Thomas: Chapter 4 and 5

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with friendship and its importance for morality. Thomas echoes Aristotle's sentiments in saying that a person's life would not be worth living, even if he had every other good in the world, were he to be without friendship. Friendship is an extremely important of a person's life and contributes substantially to that person's flourishing. Thomas discusses in depth his conception of friendship but that is not directly relevant to our purposes so I will leave it out. The important point from these chapters is that friendship requires altruism which is to say that it requires friends to act in such ways so as to respect, advance and protect one another's well being. A true friend is happy to see his friend succeed or flourish and is sad to seem him fail. The flourishing of one requires the flourishing of the other. Given the good that friendship is for people and the importance we attach to it there can be no doubt that we develop the ability to perceive the interests of our friends as well as the motivation to help them. Thomas says that these are essentially moral sensibilities as we learn how to determine and care about advancing the interests of others.

This is important to morality as a whole because our friends are not a separate species from other people and thus the moral sensibilities we develop in dealing with friends can also be applied to other people. For example, we can clearly see how an action may help or hinder the interests of another person even if we are not friends with that person. In other words friendship gives us the tools for social interaction at large.

However, I have to add some commentary here. Everything that Thomas said here is compatible with the gangster egoist we have imagined before. One can truly see and care about the well-being of some people without caring at all for the well-being of others though he may know full well what it would be to hurt or help it. What Thomas is trying to do is lay the foundation for moral sentiments/feelings. He wants to show that people are not inherently only self-interested and he wants to show where altruistic feelings come from. In this regard I think he has done quite well, but what none of this does is show that these feelings are applied to complete strangers or anybody out of one's circle. Certainly these feelings can be applied to others but showing that they arise in certain contexts does not show in anyway that they are spread over all contexts. Thomas needs something more in order to get around the problem of the the gangster who does everything he can for the well-being of his family and friends but sees everyone else as expendable when it comes to accomplishing his goals.