You're listening to journal entries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish. I'm Wesley Buckwalter. In this episode, Jessica Isserow talks about her paper "On Having Bad Persons as Friends", which was published in the journal Philosophical Studies in 2018. Jessica is a lecturer in moral and political philosophy at the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds, where she conducts research in meta ethics, normative ethics and moral psychology.

What the paper's trying to do is to give an account or an explanation or see if there's a justification we can offer for an intuition I think a lot of us have that someone who befriends or pursues a friendship with someone who's morally vicious or quite morally bad or deeply morally flawed has gone wrong somewhere. And I go through a number of different explanations of what we could be picking up on there, what the relevant moral fault or failing could be. And I think all of the possibilities I go through are getting something close to the truth.

But I don't think they get to the heart of the matter. So what I try to argue is that, where you've really gone wrong here is in the choice you've made. I think your choice reflects disordered moral priorities on your part. Basically, you haven't got your moral priorities straight if you've chosen to pursue that sort of friendship. 

I do  feel like there's this danger with moral philosophy, where sometimes we sort of say, "I have this intuition, don't you? Let's just run with it!" So just to get you on board with the intuition if you're not already, is, imagine you're at a cocktail party or just a party. It doesn't have to involve cocktails. And imagine you encounter there's someone who is quite belligerent or obnoxious and quite openly sexist. And you just think, man, that guy seems like a real jerk. And then they approach you and they say, Wesley, we have a really close friend in common. And I think your first thought, I think, would be really? like, I can't think of anyone close to me who would, you know, want to hang out with you, with you would want to spend time with you and pursue a close relationship with you.

I think you'd be surprised, at least I think. And if they named the relevant friends, you might think, huh? I might want to follow up on this. I wonder what's going on there. Something morally weird seems to be going on there. So I think one characteristic feature here, the sort of person I'm imagining is they have moral character flaws, moral vices that we tend to view as particularly serious. So not such as something like they're a bit rude or they're a bit miserly, but, you know, they're quite nasty, nasty or cruel streak.

Especially with respect to certain kinds of people, perhaps like they're quite bigoted or prejudiced. They're racist or sexist, for example. So those sorts of flaws would be the ones that be relevant for guiding us towards the sort of person I'm thinking about. And I think it's also important to specify that it's just that the person's a little bit racist or sexist and that doesn't really inform or influence their thoughts or their behavior in any way. I'm talking about someone for whom these sorts of vices really do have an important impact on how they navigate their way around the world like who they want to hire for a job, what sort of political party they would vote for.

Right. And, um, it's fairly important as well that these attitudes are to some degree explicit. So I certainly do want to say everyone who has an implicit bias, which may very well be most probably most of us is therefore a bad person. I'm not talking about those sorts of things. I'm talking about someone who has these morally serious character flaws that really does have a meaningful impact on their behavior. 

I think a lot of politicians would probably fit the bill. I was just thinking of Australia politicians like Peter Dutton. I'm not sure you heard of him. He's he's had some policies that people think are quite clearly racist. And I don't know he's not such a kind of, you know, cartoonishly evil racist. I couldn't imagine someone, my parents generation saying, oh, I went to this business dinner and Peter Dutton was there. He's actually quite a funny guy. You know, we're going for golf on the weekend.

You know, so he's not so cartoonishly evil, I think. No one I know would even do that. But I would nonetheless say really? him? like, you know, he's a bit, you know, morally questionable in terms of his policies and his moral beliefs. So I guess the politicians' one might be a good example, although I think we've got this difficulty now because of your politicians' examples and mine. Maybe the Kanye West example is better. Maybe if you saw Beyonce hanging out with Kanye West, you know, in your latest tabloid, or magazine, you might say, oh, really?

I kind of thought she was better than that. Why is she why does she want to hang around him? So that might be the kind of case you're not kind of worried the person's...there's like something seriously gone wrong. You still think they've made a kind of a bad moral call or an error in moral judgment or there's something you think is morally amiss there. 

The focus isn't on sort of associative friendships like work colleagues, you get along with or your Facebook friends. It's definitely on what's sometimes called true or companion friendship. And so the kind of heuristic here'll be something like if your electricity goes down, who you going to call to ask to stay at their place or crash on their couch. If there's a personal problem, who are you going to confide in? Who are you going to trust? Kind of who you going to call type test. That's a heuristic. But in terms of a kind of positive characterization I can offer, usually there'll be the following. I call them characteristic features. A lot of people would take them to be definitive of companion or true friendship that things like, you know, you really desire the person's company, you like them and you value them for their own sake. You're not just friends with them because they give you some other sort of good. You value them as a person. You share experiences together, you trust one another. Those sorts of things would be the kinds of characteristic signs of companion friendship with the kind of interested in.

