Nicomachean Ethics

Nicomachean Ethics
The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's best-known work on ethics: the science of the good for human life, that which is the goal or end at which all our actions aim. It consists of ten subsections, referred to as books or scrolls, and is closely related to Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics. The work plays a pre-eminent role in explaining Aristotelian ethics.
The theme of the work is a Socratic question previously explored in the works of Plato, Aristotle's friend and teacher, about how men should best live. In Aristotle's Metaphysics, he describes how Socrates, the friend and teacher of Plato, turned philosophy to human questions, whereas pre-Socratic philosophy had only been theoretical. Ethics, Aristotle says, is practical rather than theoretical, in the Aristotelian senses of these terms. It is not merely an investigation about what good consists of, but it hopes to be of practical help in achieving the good.
It is connected to another of Aristotle's practical works, Politics, which similarly aims at people becoming good, through the creation and maintenance of social institutions that promote human flourishing. Ethics is about how individuals should best live, while the study of politics is from the perspective of a law-giver, looking at the good of a whole community.
The Nicomachean Ethics is widely considered one of the most important works of philosophy. It had an important influence on the European Middle Ages, and was one of the core works of medieval philosophy. As such, it was of great significance in the development of all modern philosophy as well as European law and theology. While various philosophers have influenced Christendom since its earliest times, in Western Europe, Aristotle became "the Philosopher" (for example, this is how he is referred to in the works of Thomas Aquinas). In the Middle Ages, a synthesis between Aristotelian ethics and Christian theology became widespread in Europe, as introduced by Albertus Magnus. The most important version of this synthesis was that of Thomas Aquinas. Other more "Averroist" Aristotelians such as Marsilius of Padua were also influential.
Until well into the seventeenth century, the Nicomachean Ethics was still widely regarded as the main authority for the discipline of ethics at Protestant universities, with over fifty Protestant commentaries published on the Nicomachean Ethics before 1682. During the seventeenth century, however, authors such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes argued that the medieval and Renaissance Aristotelian tradition in practical thinking was impeding philosophy in their time.
More recently interest in Aristotle's ethics has been renewed by the virtue ethics revival. Recent philosophers in this field include Alasdair MacIntyre, G. E. M. Anscombe, Mortimer Adler, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martha Nussbaum.
Title and abbreviations
The title is usually assumed to refer to Aristotle's son Nicomachus. One theory is that the work was dedicated to him, another is that it was edited by him (though he is believed to have died young, probably before he could have managed this alone). Another possibility is that the work was dedicated to Aristotle's father, who was also named Nicomachus. It is unlikely that it was dedicated by Aristotle himself, as it does not appear to be in a form Aristotle intended for publication. Rather it seems to be something like lecture notes meant for the lecturer or for consultation by his students.
The oldest known reference to the Nicomachean Ethics by that title is in the works of Atticus (c. ), who also references the Eudemian Ethics by its name.
In Greek the title is , which is sometimes also given in the genitive form as . The Latin version is or .
The Nicomachean Ethics is often abbreviated as NE or EN. Books and chapters are referred to with Roman and Arabic numerals respectively, along with corresponding Bekker numbers. So, for example, "NE II.2, 1103b1" means "Nicomachean Ethics, book II, chapter 2, Bekker page 1103, column b, line number 1". Note that chapter divisions, and even the number of chapters per book, are somewhat arbitrary and sometimes different compilers divide up books into chapters differently.
Background
Parts of the Nicomachean Ethics overlap with Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics: Books V, VI, and VII of the Nicomachean Ethics are identical to Books IV, V, and VI of the Eudemian Ethics. Opinions about the relationship between the two works are divided. One suggestion is that three books from Nicomachean Ethics were lost and subsequently replaced by three parallel works from the Eudemian Ethics, which would explain the overlap. Another is that both works were not put into their current form by Aristotle, but by an editor sometime later.
There is no consensus on the date of composition of the Nicomachean Ethics. However, a reference in the text to a battle in the Third Sacred War in acts as a for that part of the work. The traditional position, held for example by W. D. Ross, is that the Nicomachean Ethics is a product of the last period of Aristotle's life, during his time in Athens from until his death in .
According to Strabo and Plutarch, after Aristotle's death, his library and writings went to Theophrastus (Aristotle's successor as head of the Lycaeum and the Peripatetic school). After the death of Theophrastus, the peripatetic library went to Neleus of Scepsis.
Some time later, the Kingdom of Pergamon began conscripting books for a royal library, and the heirs of Neleus hid their collection in a cellar to prevent it from being seized for that purpose. The library was stored there for about a century and a half, in conditions that were not ideal for document preservation. On the death of Attalus III, which also ended the royal library ambitions, the existence of Aristotelian library was disclosed, and it was purchased by Apellicon and returned to Athens in about .
Apellicon sought to recover the texts, many of which were seriously degraded at this point due to the conditions in which they were stored. He had them copied out into new manuscripts, and used his best guesswork to fill in the gaps where the originals were unreadable.
When Sulla seized Athens in , he seized the library and transferred it to Rome. There, Andronicus of Rhodes organized the texts into the first complete edition of Aristotle's works (and works attributed to him). The Aristotelian texts we have to day, including that of the Nicomachean Ethics, are based on these.
Aspasius wrote a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics in the early . It suggests "that the text [at that time] was very like what it is now, with little or no difference, for instance, of order or arrangement, and with readings identical for the most part with those preserved in one or other of our best [extant manuscripts]." Aspasius noted "the existence of variants—which shows that there was some element of uncertainty as to the text even in this comparatively early stage in the history of the book."
The oldest manuscript that exists today is the Codex Laurentianus LXXXI.11 (referred to as "Kb") which dates to the 10th century.
