What does it mean to be a good friend? Not simply a nice one, rather a good one in the fuller, Aristotelian sense?
A recent article, Friendship as a Non-Relative Virtue (Friedman, 2021), returns to Aristotle’s claim in Nicomachean Ethics Books VIII–IX that friendship is not merely a pleasant feature of a good life; it is, in some sense, its pinnacle.
For Aristotle, complete friendship means wishing your friend well for her own sake, sharing in virtuous activity, and, through good friendship, coming to understand something about who you are. A good friend has first learned to be good to herself, because that is what enables her to recognise and wish the good for someone else.
This raises a question that girls’ schools rarely ask directly:
Are we guiding girls to make friends, or to be friends?
Friedman’s analysis draws out an important distinction between the capacity to ‘get along’ with others and the deeper relationship grounded in a shared pursuit of the good.
The first is about sociability: being pleasant, tactful, generous, and easy to be around. The second asks considerably more of us. It means wanting good things for another person as fully and sincerely as you want them for yourself.
Much of what we call ‘friendship skills’ in schools sits closer to the first category: kindness, inclusion, and conflict resolution. Valuable, although arguably still at the level of sociability rather than virtue.
Aristotle’s harder claim is that genuine ‘besties’ are only possible between those who are, in some real sense, already good. Friends refine and reveal each other’s character rather than simply presenting themselves as sociable.
The stakes of that distinction become clearer in another recent paper on friendship in psychotherapy (Guggenheim, 2023). Here, true friendship is defined as the capacity to simply be there with someone in difficulty, without needing to fix the problem, offer advice or fill the silence.
Sometimes, that is what we need: no explanation or solution, simply someone who sits beside us in our difficulty and makes it possible to face something we could not face alone, or disclose to anyone else. A friendship of virtue is so much more than a nice-to-have.
How do girls learn to form friendships? This question is not simply whether school feels socially pleasant, or whether every girl feels included. It is also whether she is developing the capacity to become the kind of friend another person can turn to when something genuinely hard happens.
And this brings us to a difficult tension. Can schools genuinely cultivate the capacity to ‘wish another’s good as your own’ within social environments that, despite their inclusion policies, still operate through comparison, status and belonging?
Perhaps the task for schools is not to resolve that tension, but to make it visible. To give girls the language to distinguish between being sociable and being a true friend, and, more importantly, the opportunity to practise choosing the latter.
Friedman, R. Z. (2021). Friendship as a Non-Relative Virtue. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 20(1), 30–55. https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v20i1.1263
Guggenheim, N. (2023). Friendship of Virtue – The Place of True Friends in the Psychotherapeutic Process. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83, 89–109. https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-022-09389-0