Friendship and Its Place in the Moral Debate

Friendship is a central theme in ancient ethics, most notably in Aristotelian ethics, with two of the ten books of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Books VIII and IX) (1985) devoted to the subject. But modern moral philosophy (from the mid-eighteenth century to the later part of the twentieth century) largely overlooked the role of friendship in moral life, in part because of the dominance of the impartialist stance of utilitarian and Kantian moral theory. Those theories also influenced the study of Aristotelian ethics. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this trend shifted, in part due to a confluence of causes—renewed interest in Aristotelian ethics for its own sake, the development of modern virtue ethics, and the rise of feminist ethical theory. A seminal article by John Cooper on Aristotelian friendship (1977) helped to make Aristotle's account accessible, and especially emphasized the...