What makes a true friend? How do you tell a real friend from a fake one? Aristotle identifies three kinds of friends based one reasons we might love them. In this video, I explain how this is relevant today and whether or not he successfully identifies what makes a real friend.
NOTES
- Kinds of friends correspond to object of love
- 1. Useful friend
- Object of love: usefulness
- “object of love” = thing loved
- External to friend
- E.g., money, fame, power, sex, popularity
- Lost when usefulness is gone
- Object of love: usefulness
- 2. Pleasure friend
- Object of love: enjoyable characteristic
- Internal, but incidental
- E.g., attractive, funny, shared pastimes
- Can be lost if:
- Tastes change
- Characteristic changes
- Object of love: enjoyable characteristic
- 3. Perfect friend
- Object of love: good person
- E.g., specific people
- Subject of love: good person
- S1: only a good person desires the good
- O1: true friends that aren’t good people
- R1: degrees of virtuousness
- A1: everyone benefits
- 1. Virtue is conducive to happiness
- S1: virtue is conducive to human flourishing
- 2. Virtuous people pursue virtuous things for themselves
- S1: virtuous person desires virtuous things
- 3. The perfect friend is a second self
- Virtuous person sees the good in the other and identifies with that person
- 4. So, virtuous people pursue virtuous things for their perfect friends
- 5. So, their perfect friends are more likely to be happy
- 1. Virtue is conducive to happiness
- A2: most enduring
- 1. Virtue love = love of the person
- 2. So, that won’t go away
- O1: can’t you change your character?
- Aristotle: yes
- If your friend goes bad, then you can try to change him back if you’d like
- But you don’t have to
- Aristotle: yes
- O1: benefiting friend only b/c you see her as yourself, so this is a selfish love
- R1: only when it’s about pleasing your desires, not when it’s about being noble
- O2: object of love is the quality of the person, not the person himself; so it’s still about what we can get from that person, which is selfish
- S1: otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to leave when they go bad