Love and Friendship
Emma is a novel about the centrality of love and friendship to its heroine’s happiness. Emma’s friendship with Mr. Knightley illustrates Aristotle’s conception of the highest kind of friendship: a friendship of virtuous people who share their lives through conversation and joint activities. Critics who disagree with this claim misunderstand either Emma’s character or Aristotle’s conception of virtue. Some critics reject the Aristotelian-Austenian conception of a good friendship on the grounds that a good friendship is often in conflict with moral and epistemic virtue. Good friends are, and ought to be, epistemically biased, and willing to do immoral things for their friends’ sake. But while there may be moral dilemmas in which whatever one does is wrong, it is only in the friendships of bad or “morally casual” people that there is frequent conflict between friendship and moral and epistemic virtue. Such conflict is not inherent in the nature of friendship.