Part IV: Social Bonds

Friendship as Ethical Primitive

Introduction

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Friendship as Ethical Primitive

A relationship is aligned under type $R$ if the viability of the relationship requires the flourishing of all participants:

\viable_R \subseteq \bigcap_{i \in \text{participants}} \viable_i

The relationship can only persist if everyone in it is doing well. Friendship is the relationship type where this alignment is not instrumental but constitutive:

\viable_{\text{friendship}} \equiv \viable_A \cap \viable_B

The friendship is the region where both friends flourish. There is no friendship-viability separate from participant-viability. This is why friendship is the ethical primitive—the relationship type against which others are measured. In a genuine friendship, you cannot advance the relationship at the expense of the friend, because the relationship is the friend's flourishing (and yours).

Existing Theory

Aristotle distinguished friendships of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue (Nicomachean Ethics VIII–IX). In our terms: utility-friendship is contaminated with $\viable_T$ (transaction); pleasure-friendship is contingent on a narrow band of $\viable_F$ ; virtue-friendship is the uncontaminated case where $\viable_F \equiv \viable_A \cap \viable_B$ . His claim that only virtue-friendship is "complete" is the claim that only the uncontaminated manifold has the right geometry.

Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative—treat persons never merely as means—is a prohibition on incentive contamination. To treat someone merely as means is to subordinate their viability manifold to yours, collapsing the relationship into pure instrumentality.

The ending of a relationship is the most precise manifold diagnostic available. Grief tells you the care manifold was real—you can only grieve what you were genuinely coupled to. Relief tells you a contaminating manifold has been removed—the lightness of escaping a relationship that had been instrumentalizing you. And the confusing mixture of grief and relief, which many people experience after leaving a relationship that was both genuine and contaminated, is the affect system's honest report that both manifolds were active: the care was real, and the exploitation was real, and now that both are gone, the system registers both losses and both liberations simultaneously.

This dual signal is often pathologized as "ambivalence" or "confusion." It is neither. It is accurate manifold reporting. The system is telling you exactly what was there: a bond that was partly clean and partly parasitic, and the dissolution has removed both the parasite and the host.