I’ve read a bit about the philosophy of friendship over the years, but none of it is much use when encountering Facebook for the first time. Thinking myself too middle-aged for what I thought to be a youth site I hadn’t even looked at it until last week, when Jacques Chester asked me to link to a Liberty and Society group and I decided (in my middle-aged caution) to check before I linked. But I had to join first, and every day since I have received emails from Facebook telling me that person X, Y or Z has added me as a ‘friend’ and wanting to confirm that we are in fact ‘friends’.
In most cases, it’s been pretty easy to ‘confirm’ these people as friends. But can I be a ‘friend’ of someone whose name and face I don’t recognise? (from the friends we have in common I presume we must have met, but I don’t remember it). Or someone whose name and face I do recognise but I haven’t seen them, been in touch with them, or even thought of them for years? On the other hand, not confirming someone as a ‘friend’ could be seen as rude. Just because I am not a friend doesn’t mean I want to make an enemy.
I am a little sorry that Facebook is stretching the concept of ‘friendship’. Though of course friendship long predates liberalism, it seems to embody the liberal voluntary ideal more than other forms of social relationship. Pre-Facebook at least, it was a relationship of mutual agreement, in which the parties chose each other. You can’t choose your family or your neighbours or even your colleagues most of the time, but you can choose your friends.
But Facebook won’t affect other liberal aspects of friendship. Unlike other forms of voluntary relationships such as marriage or employment based on legal frameworks, in friendship the parties (usually implicitly) set all their own relationship rules. These rules often evolve over time, adapting to signals from each other and circumstances, like a market. Friendship is one of the very few areas of society in which there is virtually no state interference from Western liberal democracies. It is one of the last realms of near-complete freedom.
Andrew Norton 
I received a “Friend request” from an acquaintance I know through political networks. It occurred to me then that different categories of relationship better encompass human relationships rather than the single category “friend”.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if people’s use of Facebook has a half-life, at which time some other internet phenomenon will take its place as the activity of the moment (and depresser of productivity at work).
There’s something wrong about “depresser” but in my tired state I can’t see what it is.
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I’m glad you posted this as I also thought it was a little odd how anyone you had even the most tenuous connexion to was labelled a ‘friend’. That’s probably not how Facebook (and other social networking sites) was first envisioned, but it is what it has become.
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I think this is just semantics. For the purposes of Facebook, “friend” really just mean someone you have granted access to certain private functions in relation to your online profile. Instead of an “Add as a friend” button, they could have had a “Create link on database” button, or some such – but that wouldn’t have been as marketable. I have plenty of “friends” on Facebook who, I’m sure, I share a mutual acknowledgment that we’re not really “friends” in the real world. For example, one of my “how do you know this person” descriptions is “we were on student council together and we hated each other”, which is more accurate than it is ironic.
That said, I appreciate your dilemma of people adding you who either you don’t recognise or who you don’t want to grant access to the private aspects of your profile. If I don’t know who the person is or I have a strong objection to their gaining access to my profile, I just ignore their request – despite the possibility it may cause offense. If it is a real imposition, you could always delete your Facebook profile altogether and rely on more traditional socialising instruments.
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Andrew, I’m clearly much more middle-aged than you (despite my more recent date of birth), because I CANNOT SEE THE POINT of Facebook. If you have a friend and you want to share something with them, why not just pick up the phone or perhaps even send an email? Linking to a website is so much less personal, but then I guess older people would think that even phone or email are impersonal…
Perhaps I being a bit hypocritical: A cousin of mine got me onto Geni, which is a family tree site. At the start it seemed like a good idea – I put my wedding photos up to avoid mailing them to 10s of people. But now I have 1092 relatives on my tree and get regular emails telling me about people like my “great uncle’s daughter-in-law’s uncle’s first cousin once removed’s daughter-in-law’s uncle’s son-in-law’s grandmother ” (no kidding). God help me if one of them is a terrorist.
