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Virtue or Art?: Political Friendship Reconsidered
Author(s) -
Eitel Adam
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of religious ethics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.306
H-Index - 20
eISSN - 1467-9795
pISSN - 0384-9694
DOI - 10.1111/jore.12141
Subject(s) - distrust , virtue , democracy , politics , economic justice , friendship , gratitude , argument (complex analysis) , order (exchange) , sociology , epistemology , environmental ethics , aesthetics , law , law and economics , philosophy , political science , social science , social psychology , psychology , biochemistry , chemistry , finance , economics
In Talking to Strangers (2004), Danielle Allen argues that democratic citizens will need to acquire new habits for contending with distrust in order to prolong the democratic experiment. Though Allen's solution recalls her reading of the Republic , it is to Aristotle, not Plato, that she turns for help theorizing those habits. Drawing upon the Nicomachean Ethics , she proposes arts or techniques that might substitute for and outpace justice by enabling democratic strangers to treat one another like friends. While I endorse Allen's analysis of the problems posed by rising levels of distrust, I propose a different solution. First, I argue that the habits Allen describes would have to be virtues and not merely techniques in order to effect real political change. Then, second, I identify those habits as “piety” and “gratitude”—virtues which, I contend, are not so much substitutes for as supplements to justice. My argument thus elaborates Thomas Aquinas's account of justice and its “potential parts” in the Summa Theologiae .