ABSTRACT

The previous two paragraphs are not leading to a defense of a friendless life. Rather, my aim in this paper is to try to distinguish the merely causal effects of friendship on the way that our lives

are going from the necessary contributions of friendship to our well-being. And, in order to do this, we need to consider friendship in its various forms, from the ideal to the not so ideal, and to consider various types of friends, from the virtuous to the just not very nice, from the witty and charming to the dull and tedious, from the happy-go-lucky to the chronically depressed, from the wealthy and generous to the strapped and/or just plain stingy. Are we necessarily better off for having friends, no matter what our nature, our friends’ nature, or the particularities of the friendship?