In the paper, I walk through different accounts, different explanations you might give of what's gone wrong here. Where, if at all, the person's made some kind of error or moral mistake.

So the first of these is the dessert hypothesis. So this basically says, you know, if Wesley is hanging out with Kanye West on the weekend, something's morally gone amiss there. What is it? Well, the dessert hypothesis says, you know, it seems like Wesley is just you know, Kanye West doesn't deserve Wesley's friendship. You know, he's giving him something he just doesn't deserve the goods of friendship, that kind of dividends of friendship.

These are goods of which this morally bad person is undeserving. So that's where you've gone wrong, really giving someone something that they just don't deserve. The objection to the dessert view I guess it kind of presupposes that something I think a lot of people share a kind of organizing aim or ambition, which is if we really want to, you know, accommodate duties of friendship within the moral sphere to some degree, we shouldn't do it in such a way that we end up grossly mischaracterizing what duties of friendship are or entail.

And I think the dessert view runs the risk of doing that. So I think that we often give our friends things they don't deserve. We might give them a second chance if they don't deserve it. We might forgive them even if they haven't repented completely. If they don't deserve our forgiveness. And it's not obvious to me we're doing something wrong every time we do that. In fact, I think a lot of people would say that's quite a sign of virtue of some degree or a morally good character trait.

If you're forgiving in this way and so I worry that the dessert view is in general is encouraging this rather different perspective of our friends, where we're kind of moral bookkeepers. We're kind of doling out the goods in so far as we feel like our friends have earned it. And I think that's the wrong kind of approach to take to how we interact with our friends. 

So the second hypothesis I look at. So this is different to the desert view. The dessert view effectively says something strange, which is you're doing wrong by this bad person, in a sense, by giving them something they don't deserve.

You're not really treating them like a full fledged moral agent in some way. But the abetting says something rather different, which I think is an intuition a lot of people have. Whenever I pitch these sorts of cases to them, they say, well, the people you're really doing wrong by are others, the victims of this bad person's attitudes or their behavior. So if this person you're fostering this close friendship with this quite racist, for example, then the victims of their racist behavior, attitudes are the people you're really doing wrong by.

Why? Because you're kind of aiding or abetting them in some way by cultivating this friendship with someone who's quite seriously racist. The abetting view I think it's picking up on an important intuition. I think the account I ultimately, arrive at can account for that intuition as well, which is that you're doing wrong by others in some degree when you are pursuing this friendship with someone who is heavily racist or sexist.

But I think the abetting view goes about it the wrong when it's trying to accommodate that intuition. And that's because I think it's really hard to give a lot of substance to the idea or it's hard to flesh out and make good on this claim that you are aiding or abetting someone purely by being friends with them. If I really like veal and I befriend someone who doesn't really mind it either way but I start taking them to steak houses and cultivating this taste for veal, maybe then I've kind of, you know, done something maybe then there's a kind of sense which the friendship has influenced them for the worse. But I mean, suppose I have another friend who just likes veal and we go out to dinner at places that aren't steakhouses, but they order it. Do I kind of pick up the moral tab for that in any meaningful sense. I mean maybe to some degree if I say nothing, there's some tiny bit of blame that should come my way. But I think not the sort of amount you'd need to really make good on that intuition that they're responsible. It's consistent with being friends with someone, that you're indifferent, you're opposed to various projects and attitudes they have.

So I think it can't be that just being friends with someone, purely being friends with someone is enough to license any sort of heavy attribution of moral responsibility to them for what their friends do. So I think  are they aiding and abetting this person? I mean, yes, there's a sense in which they're giving them some sort of background support, they're giving them their friendship. They're sort of maybe signalling to them that they're a decent human being who is worthy of friendship.

Maybe they're aiding and abetting them in some sense. But it seems like too thin a sense to really give substance to the claim that this person is responsible for what the bad person is doing or for their racist behavior. So I think that's too strong. 

OK. So hypothesis number three. Another explanation for where this person who's befriended and cultivated this meaningful friendship with a morally bad person where they've gone wrong. Well, the risk view says, and it comes in two varieties they've put themselves at risk in some way.

Right. The person they're really doing wrong to is themselves. This comes in two versions, the first version of the risk view says it's a kind of practical or prudential risk that you've undertaken here. And I mean, the kind of the pitch for this would be something like if you lie down with dogs, you'll wake up with fleas. Right. If you mix with in circles with nasty people, they're eventually going to be nasty to you as well.