Synopsis
Aristotle was the first philosopher to write ethical treatises, and begins by considering how to approach such a subject. He argues that the correct approach for subjects like Ethics or Politics, which involve a discussion on beauty or justice, is to start by considering what would be roughly agreed to be true by people of good upbringing and substantial experience in life, and then to work from that foundation toward a more rigorous understanding. Over the course of the Ethics, Aristotle alternates between a theoretical and systematic approach to formalizing ethics and a more empirical approach of consulting opinion, prior philosophical or literary works, or linguistic clues.
Aristotle's ethics is said to be teleological, in that it is based on an investigation into the , or end, of a human being. In Aristotle's philosophy, the of a thing "can hardly be separated from the perfection of that thing",and "the final cause of anything becomes identical with the good of that thing, so that the end and the good become synonymous terms".
Taking this approach, Aristotle proposes that the highest good for humans is , a Greek word often translated as "flourishing" or sometimes "happiness". Aristotle argues that is a way of being in action that is appropriate to the human "soul" at its most "excellent" or virtuous. is the most "complete" aim that people have, because they aim at for its own sake. An excellent human is one who is good at living life, who does so well and beautifully. Aristotle says such a person would also be a serious human being. He also asserts that virtue for a human must involve reason in thought and speech, as this is an aspect (an , literally a task or work) of human living.
After proposing this ultimate end of human activity, Aristotle discusses what ethics means. Aristotelian Ethics is about how certain beneficial habitual characteristics (virtues) enable a person to achieve and how one goes about developing a virtuous character. He describes a sequence of necessary steps: First, you practice righteous actions, perhaps under the guidance of teachers, until you have developed good habits. These habits allow you to develop a stable character in which those habits become voluntary choices, at which point they are the virtues whose practice embodies .
The Greek word , or "character", is related to modern words such as ethics and ethos. Aristotle does not equate character with habit (in Greek, with a short "e") because character involves conscious choice. Instead, character is an like health or knowledge—a stable disposition that one must pursue and maintain with effort. However, good habits are a precondition for good character.
Aristotle reviews some specific ways in which people are thought worthy of blame or praise. He describes how the highest types of praise imply having all the virtues of character at once, and these in turn imply not just good character, but a kind of wisdom. The four virtues that he says require the possession of all the ethical virtues together are:
Being of "great soul" (magnanimity), the virtue with which one deserves the highest praise and has a correct attitude towards the honor this involves. This is the first case Aristotle mentions, in the initial discussion of practical examples of virtues and vices in Book IV.
The type of justice or fairness of a good ruler in a good community. He discusses this during the investigation of the virtue (or virtues) of justice in Book V.
, or practical judgment, in Book VI.
The virtue of being a truly good friend, in Book VIII.
(The Eudemian Ethics VIII.3 also uses the word "", the nobility of a gentleman, to describe this same concept of a virtue containing all the moral virtues.)
The view that praiseworthy virtues in their highest form, even virtues like courage, require intellectual virtue, is a theme Aristotle associates with Socrates; it is an approach portrayed in the Socratic dialogues of Plato. Aristotle professes to work differently from Plato by trying to start with what well-brought up men would agree with, and to take a practical approach, but by book VII Aristotle argues that the highest of all human virtues is not a practical one: contemplative wisdom. But achieving this supreme virtue is inseparable from achieving all the virtues of character, or "moral virtues".
Aristotle's view, that the highest good for man has both a practical and theoretical side, is also in the tradition of Socrates and Plato—and in opposition to pre-Socratic philosophy. As Ronna Burger points out: "The Ethics does not end at its apparent peak, identifying perfect happiness with the life devoted to ; instead it goes on to introduce the need for a study of legislation, on the grounds that it is not sufficient only to know about virtue, but one should try to put that knowledge to use." At the end of the book, according to Burger, the thoughtful reader is led to understand that "the end we are seeking is what we have been doing" while engaging with the Ethics.
Book I
Book I attempts to both define the subject matter of ethics and justify the method that Aristotle has chosen with which to examine it. As part of this, Aristotle considers common-sense opinions along with the opinions of poets and philosophers.
Who should study ethics, and how
Aristotle points out that "things that are beautiful and just, about which politics investigates, involve great disagreement and inconsistency, so that they are thought to belong only to convention and not to nature". For this reason Aristotle says we should not demand exacting rigor, like we might expect from a mathematician, but rather look for answers about "things that are so for the most part". People are satisfactory judges of subjects like this that they are acquainted with, however the young (in age or in character), being inexperienced, are less likely to benefit from this kind of study.
I.6 contains a famous digression in which Aristotle appears to question his "friends" who "introduced the forms". This refers to Plato and his school, and their Theory of Forms. Aristotle says that while both "the truth and one's friends" are loved, "it is a sacred thing to give the highest honor to the truth", signalling that he believes the Theory of Forms is not quite that. A Forms-based discussion of The Good might try to discover some characteristic that all good things have in common. Aristotle does not find this approach promising; the word "good" is used in too many ways. He says that while it is probably not coincidental that various things called good share that description, it is perhaps better to "let go for now" the quest for some common characteristic, as this "would be more at home in another type of philosophic inquiry": not helpful for discussing how people should act, in the same way that doctors do not need to philosophize over the definition of health in order to treat each case. Aristotle insists on treating ethics as a practical discipline rather than a theoretical one.
Defining and the aim of the Ethics
The opening passage asserts that all technical arts, all investigations (every , including the Ethics itself), indeed all deliberate actions and choices, aim at some good apart from themselves. Many such goods are intermediate, desired only as means to higher goods.
Aristotle asserts that there is one highest good— (traditionally translated as "happiness" or "flourishing")—which is the same as good politics should aim at, because what is best for an individual is less beautiful and divine than what is good for a people or city. Politics organizes communal practical life, so the proper aim of politics should include the proper aim of all other pursuits, and "this end would be the human good". The human good is a practical target, in contrast to Plato's references to "the Good itself". Aristotle concludes that ethics ("our investigation" or ) is "in a certain way political".
Aristotle then elaborates on the methodological concern with exactness. Ethics, unlike some other types of philosophy, is inexact and uncertain. Aristotle says that it would be unreasonable to expect demonstrations of strict mathematical exactitude, but rather "each man judges correctly those matters with which he is acquainted".