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Rajat – I’m yet to entirely see the point, and indeed probably wouldn’t have looked it again except for these emails I have been receiving. But it has only been a week. The main potential use I can see is perhaps keeping track of people I know but do not see regularly. But most of them are cases of ‘friendly with’ rather than ‘friends with’.
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Sorry this is off topic, Andrew – I couldn’t see a contact email to give you a tip off. 😉
Theres an interesting article on the connection between rising GDP (ie wealth) and happiness in todays Australian I thought you’d be interested in; I know youve written on this a few times.
A snippet:
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“It is one of the last realms of near-complete freedom.” Buck up Andrew, things aren’t that bad! We have more access to anything we want to read than any other people, anytime. More opportunities for expression – you have a blog, a magazine, Facebook … Presumably you can get on a plane and go anywhere you like. Your parents haven’t arranged a marriage for you? You weren’t conscripted into the army. You vote and vote in local, state and federal elections. Surely any more freedom would just be exhausting.
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You vote and vote in local, state and federal elections
Voting isn’t a freedom in Australia, it is a compulsion.
Surely any more freedom would just be exhausting.
You’d think that wouldn’t you? But your imagination of what freedom entails is very limited.
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Yes. The tax code is more extensive than it has ever been. You are now free to waste an entire lifetime reading it. 😦
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Brendan, compulsory voting is designed to protect your right to vote, not take away your freedom.
It is aimed at stopping people intimidating you into not voting.
In some other countries voting outcomes are affected by intimidating certain sections of society (particularly women in Islamic countries) into not voting.
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Stephen, that really makes no sense. If that was the case, then why are non-voters fined and threatened with gaol if they refuse to pay?
And since when does Australia have a problem with religious fundamentalists denying women the vote?
That is the craziest reason for compulsory voting I have ever heard.
Protecting my rights by forcing me to do something? You’re kidding me, right? What rights do I enjoy when it is complusory? Shouldn’t it be my choice to exercise a right? Even a stupid positive right like voting?
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OK, I’m curious. Brendan and Terje, what important freedoms are you missing out on? How would your lives be significantly improved by exploiting these new spheres of freedom?
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Russell,
You are looking at it the wrong way. If the state is going to compel me to do something, the onus of proof of net benefit lays on the party proposing the compulsion, not the party subject to it.
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Brendan – it’s not often that Andrew let’s fly with a bit of hyperbole like “friendship … is one of the last realms of near-complete freedom”, so I couldn’t resist asking what foregone realms of freedom would he, you and Terje like restored.
When you say “the proof of net benefit” do you mean benefit to the community?
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Look you can twist it whatever way you want. If you honestly believe they’ll send you to gaol for not paying a fine for not voting then you have serious problems, but I suspect you don’t beleive that and just wanted to solidify your point.
The fact is Australia has historically been a world leader in democratic freedoms – the secret ballot is an Australian invention, and also used to go by its old name, the Australian Ballot. The second area we have pioneered is through compulsory voting, to prevent people intimidating others into not voting.
Your reply is a logical fallacy. Enforcing the law (the fine) doesn’t in anyway present evidence to the contrary regarding the purpose of the law. What is a law if it is not enforced? Passing a law for cumpolsory voting isn’t worth the paper its written on without a penalty for a breach.
Voter Supression is a regular campaign tactic even today in the United States, with both major parties devoting massive time and energy to finding ways to reduce voters from voting rolls and prevent opposition party activists from encouraging voters to turn out to vote. In 2002 Republican officials tried to reduce Democratic voters by paying professional telemarketers in Idaho to make repeated hang-up calls to block Democrats’ ride-to-the-polls phone lines on election day.
With compulsory voting such tactics are moot because we have 96+% voter turnout so encouraging people to get of their arse and vote is unnecessary.
In the USA before 1965 some southern states used government taxes, called Poll Taxes and literacy tests designed to prevent African Americans and working-class whites from voting.
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Russel, you are avoiding the issue and persisting with the idea that it is up the the free individual to justify their freedom.
Costs and benefits are to individuals, not communities. Communities can’t lose freedoms because they don’t have any. Define how a community can experience a benefit?
