Teaching Ethics

Volume 21, Issue 1, Spring 2021

Moral Friendship as Perfectionist Resistance

There are striking points of affinity between Hannah Arendt’s concept of a politico-moral variety of allusive thinking, and Stanley Cavell’s concept of aversive thinking characteristic of Emersonian Moral Perfectionism (EMP). Although both Arendt and Cavell’s EMP are pessimistic if not hostile to the suggestion of the redemption of a vibrant public sphere, their thought suggests possible moves toward a practical politico-moral philosophy—political philosophy as provocative moral practice recognizable in Socrates and Diogenes of Sinope. The paper teases out threads of thought in Arendt and Cavell toward an account of a quasi-public perfectionist philosophical practice—call it moral friendship—supportive of political-moral judgment in response to social conditions of its repression. Moral friendship is ultimately the cultivation of moral taste that enables one to notice moral phenomena susceptible to one’s judgment whose failure to be noticed is an occasion for regret.