambiguous as it stands. One potential reading of it is the following: that, say, friendship might have good consequences for you, but that does not mean that friendship will or would have good consequences for me. We can imagine Herman saying that to you after you insist to him that he is missing out on something good in not having friends in his life. And this is something that is always important to keep in mind: for anything such as friendship, its good consequences will always be contingent upon its circumstances, in particular upon the nature of the parties to the friendship and upon the other circumstances of their lives.

But there is another reading of the claim, a reading according to which something’s intrinsic value is always a relative matter, determined by an individual’s subjective attitudes toward the relevant thing. Thus, the claim can be read as an endorsement of what I will call ‘value subjectivism’:

Value subjectivism: X is intrinsically good for person Y if and only if Y has the appropriate subjective attitude toward X.

What is the appropriate subjective attitude? There are a variety of suggestions that philosophers advocating value subjectivism have made, but the one that we will consider is that of desiring or wanting X intrinsically, i.e. desiring or wanting X for its own sake and not merely in virtue of its consequences. According to such a view, then, friendship is good for Herman if and only if Herman desires intrinsically that he have friends. So if Herman does not desire friends intrinsically but I do, then friendship is intrinsically good for me but not for Herman. In section 4.3 we will consider the value of friendship according to a version of value subjectivism where the appropriate subjective attitude is desiring intrinsically.

Finally, we need to consider whether friendship is objectively intrinsically valuable (section 4.4), where we are understanding objective value according to:

Value objectivism: To say that X has objective intrinsic value is to say that X has intrinsic value regardless of anyone’s subjective attitudes toward X.²

If friendship has objective intrinsic value then, regardless of Herman’s attitudes toward friendship, i.e. regardless of whether Herman wants, values, or approves of friendship, his having friends would be good for its own sake. Of course, we can notice that even if friendship has objective intrinsic value, if Herman has only negative attitudes toward it, it will probably not be as instrumentally valuable in his life as it would be in the life of someone who values and approves of friendship. For example, if Herman dislikes having friends, he is likely to derive far less pleasure from having them than would someone who values having friends. Similarly, Herman’s negative attitudes may make it more difficult for him to derive self-knowledge and self-improvement from his interactions with them. His attitudes will certainly make it more difficult for him to sustain any friendships that he manages to form.

In the following sections I will consider three options. First, in section 4.2 I will consider the instrumental value of friendship, in particular with respect to the consequences of pleasure, self-knowledge, and self-development. Second, in section 4.3, I will consider friendship as intrinsically valuable according to one version of value subjectivism, a version according to which the relevant subjective attitude for determining whether some X is valuable for a person Y is Y’s intrinsic desiring. Third, in section 4.4, I will consider friendship as objectively intrinsically valuable, i.e. as valuable regardless of anyone’s subjective attitudes toward it. Finally, in sections 4.5 and 4.6, I will consider friendship’s contribution to the moral life and its role in rational deliberation.

4.2 The consequences of friendship

4.2.1 Pleasure

Pleasure (or at least certain pleasures) has long been regarded as having intrinsic value, i.e. as being good for its own sake. After all, when we ask someone why some X, be it money, vacations, career success, development of talents, sex, a new car, or a summer home, is worth having, the answer often takes the form, “Because I will enjoy it,” or, “Because it will get me Y and I will enjoy Y.” However, if we push the issue and ask, “OK, but why do you want pleasure, or to enjoy yourself?” we are likely to get a puzzled look. It seems that if you know what pleasure is, you know why it is worth having: just because of what it is, considered in and of itself.

Some philosophers have advocated Hedonism as a theory of intrinsic value:

Hedonism: All and only pleasure has intrinsic value, and all and only pain is intrinsically bad.

Hedonism is a monistic account of value: it holds that one and only one type of thing, namely pleasure, has intrinsic value. We do not, however, have to accept Hedonism in order to accept that pleasure is one of the types of things that has intrinsic value. We can accept a pluralistic account of value, according to which pleasure is one of several or many types of things that has intrinsic value. One reason to accept that pleasure is at least one of the things that has intrinsic value is the following thought experiment: imagine a world in which you have all of the things (other than pleasure) that you take to have intrinsic value. Now change that world in just one respect: you come to enjoy or take pleasure in all of those other intrinsically valuable elements of your life. Surely your life is now even better than it was before.

There are, as with any significant philosophical issue, plenty of questions that would need to be addressed in order to defend the claim that pleasure is intrinsically valuable, most importantly, ‘What is pleasure?’ But, given our scope, we will set those issues aside and simply consider how friendship contributes to a pleasurable life. After all, a further, important reason for thinking that pleasure is intrinsically valuable is a consideration that I raised in Chapter One: it is, I think, very difficult to describe someone as living a happy life if she is not enjoying or taking pleasure from her life. So if we are inclined to think that the maximally valuable ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: friendship, philosophy, and Facebook
• One: Friendship and the good life
• Two: The nature of friendship
• Three: Friendship online
• Four: What good are friends?
• Five: Social media and the value of friendship
• Index