01 - Augustine on Norms of Belief in Friendship

In De Fide Rerum Invisibilium (1.1-3.5) and briefly in De Utilitate Credendi (10.23-4), Augustine argues that friendship is impossible without some beliefs, including the belief that our friends have goodwill toward us. Prior scholarship (e.g. White 1992, Nawar 2015) has addressed how Augustine adopts elements of classical conceptions of friendship (drawing especially upon Cicero) but modifies them to fit a Christian framework. Apart from a brief reconstruction of Augustine's argument in F. Invis. in King and Ballantyne 2009, however, there has been little focus on Augustine's norms for belief formation in friendship. I argue that, in F. Invis. and Util. Cred., Augustine uses friendship to illustrate the general norm that we should form beliefs in a manner conducive to our happiness. Augustine accordingly conveys that considerations of our happiness should determine both the beliefs that lead us to engage in characteristic activities of friendship and the evidentiary thresholds for those beliefs (i.e. the minimum evidence required), where the relevant evidence consists of observations of a friend's actions; in Augustine's view, we can successfully follow the norm only if we already hold true beliefs about what is good for us.

I first distinguish between what I call subjective goodwill (willing something for someone because one believes that it is good for them) and objective goodwill (where one wills what is truly good for the person). I propose that, when Augustine claims that we should believe in our friend's goodwill, he has in mind objective goodwill. He thinks that we should not engage in the joint activity characteristic of friendship without believing that our friends have objective goodwill, since we could then undermine our happiness by subjecting ourselves to moral corruption, as illustrated by a case of false friendship at Confessiones 2.3-2.10. Nawar and Burt 1999 argue that Augustine takes friendship to require that friends correctly understand each other's good, in a distinctly Christian way. It follows, I argue, that we will only properly form the belief that a friend has objective goodwill toward us if we have a correct belief about what is good for us. I briefly argue, though, that, in f. invis., Augustine implicitly allows for a more limited, partial grasp of our good on which human friendships even among non-Christians may be grounded.

I then argue that considerations of what promotes our happiness determine both maximum and minimum evidentiary thresholds for the belief that a friend has objective goodwill toward us. Regarding the latter, Augustine applies the norms (util. cred. 11.25) that we ought not hold beliefs about others facile ("easily") and ought not suppose that our beliefs about others amount to infallible knowledge; such norms promote our happiness by helping to insulate us from potential corrupting influences. Regarding maximum evidentiary thresholds, Augustine indicates that, to enjoy the benefits of friendship and promote our happiness, we should hold such beliefs about our friends even in the absence of certainty and should not require that we stringently test our friends before forming these beliefs.

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Presenters

Alexander Vega, Harvard University

  SCS-40