Rethinking Aristotle's Theory of Friendship in the Internet Age

Virtue theorists are increasingly turning their attention to the importance of information and communication technologies for their impact on the prospects of the good life in the Internet Age. This dissertation focuses on one aspect of that larger turn in that it considers technological issues for the practice of friendship. After proposing a centrally organizing definition of "online friendship" intended to exclude trivial cases while remaining open to the wide diversity in patterns of internet use in personal relationships, I begin by surveying traditional and recent philosophical arguments as to the nature of genuine friendship. Recent work in friendship theory focuses on a process known as disclosure of the self. I show that recent arguments fail to adequately account for this process and so fail to account for the psychological intimacy thought to distinguish friendship from other sorts of personal relationship. I remedy this problem by developing a new account of disclosure of the self and show how it is anticipated in Aristotle's theory of friendship. I argue that because of the way in which friendship should be understood as a minimally structured relationship, but also a relationship requiring substantial personal commitment, a theory of friendship must also account for the mechanisms by which friends manage and integrate the various lower order episodes of disclosure of the self. I then turn towards expanding upon this Aristotelian framework and applying it to the particularities of the internet context to show how internet communications and activities can permit internet users to meet the conditions needed for disclosure of the self and hence genuine friendship. I later identify and rebut a number of recent arguments against internet technology use for the sake of mediating friendship. I conclude that internet technologies can provide distinctive advantages for securing and maintaining friendships under adverse conditions predicted by the Aristotelian conception, and I suggest how moral virtue development in friendship can be related back to the broader concerns of philosophers working at the intersection of virtue theory and the philosophy of information technology and society.