So this says, look, this person is prejudiced against this group of people today. What's not to say they're going to be prejudiced against people like you tomorrow? Right. They they carry a worrying kind of potential that they've shown in their attitudes. So you're really putting yourself  at risk here by being friends with someone who's fairly horrible. 

Why doesn't the practical version of the risk view work or why is it not completely convincing? Well, I think for myself, it just seems that, you know, based on what I know about people, they're surprisingly capable of compartmentalizing.

Right. You can think of a horrible dictator or some other person who you think is even evil. You don't when you think of someone who's bad. I think often you find these people are loyal friends or loving parents. Right. They're often quite good at distinguishing between different kinds of people, and the moral treatment they're prepared to give them. So, you know, there's some risk here. It's not obvious to me that sort of every time we have someone who is nasty, the nastiness isn't kind of contained or directed against a particular group of people such that we should fear the nastiness will turn around on us tomorrow.

Right. I think, no sort of white supremacist is concerned that the person's going to turnaround on white people or something to that degree, right? So I think the risk, we shouldn't sort of the risk seems overblown to me, basically. Another thing I find wrong with the practical version of the risk view, you putting yourself at prudential risk is that even if that were true to some degree, I think and I don't know if you share this intuition, but I think that when we imagine someone say someone close to us who is befriended someone who is heavily sexist or racist, I don't just think they've made a kind of practical error,  like something that's prudentially unwise. I think they've gone wrong in a moral sense as well. So I think for that reason, the practical version of the risk view is definitely just got to be part of the explanation. 

The second version of the risk hypothesis doesn't say you're putting yourself at practical risk but you're putting yourself at moral risk by entering into a friendship with a bad person. And the idea here is, look, if this person gets caught in a bind or they're mixed up in some illegal or moral activity, they might call upon you to sort of help them out.

And then it looks like it's going to be hard for you to say no because you forged this close relationship with them. So you're exposing yourself to this kind of moral risk. You know, this danger that you will start doing morally bad things as well and get caught up in the immorality somehow.

Okay why don't I like that? I actually think there is an important element of truth to this idea. I think the account I end up with can accommodate it to some degree. There's a worry that the badness kind of rubs off on you or is some kind of moral taint that rubs off on your character somehow. My little sister's 10 years younger than me and I remember my mom. Whenever there's a friend coming over, she'd always feel like, Oh, thank goodness it's a dork.

Or it's someone who's like a nerd who's coming over, it's not the bad kid with like the piercings who smokes or something. So I kind of got what she was coming from. It's a kind of relief. But why? It seems because you're worried this person will be a bad influence and rub off on them. I get that. But that being said, I just don't think we should. I don't think we should exaggerate the kind of moral risk. I think if we if we really did take moral risk to be something that ruled out someone from being a friend, we'd just have no friends.

Every friendship seems to put us at moral risk in some way. A lot of the time, friendship requires us to override other sorts of moral obligations in order to do right by our friends. So I think Cocking and Kennet make this point really forcefully in their paper. They said, look, we often are going to be called upon by our friends to do things that, you know, in some respects are wrong, even though we might have duties of friendship to do them.

And it doesn't seem like these friendships are there by any less genuine or real friendships for that reason. So it seems like a general feature of friendship that it's going to place us in moral danger in some way. So it can't explain what goes wrong in this particular case, because it's just something we accept about friendship in general that will put us at moral risk. Maybe this friendship puts us at extra moral risk. Maybe that can partly account for what's gone wrong there, but I don't think we should make too much of the moral dangers friendship poses. I think we accept that in any case. 

So the final account I look at and the one I ultimately support that I think really gets to the heart of the matter of whether person goes wrong of befriending someone is morally bad is that their choice of that person as a friend reflects disordered moral priorities on their part. It shows they don't really have their moral priorities straight. I don't want to suggest we choose friends like we choose a dress or a meal on a restaurant menu.

But I do think we have some say in who our friends are, right? We might find ourselves liking people and slowly entering in to a friendship with them. But there's still often the opportunity to reflect upon what draws us to them and whether it should draw us to them. Right. So you might hang out with someone more more often, because at least in part, you find their jokes funny. They make you laugh. You might start thinking about this person and say, oh, all those jokes are really nasty.