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…and do it without referring to individuals, while you’re at it…
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Stephen, you’ve clearly failed to understand what a right is and is not. The right to vote is not the same as a legal obligation to vote. One is a right, the other is a infringement of my right to NOT vote. Non-payment of fines typically leads to gaol, that is the whole point. What is the point of issuing fines, if you’re not going to enforce payment. And if I can avoid payment and punishment for non-payment, what is the point of issuing the fine in the first place.
I have been fined for not voting and I did avoid it by a slight extension of the truth, claiming that I’d moved inter-state (I had) before the election (I hadn’t). It was a pure oversight on my behalf, I didn’t realise that voting in council elections was compulsory in Victoria as I am from WA where it isn’t. There was no malice, no victim, so why should I have been fined in the first place and felt a need to perjure myself to avoid a stupid fine for not voting? It is ridiculous. Anyone who pays a not voting fine is not imaginative enough to avoid it, but the point is, making people jump through hoops to avoid stupid laws is more stupid.
Compulsory voting is stupid and its most significant unintended consequence is to turn participation in the democratic process from a proud duty and a positive experience to a drudgery and an inconvenience, with the resultant decrease in the quality of political discourse.
I really don’t see how compulsory voting would stop underhanded tactics during elections. If voting were compulsory in the US, can you imagine an African American in Lousianna in 1960 fighting their way through a bunch of angry white supremicists to get to the polling booth because of fear of a fine? Crack down on illegal intimidation of voters, don’t crack down on voters for being fearful.
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Chaplain under fire for pedophile friendship
I thought this was relevent – an example of interference in the freedom of friendship?
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Stephen,
If people wanted to intimidate others into not voting, I doubt whether a $20 fine is going to make much difference. If you are worried about intimidation in the way it occurs in most places of the world, I’m sure it isn’t too hard to think of laws to stop it.
More importantly, if politicians wern’t the hopeless lying populist trash that they have become in many Anglo-countries, and they actually had real policies and the parties offered real alternatives, people might actually turn out to vote voluntarily — The last election in France got 85% of registered voters, so it is possible.
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“Define how a community can experience a benefit? and do it without referring to individuals, while you’re at it…”
A community can benefit by protecting itself from a disease if a certain proportion of the community is vaccinated.
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Russell,
Really? And who would this proportion be, then? Immunisation programmes provide individual benefits, Russell. Just because an individual benefits from the actions of others, when he himself takes no action, is an unintended consequence of the selfish behaviour of the people who get immunised. When you subject your kids to immunisation and the minor risk associated with it, you are doing so to protect them, not your lazy arse neighbour’s kids.
Try again.
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Brendan – isn’t this just semantics? You can always say, as a community is made up of individuals, that only individuals act and only individuals benefit – but we don’t live as hermits in caves. The whole community has benefitted from not having polio or tuberclosis epidemics – just imagine how much more you would be taxed if the hospitals were filled with your fellow citizens struck down with those diseases.
“Just because an individual benefits from the actions of others, when he himself takes no action, is an unintended consequence of the selfish behaviour of the people who get immunised. When you subject your kids to immunisation and the minor risk associated with it, you are doing so to protect them, not your lazy arse neighbour’s kids”
This is a fairly miserable view of the effort a lot of volunteers put in, which benefits a lot of other people ( the community). My next door neighbour helps a migrant family learn English, my sister (via a network run by the local council) takes an elderly women shopping and to doctor’s appointments etc. All these things benefit individuals, save having to have government programs to do stuff, multiply “social capital” and “trust” – – they benefit the community!
I think there is an unbridgeable difference of perception between us – which is also how I felt when Andrew wrote of friendship, above “These rules often evolve over time, adapting to signals from each other and circumstances, like a market.” Sorry, but human relationships of any depth are not like a market.
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Wow! Talk about following the argument whereever it leads – from Facebook to immunisations for children (although I suppose that a tangential link might relate if you think about real viruses and computer viruses).
But I digress. I think that the main thing about new IT trends like facebook are that we live in the electronic age, and that we don’t really go out and spend much time interacting with each other as people or as a community anymore. It used to be that we just sat in front of the TV instead of meeting, and now instead, we spend all our time doing things on the internet.
