Ethical Dilemmas

In this paper, I will explore the question of the moral permissibility of intervening when I see and know of a close friend suffering with abuse and self-harm. This question touches on a larger debate as to the extent of a person’s autonomy, and if that can ever be overruled by someone else’s attempt to force a decision they believe is in the best interest of their friend. The specific example I will be focusing on is when the close friend explicitly tells me to not seek help on their behalf. It is a situation where I believe that she is not safe living at her home, and I am constantly scared that one day will be the day that something extremely serious occurs and I am never able to see my best friend again. I argue that is is morally permissible,

not required, to intervene in these circumstances, based on the nature of a close, or best, friend relationship, and the effect the knowledge of the abuse and resulting self-harm has on my own well being.
Firstly, I wish to establish what a best friend in the context of this paper is, and the implications that definition has on my argument. The relationship between me and my best friend is not an explicitly contractual relationship. We did not draw up a terms of condition when we first met and agree to sign and abide by them throughout our friendship. Our relationship is in no way legally binding. There are, however, implied agreements and expectations that come from the relationship, which include a level of trust, respect, and love for the other person. This is not the only type of relationship grounded in this way. Parents are not required by any power to love their children, but it is an expectation that is generally held about that type of relationship. Much like the relationship between parent and child, there is no document that requires best friends to care for each other and support them through whatever happens in their respective lives, but it is an expectation that best friends generally have of each other. Best friends also help alleviate feelings of loneliness in that they know what is going on in your life and to an extent experience life events with you, so you aren’t doing so by yourself. The intimacy between best friends means that when something objectively good and exciting happens to one of you (a graduation, wedding, new job, moving cities), the other shares in that joy and happiness. Conversely, a negative event (a death, divorce, or laying-off) also adversely impacts both parties. This type of intense relationship, from my experience, is commonplace among teenagers and young adults, particularly high school (and early college-aged) girls. The situation that the question of this paper is inspired by involves the relationship between myself and another girl, who I became best friends with during high school, which is already known to be a fairly tumultuous period of young women’s lives, without the added factor of one suffering from abuse and self-harm.
The emotional investment in the other person’s life, a marker of a relationship between best friends, makes me, too, susceptible to feelings of sadness, confusion, and anger due to these types of negative events directly affecting my best friend. A friend who is not as close, an acquaintance or even a stranger can feel sympathy towards another person due to events like death, divorce, and self-harm, but I argue that they are not personally emotionally affected by the unhappiness or pain felt, because they lack the same level of emotional intimacy that best friends have. This type of distantant sympathy can be clearly seen through advertisements or videos looking for donations to a specific cause. St. Jude’s runs advertisements showing gravely ill children and explaining how your donation can make a real difference in their lives. This type of ad is successful because it targets our emotions. It is looking to use those feelings of sympathy that we form for others in bad or upsetting situations to gain donations. However, I do not personally know those children, know nothing of their lives beyond what is shown in a two minute ad, and they do not know anything about me. I feel sympathy for their situation (and am thus inclined to donate), but my life is in no way altered by the knowledge that these children have, for example, terminal cancer. The sympathy, or any other feelings, felt towards a distant or unfamiliar person in an upsetting situation is different from the feelings felt when it is your best friend in that same situation.
The knowledge of the abuse and self-harm that my best friend is suffering from puts an intense burden on my own well being. While I do not equate the physical and emotional harm felt by my close friend with my own, I claim that I, as the confidant, am not left with purely feelings of detached sympathy, but rather my own emotional and mental turmoil. It is because of the personal affect on my own well-being that it is morally permissible to seek appropriate help for my best friend.
The strongest and most obvious counter to this claim comes through the question of why taking care of my own well being supersedes the privacy and inferred confidentiality of the friendship and the other person’s explicit declaration that they did not want any interference.

My opponent will claim that there are other ways to address my own emotional and mental health (resulting from the knowledge of the abuse), that do not involve seeking professional help for my best friend. They will ask why I cannot just enroll in individual therapy sessions, or talk to a professional about my own feelings and not include my best friend in it? This sub-question about why I could not simply talk to my own therapist or professional can be answered by once again looking at the nature of the relationship between best friends. Part of my definition of that relationship involves the emotional investment that these types of friends have in each other’s lives. Whether rightly or wrongly (the debate about how healthy this type of best friend relationship is for both parties is outside the interests of this paper), my emotional well-being is fairly strongly connected to the well-being of my best friend. The only way I could take care of myself through therapy sessions is if I detached the emotional strings that connect my best friend and I, thereby breaking the friendship. A counterargument to and question pertaining to friendship cannot be simply to end the friendship. There would be no true, close friendships left in the world if every time someone was faced with a moral dilemma regarding their friend, the correct answer is just to ditch the friend all together—basically avoiding the dilemma

entirely.
I will answer the larger question of the counter argument by adopting a Kantian view of my decision to seek help for my best friend. I argue that the maxim I am acting on does not involve any malicious intent, and the fact that through the action that I take I do not follow my friend’s wishes, is merely a consequence of the action. As as been extensively discussed throughout the quarter, judging actions based purely on their consequences is not a sound way to evaluate individual’s actions. Doing so disregards any investigation into the intention behind those actions, which is the only part of an action that can be judged for its morality. The maxim that I am acting on looks like this: 1. The circumstances of the situation are such that I am extremely emotionally impacted by the pain that my best friend is struggling with as a result of abuse. 2. The ends that I hope to reach is to get to a place when I am not feeling a huge burden, which is affecting my overall well-being, from the knowledge of the abuse. 3. The only action that I can take is to seek help for my friend, knowing that it will hopefully life that burden. If I universalize this maxim, as Kant says I must be able to, we would live in a world where all people who are suffering from abuse, and had a best friend who cared deeply about them, would be confronted with the help the friend believes they desperately need. The secondary consequence of this action, of essentially going behind my friends back, is not the main goal or intention of the action. If the ends I was looking to satisfy were to betray my best friends trust or expose their dire situation for the fun of it, I could complete the same action, but the maxim would be entirely different. Because my only desired end, as stated in the maxim, are to alleviate my own suffering from the knowledge of the abuse, the maxim holds.
The argument I have presented shows that it is morally permissible to seek help for a friend suffering from abuse and self-harm. I have principally framed this argument through the intense nature of the relationship between two best friends. I do acknowledge that much of the argument sounds very self-centered and self-serving, but it is much clearer to argue from this direction, then to try and prove that for whatever reason I had a right to wield power over my best friend and force decisions I thoughts were the best for her. My argument does not touch on weather or not my friend has to accept the help that she is confronted with as a result of my actions. Because my best friend is now over the age of eighteen, there would be no legal ramifications if she refused help and declined to press charges. However, I do not think the argument would have to be altered to differentiate between if my friend is over or under eighteen. Either way, the only goal is to seek a better situation for my best friend because her life matters so much to me and is connected so tightly to mine.