On being good friends with a bad person

Abstract

Many philosophers believe that it counts against one morally if one is close and good friends with a bad person. Some argue that one acts badly by counting a bad person as a good friend, because such friendships carry significant moral risks. Others locate the moral badness in one’s moral psychology, suggesting that one becomes objectionably complacent by being good friends with a bad person. In this paper, I argue that none of these accounts are plausible. In fact, I propose that the starting intuition, that there is something pro tanto morally bad in being close and good friends with a bad person, does not track ethical reality. A person’s friend list isn’t at all in-principle informative of a person’s moral character. I also diagnose why we nonetheless have this mistaken intuition. I propose that friendships are fragmented in two crucial aspects. Once we observe these fragmentations, our initially mistaken intuition completely goes away.