What I wonder is whether or not things like facebook are an electronic attempt for people to reclaim, in the new age, some degree of the social interaction which used to exist before we all went electronic, and if so, how successful is this instead of actually meeting or speaking to people?
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Russell,
Don’t accuse me of a miserly outlook on life, I applaud volunteer behaviour and believe that our ability to act charitably is much under-rated by people who would replace voluntary activities with state services.
It is not miserly to consider that a volunteer benefits from their volunteering action, but your example wasn’t about charity, it was an inherently selfish act of immunisation. Any benefits others gain from my immunisation are positive side effects, but the primary purpose is to keep myself or my children healthy. Positive side effects are a bonus, and I get additional benefit from feeling good about doing both the smart thing and a good thing. But if it was only the good thing and the cost to me was excessive, then I would have less motivation to do it. Say if immunisation resulted in a 1 in 10 chance of bad side effects, then I may not immunise myself. This is what parents who don’t understand the risk are doing when they refuse to give their children the super-immunisation, they are mis-weighting the adverse outcome against the probability. They don’t care about the positive benefits to others, they are worried about the negative impacts on their children. Their irrationality doesn’t cost them most of the time though, because they get benefits of others immunisation reducing the chance of the disease being present. Their irrational selfishness is being rewarded by other’s rational selfishness.
As for voluntary work, to claim that volunteers don’t get rewarded for their work through the good feelings that they have, the sense of pupose they gain, the socil network they develop, the social status they gain, the experience they gain, is to ignore the reason people do volunteer. People choose their own rewards, for some it is enough to see the smile on a child’s face, and that in itself is reward enough to them.
It is quite difficult to imagine a truly selfless act, one that provides you with absolutely no benefit whatsoever, much less commit one without some external clear and present danger, such as people risking their lives during emergencies.
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On the facebook topic, I’ve received a bunch of invites from friends, but to be honest, I can’t be bothered. I’d rather them simply email me the photos, or send me a personal email. Typing my email address into a social network site does not a friendship make.
I don’t think Andrew is right though, there are lots of areas the state doesn’t interfere. Most of my life is free of state interference, but I am an educated, employed, middle class male. The problem is, is that if you have to be middle class and male to avoid the state, that leaves a whole lot of people who aren’t free of almost daily interactions with the state.
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“It is quite difficult to imagine a truly selfless act”
Brendan are you asking us to believe that you’ve never been loved?
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Russel, what are you talking about? The person who loves someone else feels good about it, and hopefully gets to trade those feelings for equal feelings in return. How is that selfless? Emotions aren’t an action anyway.
This is getting a bit personal for a blog, don’t you think?
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“This is getting a bit personal for a blog, don’t you think?”
Sort of. I thought your statement: “It is quite difficult to imagine a truly selfless act” was kind of shocking, but maybe that’s just my experience … I didn’t have to imagine truly selfless acts, just remember witnessing them, thousands of them. I’ve been lucky then.
I often think, when I see commenters here wielding the razor of reason, of that phrase: “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know”
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Russell,
Not to put to fine a point out of it, if you derive anything positive from an act of charity of kindness, even a glimmer of joy or wellbeing, then it isn’t selfless. If people didn’t receive these positive reinforcements through their body chemistry, they wouldn’t do them. I’m just trying to be honest about what motivates humans, not denigrate the acts of charity and kindness that surround us.
It doesn’t cheapen the act to know that fire-fighters get a visceral thrill and adrenalin rush from entering burning buildings and rescuing people. To a certain extent, knowledge that fire-fighters enjoy their work so much is a reason their pay is so low, they are getting non-monetary rewards, and is why Australia successfully relies on volunteer country fire-fighters. The non-monetary rewards must be pretty high to risk your life for a living for either little money or no money. Similar reasons could be attributed to teachers’ and nurses’ low rates of pay (not to mention socialised education and healthcare).
