The ethics of friendships: Are our values reflected in the people we spend time with?

Some psychologists believe that we become the average of the people we spend the most time with. However, this can make things complicated for our own morals, ethics, and values.

In the middle of 2020, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Malala Yousafzai was harassed on Twitter for endorsing her conservative friend at Oxford University. It made headlines around the world, with thousands of people commenting on who they felt they could and couldn’t be friends with out of principle. 

While friendships often transcend differences of opinion, most people have limits on what values and beliefs they will tolerate in the people they spend time with. It’s important to ask ourselves: does being friends with someone mean agreeing with all their values and beliefs? Or can we be friends with someone we disagree with?

There is more to friendship than simply sharing values and beliefs

When we enter into a friendship, we are agreeing to a set of duties and expectations of what it means to be a good friend. These duties can involve providing support during difficult times, celebrating accomplishments, being caring and empathetic, and so on. 

However, it’s unlikely we’ll have friends who we agree with 100% of the time. This could mean disagreeing with a choice they made, or realising that you have differing values about something. It is perfectly reasonable to disagree with a friend or hold an opposing view, and not be hypocritical in your own beliefs.  

It’s important to interrogate, though, what this means for us. When Malala was harassed online for having a friend with different political views, it wasn’t because she herself expressed those views. Rather, it was because she supported a friend with different views, and that support supposedly had to have indicated something about her own values and beliefs. 

Friendships, however, are so much more than shared values. Having people in our lives with different values and opinions can broaden our perspective on the world, while also providing us with the opportunity to question the reasoning behind our own beliefs. 

Even though there is more to a person than both their views and the views of their friends, it is naïve to claim that our friends’ values don’t have an impact on us.

So, there has to be a threshold of tolerance in what we are willing to understand in our friends’ values. The ethical dilemma we find ourselves in is where we draw the line. 

There is no doubt that some categories of opinions and values shouldn’t be given the same airtime as others. One way we can discern this is by asking: what are the implications on others in expressing or acting on this belief? 

Some beliefs predominantly impact the individual who holds them. Food preferences, opinions about what clothes look good, or what music sounds best are unlikely to have a significant effect on the people in this person’s life. 

However, expressing or acting on other kinds of beliefs can have obvious, negative impacts on certain groups of people such as racist, sexist or homophobic rhetoric, disinformation, and hate speech. Understanding that expressing some kinds of beliefs has an impact on the broader community characterises the harm of unchecked intolerance. 

When we overlook a friend’s more severe hateful or discriminatory belief, we can become complicit in allowing a belief that harms others to go unchecked.

Overlooking a hateful or discriminatory belief the same way that we might overlook a difference in taste or preference makes it seem like we are condoning, if not supporting, that belief. For example, if your friend was continuously espousing hate speech and you didn’t call them out on it, it doesn’t matter if you didn’t partake in hate speech yourself. By letting it slide because it’s a friend, the harm of expressing these values is still being done. Challenging and speaking out about that belief doesn’t mean that we are being a bad friend – in fact, it usually means the opposite.

One possible solution: deal breakers

Even though we can’t expect to have all the same values as our friends, we might expect that we have the same deal breakers as them. A deal breaker is something like a value or personality trait that will cause a person to back out of a relationship or agreement. For example, one of the things that might connect us to our friends is that we all have a deal breaker that we won’t tolerate someone who is rude or unkind to strangers. Having the same deal breakers means that we draw the same line in the sand of what we will and won’t tolerate, rather than ensuring that we agree on every single value. 

The concept of a deal breaker can be helpful with ethical value differences in our friends, too. For example, it could be that we’re happy with different approaches to ethical decision making, as long as we both won’t tolerate anything that harms others unnecessarily. Instead of making sure we agree with our friends entirely, we’re making sure we’re on the same page about the “non-negotiable” values we have. 

As with most ethical issues, the answer is rarely black and white. In this case, the line we draw with what values we tolerate in our friends can often fluctuate due to external factors, including mental health and personal context. 

At the end of the day, being someone’s friend shouldn’t mean that you have to defend every single belief that they have. I would hope that my friends feel that they can challenge my beliefs, and that I can do the same for them. However, it is important that we think about the deal breakers we have and hold our friends accountable for how their beliefs impact the broader population, and be willing to look inward when they do the same for us.