Maybe, maybe I shouldn't be seeking this person's company so often just because those nasty jokes make me laugh. So I think you can reflect upon what it is that attracts you to people and whether or not it ought to. That's the kind of first ingredient of the account idea that you can choose your friends. Now, I think when you are choosing your friends, when you have this opportunity to say, oh, I'm getting quite close to this person, should this go somewhere?

Should I let this kind of flourish into a meaningful friendship? You might say, well, you know, maybe they have some moral faults like, I don't know. For some people, this would be a moral fault, not for everyone, but they might eat meat a lot. And you might say, well, it's a fault I can live with. Right. It's not something that makes them not worthy of my friendship or makes them someone I should be hesitant morally to spend my time with.

But I think it would be odd if you had that same sort of attitude when the person was explicitly bigoted or prejudiced, like if they were really racist or sexist. I think it'll be strange to kind of say, but it's strange. I think there would be something morally, morally criticizable, or morally bad at least about saying, well, this person's really sexist but you know, man the make a mean pina colada.

I like spending my time with them and having fun with them. I think that sort of attitude where you kind of discount serious moral flaws because the person has other recommending qualities. I think it does suggest you don't have your moral priorities straight because you're prepared to excuse these sorts of serious flaws or not even to excuse them, you're at least prepared to discount them, to think they're not so important, they don't weigh that heavily on your moral conscience because the person's fun to be with or you enjoy their company. You enjoy other aspects about them. 

The idea is basically sure it's part of friendship that you discount some of the person's faults in a way. Right. You don't call them out every time they wear leather boots. If you're a vegan, right. There's some moral leniency that seems important for friendships to flourish. But I think there has to be a moral line we draw somewhere, specially at the choosing stage. Right. Especially when you haven't forged any relationship with these people and you don't have these strong duties to them that you've inherited from this history you share.

I think at that stage there should be some moral faults that you're not willing to discount at the outset, that you say, well, even if this person does make a mean pina colada, they're racist, even if they tell funny jokes. Those jokes are actually quite nasty on reflection. I think if you don't do that, if you say oh forget about the racism, I'm having fun with them and you allow it to develop. There is some sense in which you're morally criticizable for that sort of choice.

The moral priorities view that I like, I think that has important advantages over the other three hypotheses I consider. So start with the desert view and how that compares to the moral priorities view. I think the desert view, as we said, it seems, to really over moralise friendship, and in particular our interactions with our friends. You know, we should kind of be moral bookkeeper's who dole out support what it's deserved, withhold goods when they're not deserved and so on.

That seems like the wrong sort of picture to paint our interactions with our friends. Now, my view as a kind of moralizing element to it as well, but it moralizes he initial choice. So it doesn't say once you're friends with someone, you should be constantly, you should have this moral checklist, where you make sure they're doing okay and they're worthy of friendship. But my view does say, look, it seems not implausible we do have some sort of moral duty to be not incredibly selective and precious, but at least to be somewhat sensitive to certain considerations.

When we enter into friendships with people like whether the person is someone we would take to be incredibly morally vicious or bad in such a way that we wouldn't want to sort of discount those character flaws just because they have some other recommending qualities. The abetting view says you do wrong to others by pursuing this friendship with a bad person. And I want to say, yes, you do. I agree. But on my view that's explained because it looks like others aren't on your moral radar.

When you choose this friendship with a bad person. Right, it looks like you say, well, this person's quite racist. It would really suck to be the people whom their racist views target or are prejudiced against. But I'm not one of those people. Lucky me. So it seems like you're really discounting, right? The harms done by racist attitudes and racist behavior and racist policies to some degree, if you discount someone's racist qualities in that matter.

So I think these people don't seem to be on your moral radar to an appropriate degree. They don't seem to carry much moral weight in your choice. You might think. I think there's that kind of expressive disvalue of what you're doing. You are least expressing not enough sort of care for the sorts of victims of racist attitudes when you're so willing to discount racism as a quality, as being morally weighty enough to sway you away from entering into a friendship with someone.

So what is my view, this moral priorities have a leg up on the moral risk view? Well, the moral rescue says you're posing a risk to your moral character. There's this danger that you're going to become a bad person as well, or that you're going to get mixed up in the morality of what this person is doing. And I want to say, yes, I agree. My view will account for that as well. The moral priorities hypothesis will say, well, you are cultivating a worrying sort of moral complacency when you discount these serious character flaws. You don't really seem to stand for those values that speak against being racist or sexist, if you're willing to discount these qualities in someone.

