love

Who is a real friend? Aristotle’s Three Friends

by Leave a Comment

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
  • 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
  • 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
    • 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
    • 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

Further Reading

Aristotle Nicomachaen Ethics Book 8 and Book 9

Does God allow suffering for the sake of love?

by Leave a Comment

Love is probably the most important things to humans apart from what we need to survive and for safety. In this video, I explore the possibility that love requires suffering, and then I relate this idea to the Problem of Evil.

NOTES

  • Types of love
    • Self-interested loves (Aristotle)
      • 1. Friendship of Utility
      • 2. Friendship of Pleasure
      • 3. Friendship of Virtue
    • True love (Aquinas)
      • Desire for the good of the beloved
  • Love defense
    • 1. True love requires serving the beloved
    • 2. Serving presupposes a lack of some good needed
    • 3. The lack of a needed good is an evil
    • 4. So, true love requires evil exist
    • 5. True love is a great good
    • 6. So, possibly God allows evil for the sake of true love
    • I think this argument could be improved by changing (1) to say that true love is greatly benefited by serving the beloved. This would change (4) to say that true love is greatly benefited by the existence of evil. The overall point wouldn’t change because God would still be allowing evil for the sake of true love.