A good friend will take you to rehab even if it costs them your friendship
I was pointed to a post earlier called 7 Traits Of A Good Twitter Friend. I disagree with almost all of them. The one I disagree with the most is this one: A good Twitter friend will always take your side if there is ever a conflict with another tweep
.
Ignore the stupid “tweep” thing - mentally rewrite it to “Twitter user” or whatever. Yes, it’s ugly.
Why is this wrong? Well, imagine there are three people on Twitter: Colin, David and Eleanor. Colin is friends with David and Eleanor. But David and Eleanor have a strong disagreement which turns into a conflict. Ideally, then, Colin should take the side of both of them. But what if that’s impossible? If he takes one person’s side, then he is being a bad friend to the other. Alternatively, he could stay out of the conflict, but then he’s not really being a good friend to either of them because, according to the rules of the aforementioned post, he should be taking the side of his friend. This apparently virtuous trait seems utterly impractical: I’ve been in these situations. I’ve got people I know and trust who are at loggerheads. Sometimes in a big way. It’s a dilemma everyone has to deal with. There seems to be a few different strategies: stay out of it completely, try and help the participants in the conflict resolve their differences but remain neutral or make a fair assessment and act accordingly. All three have downsides. Keeping absolutely neutral means you are potentially letting one friend damage another - and you are also not being there for your friend. Staying out of it is pretty bad too - if one of your friends is being completely beastly to another, you really should try and help if you can. Trying to make an assessment is difficult because they are your friends, and you’ve got warm emotional feelings for them. What compounds this difficulty is the fact that you can’t discuss what to do with anyone, because they might then get involved, or they might be in one of the camps.
But trying to calmly and rationally evaluate these kinds of conflicts has one thing going for it. When someone one knows is being self-destructive, one often feels that one should intervene. If a friend joins the Cult Church of Scientology or develops a heroin addiction or gambles all the money they’ve put away for their child’s education, you should step in. We often talk about you owing it to your friend to help them - even in spite of the fact that they will protest your help. If you knew that someone you cared about was causing themselves immense harm with drugs, and you had the opportunity to take them to rehab, but only at the possible cost of your friendship with them, you should do it. It’s a simple utilitarian calculation: just as we condemn someone for not getting their suit dirty to save a drowning child in a pond, we should probably also condemn the person who isn’t willing to risk their friendship with a person to save them from something that would harm them - if you cared about them, you’d save them from themselves even if they never forgive you. It gets marginally more complex when you add third parties into it, but the principle is the same. Sometimes being a friend means doing something that your friend won’t like. Teachers have to do this - so do parents, doctors and many others. I didn’t like someone drilling the basics of arithmetic into my head as a child, but I like the results of them having done so - without it, it’d be very easy to get short-changed in shops.
I think this ethic goes further though. I’m not an epistemic relativist in the sense of thinking that some particular proposition P can be true (or P can obtain) with regards to one person while it can be false (or not-P obtains or whatever) with regards to another person. I think that epistemic error is, in general, a bad thing - and that if a friend errs in a matter of fact in a non-neglible way, then you have no duty not to correct him. That is, you don’t have an obligation to correct him, but it certainly is allowed. You might choose not to - it might be too trivial. You might have some choices about how you do it - obviously, blasting out that person’s epistemic shortcomings on the public timeline may be rather rude compared to sending them a quiet e-mail or DM. Telling them of their error may cause you to have some further responsibilities: to explain yourself, to be willing to apologise if they say you’ve hurt their feelings, to be willing to take back what you’ve said if their belief turns out to be justified.
There are plenty of us who are very happy to have others correct our mistakes. Part of the reason I advocate it is because I think it’s actually the healthiest attitude to have. If you can accept that people who are pointing out that you are wrong aren’t “attacking” you or “siding with the enemy” but just trying to help you find the truth, and thus help you be a better person - then this whole layer of stress and pain disappears.
If I had to boil this down: it’s about honesty. You shouldn’t sell your friends out, but you shouldn’t bullshit them either! You should help them when they fall down, even if they aren’t in the position to appreciate it, and when they grossly err in their reasoning, you should be honest and tell them.
This goes back to what I said in Disagreement is good unless you want to go pro in social media. We’re still finding our feet on this Internet thing - one of the things which I think we’ve really missed is trying to facilitate epistemically healthy communities online. I don’t know how we do this, but it’s a big challenge. There’s an Aristotelian balancing act there with freedom of expression, honesty, openness, passion and firmness all kind of floating around with competing demands - how do we get to a place where we can say call bullshit bullshit but without being a bunch of rabid attack dogs.
