Bad Education: Pity, Moral Learning, and the Limits of Rousseauan Friendship John Warner Abstract: Despite a recent resurgence of interest in friendship and a seemingly inexhaustible fascination with Rousseau, scholars have neglected Rousseau’ s conception of friendship. The work that does exist emphasizes friendship’ s ability to inculcate virtue, and moors Rousseau to the classical notion that friendship catalyzes ethical improvement. However, Rousseau lowers the aim of friendship by decoupling it from the process of moral learning and putting limits on the degree of intimacy between friends. The argument is made in four steps. First, Rousseau’ s theory of friendship differs from its relevant predecessors in both origin and end. Second, the effort to ground friendship in pity bounds emotional intimacy, since pity introduces elements of character difference as well as sameness. Third, Rousseauan friendship fails to catalyze virtue and is successful instead in providing consolation. Finally, the essay considers the function of friendship in a Rousseauan polity. How do we become better human beings? To see the question is to see its importance. It is also to see its difficulty, for in order to answer it we must have both a conception of the human good as well as some idea about how it is brought into existence. Classical political philosophers since at least Aristotle have appealed to friendship in order to solve these interrelated pro- blems. They view the relation between friends as a direct instantiation of the good both because it is immediately pleasurable and because it cultivates excellence through the development of human capacities. 1 To these psychic benefits are added political ones, for friendship facilitates personal John Warner is Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, University of California-Davis, 665 Kerr Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616 (jmwarner@ ucdavis.edu). The author thanks the UC Davis Political Theory Forum and the attendees of the 2013 Meeting of the Rousseau Association. I also wish to thank John T. Scott, Robert Taylor, Christopher Kelly, Shalini Satkunanandan, Joseph Reisert, and Keri Oskar for their helpful suggestions. 1 Lorraine Pangle, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ronna Burger, “Hunting Together or Philosophizing The Review of Politics 76 (2014), 243–266. © University of Notre Dame doi:10.1017/S0034670514000072 243