Duties of Friendship?

I think that Dixon confuses moral obligation with emotional inclination.  By suggesting that people have duties to their friends, he misses the point of friendship, which is that it is defined by the actions people take towards one another based on mutual emotional connections.  He claims that if one has a friend, one must as a result perform occasional favours for that friend, and if one fails to do so one is acting immorally.  I disagree with this claim, and instead offer the idea that if one fails to perform occasional favours for a friend (without extenuating circumstances, obviously) then one is simply not being a friend.  The friendship dissolves, and none of this is immoral, because friendship is necessarily voluntary, and terminating a friendship is not in and of itself immoral.

Dixon contends that one still has 'duties' to former friends even after the friendship has terminated, but again, I think he is confusing duty with inclination.  If a stranger and one's former close friend were both in need of a blood transfusion, it is true that one would likely choose to give blood to the former friend, and it is also true that if one chose to give blood to the stranger one's friends and acquaintances might condemn one, but none of that is due to morality.  One's preference for helping the former friend is due to lingering sentiment, perhaps so small an amount of it that one does not realise it is there.  One's current friends might condemn one for not helping the former friend because they presume that if sentiment does not exist, then the former friendship was not really sincere, and insincere friendships are in many cases immoral.  The same theory of lingering sentiment applies with parents; in most cases, no matter how estranged a child is from their parents, they retain some tiny scrap of sentiment which would lead them to help a parent over a stranger.  If this sentiment is not present, then any emotional inclination dissolves - exactly as Dixon's 'duties' dissolve if a child never had a friendship with their parents, or if they had good reason to terminate their friendship.

Due to the reasons above, I do not agree with Dixon's idea of  'duties of friendship.'  Instead, I concur wholeheartedly with Jane English's views on the topic.