Ethics for the Very Young by Kenyon Erik; Terorde-Doyle Diane; Carnahan Sharon

Ethics for the Very Young by Kenyon Erik; Terorde-Doyle Diane; Carnahan Sharon

Author:Kenyon, Erik; Terorde-Doyle, Diane; Carnahan, Sharon,
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-01-04T04:28:56+00:00


81

Chapter 7

Lesson 4: Friendship

Aristotle on Friendship

How many friends do you have, really? Judging by a typical Facebook account, most people have hundreds or thousands. But, if we set the standard for friendship at a simple click and the occasional status update, we’re missing out on a rich part of human experience.

Perhaps friends are people we enjoy interacting with on a regular, one-on-one basis. If that’s the case, are coworkers or fellow students your friends? Are just the ones you like interacting with at work or school your friends? How many of these people do you see outside of work or school? How many would you invite to your wedding? How many would come?

And then there are our social circles: those groups of people that we get together with when we go out. Are our real friends the ones we choose to spend our free time with, the ones we look to when we want to have fun? Perhaps. But many such relationships are the quickest to fall by the wayside as people start families or move to new cities.

Perhaps, then, it is endurance that shows who our real friends are: those relationships that will last no matter how circumstances change. If that’s true, are our family members our true friends? As with death and taxes, our family will always be there. How many of us would even think of family members as friends in the first place?

Given that most of us consider friendship an important part of life, we’re left with a dilemma: We all want to have friends, and we all want those friendships to be real, but it turns out that it’s hard to say what a “real friend” might be. Before we can say how many real friends we have, we need to figure out what we’re even talking about.

82One approach would be to split “friend” into categories. We could do this by context: school friends, work friends, Facebook friends, going-out friends, girlfriends, boyfriends. We could do this by standing: acquaintances versus close friends, new friends versus old friends. But it’s hard to see when such a process would stop. What’s worse, all it accomplishes is to restate the question, Which categories are our real friends?

Aristotle saw friendship as such an important part of the good life that he dedicated two books of his Nicomachean Ethics to it (EN 8–9). “Human beings,” after all, “are a political animal” (EN 9.9). We naturally form relationships with each other, and living well, at least in part, requires us to form good relationships. Rather than look to context or standing, Aristotle suggests we categorize friendships by what they are based on. He narrows this down to three possible bases: pleasure, utility, and virtue (EN 8.2–3).

Friendships based on pleasure, he suggests, are common among the young and tend to be short-lived. If what we have in common with our “going-out friends” is going out, there’s little reason to stay in touch once we start a family or move to another city.



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