Definitely gets messy in the application. So, I mean, it's a hard balance to strike, right because on the one hand. On the one hand, I don't think people should so sort of judgey wudgey, or so morally precious or fussy when they're choosing whether or not to pursue friendships with people. Right like if you met someone at a dinner and you enjoyed their company but they made one joke you thought wasn't particularly morally great and you might say, oh, I'm not seeing that person anymore.

I mean, that would be too quick, right? I think the problem with cancel culture isn't that we're willing to express our dislike or disapproval of people who are morally bad. I think that it's we're too quick, too quick to shoot from the hip and to jump at what could very well be an uncharitable assessment. So I think some moral fussiness or preciousness isn't necessarily a bad thing. As long as it's kind of appropriately sensitive to the evidence, we're not so quick to jump to bad moral conclusions about other people or reach moral judgments about them.

I mean, I've often met people who I know, I mean not a lot, but some meaningful proportion of my close friends are people who I wasn't mad about when I first met them. I might have thought they were arrogant. I might have thought they were stuck up or that they had virtue signalling tendencies or lots of fault I thought people had when I first met them, that I realized on reflection I was just making quick judgments about them. So, I mean, I think for that reason, canceling people, there can be a justification for doing that. But we should just be careful about how we arrive at our judgments. 

If I gave someone advice, it would be something like go out there and make friends, pursue relations with the people you care about and that you'd like spending time with and that make you're life better. But on the other hand, just keep a kind of ear out. Keep a moral eye out for what might be quite morally vicious or quite strong, strongly bad character traits that you might not want to enter into a person, enter into a friendship with someone who had them. Otherwise you could be led into this trap where you grew really morally complacent and you say, oh, everyone's a little bit racist, maybe I'll just put this aside. I think that's something we wouldn't want to happen to us. 

What I really want to do next is explore the possibility that even though some of our duties to our friends are a kind of moral duty, maybe there's just something entirely different the grounds duties of friendship, then what grounds moral duties. Maybe they're separate spheres in a way. Maybe the friendship is not a proper subset of the moral, as we tend to think of it. 

One example, I think I got it from Alex Nehamas I think was the Thelma and Louise case. Have you seen the film? They do horrible things. They lock cops into the boots of cars. They steal things. I think they kill someone from memory.

They do horrible things. But you get the sense they had this rich and true friendship. What each does those horrible things for the sake of the other. And I think even though from a moral point of view, there's lots to be said against what they do from the perspective of friendship you might say that's great. These are the cases where this philosophical effort that's been made to account for friendship wholly within the moral sphere, or the moral purview becomes really difficult because you might think maybe friendship and morality have to come apart sometimes.

Maybe being a really good friend would mean doing things that we just can't morally justify. It's not a case where one moral duty is pitched against another and the one that relates to friendship wins out. It's a case where you really would be doing something wrong in being a good friend. So I think these sorts of cases draw attention to that. And personally speaking, I don't defend this in the paper. I wouldn't have had space t but I think maybe we should try and account for duties of friendship beyond the moral sphere. So that's not to say we don't have moral duties to our friends, right, you can have moral and legal duties to do the same thing. But it might be that whatever grounds our duties of friendship is distinct from what grounds our general moral duties to all other people. That's the possibility I definitely want to explore in future work for these sorts of reasons. 

Because you might think, once I'm friends with someone I should discount their flaws to some degree so we can, you know, they can confess their moral sins to me and I can help them and not judge them heavily. It's part of friendship that we do to some degree discount those flaws. Are we being morally complacent when we do that? Well, it's hard to achieve a balance there right. There are some views that say, look, you shouldn't constantly have this kind of moral spotlight on your friends, where you're judging them and trying to see if you should be maintaining the friendship or not.

That would just be off right. No plausible moral theory should tell you to do that. But maybe what you should do is you should have a kind of alarm system, a moral alarm system where you do things for the friend's sake. You act out of love and concern for them. But if they ask you to help them move a body you have this moral alarm system that goes off and overrides that duty. Now, I think this is the kind of choice point you get to because on the one hand, you can say, well, anyone who's not prepared to discount the dead body thing or the murder and to sort of act in their friend's interests wouldn't be a good friend even if they'd be a morally good person.

Other people would say, no, no, this is also a morally consistent story we can tell where you shouldn't discount those sorts of flaws because that's what friendship qua a kind of moral duty requires you to do. There's a kind of harmony between friendship and moral duties there. 

That's it for today's episode. Visit our Website at JournalEntries dot fireside dot fm for more information about Jessica Isserow, her work and some of the resources mentioned in this episode. Special thanks to Two Cheers for creating our theme music and for financial support from the University of Manchester.