Friendship, Reciprocity, and Relational Justice

Sanjar Akayev

Central European University

Many relational egalitarians argue that friendship embodies the ideal of equality and can illuminate what it means to relate as equals on a broader social scale (Viehoff 2014, 2019; Scheffler 2015; Kolodny 2014; Wilson 2019). However, Joseph Chan (2021) has provided a forceful critique of this view, arguing that friendship is not governed by the norms of relational equality. While broadly persuasive, Chan’s critique may lead one to think that friendship has no relevance for our normative theorizing. In this paper, I argue that this is not so, and that the model of good personal friendship can inspire a different approach to relational social justice—namely, relational sufficientarianism (Bengtson & Nielsen 2023; Lippert-Rasmussen 2021). This is because friendship is governed by the norm of reciprocity, which requires us to reciprocate the relational benefits (e.g., care, concern, support, or love) received from our friend (e.g., Helm 2023). While the norm of reciprocity requires that we “answer in kind”, it nonetheless does not require that we return the relational benefits in the exact same amount or with the exact same intensity. The norm is not rigid, and this is good for friendship: if we were to interpret it in a stricter way, we would spend much of our time caring about miniscule discrepancies between us and our friends. Although our commitment to reciprocity may sometimes (incidentally) lead to rough equality of relational benefits within friendship, its primary purpose is to prevent our relationships from becoming too lopsided. Good friends relate as “sufficients” by not allowing each other to fall below the minimal threshold of relational benefits enjoyed within the relationship. Good friendship, thus, demands relational sufficiency, not equality. Insofar as we take it to be an embodiment of attractive normative principles, friendship may inspire a different understanding of what relational justice requires.

Chair: Leonard Parr

Time: 04 September, 10:00 – 10:30

Location: SR 1.004