Aristotle states that while most would agree to call the highest aim of humanity , and also to equate this with both living well and doing things well, there is disagreement between people, and between the majority and "the wise" about what this consists of. He distinguishes three possible ways of life that different people associate with happiness:
the slavish way of pleasure, which is how most people think of happiness
the refined and active way of politics, which aims at honor
the way of contemplation
Aristotle also mentions two other possibilities that he argues can be put aside:
having virtue but being inactive, even passively suffering evils and misfortunes. Aristotle says no one would propose such a thing unless "biting the bullet" to defend a shaky hypothesis (as Sachs points out, this is indeed what Plato depicts Socrates doing in his Gorgias).
money making, which Aristotle asserts is a life based on aiming at a merely intermediate good
Each commonly proposed happy way of life is a target that some people aim at for its own sake, just like they aim at happiness itself for its own sake. As for honor, pleasure, and intelligence, as well as every virtue, though they lead to happiness, even if they did not we would still pursue them.
Happiness in life, therefore, includes the virtues, and Aristotle adds that it would include self-sufficiency—not the self-sufficiency of a hermit, but of someone with a family, friends, and community—someone whose leaves them satisfied, lacking nothing.
To describe more clearly what happiness is like, Aristotle next asks what the work or function of a human is. All living things have nutrition and growth as a work, all animals (according to Aristotle's definition of animal) have perception as part of their work, but what work is particularly human? The answer according to Aristotle is that it must involve reason, including both being open to persuasion by reasoning, and thinking things through. Not only does human happiness involve reason, but is also an active being-at-work, not just a potential. And it is measured over a lifetime, because "one swallow does not make a spring". The definition given is therefore:
Because the good of a person is a work or function, just as we can contrast casual harpists with serious harpists, the person who lives well and beautifully in this actively rational and virtuous way will be a "serious" person.
If happiness is virtue, or a certain virtue, then it must not just be a condition of being virtuous, potentially, but an actual way of virtuously "being at work" as a human. For as in the Ancient Olympic Games, "it is not the most beautiful or the strongest who are crowned, but those who compete". And such virtue will be good, beautiful, and pleasant; indeed Aristotle asserts that in most people different pleasures are in conflict with each other while "the things that are pleasant to those who are passionately devoted to what is beautiful are the things that are pleasant by nature and of this sort are actions in accordance with virtue". External goods are also necessary in such a virtuous life, because a person who lacks things such as good family and friends might find it difficult to be happy.
Questions that might be raised about the definition
Aristotle addresses some objections that might be raised against his proposed definition of .
First, he considers the definition in light of a Socratic question (found for example in Plato's Meno) of whether might be a result of learning or habit or training, or perhaps divine grace or random chance. Aristotle says that does result from some sort of learning or training. But, although not god-given, is one of the most divine things, and "for what is greatest and most beautiful to be left to chance would be too discordant".
Aristotle says must be considered over a whole lifetime, otherwise Priam, for example, might be defined as unhappy only because of his unhappy old age.
Concerning the importance of chance to , Aristotle argues that a person at work in accordance with virtue "will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances, as a good general will turn the forces at his command to the best account, and a good shoemaker will make the best shoe that can be made out of a given piece of leather, and so on with all other crafts". Only many great misfortunes will limit how blessed such a life can be, but "even in these circumstances something beautiful shines through".
Aristotle says that it "seems too unfeeling and contrary to people's opinions" to claim that the postmortem "fortunes of one's descendants and all one's friends have no influence at all" on one's . But he says it seems that if anything at all gets through to the deceased in this indirect way, whether good or bad, it would be something faint and small.
Aristotle distinguishes virtue and . Virtue, through which people "become apt at performing beautiful actions" is praiseworthy, while is something beyond praise: blessed, "since every one of us does everything else for the sake of this, and we set down the source and cause of good things as something honored and divine".
From defining happiness to discussion of virtue: introduction to the rest of the Ethics
Aristotle asserts that we can usefully accept some things said about the soul (another reference to Plato), including the division of the soul into rational and irrational parts, and the further division of the irrational parts into two parts:
one that is "not human" but "vegetative" and most at work during sleep, when virtue is least obvious
another that is amenable to reason: "the faculty of appetite or of desire" in the soul that can comprehend and obey reason, much as a child can act "rationally" not by reasoning but by obeying a wise father.
The virtues then are similarly divided, into intellectual virtues, and virtues of character concerning the irrational part of the soul that is amenable to reason.
This second set of virtues, "moral virtues" as they are often translated, are the central topic of Book II.
Books II–V: Concerning excellence of character, or moral virtue
Aristotle says that whereas intellectual virtue requires teaching, experience, and time, virtue of character comes about as a consequence of following the right habits. Humans have a natural capacity to develop these virtues, but it is not human nature but training that determines whether they actually develop.
Aristotle says moral virtues are found at a mean between deficiency and excess. For example, someone who flees is a coward (with a deficiency of bravery, or an excessive response to fear), while someone who fears nothing is rash (the opposite extreme). The virtue of courage is a "mean" between these two extremes. For this reason, Aristotle is considered a proponent of the golden mean doctrine. People become habituated well by first performing actions that are virtuous, possibly guided by teachers or experience; these habitual actions then become real virtues when people come to characteristically choose such actions deliberately.
According to Aristotle, character, properly understood, is not just any tendency or habit but something that influences what causes us pleasure or pain. A virtuous person feels pleasure when they perform the most beautiful or noble actions; their practice of virtues and their pleasure therefore coincide. A person who is not virtuous, on the other hand, often finds pleasure to be misleading. For this reason, the study of virtue (or of politics) requires consideration of pleasure and pain.
When a person does virtuous actions by chance or by following advice, they are not yet necessarily a virtuous person. It is not like in the productive arts, where the thing being made is what is judged as well-made or not. To be a virtuous person, one's virtuous actions must be (a) done knowingly, (b) chosen for their own sakes, and (c) chosen according to a stable disposition (not on a whim, or uncharacteristically). Just knowing what would be virtuous is not enough.
