What makes a friendship a good friendship? One way of answering that question, taken by Aristotle and many philosophers since, is to describe an ideal friendship, and then say that a friendship is a good friendship insofar as it resembles the ideal. An ideal of friendship, so presented, is intended to capture the qualities that all good friendships share, regardless of who the friends are and regardless of their circumstances. This approach to good friendship, I argue, fails to capture the variety of good kinds of friendship and the role of friendship in real human lives. I propose an alternative approach, on which a good friendship is one that improves the lives of the friends by bringing to those lives some of the many disparate values especially associated with friendship. On this view, there are many forms of good friendship, often mutually incompatible; no single kind of friendship is a model for all others; and the point of friendship is to improve the lives of humans as they are, with all their distinguishing weaknesses, limitations, and needs.

中文翻译：

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超越友谊的理想

是什么让友谊成为良好的友谊？亚里士多德和此后的许多哲学家采用的回答这个问题的一种方法是描述一种理想的友谊，然后说，只要它与理想的友谊相似，友谊就是好的友谊。如此提出的友谊理想旨在捕捉所有良好友谊所共有的品质，无论朋友是谁，也无论他们的情况如何。我认为，这种建立良好友谊的方法未能捕捉到良好友谊的多样性以及友谊在现实人类生活中的作用。我提出了另一种方法，在这种方法中，良好的友谊可以通过给朋友的生活带来一些特别与友谊相关的许多不同的价值观来改善他们的生活。按照这种观点，良好的友谊有多种形式，但往往是互不相容的；没有哪一种友谊可以成为所有其他友谊的典范；友谊的目的是改善人类的生活，尽管他们有明显的弱点、局限性和需求。