Virtue or Art?: Political Friendship Reconsidered

Journal of Religious Ethics 44 (2):260-277 (2016)
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Abstract

In Talking to Strangers, 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.

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Citations of this work

Democracy, Tolerance, Aquinas.John R. Bowlin - 2016 - Journal of Religious Ethics 44 (2):278-299.
Aquinas and the Democratic Virtues: An Introduction.Jennifer A. Herdt - 2016 - Journal of Religious Ethics 44 (2):232-245.

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References found in this work

The Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle - 1951 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 143:477-478.
Democracy and Tradition.Jeffrey Stout - 2004 - American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 25 (2):185-190.
A Rhetoric of Motives.Kenneth Burke - 1950 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 3 (2):124-127.

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