According to Aristotle's analysis, three kinds of things are present in the soul: feelings, faculties or capacities, and acquired habits. Virtues are — neither of the other qualities of the soul is chosen, and neither is praiseworthy in the way that virtue is.
As with the productive arts, with virtues of character the focus must be not only on the making of a good human in a static sense, but making a human that functions well as a human.
In II.7 Aristotle gives a list of character virtues and vices that he will discuss in Books II and III. This list differs between the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. Aristotle reiterates that it is not meant to be exhaustive.
Aristotle also mentions some "ways of observing the mean" that involve feelings or emotions: a sense of shame, for example, is sometimes praised, or said to be in excess or deficiency. Righteous indignation is a sort of mean between and envy. Aristotle says he intends to discuss such cases later, before the discussion of Justice in Book V. But the Nicomachean Ethics only discusses the sense of shame at that point, not righteous indignation (which is however discussed in the Eudemian Ethics Book VIII).
Aristotle says that in practice people tend by nature towards the more pleasurable of the vicious extremes, and therefore to them the virtuous mean appears to be relatively closer to the less pleasant extreme. For this reason it is a good practice to steer toward the extreme that is less pleasant while you are hunting for the mean, which will help to correct for that tendency. However this rule of thumb is shown in later parts of the Ethics to apply mainly to some bodily pleasures, and Aristotle asserts it to be wrong as an accurate general rule in Book X.
Moral virtue as conscious choice
Aristotle begins by distinguishing human actions as voluntary & involuntary, and chosen & unchosen, and investigates what makes an action worthy of praise or blame, honor or punishment, and pardon or pity.
Aristotle divides wrong actions into three categories:
Voluntary acts which are caused by a person's will or desire or choice.
Involuntary or unwilling acts, which are caused by some outside factor or by ignorance (for example the wind carries a person off, or a person has a wrong understanding of the particular facts of a situation).
"Non-voluntary" or "non willing" actions that are bad actions done by choice, but not deliberately, for example actions that are demanded from us under threat, or actions that are the lesser evil when no good actions are available. If you regret a non-voluntary wrong action of this sort, it is effectively equivalent to an involuntary action for the purposes of assigning blame.
There are two varieties of ignorance, and these differ as to how they affect blame. If you are ignorant of what is good and bad, this is itself blameworthy—a sign of bad character. But if you know what is good, but are just mistaken or deceived about some particular situation such that you choose the bad while thinking it to be good, this is excusable. Aristotle explains this in terms of syllogistic reasoning. Imagine a syllogism of this form: "It would be bad to serve poison to your father. This glass of wine has been poisoned. Therefore it would be bad to serve this glass of wine to your father." If you are ignorant of the first (universal) premise, but not the second, and so you serve the wine, you are depraved. If you are ignorant of the second (particular) premise, but not the first, and so you serve the wine, you are merely mistaken.
Aristotle defines and discusses several more critical terms:
Deliberate choice, "seems to determine one's character more than one's actions do". Things done on the spur of the moment, and things done by animals and children, can be willing, but driven by desire and spirit and not deliberate choice. Choice is rational, and according to Aristotle, can be in opposition to desire. Choice always concerns realistic aims (which distinguishes it from "wishing"——which can also be about implausible things like immortality) and things in our power (which distinguishes it from "opinion" which can be about all sorts of things).
Deliberation, at least for sane people, does not include theoretical contemplation about universal and everlasting things, nor about things that might be far away, nor about things we already know precisely, such as how to sign our name. "We deliberate about things that are up to us and are matters of action" and concerning things where it is unclear how they will turn out. Deliberation is therefore not how we reason about which ends we pursue (health, for example) but how we think through the means of achieving those ends. When desire (for an end) and deliberation (about the means) combine, a choice is born.
Wishing is something like deliberation, but focuses on ends rather than means. Contrary to some theories, Aristotle says that people do not wish for what is good by definition (though perhaps people do always wish for what appears to be good). A worthy person, however, does wish for what is "truly" good. Most people are misled by pleasure, "for it seems to them to be a good, though it is not".
Virtue and vice according to Aristotle are "up to us". Although no one is willingly unhappy, vice, which leads to unhappiness, always involves actions decided on willingly. Vice comes from bad habits and aiming at the wrong things, not from deliberately aiming to be unhappy.
Lawmakers are cognizant of these distinctions: they try to encourage or discourage various voluntary actions, but do not concern themselves with involuntary actions. They also tend not to be lenient towards people who act from negligent ignorance, for instance if they are drunk, ignorant about things that are easy to learn, or have allowed themselves to develop bad habits and a bad character. Though people with a bad character may be ignorant and even seem incapable of choosing the right things, such a condition stems from decisions that were originally voluntary, in a similar way to how poor health can develop from past choices—and, "While no one blames those who are ill-formed by nature, people do censure those who are that way through lack of exercise and neglect."
Aristotle now considers some specific character virtues, starting with two that concern "the irrational parts of the soul" (fear and desire): courage and temperance.
Courage
To have courage means to characteristically display appropriate confidence in the face of fearful situations. (However some fears are noble, like the fear of disgrace, and to be fearless in such a situation is not a virtue but is something more akin to shamelessness.) Courage usually refers to confidence and fear concerning man-made evils; and is exemplified by courage in the face of the most fearful thing, death, particularly death in battle. Aristotle says that fear of death is particularly pronounced when one has lived a life that is both happy and virtuous—death is worse if the life it threatens is unusually good—and this may make courage ironically more difficult to achieve for people who otherwise are skilled in the virtues.
