1. How can Aristotle solve the problems that plague the good-loves-good theory in the Lysis?  Aristotle explicitly endorses the good-loves-good theory.  The main problem is something like this.  To the extent that you are in a good state, you are not lacking anything.  Thus you need nothing, and in particular do not need friends.

·        Aristotle thinks that happiness is the exercise of virtue.  Thus, if you practice perfect virtue, you have perfect happiness, and so you don’t need friends: since your happiness is already perfect, friends will not add anything to it.

· Discussion.

· A.’s answer to this question is found in IX.9.  A. gives us a number of reasons why the perfectly virtuous person benefits from friendship and why the happy (eudaimonic) or blessed person will need friends.  Think of A. as arguing against an opponent who thinks that a friendless hermit who is full of virtue is going to be the happiest person, the one most truly living a flourishing human life.  Here is how he argues against this person:

·        (I) Happiness is not the same thing as virtue according to Aristotle.  Rather, happiness is an activity.  It isn’t just passively sitting back and enjoying your virtue.  Aristotle has a lovely observation elsewhere: Olympic medals are not given for the strongest or the fastest—but for the winner.  Being the strongest or the fastest will not gain you any medals—if you don’t enter.  In the Games, we are rewarded for running the fastest and exhibiting the greatest strength: i.e., for activities.  Now, the happy person is one who exercises her virtue—the exercise of virtue is the main part of her happiness.  For instance, she has the virtue of generosity.  So she actively gives, and enjoys giving, and this giving and its enjoyment is a part of her own happiness.  But to give someone needs to receive.  Thus, she needs people whom she can love, so that she can lavish her generosity on them.

o       This is an interesting reversal of what we had in the Lysis.  Here we have the person who possesses all good giving to others.  She needs others to be fully happy—she needs them as recipients of her love’s gifts.

·        (II) It is a part of the nature of the human being to live in a community with other human beings.  Aristotle expresses this by saying that the human being is a political animal.  But living together in community is a form of friendship: one is a friend of one’s fellow citizens.  The word “friend” here is weaker than it is in English, perhaps.  But some fellow feeling towards one’s fellow countrymen is something we do understand.  If you’ve ever been in a foreign country and met people from back home, you may know what I mean.  Aristotle does not, however, at this point explain why we are political animals.  He just says that this is part of our nature.

·        (III) A. notes that the reason people think the happy person doesn’t need friends is that they forget that pleasure-friendship and utility-friendship are not the only kinds of friendships.  The fully happy person has all she needs for happiness: she does not need another’s help.   She doesn’t need to get any worldly goods from anybody.  And she enjoys her own life to the full: for she is virtuous, acts virtuously, and enjoys acting virtuously.  Thus, she doesn’t need pleasure-friendship.  But it does not follow, Aristotle observes, that she doesn’t need friendship at all.  This argument doesn’t try to prove that A. is right, but does attempt to show that the most likely argument for his opponent’s position is wrong.

·        (IV) We now get into the deeper arguments.  It is a part of happiness to observe, study and think about virtuous actions that belong to one.  But it is easier to see the actions of others than of oneself.  (Why?)  Now, the virtuous actions of a friend can be observed, studied and thought about quite well.  Moreover, these actions belong to one.  For, everything friends have, they have in common, and the friend is another self.  This looks forward to the next argument. 

        (V) Cooperation…

·        (VI) Living with a virtuous person helps to further our own virtue.  (But if one is perfectly happy, does one need this?)  Aristotle at one point clarifies that “living together” doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for animals, such as eating from the same trough (or having sex, one might add).  Rather, it means acting together, cooperatively—see above.  For Aristotle, life is a form of activity.

·        (VII) A good person appreciates things that are of their nature good.  Life is of its nature good and pleasant.  We are, of course, talking of a life not like that of the vicious person, Aristotle notes, but of a well-defined life, an orderly life.  Such a life is objectively good and pleasant.  Now, the virtuous person appreciates and enjoys things that are objectively good and pleasant.  Thus, she appreciates life.  The life talked about is a life of perception and thought.  To perceive someone as perceiving and thinking is to perceive them as alive: for that is human life.  When we live, we perceive that we live, since when we think, we perceive that we think.  This is pleasant.  But likewise it is pleasant to perceive the life of a friend, the thoughts of a friend.  This we will do if we live together with the friend.  Again, this living together is a form of activity—Aristotle is not talking about roommates, but about people who share their lives actively.  And the kind of activity at issue here is the activity of perception and thought, not eating together as pigs do (or even having sex together, as pigs also do, one might add).  The friend is “another self.”  Thus, her life will be as pleasant to you as yours is.

·        All of these arguments attempt to show that even a fully happy person who has everything else—virtue, wealth, pleasure—needs to have friends.

·        All of the arguments, not counting (II) and (III) which are not really full arguments, except perhaps for the last, have a certain feature: They depend on human weakness, imperfection or limitation, either in the happy person or in the friend.  Argument (I) depends on weakness, imperfection or limitation in the friend.  Argument (IV) depends on the fact that we cannot observe ourselves that well.  Argument (V) depends on the fact that we cannot be continuously active.  Argument (VI) depends on our need for further virtue. 

