Norm manipulation as a condition of friendship

ABSTRACT

Cathy Mason (2020) argues – against my position in Phelan (2019) – that significant norm-manipulation is unnecessary for friendship. Instead, she holds that norm manipulation is a, perhaps omnipresent, causal result of the very feature I deny as necessary to friendship: mutual caring or love. Mason’s counter-examples allow for further explication of the norm-manipulation view of friendship. However, they do not constitute a compelling challenge to that view, because they do not seem to involve collaborative norm manipulation at all. Instead, they are better described as cases in which people come to be subject to established cultural norms they were not previously subject to, because they voluntarily come to fall under a distinctive relationship relative to one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Friendship
• norms
• norm manipulation‌

Acknowledgements

Ingrid Albrecht, Celia Barnes, Benjamin Chan, Kathy Mason, and Mark Warren provided feedback on earlier drafts that helped improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Notice, I am not claiming that all of our interactions are socially structured. It is possible to act in a way that departs from a normative framework. After all, an expectation is not an expectation if it cannot be broken.

2 This point is akin to Mason’s that ‘there are many different social scripts for different contexts’ (5), and Mason agrees that there are distinctive cultural norms in place for different specific relationships.

3 Provided, of course, that the two people like one another, since I maintain that significant norm manipulation is but a necessary condition on friendship. More on this shortly.

4 Consider, for example, one of the most famous friendships in English literature, that between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson. More than three decades his junior, Boswell had desired to meet Johnson for reasons of personal edification for two years by the time they bumped into each other at Tom Davies’s bookshop on May 16, 1763. In his London Journal (Boswell et al., 1950), Boswell remarks, ‘about seven came in the great Mr. Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see’ (220). A more contemporary, fictional example is, perhaps, the friendship between Joe Buck and ‘Ratso Rizzo’ in Midnight Cowboy. Indeed, Aristotle (1999) suggests that true, character friendships might arise for instrumental reasons, since he contends that goodwill is the proper reaction to being benefitted, and that ‘goodwill is inactive friendship, and that when it lasts some time and they grow accustomed to each other, it becomes friendship’ (1167a12).