Everything that we do characteristically, that is, as a manifestation of some characteristic like courage, we do for a purpose that is identical to the purpose of that tendency or character trait itself. Any particular courageous act has the same aim (at least with respect to its courageousness) as the general trait of courageousness does. The aim of a particular act done courageously is not in the specific and incidental goals of the act itself, but in the service of the virtue of courageousness. The reason why someone develops courage is that he or she sees courageousness as honorable and beautiful and noble, as "a glory to human nature" as J.A. Stewart put it in his summary of this chapter.
People who have excessive fearlessness would be mad (Aristotle remarks that some describe Celts this way). Aristotle also says that "rash" people, those with excessive confidence, are generally cowards putting on a brave face.
Aristotle notes that the term courage is sometimes misapplied to five other types of character:
Citizen-soldiers who display a quasi-courage that is motivated by penalties for disobedience, by hope of honors, or by fear of shame at being caught acting cowardly. Such motivations can make an army fight as if brave, but true courage is motivated by the love of the virtue, not by such external motives. Aristotle notes that Homeric heroes such as Hector had this type of courage.
People who are experienced in dealing with some particular danger often seem courageous, though it's really their skill rather than their courage which gives them confidence.
Passion or anger can look like courage. People who exhibit can be blind to dangers, but unlike truly courageous people they are not aiming at virtue. Aristotle notes however that this is "something akin to courage" and if it were combined with deliberate choice and purpose it would seem to be true courage.
The boldness of someone who feels confident based on many past victories is not true courage. Like a person who is overconfident when drunk, this apparent courage is based on a lack of fear (not confidence in the face of fear), and will disappear if circumstances change.
People who are overconfident simply due to ignorance of the danger can mimic courage.
Avoiding fear is more important when aiming at courage than avoiding overconfidence. As in the examples above, overconfident people are likely to be called courageous, or considered close to courageous. As Aristotle said in Book II, with moral virtues such as courage the extreme one's normal desires tends away from is the best one to aim towards when trying to find the mean.
Courage leads people to risk pain, and therefore away from what they would more naively desire. The courageous person values courage more than they fear pain or even death.
Aristotle's treatment of this subject is often compared to Plato's. Courage was dealt with by Plato in his Socratic dialogue named the Laches.
Temperance
Temperance (Sophrosyne, also translated as soundness of mind, moderation, discretion) is a mean with regards to pleasure. The vice that occurs most often is excess in response to pleasure (: licentiousness, intemperance, profligacy, dissipation, etc.). The vice of deficiency by contrast is so unusual that Aristotle calls people with it "almost imaginary characters" and cannot find a Greek word for the vice.
Pleasures are divided into those of the soul and of the body. But those who are concerned with pleasures of the soul—honor or learning, for example—are not usually referred to as being temperate or dissipate. Not all bodily pleasures are relevant, either; for example delighting in sights or sounds or smells are not things people are temperate or profligate about, unless it is the smell of food or perfume that triggers yearning. Temperance and dissipation concern the animal-like, Aphrodisiac pleasures of touch and taste.
Some desires, like that of food and drink, or sex, are shared by everyone. But not everyone has the same particular manifestations of these desires. You can go astray by desiring the wrong thing, by desiring too much, or you can desire it in the wrong manner.
The temperate person desires things that are not impediments to health, nor contrary to what is beautiful, nor beyond that person's resources. Such a person judges according to right reason.
Appetite is a form of pain; the intemperate are pained more than they ought to be about not getting their favorite varieties of bodily-touch pleasure. Temperate people are not so easily pained.
Intemperance is a more willingly chosen vice than cowardice, because it positively seeks pleasure, while cowardice avoids pain; pain can make it harder for someone to exercise choice. For this reason we reproach intemperance more, because it should be easier to habituate oneself so as to avoid it. In Greek, the word Aristotle uses for "intemperate" is the same one used for "unchastened", as in a spoiled child. Aristotle thinks this is apt, as temperance is about disciplining the needy child inside of us, so that none of our appetites exceed the control of our reason.
Book IV. The second set of examples of moral virtues
The moral virtues discussed in Book IV concern behavior in social or political situations. Book IV is sometimes described as reflecting the norms of an Athenian gentleman in Aristotle's time. While this is consistent with the approach Aristotle said he would take in Book I, there is long-running disagreement concerning whether this was meant as a starting point to build up to more general conclusions, for example in Book VI, or whether it shows that Aristotle failed to successfully generalize, and that his ethical thinking was parochial.
Liberality or generosity
This virtue concerns how people act with regards to giving money, and things whose worth is thought of in terms of money. The two extremes of deficiency and excess are wastefulness and stinginess respectively.
Aristotle's approach to defining the correct balance is to treat money like any other useful thing, and say that the virtue is to know how to use money: giving to the right people, in the right amount, at the right time. Also, as with each of the ethical virtues, Aristotle emphasizes that a virtuous person is pleased at doing the virtuous and beautiful thing.
It is better to err on the side of generosity: A liberal person "is more annoyed if he has not spent something that he ought than pained if he has spent something that he ought not".
Aristotle points out that we do not praise someone simply for not taking (which might however earn praise for being just). "[I]t is more characteristic of virtue... to do what is noble than not to do what is base." He also points out that "generous people are loved practically the most of those who are recognized for virtue, since they confer benefits".
Aristotle says the source of the money one is being generous with is also important: "a decent sort of taking goes along with a decent sort of giving". Profligate people are often wasteful and stingy at the same time; when trying to be generous they often take from sources whence they should not (for example pimps, loan sharks, gamblers, thieves), and give to the wrong people. Such people can be helped by guidance, unlike stingy people (and most people are somewhat stingy). Stinginess is reasonably called the opposite of generosity, "both because it is a greater evil than wastefulness, and because people go wrong more often with it than from the sort of wastefulness described".
Magnificence
Magnificence is similar to generosity but concerns larger amounts of wealth. Aristotle says that while "the magnificent man is liberal, the liberal man is not necessarily magnificent".
The immoderate vices in this case concern "making a great display on the wrong occasions and in the wrong way". The extremes to be avoided in order to achieve this virtue are paltriness (Rackham) or chintziness (Sachs) on the one hand and tastelessness or vulgarity on the other.
