Friendship Questions

Questions:

1. At 1155a3 Aristotle presents the virtue of friendship with some hesitation as concerns its status as excellence. What does he say in Excerpt Chapter 1 that may lead to that hesitation? Think of imperfect friendships. Ask yourself what excellence a good person would gain from a friendship with another good person. Are all good men friends?

2. What kinds of likable things are there, and how do they constitute different types of friendship? (chapter 2).

3. Put together the three traits of friendship that in combination are a necessary feature of friendship. (Chapter 2).

4. What is ‘goodwill’? What is it to have the goodwill we ought to have as a friend? Is goodwill just an attitude, or will it also need to show in action? (Chapter 2). Why do friendships based on pleasure or utility fail to fulfill the normative definition of goodwill? (Chapter 3).

5. Put together the features of ‘perfect friendship’ from Chapter 4. Is there space for pleasure and utility internal to perfect friendship? Also list features that are factual or likely to obtain in perfect friendship. Will we befriend each good person in our environment? Ought we to?

6. What renders friendships based on pleasure and utility inferior in ethical value? Do these friendships include goodwill? (Several factors! See Chapters 3 & 5).

7. How does friendship-love (philia) differ from the love of lovers (eros)? (Chapters 5, 7 & 10)? Contrast goodwill with Aristotle’s idea of what matters in erotic love.

8. Distinguish the three pure types of friendship, distinct in the goods pursued by both friends, from two other constellations: (a) the friends exchange two different kinds of goods; (b) the friendship between persons of different status like parents and children (1158b13), or lovers in the erotic sense. What do the three pure types have in common that those who exchange different kinds of goods, or are supposed to interact differently according to the side they are on do not share? Can the different constellations mix? (See 1157a27-35).

9. Why is it impossible to have many friends in the form of perfect friendship? And why does Aristotle here compare perfect friendship to love by calling the both ‘excess’?

10. Why is giving and receiving the same kind of thing, and of receiving and giving in equal quantity or intensity important? (Exchange of pleasure; offer useful items in proportion to the useful items received.) This seems to be pre-understood for perfect friendship, where goodness counts, and not the value of the items otherwise exchanged. But equality seems to be important in imperfect friendships. (1157a4,1158a1,1158a19,1158b1, 1159b3).

11. What are the ‘good’ ways of living structurally asymmetrical friendships, like that between father and son or an older person and a younger person? (Chapters 8 & 10).

12. Read Book IX, Chapters 4 & 8 in our Reader and determine to what extent self-regarding friendly love is as valuable from the point of view of friendship as is the other-regarding love towards the friend. How does Aristotle distinguish between self-love in the service of wealth and pleasure and the self-love that regards excellence?