Equal Mutual Love and Respect

It is a central aim of Alexander Nehamas's book to avoid a moralistic conception of friendship, but he might concede that friendship is at least constrained by the ordinary demands of morality. Kant goes further than this, and at least once in the treatment of friendship in the “Doctrine of Virtue” he asserts that “human beings have a duty of friendship.” Surely Nehamas would reject this bald statement. However, Kant's conception of friendship might not to be so remote from Nehamas's, or Nehamas's from his, after all. For the two headings under which Kant subsumes all duties of virtue are self-perfection and the happiness of others, so to the extent that we can meaningfully speak of a duty of friendship, it will have to be cashed out in terms of one or both of these “ends that are also duties.” Kant's language might still be too moralistic for Nehamas, but cashing out the value of friendship in terms of its contribution to one's own development and the happiness of one's friends is not, I think, alien to the substance of Nehamas's approach.