Friendship and trust as moral ideals: an historical approach

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Abstract
It is not peculiar to modern society that ideals of friendship express some of the ‘noblest’ potentials of human association. But an ideal of friendship so contrary to the forms of association that dominate the larger society is distinctive to our times. Explicit contract, rational exchange, formal division of labor, and impersonal institutions define the Great Society; by inversion, they also define those ideals constituting friendship understood at its morally best. Especially in the urban core of Western society, particularly its more educated sectors, friendships are judged of high quality to the extent that they invert the ways of the larger society. In this ideal, friendships are voluntary, unspecialized, informal and private. They are grounded in open-ended commitments without explicit provision for their termination—unlike contractual relations, prior stipulation of the conditions that legitimately end a friendship cannot be constitutive of friendship. In such an ideal, friendships are diminished in moral quality if terms of exchange between friends are consciously or scrupulously monitored, for this implies that utilities derived from friendships are constitutive, as in market relations, rather than valued as expressions of personal intentions and commitments.

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