The Goods of Friendship

Abstract

My topic is the value of friendship, but I will extend it to include all forms of love or close personal attachment, including familial love, such as between parents and children, and erotic love, between spouses or committed sexual partners. I take these all to involve the same principal elements, namely a desire to be with another person and get pleasure from her company and a desire for her happiness or for whatever else is good in her life, such as success in her career. We want to be with the people we care for and we want them to lead fulfilling lives, and we want these things more for them than we do for strangers. Of course the forms of love differ in important ways. Erotic love, for example, involves a desire to share sexual pleasure with a partner that is not found in familial love or non-sexual friendship. But this is just a specific form of the desires to be with a loved one and to give her pleasure. It does not make for something completely distinct from non-sexual friendship but for friendship with an added erotic element.