1 Confessions of a Moral Schizophrenic* By Jayme Johnson I ...

ideal to govern a general pro-friendship disposition rather than over each disposition for
the treatment of a particular friend.
The manner in which the counterfactual condition mediates between the criterion of
right/regulative ideal and the set of dispositions, on Mason’s interpretation, creates a sort
of hierarchy of dispositions. The governing conditions proper for friendships would be
regulated by a general pro-friendship disposition, and the acceptance/terminating
conditions would themselves be dispositional. In this case, the terminating condition
would be a disposition to cease having a pro-friendship disposition if it could no longer be
argued that the best lives are had by those with friendships, and that it is a better world in
which such relationships exist. So long as these two conclusions can be upheld empirically,
the sophisticated consequentialist may keep and maintain the pro-friendship disposition,
and thus engage in true friendships. The agent meets the counterfactual condition by
developing this structure of dispositions and changes a given disposition only if it is no
longer morally defensible to keep that disposition. (This answers question two.) A major
advantage to this interpretation, Mason argues, is that under it “the circumstances in
which a pro-friendship disposition would cease to be optimal are much more drastic than
the circumstances in which a particular relationship would cease to become optimal.” 43
The difference between the Cocking and Oakley and the Mason interpretations is
easily seen in the following example. Dick is a sophisticated consequentialist who recently
discovered that he could make a substantial improvement in the conditions of a certain
third-world nation. In order to do so, however, Dick would have to end his life as he now
43 Ibid. 392
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