Friendship: Liberty, Equality, and Utility

Addresses the question of whether special preference for friends is morally justified.

In Friendship, James O. Grunebaum introduces a new conceptual framework to articulate, explain, and understand similarities and differences between various conceptions of friendship. Asking whether special preference for friends is morally justified, Grunebaum answers that question by analyzing a comprehensive comparison of not only Aristotle’s three well-known kinds of friendship?pleasure, utility, and virtue?but also a variety of lesser-known friendship conceptions from Kant, C. S. Lewis, and Montaigne. The book clarifies differences about how friends ought to behave toward each other and how these differences are, in part, what separate the various conceptions of friendship.

"Philosophical treatments of friendship are very important in our time and are neglected. Grunebaum pursues the issues of how can one show the partiality to friends that friendship demands and at the same time give the equal treatment to non-friends that equality demands. This is an important issue in ethics." ? John R. Scudder Jr., coauthor of Beyond Friendship and Eros: Unrecognized Relationships between Men and Women