Friendship for virtue

Voluminous bodies of literature continue to be published on Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics within philosophy and social science. No less than two of the ten books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to the topic of friendship, in particular its ‘complete’ or most developed type as ‘friendship for character or virtue’. Yet the salience accorded to friendship within the current virtue ethics literature is not proportionate to the importance accorded to it by Aristotle. Furthermore, in current moral education, where Aristotelianism is all the rage, friendship is rarely mentioned. This book has four main aims. The first is to give the virtue of friendship the pride of place it deserves in contemporary Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics. The second is to integrate Aristotelian theory with recent social scientific research on friendship through mutual adjustments. The third is to retrieve Aristotelian friendship as a moral educational concept, where ‘friendship for virtue’ is to be understood as ‘friendship for virtue development’. The fourth is to offer a more detailed and realistic account than Aristotle did of why even the best of friendships can go stale and dissolve and why the human relationships they represent are so precarious—for example in circumstances where erotic love and friendship clash. Through its revised and applied Aristotelianism, this book makes a contribution to various ongoing debates within moral philosophy, moral psychology and moral education about the salience of friendship—addressing the topic in a way that is accessible both for academics and general readers.