·        Argument (VII) suggests that it’s not enough just to appreciate our own life.  We need to appreciate the life of another human being.  Why?  Is it that our own life is not pleasant enough?  Or is it that it is easier to observe the life of another?  Or is there something deeper at work?  Could we know that we are thinking without knowing that others are thinking?  Or is it just that the more lives we appreciate, the better things are.

·        It seems, thus, that most if not all the reasons we need friendship are due to our human limitedness.  Thus, the gods would not require friendship.  Is this right?  Is friendship a concession to human weakness?

·        But note the shift from Plato.  In Plato, friendship was ultimately towards the Forms.  People were needed to get to see the Forms, but it is the Forms that mattered.  In Aristotle, interpersonal friendship is not just a means, but an end in itself.  It is a part of the happy life, and not just a means to it.

o       This is an important distinction.  For instance, having money is a means to happiness.  It is not itself a part of happiness.  But if you go to a good movie, watching the movie is not just a means to happiness: it is not that there is something separate from watching the movie that the movie will help you get.  Rather, watching the movie is a part of happiness.  Of course if the movie is truly good, watching it will be both a part of happiness and a means to happiness: for it will show you the way to living a more meaningful life.  But it won’t be just a means to happiness, the way money and broccoli (assuming you don’t like it) are.  Friendship is like that.  It is a part of happiness, but it also leads to greater happiness by helping you to grow in virtue.

2. At IX.11, we get a good discussion of when we should spend time with our friends.  Answer: Mainly when we can do good to them, though we must not be kill-joys—we must not utterly avoid letting our friends help us.

3. Film clip.

4.   Whiting’s article sketches an Aristotelian theory of friendship based on commonality of character.  She calls this an ethocentric theory, i.e., one based on ethos, or character.  One’s friends are people with whom one has a character in common, ones whose values one identifies with.  The reason for one’s friendship with them is precisely the commonality of character.  One loves them for their character.

· Some people think this is unacceptable morally.  We should love our friends warts and all.  Moreover, we should love them for being the individuals they are, rather than for falling under a description like “having a good character” or “having a character like ours”.

· Whiting has a response to this argument.  She says that there is nothing wrong with a person loving herself in this way, loving herself only for her virtues.  A virtuous person, she thinks, will love herself in this way.  She will not admire her own vices.  She will not think highly of herself except insofar as she is virtuous.  She will seek to benefit herself only insofar as she deserves it.  She will seek to promote only her own virtuous goals or ends—the goals that follow from her own values.  We do not think a person like this immoral.  But now if in the cases of ideal friendship, one’s relationship to one’s friend is like one’s relationship to oneself, and if this is an acceptable form of relationship to oneself, then surely it is an acceptable form of relationship to one’s friend!  In fact, if I am virtuous, then I would want to be loved precisely for my virtues.  I would not want my vices appreciated—indeed, I would like to destroy them.  I would want people to care about me precisely to the extent I care about myself.

· The challenge Whiting sets herself is to answer why we should care for ourselves or for our friends.

· One answer she rejects is that our friends’ goods become our goods because we value our friends.  She calls this the “colonizing ego” view.  Our egos, our selves, colonize the selves of others, encompass them, pull them into our own, so that the friend’s goods become our own.  So we promote our friend’s goods.  But this is objectionable.  One reason it is objectionable is that it makes us see the value of our friend’s goals as dependent on our own.  But we do not see our own goals as dependent in this way on anybody’s goals.  We see our own goals as simply good.

· If I appreciate my virtues, I will appreciate similar virtues found in anybody, since I appreciate the virtues for being virtues rather than for being mine.

· The central objection to Whiting’s view is that it makes the lovable in people be something repeatable, something not unique to the individual.  But, Whiting asks, what is it about a unique feature that makes it lovable.  I am the only product of this sperm and that egg.  How does that unique feature make me lovable? 

· But if we look at “unique-making” features like “That particular beautiful shade of hair”, we find that they are in fact repeatables.  Someone else could have had that shade of hair, even if by chance nobody did.  When we ask ourselves what it is we value about someone we will always come up with features that could in principle be repeated.

· A variant of the central objection is that we end up not loving our friends but their characters.  Whiting says (p. 23): “As long as we and our friends identify with these values and take our commitment to them as central to who we are, this requirement of shared commitment to certain central values does not mean that we and our friends fail to love one another, loving only these values instead.”  But I am not the same as my values, however much I may identify with them!

· Whiting leaves open the possibility that once a friendship forms, there may be additional reasons to care about the person, reasons flowing from the friendship itself, rather than from the virtuous features of the other.

· Here’s one way Whiting’s story differs from Aristotle’s.  Whiting takes commonality of values and commitments to be what grounds friendship.  Thus, perhaps, one could have friendship between three Nazis, if they could have common values.  Nonetheless, from the point of view of the people involved, there is no difference between the two theories.  The Nazis, just like the Aristotelian virtuous person, think that they are virtuous.

5. Kierkegaard. Victor Eremita the Editor, “A”, Judge Wilhelm.