Just Between Friends

In Chapter Eight of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies three types of friendship--friendship based on virtue, friendship based on pleasure, and friendship based on utility. While his categorization may be overly simple, it is instructive, particularly when run across the concept of audience in rhetoric and the question of the ethics of rhetoric brought up so often by Plato. If we think of friendship as the the relationship between the rhetor and the audience, when friendship is based on virtue, then rhetoric will be ethical. The ethics of the rhetor/audience relationship based on pleasure and utility is less obvious. As long as the audience and the rhetor know that their relationship is due to pleasure or utility, then there shouldn't be an ethical dilemma.

At least that's the theory. Even so, when I walk onto a used care lot, I know that the salesman wants to sell me a car for as much as possible, just as I want to buy a car for as little as possible. This does not sound like a relationship built on ethics at all.


We run into even more problems when the audience thinks that the relationship is based on virtue when it is really based on utility. That car salesman is doing everything he can to convince me that he is on my side, that he wants to help me. He is trying to be my friend. The ethics of that situation becomes even murkier, particularly if he is successful.

Pleasure adds another dimension that makes those clear categorizations even murkier. Plato was always worried that pleasure would disguise the true nature of the relationship, although he expressed this worry in terms of truth. For Plato, since truth did not need decorative language designed to please the audience, whenever he heard rhetorical devices he worried that their very use could only mean one thing, to disguise truth.

When rhetoric disguises the relationship what happens to truth?

(In a previous version of this post I erroneously identified this passage as being in the ninth chapter. Thanks for catching that, Danny. I'm referencing the W. D. Ross found at the International Classics Archive,  http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/nicomachaen.html.