Mothering and the Sacrifice of Self: Women and Friendship in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle characterizes the perfect form friendship as that between two good persons similar to each other in the excellence of their virtue. Two problems emerge, however, in AristotleA¢â¬â¢s analysis of perfect friendship. First, it appears that it is only open to men, and second, it does not seem to transcend the primary love of self that spurs all human beings to wish for their own good most of all. In this paper I argue that despite AristotleA¢â¬â¢s initial characterization of perfect friendship as exclusively male and self-centered, his discussion of the mother-child relationship brings a selfless feminine form of friendship to the fore. Aristotle suggests that a motherA¢â¬â¢s love is the one example of unconditional love in human life. I conclude that for Aristotle the self-sacrifice of mothering is a selfless form of friendship that is higher than the A¢â¬AperfectA¢â¬Â friendship between two good men.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".