Aristotle on Friendship and the Shared Life

In this paper I want to consider the value of friendship from an Aristotelian point of view. The issue is of current interest given recent challenges to impartialist ethics to take more seriously the commitments and attachments of a person.' In what follows I want to enter that debate in only a restricted way by strengthening the challenge articulated in Aristotle's systematic defense of friendship and the shared life. After some introductory remarks, I begin by considering Aristotle's notion that good living or happiness (eudaimonia)2 for an individual necessarily includes the happiness of others. Shared happiness entails the rational capacity for jointly promoting common ends as well as the capacity to identify with and coordinate separate ends. This extended notion of happiness presupposes the extension of self through friends, and next I