ABSTRACT
Friendship gets characterized as a freely entered unity benefitting from the joint activity in which what each friend receives is the same good that the other obtains, a good that can be had nowhere else but in the fraternity they share. Paternal friendship is a tyrannical relation, where a father treats children as slaves, whereas the friendship of husband and wife is aristocratic, reflecting a difference in worth that may verge on oligarchy when the difference gets tied to control of wealth. Friendship poses a dilemma for Plato, given his own objections to family parochialism. If friendship is to be irreducible to family, social, or political community, it will have to seek its guidelines in formal right or morality, the only alternative modes of self-determination. Friendship deserves no more place of its own in ethics if, like Hegel, one acknowledges formal right and morality, without ignoring ethical community.
