Our main concern in this chapter is to argue that consequentialist and Kantian ethical theories are unable to recognise the nature and value of friendship. As we mentioned in the introduction to the book, the plausibility of any ethical theory rests importantly on its capacity to recognise great human goods, such as friendship, and the problems which impartialist theories like consequentialism and Kantianism have in accommodating friendship may provide important insights into the capacity of these theories to accommodate the value and normative force of various professional roles. For not only have both friendship and professional roles been thought to license departures from what impartialist ethical theory would ordinarily require of us, but friendship has been appealed to as a model to explain how such departures might be justified in professional life.

We do not think – as some writers have – that the independent value of friendship and the departures it might license from Kantian and consequentialist moralities provide (at least, in any straightforward way) a justification for such independence of value and departures in various cases of professional morality. As should become clear from our later discussions in this chapter and in chapter 4, we think that there are some important disanalogies between friendship and professional life with respect to the challenge each might be thought to pose for impartialist ethical theory.