Why do you think the government spends time and money propagandising charity work, is it to boost the recognition of voluntary work? If charitable work was selfless, people wouldn’t mention it on their cvs, for instance.
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Brendan – this is a very purist approach to life you have: even a ‘glimmer’ of self-satisfaction and the act isn’t selfless. Hmmn. I guess I’m just prepared to accept all the little, mostly selfless, acts I see as, well, selfless. Sometimes people just respond to other people’s needs, even though they don’t want to, it’s just how they are. I don’t really think you can prove that all acts do have even the tiniest degree of self-satisfaction, but as I said, I don’t think it matters.
I wouldn’t have cited fire-fighters, or even Simpson and his bloody donkey, (no breach of comments policy – the donkey was surely bloody, carrying wounded soldiers) but what about bystanders at the scene of an accident or disaster who don’t even think, but fling themselves into danger to help rescue someone? A fairly selfless act I would say.
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If people’s reaction’s during emergencies are the best you can up with as “selfless acts”, then in the scheme of human activity, most people are never in a position nor likely to encounter a selfless act.
Charitable acts don’t need to be heroic in the dramtic sense of the word, the vast majority of volunteer work is drudgery. Ask someone who mans homeless shelters as a volunteer whether they get satisfaction out of their work.
Whether you think an act is selfless matters little though. I think we both agree that charitable work is good, even if we come from different ideas about the nature of the human condition. From a political point of view, I’d prefer that the state stopped crowding out charitable works through the provision of services and the regulation of service provision.
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Brendan,
you need to distinguish between whether people would perform altruistic acts even if they were not rewarded — i.e., just because there is a reward does not imply people act because of it. These things are easy to test, and people certainly have for many years, with groups as young as 18 months old (Tomasello and K? have a famous peg study from a few years back), and chimpanzees in captivity even act altruisically towards humans also. You can also do things like vary the reward — under the assumption people act altruistically based on rewards, it should be the case that the bigger the reward you give, the more altruistic behavior you should find — but this relationship is generally weak with huge individual differences.
It is also worthwhile pointing out that in terms of a reward scenario, there should be negative correlations with age (young people have more to gain over time) — but you’ll find great amounts of altruism between old people in places like old people’s homes, when these guys have almost nothing to gain.
It seems to me thatgiven most of the evidence points to the fact that altruistic behavior is not strongly related to rewards, then the onus is really on those that say it is to provide the studies and evidence, and preferably evidence as to why the other studies don’t find such a relationship.
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Brendan,
a good article to read about this is “The nature of Human Altruism” which is a review article in Nature in 2003 by Fehr and Fischbacher. You can find it on google scholar using the terms altruism and rewards and then clicking on the html version.
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Nobody wants me to be their friend.
Was it something I said?
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Apparently everything has its price Rafe – perhaps you need to raise your bids.
(BTW I don’t suppose you have a copy of “Lives of the Saints” you could lend Brendan, do you? – I had to memorise it at school so didn’t need to keep a copy)
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back to the topic I think fuddy duddies like Rajat and Andrew are missing out on the *real* reason behind Facebook i.e. networking with ‘celebrities’. You sign on to facebook, make friends with people you know, then trawl through their friends to see if they have any celebrities among them, then make some excuse to communicate with them and/or subsequently request friendship with them. six degrees of separation:-)
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PS in andrew’s case he may be missing the point because he is one of these ‘celebrities’ which is why he gets all these unsolicited friendship requests.
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So… in that case, all that blogging and Rafe is no more of a celebrity than I am.
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Pursuing your self-interest can mean different things to different people. It does not necessarily mean greed.
Many businesspeople get satisfaction from making lots of money, but Mother Teresa pursued her self-interest by helping the poor. People have different personalities, but everyone pursues their self-interest if given the chance.
A truly self-less act might be giving up your life to save another.
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I never claimed that the size of the reward mattered, I merely claimed that the acts were not selfless. How do you measure the size of feeling good about yourself?
People may learn that they feel good about helping others, parents teach children to share etc. Why do you think this means I don’t value charitable works or am small hearted ub some way? Not a charitable attitude to have.
