Nicomachean Ethics · Chapter
Friendship or Love explained
This chapter explores the nature of friendship, distinguishing between friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue, and examining how equality and inequality shape different types of relationships, including those between parents and child
What happens
This chapter explores the nature of friendship, distinguishing between friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue, and examining how equality and inequality shape different types of relationships, including those between parents and children, brothers, spouses, and citizens under various political constitutions. It emphasizes that true friendship is based on virtue, habit, and mutual goodwill, and that it requires a certain equality or proportional reciprocity to endure.
Themes in this chapter
Friendship and Community
The chapter extensively discusses friendship as a form of association, its dependence on equality or proportionality, and its role in political and familial relationships.
Justice and Fairness
Friendship is closely linked to justice, with the text noting that both require proportionate reciprocity and that the absence of common ground eliminates both friendship and justice.
Characters to notice
- Aristotle
Primary author and philosopher presenting the analysis of friendship, its types, and its relation to justice and political systems.
Key passages
“The friendship, again, of man and wife is the same as that which has place in an aristocracy; for both benefit in proportion to their merit, the better getting more good, and each what is fitting; but this is the rule of justice also.”
The relationship between husband and wife mirrors an aristocratic political system, where each benefits according to their worth, and this proportional distribution is also a principle of justice.
Aristotle draws an analogy between marital friendship and aristocratic governance, emphasizing proportional benefit.
“The truest friendship, then, is that which exists between good men, as we have said again and again. For that, it seems, is lovable and desirable which is good or pleasant in itself, but to each man that which is good or pleasant to him; and the friendship of good men for one another rests on both these grounds.”
The most genuine form of friendship is between virtuous individuals, because they are both good and pleasant in themselves, and they value each other for these intrinsic qualities.
This highlights Aristotle's view that virtue-based friendship is the highest and most stable type.
“For where ruler and subject have nothing in common, there cannot be any friendship, any more than there can be any justice— e.g. when the relation is that of a workman to his tools, or of the soul to the body, or of master to slave.”
When there is no shared interest between a ruler and a subject, friendship and justice are impossible, just as they are between a person and their tools, or a master and a slave.
Aristotle argues that friendship requires common ground, which is absent in purely instrumental or hierarchical relationships.