Egalitarian Justice and the Limits of Friendship

Date
-
Event Sponsor
The Munro Lectureship Fund and The Lane Center
Speaker

Chiara Cordelli, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Stanford University

 

Abstract

Friendship distributes critical benefits across society, including material, cultural and social forms of capital, and does so unequally. There is wide empirical evidence that income, wealth, and levels of education vary dramatically according to the quality of individuals’ friendships. In light of these facts, this paper focuses on whether and how egalitarian requirements should extend beyond the family and the market, to minimally structured relations such as personal friendship. I first show that the practice of friendship presents a problem for theories of justice -- most famously G.A. Cohen’s -- that advocate for the direct extension of principles of egalitarian justice from political institutions to unregulated personal conduct. These theories, I argue, either fail to secure an appropriate moral space for friendship or are destined to generate an unfair distribution of social burdens among individuals, according to the particular identities of their own friendships. I then argue that principles of justice, beyond imposing reasonable constraints upon the conduct of friends through institutions external to friendship, ought to assess the patterns of socialization through which friendships form and develop. The inequalities produced by friendship should be indirectly adjusted by shaping the social and organizational environment of the civil society in which friendship relations develop.

 

Biography

Chiara Cordelli is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Stanford University. She earned a PhD in political theory from University College London in 2011 and was a doctoral fellow at the Library of Congress, in Washington DC in 2009. She works on theories of justice and civil society and has written on the ethics of privatization, the egalitarian duties of nonprofit associations, and the moral limits of friendship. She is currently working on a book project entitled Justice and Civil Society: from Background Culture to Distributive Structure.