Foreword xior social station, friendship involves identifying areas of the relationship where the
friends stand as equals. As C. S. Lewis (1960) remarked, friendships are always
“about something” (p. 66), which functions as a leveler and occupies their shared
attention and responsibility to each other. Striving in and for equality constitutes an
inherently ethical quality of friendship. As such, beginning in childhood, participat-
ing in friendship is a site for ethical instruction, for cultivating understandings of
fairness and cooperation. And throughout our lives issues of equality and power
must be settled between friends.
Aristotle (1980) once observed that where there are friends, there is no need for
justice, but where there is justice there still is a need for friendship. By this he meant
that serving justice is a crucial concern that continually must be addressed and upheld
between friends. In contrast, formal justice often requires overlooking the contingen-
cies of a judged person’s life that friends typically will consider thoughtfully and with
care in evaluating the other’s actions. In light of close friendship’s voluntary, personal,
affective, mutual, and equal qualities, such friends negotiate a private moral sphere
within the constraints of the cultural and public moralities shaping their possibilities.
What does it mean to be fair to our friends? How do we decide which standards will
be upheld in given cases— the idiosyncratic ones we have developed, tailored to our
specific needs as friends, or the conventions of the larger social order? What hap-
pens when we do not meet the expectations that we have established either tacitly or
explicitly in our friendship? It is important to note that many of our baseline notions
of fairness and social justice are established with friends during childhood and ado-
lescence. One reason for this accomplishment in friendship is that our close friends
are the first persons in our lives who are not obligated to care about us. Friends earn
and negotiate each other’s affection and respect.
Our practices of friendship influence and reflect how we organize our exis-
tential, personal, social, romantic, familial, occupational, religious, and political
lives. Consequently, our participations in friendships also provide concrete mea-
sures of the freedom we have to pursue voluntary relationships (or dimensions of
relationships) of affirmation, caring, utility, pleasure, and virtue patterned by the
tasks, challenges, and enabling and constraining features of our life circumstances.
Nevertheless, friendships remain highly susceptible to their enveloping circum-
stances and means of achievement.
Because of this simultaneous flexibility, relational constitution, and vulnerabil-
ity to contextual determinants, understanding the achievement, maintenance, and
psychological functions of friendship compels us to consider an array of attributes
patterning human life. With their concern for each other’s personal well- being
and just treatment, friends are mindful of the eligibilities for participation in sup-
posedly voluntary associations. Cultural hierarchies of valued relationships often
privilege family, marriage, and work relationships over friendships, even while, as
mentioned, friendship also may or may not be permitted as a dimension of these
bonds. Culturally sanctioned activities and feelings across the social spectrum of