Kitap 8
10
Dispute may arise however as to the value of the service rendered. Is it to be measured by the benefit to the recipient, and the return made on that basis, or by the cost to the doer? The recipient will say that what he received was only a trifle to his benefactor, or that he could have got it from someone else: he beats down the value. The other on the contrary will protest that it was the most valuable thing he had to give, or that it could not have been obtained from anybody else, or that it was bestowed at a time of danger or in some similar emergency.
11
Perhaps then we may say that, when the friendship is one of utility, the measure of the service should be its value to the recipient, since it is he who wants it, and the other comes to his aid in the expectation of an equivalent return; therefore the degree of assistance rendered has been the amount to which the recipient has benefited, and so he ought to pay back as much as he has got out of it; or even more, for that will be more noble.
11
In friendships based on virtue, complaints do not arise, but the measure of the benefit seems to be the intentionLit., choice in Aristotle’s technical sense. of the giver; for intention is the predominant factor in virtue and in character.
