A term or concept · 1990 · Ethics
Is it good for you?
The question underneath all of it, and the reason the clinical literature went in circles for forty years: is a parasocial bond a form of wellbeing, a substitute for it, or neither?
Still unresolved and the most honest place to be. The honest answer is that it depends on cost - money, sleep, peace - rather than on the strength of the feeling, which is why the disorder cannot be identified from the feeling alone and why the audit scores both axes instead of one.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
1950 1950-1999 · 1990 1999
Provenance · 2 source record(s)
- retrievableThe test this site keeps applying, from the source: whether an arrangement flatters a life is not the question. Aristotle's eudaimonia is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a whole life - a standard applied to the completed life, not the enjoyable momentAristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and X; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 'Aristotle's Ethics'. ↗
- unverifiedAnd the reason the question recurs: the standard is deliberately not reducible to pleasure, which is why an analysis of what makes people feel better about their attachments keeps needing this older vocabularyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 'Aristotle's Ethics'. ↗
Connected · 2 out, 2 in
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