ABSTRACT
This chapter develops an account of good reasoning in friendship. It examines some tensions inherent in commonplace reflections on how people think about their friends, tensions that may look familiar to the reader even if they have never been consciously articulated. Friends seem to appeal to three different kinds of reasons: generic repeatables, particulars, and partiality. The friends are irreplaceable at least partly in virtue of the identity conditions of friendships, which do not seem to survive the replacement of friends. The chapter distinguishes between "repeatable" and "nonrepeatable" properties. A more nuanced strategy for explaining friendship would accommodate both flexibility and more rigid principled valuing, but this approach ultimately faces problems as well. Friends can choose to end a friendship for each other's sake, or their own, as a result of valuing themselves and each other. Friendships can be ended with good reason, but even where friends are bad, something valuable seems to be lost when the friendship ends.