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Brendon: I’ll claim (and I believe the evidence supports me), that altruistic acts and feeling good (or for that matter, any type of reward) are only weakly correlated — and hence many (not all) altruistic acts are essentially selfless.
The claim is therefore that people do altruistic acts because they are essentially programmed to do so (i.e., its a genetic predisposition on behavior), do so for other reasons (like being forced to thanks to social pressure), and a whole gamut of other reasons not to do with feeling good.
Read the article — its really interesting, and shows just how complicated making attributions about why people do these sorts of things is.
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Conrod, you’re missing my point. If you get anything in return for altruism, then it is not selfless, irrelevent to the correlation of strength of reward. I normally don’t go hunting for other people’s references, but in your case I’ll read the article and get back to you. First impression, though, they could have formatted the article with a bigger font. It is truly an act of charity to read such eye straining material.
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From reading the article, all I gather is that if reputation is at stake, most people will behave fairly, if it is not, there are some that will continue to act fairly, and some that will not. It really didn’t tell me anything about whether charitable works are selfless or not. There was a lot of talk about future rewards, which indicates a non-selfless act, but not much explanation of why strong reciprocators act the way they do because the results cannot explain n-person cooperative behaviour.
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Brendan — sorry if the article is hard to understand (I read this sort of stuff all the time as part of my job). I suggested the article because it shows that:
(a) altruism is very complex (it can be examined at different levels and in different forms);
(b) You can however succesfully investigate altruism and aspects of it in constrained situations (and hence investigate things like reward conditions);
and most importantly
(c) you can construct theories of altruism that do not rely on selfish behavior (your “feeling good”) that have predictive power in some circumstances. This suggests that altruistic behavior is not neccesarily done just so the individual feels good.
I find it intersesting because if we don’t just rely on maximizing our gains then a good question is why we do it (like, why do we all co-operate in a way that other animals don’t?). This is where we degenerate into more speculative reasons, and people wonder about the genetic basis of it.
Its worthwhile noting that some of this has strong relevance to the types of things that you often argue about, (which is why I suggested it) because it shows that group co-operation (or lack of it) can rely on small numbers of individuals.
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Conrad, this article supports my argument more than it disproves it. It shows a strong correlation between people acting fairly when they have something at stake. For instance, when reputation was a factor, individuals would not accept an off less than 4 MUs out of 10, but when it wasn’t, they’d accept 3 MUs in the ultimatum game.
The fact that they didn’t simple act selfishly all the time and accept any offer, independent of guaranteed future interactions or not, isn’t difficult to imagine. Punishing someone (and yourself) for unfair behaviour today provides future benefit irrelevent to whether you deal with that person or not, because of the expectation that they may have to deal with others in the future. If they are reasonably sure that others will behave as they do in punishing unfair behaviour, then they do benefit in the future by having to deal with less defectors overall. They must trust that others do the same to get a future benefit, but experience tells them whether this is true or not.
Just because I am a libertarian doesn’t mean I don’t have faith in other humans, in fact to a certain extent, it means I have to have more faith in the moral actions of others, because I would choose not to be protected by the state in order to enjoy greater personal freedom.
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Justin — I wasn’t saying you don’t have faith in other humans at all — and I agree that being a libertarian requires more faith in others than other political persuasions (probably a lot more).
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Conrad,
I assume that your last post is addressed to me? I guess it simply boils down to the idea that if you have a fair idea of what type of situations promote the best in human behaviour, you can look for these properties and endorse them. Saying that charity is some sort of unexplainable selfless act, gives you no clue on the human condition and seems to me an act of pure faith, a pseudo-religious experience, a concept I don’t believe. Faith is where reason ends and superstition begins.
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“being a libertarian requires more faith in others than other political persuasions (probably a lot more”
or being a libertarian suggests a lot of confidence in your ability to be able to exploit the opportunities in any situation and come out a winner. Maybe people on the left have faith in most people (even if the community needs protection from those rogue exploiting libertarians) but think that building up social institutions helps develop the more civilised aspects of our nature.
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