Hello. My name is Reverend Hope. I am a spiritual advisor with a special interest in marriage and relationships. I am by no means an expert, but I have some interesting ideas to share with you about love, relationships, and friendships.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you get a call from that one friend who only wants to see you because they need your help for something? How about a boss that often takes advantage of his position to ask for extra favors at the job? If you’ve had any friendships, you would know that many of them end up like this.
Many friendships and relationships of all kinds run into the issue of instrumentality. We often find ourselves doing something because we stand to gain or benefit from doing it. We work so we can get a paycheck. We deal with, and hopefully cooperate with, other people at work because doing so proves beneficial on the way to meet our desired goal, which is to get paid. Does this mean that we’re using the people we work with in order to gain something purely for ourselves?
The short answer is yes. We use our coworkers and our bosses as a means to an end, and any seeming friendship that we may have with them at work, quickly fades away once the context of work is removed. The relationship we have with coworkers at its baseline is utilitarian, and it only changes if we start to make connections to them outside of the working context.
Okay, so we become friends with our coworkers outside of work, does that mean we are no longer using them for our own personal gain? The answer isn’t necessarily yes. We may find joy in similar interests and shared activities with friends outside of work (and this applies to all kinds of friendships as well), but that doesn’t mean that we see those friends for who they truly are
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Aristotle believed that there were these 2 forms of instrumental friendships that comprise most of the friendships that people have. There is a third form which he considered to be the only “true” friendship, which is called soul-friendship (Vernon 2010).
Soul friendships are exceedingly rare. They’re the kind of deep relationship which some may call soul mates, but it can exist outside of a romantic relationship. The difference between soul friendships and instrumental friendships is the fact that soul friendships hold the quality of unconditionality. There is an acceptance of who the person is for who they are, and not just on a superficial level. This kind of friend is one who will always have your back, but also know when to give tough love. They will accept you in the most difficult of situations without judgment and choose to continue being your friend despite whatever they may be going through. However, even then there still exists a sense of instrumentality, albeit it does not form the basis of the friendship.
When I say that people use one another for their own gain, you may be thinking of people who are narcissistic or even psychopathic, but there actually needs to be an element of practical use or benefit even for the closest of friends. Narcissistic psychopaths are no friend to you, and if you know them to be as such, then you know this fact. They use people instrumentally but without consideration for anyone else’s wellbeing. The really dangerous people have little regard for the safety of the people they use. They’re not really the type of person that I’m talking about when I say that we use other people instrumentally.
Let’s use a perspective from Kant to grant us a little clarity. According to Kant, using anyone as a means to an end is morally reprehensible. This is because he believed that people have natural rights to liberty and that people should use those rights to strive for something greater than themselves. Kant might not consider working for someone simply for a paycheck to be the right thing to do, because you would be using people as a means toward that end. The problem here is the end in question. Should one work just for a paycheck, or should one find work that is meaningful and aligns with a sense of higher purpose?
Adam Smith believed that if people had what he called an impartial spectator, that people would strive to be their best and do better for other people. This would make even the most mundane jobs have some sense of meaningful purpose, because each person in the workplace is no longer using one another, but rather cooperating at a higher level in a way that is beneficial to all involved. While this sounds idealistic, not many people take the time to reflect on their own actions, much less keep in mind a third-party spectator to help guide them towards better decisions.
In The Meaning of Friendship, author Mark Vernon laments the fact that as long as jobs and workplaces are focused on commercialism above all else, then it really won’t be possible to establish anything beyond an instrumental friendship. This presents a moral dilemma, one which extends beyond the workplace.
We live in a highly commercialized society. The friends people often rely on are those who are far from what Aristotle considered to be soul friends. Kant might say that the state of our relationships and friendships is highly immoral because we are all in service to something lesser than our best selves. We are too focused on egoistic individuality, material gain, luxury comfort, extreme convenience—all things belonging to the world. It might very well be that the ability to form soul friendships is next to none because it seems that we have lost sight of the values that true friendships comprise.
If we want to be able to connect with people in a more enriching way, we have to be able to think about what truly makes a friendship and what that connection entails. Instrumentality is part of all friendships, but if we consistently have friends that only serve an external purpose, such as work friends or friends that are bound by some interest or activity, then we will continue to feel like something is missing from our connections. If you want to test the quality of your friendships, ask yourself if there would still be a connection if everything that brings you together were to suddenly be taken away. If so, you have a utilitarian friendship. If not, you may have something that is worth holding onto for dear life.