Shared Tastes: Similarity in Aristotelian Character Friendship

Aristotle claims that character friends are similar to each other. How should we understand this similarity, and what role does it play in friendship? In the paper, I argue that a broad similarity of ‘tastes’—which I understand as the appreciation of relatively good ends—is at least a facilitating condition on the formation of character friendship. This is because it (i) facilitates seeing the other as good in the first place, which is essential to character friendship; and (ii) enables the friends to spend time and share in activities together, which is characteristic of character friendship.