Journal of the History of Philosophy

Aristotle on the Friendships of Utility and Pleasure Kenneth D. Alpern IT HASCOMMONLYbeen held that of the three forms of friendship distinguished by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, only in the paradigm form--friendship on account of the good (i.e., virtue)---do the friends exhibit disinterested' concern for each other. In the other two, inferior, form--friendship on account of utility and friendship on account of pleasure--it has been thought that disinterestedness has no place and that there is little room for the qualities that are distinctive of friendship? Recently,John Cooper has forcefully argued :~that in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle does in fact give place to disinterested concern in the inferior friendships and that, consequently, these relationships are significantly more interesting than previously believed. In this article I argue that though Cooper does show that arguments supporting the common interpretaI would like to thank Richard Bosley, Myles Burnyeat, John Cooper, T. H. Irwin, Mary Richardson, and JHP referees for help at various stages of this project. Part of the reseach for the article was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. ' I use the term "disinterested" to refer to concern for another tot the other's own sake (~te~vov ~vexet), as distinguished from concern for oneself. Aristotle draws this a distinction in many places (e.g., in the wine example, 1155629-31; the discussion of ~votot, 1167a14-x8; and the Rhetoric characterization of friendship, 138obB6-81a5). According to Joachim, "The friend 6uk m Xt~otlxov is the man who exploits his friend-treats him as a mere means to his own ends .... Friendship for the sake of pleasure is less sordid . . . [but] desire for the friend's well-being is neither disinterested nor permanent." (Aristotle : The Nicomachean Ethics, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), pp. 247-48, 249.) Cp.John Burner: "We wish [a utility-friend] to be rich, for instance .... for what we hope to get out of him." (The Ethics of Aristotle, (London: Methuen, 19oo), p. 356.) Gregory Vlastos characterizes the inferior friendships as "affective bonds with men or women whose good we want because they serve our need, or interest, or pleasure, and for no other reason." ("The Individual as Object of Love in Plato" in Platonic Studies, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973) , p. 5.) "Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship," Review ofMataphysics 3o O977): 619-48, reprinted with omissions and condensations as the first part of "Aristotle on Friendship," in Essays on Aristotle 's Ethics, ed. Am~lie Oksenberg Rorty, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 198o), pp. 3ox-4 o. All references to this article are to the originally published, complete version. [3o3] 304 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY tion of the inferior friendships are faulty, a number of difficulties still remain for his position. I will try to show that a strong case can be made that the inferior friendships do not involve disinterestedness, but that these relationships nonetheless can be seen to exhibit cooperation, trust, commitment, and other virtues of interpersonal relationships. 4 Cooper's Interpretation. Cooper's argument is that two confusions have obscured Aristotle's true account: first, a failure to correctly assess the relationship between well-wishing and its grounds, and secondly, the conflation of two distinctions, one between seeking another person's well-being for his own sake and seeking it for one's own, the other between seeking another's well-being because of what he essentially is and seeking it because of his incidental qualities. When these two points are appreciated, a consistent interpretation is supposed to emerge in which the inferior friendships are constituted by "unself-interested well-wishing within the confines of an association primarily motivated by self-seeking. ''5 Aristotle speaks of friendship and well-wishing on account of (6u2) one or another of the three grounds of friendship: the good, the pleasant, and the useful. Commentators have often taken "6~" here to indicate a purposive and prospective relation: in order to produce. Cooper, however, points out that "6u~" may bear another meaning, one which is causal and "at least as much retrospective as prospective". 6 On this reading well-wishing is 6u~ one of its grounds in...