The Virtues of Academic Friends

Dr Richard Hamilton (University of Notre Dame Australia)

Professional ethics and research ethics are both burgeoning fields. Surprisingly little attention has been devoted to considering the ethical status of those who evaluate the ethics of others. But such a need is pressing since all reasonable observers will conclude that Australian Universities, in common with Universities worldwide, are currently going through a foundational crisis, and that this crisis is to a large extent ethical. It is ethical in the traditional Greek sense of the word insofar as it is a crisis about the character of the University.

I propose that the best way to understand this crisis and to formulate a robust response to it is to examine it from the perspective of the characteristic virtues of university life. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on one virtue in particular which is currently the most imperilled: collegiality, the disinterested concern for the intellectual, moral and spiritual well-being of one’s professional peers. The demands of rising student numbers and pressures to compete for grants and publications in the most prestigious journals, not to mention the increasing concern universities have for their corporate brands force academics into competition with one another. Many of us feel uncomfortable with this pressure seeing our peers as collaborators rather than rivals. Most paradoxically of all, the very business model which is so radically undermining collegiality relies at its very heart upon the ‘gift economy’ of university life.

In this paper, I will locate the issue of collegiality in the context of Aristotle’s remarks in Book IX on the Nicomachean Ethics and in the tension which scholars have identified between these thoughts and those reflections upon contemplation in Book X. I will argue that collegial friendship is one of the constitutive goods of academic life and that we jettison it at our peril.

Dr Richard Paul Hamilton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics, School of Philosophy and Theology, School of Medicine, University of Notre Dame Australia, Fremantle. He completed a PhD on love as a social phenomenon, under the supervision of Professors Susan James and Jennifer Hornsby at Birkbeck College, The University of London. He works on moral philosophy, the philosophy of the emotions, the philosophy of action and the philosophy of social sciences with particular interests in the legal definition of morally contested concepts. His most recent publications have dealt with evolutionary psychology and love as an essentially contested concept. He is currently engaged in a project investigating the biological bases of moral conduct. Before arriving at Notre Dame, he taught at the University of Manchester, the University of Leeds and Manchester Metropolitan University.