Friends as Ends in Themselves

Abstract

I define friendship as a practical and emotional relationship of mutual and equal goodwill, affection and pleasure.' In a general discussion of friendship I would unpack and defend this broadly Aristotelian definition. But my concerns in this paper can be addressed without doing so. My chief concern is to give an analysis of end love in friendship, distinguishing it from means love, as well as from other notions of end love I regard as unjustifiable. I discuss love outside of friendship only insofar as it has a bearing on love in friendship. I shall give a preliminary sketch of my topic by invoking widely-held intuitions about end friendship as that in which the friend is loved for her essential, not incidental, features; as an intrinsic, not instrumental, value; and as a unique and irreplaceable individual; and by showing how these intuitions fit in or not with the common but ill-understood distinction between conditional and unconditional love. The explication of these intuitions will follow in later sections as part of the analysis of end friendship.

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