Perhaps I have a limited amount of caring available and I am only able to care for a certain number of people. If I tried to care for both X and Y I would go over my limit and would have to reduce the amount of caring for other people to make up for it. In fact, “only X or Y could be my close friend, but not both” may be an effect of that.
It’s not “they’re my close friend, and that’s the reason to care about them”, it’s “they’re under my caring limit, and that allows me to care about them”. “Is my close friend” is just another way to express “this person happened, by chance, to be added while I was still under my limit”. There is nothing special about this person, compared to the pool of all possible close friends, except that this person happened to have been added at the right time (or under randomly advantageous circumstances that don’t affect their merit as a person, such as living closer to you).
Of course, this sounds bad because of platitudes we like to say but never really mean. We like to say that our friends are special. They aren’t; if you had lived somewhere else or had different random experiences, you’d have had different close friends.
Is my close friend” is just another way to express “this person happened, by chance, to be added while I was still under my limit”. There is nothing special about this person, compared to the pool of all possible close friends, except that this person happened to have been added at the right time (or under randomly advantageous circumstances that don’t affect their merit as a person, such as living closer to you).
I think I would state a similar claim in a very different way. Friends are allies; both of us have implicitly agreed to reserve resources for the use of the other person in the friendship. (Resources are often as simple as ‘time devoted to a common activity’ or ‘emotional availability.’) Potential friends and friends might be indistinguishable to an outside observer, but to me (or them) there’s an obvious difference in that a friend can expect to ask me for something and get it, and a potential friend can’t.
(Friendships in this view don’t have to be symmetric- there are people that I’d listen to them complain that I don’t expect they’d listen to me complain, and the reverse exists as well.)
They aren’t; if you had lived somewhere else or had different random experiences, you’d have had different close friends.
I think that it’s reasonable to call facts ‘special’ relative to counterfacts- yes, I would have had different college friends if I had gone to a different college, but I did actually go to the college I went to, and actually did make the friends I did there.
That’s a solid point, and to a significant extent I agree.
There are quite a lot of things that people can spend these kinds of resources on that are very effective at a small scale. This is an entirely sufficient basis to justify the idea of friends, or indeed “allies”, which is a more accurate term in this context. A network of local interconnections of such friends/allies who devote time and effort to one another is quite simply a highly efficient way to improve overall human well-being.
This also leads to a very simple, unbiased moral justification for devoting resources to your close friends; it’s simply that you, more so than other people, are in a unique position to affect the well-being of your friends, and vice versa. That kind of argument is also an entirely sufficient basis for some amount of “selfishness”—ceteris paribus, you yourself are in a better position to improve your own well-being than anyone else is.
However, this is not the same thing as “caring” in the sense So8res is using the term; I think he’s using the term more in the sense of “value”. For the above reasons, you can value your friends equally to anyone else while still devoting more time and effort to them. In general, you’re going to be better able to help your close friends than you are a random stranger on the street.
The way you put it, it seems like you want to care for both X and Y but are unable to.
However, if that’s the case then So8res’s point carries, because the core argument in the post translates to “if you think you ought to care about both X and Y but find yourself unable to, then you can still try to act the way that you would if you did, in fact, care about both X and Y”.
Perhaps I have a limited amount of caring available and I am only able to care for a certain number of people. If I tried to care for both X and Y I would go over my limit and would have to reduce the amount of caring for other people to make up for it. In fact, “only X or Y could be my close friend, but not both” may be an effect of that.
It’s not “they’re my close friend, and that’s the reason to care about them”, it’s “they’re under my caring limit, and that allows me to care about them”. “Is my close friend” is just another way to express “this person happened, by chance, to be added while I was still under my limit”. There is nothing special about this person, compared to the pool of all possible close friends, except that this person happened to have been added at the right time (or under randomly advantageous circumstances that don’t affect their merit as a person, such as living closer to you).
Of course, this sounds bad because of platitudes we like to say but never really mean. We like to say that our friends are special. They aren’t; if you had lived somewhere else or had different random experiences, you’d have had different close friends.
I think I would state a similar claim in a very different way. Friends are allies; both of us have implicitly agreed to reserve resources for the use of the other person in the friendship. (Resources are often as simple as ‘time devoted to a common activity’ or ‘emotional availability.’) Potential friends and friends might be indistinguishable to an outside observer, but to me (or them) there’s an obvious difference in that a friend can expect to ask me for something and get it, and a potential friend can’t.
(Friendships in this view don’t have to be symmetric- there are people that I’d listen to them complain that I don’t expect they’d listen to me complain, and the reverse exists as well.)
I think that it’s reasonable to call facts ‘special’ relative to counterfacts- yes, I would have had different college friends if I had gone to a different college, but I did actually go to the college I went to, and actually did make the friends I did there.
That’s a solid point, and to a significant extent I agree.
There are quite a lot of things that people can spend these kinds of resources on that are very effective at a small scale. This is an entirely sufficient basis to justify the idea of friends, or indeed “allies”, which is a more accurate term in this context. A network of local interconnections of such friends/allies who devote time and effort to one another is quite simply a highly efficient way to improve overall human well-being.
This also leads to a very simple, unbiased moral justification for devoting resources to your close friends; it’s simply that you, more so than other people, are in a unique position to affect the well-being of your friends, and vice versa. That kind of argument is also an entirely sufficient basis for some amount of “selfishness”—ceteris paribus, you yourself are in a better position to improve your own well-being than anyone else is.
However, this is not the same thing as “caring” in the sense So8res is using the term; I think he’s using the term more in the sense of “value”. For the above reasons, you can value your friends equally to anyone else while still devoting more time and effort to them. In general, you’re going to be better able to help your close friends than you are a random stranger on the street.
The way you put it, it seems like you want to care for both X and Y but are unable to.
However, if that’s the case then So8res’s point carries, because the core argument in the post translates to “if you think you ought to care about both X and Y but find yourself unable to, then you can still try to act the way that you would if you did, in fact, care about both X and Y”.
“I want to care for an arbitrarily chosen person from the set of X and Y” is not “I want to care for X and Y”. It’s “I want to care for X or Y”.