Aristotle reminds us that moral dispositions are caused by the activities we perform, meaning that a magnificent person's virtue can be seen from the way he chooses to do the correct magnificent acts at the right times.
Aristotle emphasizes the public nature of the giving — receiving foreign dignitaries, making religious offerings, erecting public buildings, funding festivals and entertainments, throwing weddings, lavishly decorating your home ("for even a house is a sort of public ornament").
Because he aims at a spectacle, a person with this virtue will not focus on doing things cheaply, which would be petty, and he or she may well overspend. So as with liberality, Aristotle sees a potential conflict between some virtues and being good with money. But he says that magnificence requires spending according to means, at least in the sense that poor men can not be magnificent. The vices of paltriness and vulgar chintziness "do not bring serious discredit, since they are not injurious to others, nor are they excessively unseemly".
Magnanimity or "greatness of soul"
Magnanimity is a Latinization of the original Greek which means greatness of soul. Although the word magnanimity has a traditional connection to Aristotelian philosophy, it also has a distinct use in English, which now causes some confusion. Some modern translations refer literally to greatness of soul. The term implies not just greatness, but a person who correctly thinks themselves worthy of great things, or in other words a sort of lofty pride. Although that could imply a negative arrogance or vainglory, Aristotle defines it as a virtue. He says "not everybody who claims more than he deserves is vain" and indeed "most small-souled of all would seem to be the man who claims less than he deserves when his deserts are great".
Being vain, or being small-souled, are the two extremes that fail to achieve the mean of the virtue of magnanimity. The small-souled person, according to Aristotle, "seems to have something bad about him".
To have the virtue of greatness of soul, and be worthy of what is greatest, one must possess what is great in all virtues. Sachs points out: "Greatness of soul is the first of four virtues that Aristotle will find to require the presence of all the virtues of character." The others are a type of justice or practical judgment as shown by good leaders, and truly good friends. Aristotle views magnanimity as "a sort of adornment of the moral virtues; for it makes them greater, and it does not arise without them".
Aristotle considers the greatest things that one may be worthy of. Of external goods, the greatest is honor, because this is what we assign to gods, and this is what people of the highest standing aim at. But Aristotle says that great-souled people don't pursue anything immoderately, even honor. It is being excellent, and being worthy of honor that is more important. (The haughty unconcern and disdain of a great-souled person, and his presumption and self-regard and the way he works to dominate others and put them in his debt, can make him seem arrogant, like an undeserving vain person.)
Leo Strauss argues that "there is a close kinship between Aristotle's justice and biblical justice, but Aristotle's magnanimity, which means a man's habitual claiming for himself great honors while he deserves these honors, is alien to the Bible".
Aristotle lists some characteristics of the great-souled man:
He deserves and claims great things, but above all, honor.
He is good in the highest degree, great in every virtue. He never behaves in a cowardly manner or wrongs another person, because, loving honor above all, he has no motive to do such things.
He is moderately pleased at receiving great honors from good people. Casual honors from middling people, however, he will despise.
He is indifferent to what fate brings him — "neither over-joyed by good fortune nor over-pained by evil" and cares not for power and wealth, except as a means to honor. Even honor, which he loves above all, he doesn't make a big deal about.
It helps if he's rich, powerful, and well-born, though none of those things are sufficient.
He doesn't court danger (there's not much he finds worth courting danger for). But when he encounters danger, he faces it "unsparing of his life, knowing that there are conditions on which life is not worth having".
He asks for nothing, but gives readily. He gives benefits and gifts, but hates to receive them. He hates to be in another's debt, and will overpay a debt so as to turn the tables.
He remembers (and likes to be reminded of) services he has done for others, but not those he has received (for those things are reminders of having been in an inferior position, and he prefers to be superior).
He does not stoop, but projects his dignity before people of high position and riches. However he behaves in an unassuming way towards common people, as it would be vulgar for him to act pompous in such a context.
He doesn't reach for the sorts of honors most people strive for, but only for the best ones. He's a man of few deeds, but those few are extraordinary.
He's a straight-talker "except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar". He respects truth more than people's opinions of him, so he doesn't hesitate to share his contempt and doesn't waste time trying to be tactful.
He will not serve any so-called superior, but may choose to serve a friend.
He doesn't admire much, since to a great person like him, nothing else is particularly outstanding.
He doesn't tend to bear grudges or remember wrongs against him.
He doesn't gossip or praise or demean others, mostly because he doesn't have the typical motives people have to do such things.
He prefers to possess beautiful things of no particular use more than practical things.
He moves slowly and deliberately, and speaks in a deep, level voice.
He is definitely a he, though Aristotle doesn't think he needs to point this out explicitly. The great-souled man is a great-souled man.
A balanced ambitiousness concerning smaller honors
In the same way that normal generosity was considered as a scaled-down version of magnificence, Aristotle proposes that there are two levels of virtue associated with honors, one concerned with great honors, Magnanimity or "greatness of soul" and another with more ordinary honors. This latter virtue is a kind of correct respect for honor, which Aristotle had no Greek word for, but which he said was at a mean between being ambitious (honor-loving) and unambitious (not honor-loving).
This virtue might be exhibited by a noble and manly person with appropriate ambition, or in a less ambitious person who is moderate and temperate. (There is no one-size-fits-all amount of virtuous .) To have the correct balance in this virtue means pursuing the right types of honor from the right sources of honor. In contrast, the glory hound craves accolades even from dubious sources and whether or not they are deserved, while the improperly unambitious man does not desire appropriately to be honored for noble reasons.
Gentleness concerning anger
The virtue of is the correct mean concerning anger. Someone with the vice of excess, irascibility or quickness to anger, is angry at wrong people, in the wrong manner, and so on. The vice of deficiency is found in people who won't defend themselves: milquetoasts, doormats.
Aristotle does not deny anger a place in the behavior of a good person, but says it should be "on the right grounds and against the right persons, and also in the right manner and at the right moment and for the right length of time". People can get this wrong in numerous ways, and Aristotle says it is not easy to get right.
