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  • Essay / Friendship: Aristotle's Three Types of Friendship

    “This type of friendship will persist as long as the virtue of the friends remains, and virtue is what we call enduring” (1156b5). A crucial difference between complete friendship and friendship of utility and pleasure is that in the former case, friends trust each other in a stable relationship; they share a nature of goodness that views this friendship as a “whole” rather than as “separate” individuals in a relationship. Complete friendship is relatively rare, as virtuous people are not common. According to Aristotle, complete friendship means that one friend loves for the sake of the other, and only good people can be friends for each other. Why can't bad people have complete friendship by loving each other for the other's sake? The word "good" is not separate from "virtue" or "goodness", because a good person possesses goodness and this virtue makes a person good. Bad people would love their friends only for their benefit and pleasure, for their own sake rather than for the sake of others; they are therefore not subject to the prior condition of a