Abstract

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that friendship and justice are the same, apparently flouting the not uncommon contrast between friendship and justice. I start by assessing Aristotle’s principle of equality: friends of equal standing engage in exact reciprocity in goods and friends of unequal standing engage in proportional reciprocity. In a number of ways that have gone unnoticed, the equalization principle is a requirement for understanding the sameness of friendship and justice. Just relations and friendship share the same domain, that is, the same relationship of a corresponding community. Moreover, asking how to be just to someone is the same as asking how to be a friend to that person, indicating that the virtue of justice and the virtue of friendship are also the same.