According to Aristotle, the virtue with regards to anger is not led by the emotions, but by reason. Anger can be virtuous and rational in the right circumstances, and a small amount of excess is not necessarily blameworthy, and might even be praised as "manly and fitted for command". It is better, however, to err on the side of forgiveness rather than anger; the person with a deficiency in this virtue, despite seeming foolish and servile, is closer to the virtue than someone who gets angry too easily.
Friendliness
Another virtue concerns being pleasant to others. An obsequious person is over-concerned with pleasing others, backing down too easily, even when it is dishonorable or harmful to do so, while a surly or quarrelsome person objects to everything and does not care what pain they cause others, never compromising. Once again Aristotle says he has no specific Greek word for the correct virtuous mean, but says it resembles friendship. The difference is that this friendly virtue concerns behavior towards friends and strangers alike, and does not involve the special emotional bond that friends have. (Concerning true friendship see books VIII and IX.)
According to Aristotle, getting this virtue right also involves:
Dealing differently with different types of people, for example people in a higher social position than oneself, people more or less familiar to you, and so on.
Sometimes being able to share in the pleasure of one's companions at some expense to oneself, if this pleasure is not harmful or dishonorable.
Being willing to experience pain in the short term for longer-run pleasure of a greater scale.
Apart from the vice of ordinary obsequiousness, there is also flattery, which is a sort of cunning obsequiousness practiced in order to gain some advantage.
Honesty about oneself: the virtue between boasting and self-deprecation
Aristotle is concerned here with a specific type of honesty: self-representation. (Other types of honesty might involve other virtues, such as justice.)
Aristotle said that he had no convenient Greek word to give to the virtuous and honest mean, describing someone who claims the good qualities he has without exaggeration or understatement. The vice of excess is boastfulness; that of deficiency is self-deprecation. A person who boasts claims qualities inappropriately, while a person who self-deprecates excessively makes no claim to qualities they have, or even disparages himself. As in the previous case concerning obsequiousness and flattery, vices concerned with self-representation might be part of one's character, or they might be performed as if they were in character, but really with some ulterior motive.
As in many of these examples, Aristotle says the vice of excess (boastfulness) is more blameworthy than that of deficiency (self-deprecation).
Aristotle says a person might be relatively blameless if they are occasionally dishonest about their own qualities, as long as this does not become a fixed disposition to boast. Specifically, boasting is not very blameworthy if the aim is honor or glory, but is if the aim is money.
Parts of this section critique the practice of philosophy. At one point Aristotle says that examples of areas where dishonest boasting for gain might go undetected, and be very blameworthy, would be prophecy, philosophy, or medicine, all of which have both pretense and bragging. This appears to be a criticism of contemporary sophists. But one of the words for the vices under discussion, self-deprecation (Greek , from which English "irony"), was and is used to describe the philosophical technique of Socrates. Aristotle even specifically mentions Socrates as an example, but at the same time notes that the vice of deficiency is often less blameworthy.
Being witty or charming
The virtue of being witty, charming, and tactful, and generally saying the right things when speaking playfully, at our leisure, Aristotle says is a necessary part of life. In contrast a buffoon can never resist making any joke, and the deficient vice in this case is an uncultivated person who does not get jokes, and is useless in playful conversation. It is hard to set fixed rules about what is witty and what is not a laughing matter, so a person with this virtue will tend to be "a law unto himself".
Sense of shame (a quasi-virtue)
The sense of shame is not a virtue, but more like a feeling than a stable character trait. Shame concerns acts done voluntarily, and a decent person would not voluntarily do something shameful, so a sense of shame fits awkwardly into a scheme of virtues, though shamelessness is certainly a vice.
In youth, shame is attractive, since young people are expected to make mistakes because of their inexperience, and responding to these mistakes with appropriate shame is praiseworthy. In adults, though, who should have learned their lessons already, shame is not admirable.
Book V: Justice and fairness
Book V is the same as Book IV of the Eudemian Ethics, the first of three books common to both works. It represents the special discussion on justice foreseen in earlier books, which covers some of the same material as Plato's Republic, though in a strikingly different way.
Ronna Burger points out that although the chapter nominally follows the same path as previous chapters "it is far from obvious how justice is to be understood as a disposition in relation to a passion: the proposed candidate, greed, would seem to refer, rather, to the vice of injustice and the single opposite of the virtue." In other words, justice is not described as a mean between two extremes.
He distinguishes such states-of-character from "sciences". A science concerns a subject matter in which your knowledge and skill could help you aim for opposite extremes: for example, a doctor knows the science of health, and could use this knowledge to heal someone or to harm them. A state-of-character, on the other hand, goes in only one direction — having a courageous state-of-character doesn't make it easier for you to be cowardly, nor vice versa. Justice, he says, is a state of character that is possessed by people who engage in just acts from just desires, not merely the science of knowing theoretically about just outcomes or processes.
Aristotle points out that people use the word "just" to mean "law abiding" or lawful, or to mean equitable or fair. He imagines an ideal legal system in which "all that is unfair is unlawful, but not all that is unlawful is unfair... [and] the law bids us practise every virtue and forbids us to practise any vice." But: "It would seem that to be a good man is not in every case the same thing as to be a good citizen." These two common meanings of justice coincide only to the extent that the laws are themselves good, something only lawmakers can effect.
Aristotle says that there is both a complete virtue that encompasses all types of justice and indeed all types of excellence of character, and also a partial virtue called justice which is distinct from other character traits. For example, a soldier who flees in battle might be exhibiting cowardice, but could also be exhibiting a sort of injustice (e.g. not wanting to equally share risks with other soldiers).
To understand how justice aims at what is good, it is necessary to look beyond particular good or bad things we might want or not want a share of as individuals, and this includes considering the viewpoint of a community (the subject of Aristotle's Politics). Alone of the virtues, says Aristotle, justice looks like "someone else's good", an argument also confronted by Plato in his Republic.
