The Normativity of Friendship

Abstract It is widely accepted that friendship affects the evaluation of our behavior. In virtue of friendship, acts and omissions may be variously allowed, forbidden, required, or otherwise considered better or worse. Typically it is taken for granted that such changes concern the moral evaluation of our behavior. This paper challenges this assumption. I argue that friendship involves nonmoral duties of benevolence, and is thus governed by a distinct normativity that includes moral and nonmoral duties. In this respect friendship alters the normative evaluation of our behavior, but not the moral evaluation. Such an understanding, I argue, accounts better than its purely moral alternative for how we think about important phenomena related to friendship, and can be well explained theoretically.