Aristotle for Women Who Love Too Much

Abstract

Having goodwill (eunoia) toward someone is, according to Aristotle, wishing him well, or wishing good things to him for his own sake (1155b31). As Talbot Brewer notes, Aristotle “seems to contradict himself” on the issue of whether mutual goodwill is present in friendships based on utility or pleasure as well as in those based on virtue (“character friendships”), and the different claims in the texts have sustained considerable scholarly debate. On good textual grounds, Cooper and Broadie favor the interpretation according to which goodwill is present in all three, and, on good textual grounds, Brewer rejects Cooper’s interpretation, taking Aristotle to claim that people in pleasure and utility friendships “do not in fact have eunoia toward each other, since they seek to benefit each other only because, and insofar as, they expect a reciprocal benefit for themselves,” a claim that he endorses as seeming like “exactly the right thing to say.” Brewer thus sets up a rather stark opposition, between pleasure and utility friends, on the one hand, who do not wish the other well “for his own sake” at all, but only with a view to their own benefit, and character friends, on the other, who do wish each other well for the other’s own sake and hence have mutual goodwill. But he does not consider the interesting interpretation favored by Price, which offers