Re: "Friendship in Aristotle and Adam Smith"
Thoughts on Dr. Elaine Sternberg's AdamSmithWorks essay.
Today, I had the pleasure of reading Dr. Sternberg’s comparison of Aristotle and Adam Smith’s conceptions of true friendship. Her full piece can be read at AdamSmithWorks, here; I highly encourage my readers to take five minutes to read her piece in its entirety, as it’s both edifying and illuminating.
Credit given where it’s due, I would like to thank Dr. Sternberg for providing me a novel interpretation of Smith’s impartial spectator from Theory of Moral Sentiments. Reflecting on the importance of judgment to both Aristotle and Smith’s conceptions of friendship and morality, Dr. Sternberg likens Smith’s impartial spectator to “a kind of imaginary friend [who] provides the mirroring function that actual Aristotelian friends supply.”
Just as “true friends prize each other's superior character, and criticise each other's shortcomings” in the Aristotelian framework of true friendship, so does Smith’s imaginary, omnipresent spectator—a friend in the breast, if you will.
Contrasting Aristotle and Smith from Utilitarians and Kantians — two moral frameworks I find to be conjectural and, therefore, unpersuasive — Dr. Sternberg posits that “neither author assumes that groups are prior to individuals, or that equality as such has any positive moral value.” Additionally, like Montaigne, both Aristotle and Smith “value the inherently exclusive and preferential nature of friendship.”
Having read TMS and WN, I concur with Dr. Sternberg in her assessment of Smith’s position on these matters. A position with which I am in absolute agreement.1
Being ignorant of Nichomachean Ethics, I cannot say whether or not I agree with her interpretation of Aristotle.
If Dr. Sternberg is right in her reading of Aristotle — and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of her claims — I have much to learn from Ethics, which I look forward to reading in the near future.
Note: I believe in the metaphysical, legal, and moral equality of all human beings by virtue of their shared perfect will and equally limited faculty of perception (a la Descartes and Poullain). All other forms of egalitarianism — particularly those redistributionist ones that lay claim to individuals’ productive capacity and property — I reject, like other libertarians.