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Paternalism and Friendship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Ellen L. Fox
Ellen L. Fox*
Affiliation:
California State University, Chico, CA95929-0730, USA
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Extract

Though much has been written about when paternalistic intervention is justified, and about how it is justified, much less has been written about who may do the intervening. This is a substantial lacuna in our understanding of the nature of justified paternalism. By examining the question of who it is that may most appropriately interfere with the course of our decision-making, we can learn something useful both about paternalism and about the nature of friendship.

In this essay I will argue that friendship and paternalistic intervention are linked. Friendship of the close, intimate variety that I will be discussing is in part constituted by the fact that one friend is morally justified in interfering with the other’s (problematic) decisions. Intimate friendship involves a partial meshing of identities. This meshing of identities manifests itself in part by the liberties that one friend takes in guiding the life of the other. Paternalistic intervention between friends can thus be justified because it expresses the union of the friends, and because it preserves that union.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 575 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 See, for example, Appelbaum, Paul S. et al., Informed Consent: Legal Theory and Clinical Practice (New York: Oxford University Press 1987)Google Scholar; Faden, Ruth R. and Beauchamp, Tom L. A History and Theory of Informed Consent (New York: Oxford University Press 1986)Google Scholar; and the work of Feinberg and Van De Veer, noted below.

2 Feinberg, Joel Harm to Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), 115Google Scholar

3 Van De Veer, Donald Paternalistic Intervention: The Moral Bounds on Benevolence (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986), 347CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 From, e.g., Othello to Fatal Attraction. There are interesting questions about whether the lead characters in these works were really maddened by love or by its consequences when thwarted, which might lead us back to the ‘rage’ or ‘gripping mood’ excuses. Love is probably considerably less separable from these consequences than we would like to believe.

5 Marilyn Friedman, ‘Friendship, Choice, and Change,’ unpublished MS, 2

6 Duck, Steven Personal Relationships and Personal Constructs: A Study of Friendship Formation (London: J. Wiley 1973)Google Scholar

7 Obviously this story is fictional in its particulars, but it represents a type of friendship development which is reasonably common.

8 See, e.g., Weale, Albert ‘Consent,’ Political Studies 27 (1978) 65-77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beran, Harry ‘In Defense of the Consent Theory of Political Obligation and Authority,’ Ethics 87 (1977) 260-71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Siegler, Frederick ‘Plamenatz on Consent and Obligation,’ Philosophical Quarterly 18 (1968) 256-62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kleinig, John ‘The Ethics of Consent,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplement 8 (1982) 91-119Google Scholar.

9 John Simmons, A. ‘Tacit Consent and Political Obligation,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 5 (1976) 274-91Google Scholar

10 The case of common law marriage does not constitute an adequate counterexample to this claim, since it is surprisingly hard to become married in this way, and intention to marry or present oneself as married is generally necessary.

11 Ketcham, Sarah ‘Liberalism and Marriage Law,’ in Bishop, Sharon and Weinzweig, Marjorie eds., Philosophy and Women (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 1979), 185Google Scholar

12 Cf. also Pateman, Carole The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1988)Google Scholar, esp. Ch. 6; Cronan, Sheila ‘Marriage,’ in Jaggar, Alison M. and Rothenberg, Paula S. eds., Feminist Frameworks (New York: McGraw-Hill 1984) 329-34Google Scholar; Shultz, Marjorie Maguire ‘Contractual Ordering of Marriage: A New Model for State Policy,’ California Law Review 70 (1982) 204-330CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 This is in contrast to what Van De Veer calls Hypothetical Rational Consent, which is the principle that intervention is justified if a fully rational person would consent to it. Van De Veer argues, rightly I think, that we must rather be concerned with the question of what this particular individual would consent to.

14 I am indebted to John Pollock for this example.

15 Hill, Sharon Bishop ‘Self-Determination and Autonomy,’ in Wasserstrom, Richard ed., Today’s Moral Problems (New York: MacMillan 1985) 55-70Google Scholar