Concerning areas in which being law-abiding might conflict with being fair, Aristotle says that this should be discussed under the heading of Politics. Aristotle divides particular justice further into two parts: distribution of divisible goods, and rectification in private transactions. The first relates to members of a community in which it is possible for one person to have more or less of a good than another person. The second concerns rectification in transactions that have resulted in an imbalance, and this part is itself divided into two parts: voluntary and involuntary, and the involuntary are divided further into furtive and violent divisions. The following chart shows these divisions in Aristotle's discussion of Justice in Book V.
Aristotle says that justice involves the allocation of shares of goods in a way that concerns "at least four terms, namely, two persons for whom it is just and two shares which are just". The just must fall between what is too much and what is too little, and what is just requires consideration not just for equality but for the relative political standing of the parties.
How to judge the mean is not clear, because "if the persons are not equal, they will not have equal shares; it is when equals possess or are allotted unequal shares, or persons not equal equal shares, that quarrels and complaints arise".
Aristotle does not state how to decide who deserves more or less. Different political systems have different ideas of what a fair share means. Democrats think that citizens should have equal shares, and everyone else no share or a limited share. Others (believers in oligarchy, aristocracy, etc.) think that shares ought to be proportionate to wealth, fortune of birth, or honor. Whichever rule your society has chosen, you then enact distributive justice by divvying up goods according to that rule, so that if persons A and B stand in a ratio A:B by whatever standard you have chosen (nobility of birth, wealth, citizenship, etc.) then shares of the good should be divvied out in a ratio C:D so that (A+C):(B+D) = A:B; in other words, so that in divvying up the goods you respect and maintain the original relative status of A and B.
The second part of particular justice is rectificatory. It concerns voluntary and involuntary transactions between people and looks to remediate harm caused to an individual. Emphasizing justice as a mean, he says that "men require a judge to be a middle term or medium—indeed in some places judges are called mediators—for they think that if they get the mean they will get what is just. Thus the just is a sort of mean, inasmuch as the judge is a medium between the litigants." To restore both parties to this just mean, a judge must take the amount that is greater than the mean that the offender unjustly possesses and give that part to the victim so that both have no more and no less than the mean. This rule rectifies both voluntary and involuntary transactions.
Finally, Aristotle turns to the idea that retaliation ("an eye for an eye") is justice, an idea he associates with the Pythagoreans. One problem with this approach to justice, although it is common in politics and law-making, is that it ignores different reasons for doing a crime. For example, a crime could have been done out of passion or ignorance rather than from a vicious character, and this makes a critical difference when it comes to determining what is the just reaction. Another problem is that it does not preserve the original proportions of the parties involved: "an eye for an eye" is blindly equal in its application and does not respect the original status of the parties before the transgression. For example: "if an officer strikes a man, it is wrong for the man to strike him back; and if a man strikes an officer, it is not enough for the officer to strike him, but he ought to be punished as well".
In chapter five, Aristotle gives his theory for the origin of currency as a medium of exchange. He begins from his assumption that in voluntary economic transactions, the people in the transaction begin with a certain relative proportion of goods, and end with the same relative proportion of goods. If this does not occur—if the proportion goes out of balance during the transaction—some injustice has occurred. A problem with this is that it is difficult for people to exchange things that are actually equal such that they preserve this proportion: imagine a cobbler trying to exchange shoes for a house, for example. Clearly no house-builder is going to accept one pair of shoes in trade (as insufficient) or some huge number of shoes (as unwieldy and impractical). Money exists, says Aristotle, so that both parties in a transaction can weigh their contributions on a common scale. But how does a cobbler, for instance, know how to value their product on this scale? Aristotle says that the key to determining this quantitative measure of value is . This has often been translated as "demand" by translators eager to suggest that Aristotle anticipated the modern supply and demand theory of price, but could also be translated as "use", "advantage", or "service".
Aristotle mentions that what is legal is not the same as what is just: "Political Justice is of two kinds, one natural, the other conventional." Aristotle makes a point that recalls debates from Plato's Republic: "Some people think that all rules of justice are merely conventional, because whereas a law of nature is immutable and has the same validity everywhere, as fire burns both here and in Persia, rules of justice are seen to vary." Aristotle insists that justice is both fixed in nature, in a sense, but also variable in a specific way: "the rules of justice ordained not by nature but by man are not the same in all places, since forms of government are not the same, though in all places there is only one form of government that is natural, namely, the best form". He believed people can generally see which types of rules are conventional and which natural—and he felt that most important when trying to judge whether someone was just or unjust was determining whether they did something voluntarily or not. Harmful acts can be categorized as follows:
accidental — harmful acts done from ignorance of the nature of the act, that cause an unforeseeable harm
mistaken — harmful acts done from ignorance of the nature of the act, that cause a foreseeable injury, but that do not imply vice
unjust — harmful acts done with knowledge of the nature of the act (therefore voluntary), but that are not premeditated (done from a sudden rage for instance)
viciously unjust — harmful acts that are both voluntary and chosen
There is some tension between the discussion of voluntary acts in this section and what he said in Book III. In this section, Aristotle calls acts done in and from ignorance varieties of involuntary acts; in Book III he says such acts are not involuntary, except for those that both were done from ignorance and were then regretted.
Aristotle next discusses (usually translated as "equity"), which is a skillful, nuanced corrective to by-the-books justice.
Book VI: Intellectual virtues
Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics is identical to Book V of the Eudemian Ethics.
If a virtue is the habit of deliberately choosing a virtuous mean, how does one come to know and recognize that mean or the vicious extremes we should avoid? And how does one translate that knowledge into action—how does knowledge become choice?
Recognizing the mean means recognizing the correct boundary-marker that defines the frontier of the mean. So practical ethics (having a good character) requires knowledge.
Aristotle divides the soul into a part having reason (the intellect) and parts without it (one part concerning perception or sensation, and another with appetite or desire). He has so far been discussing the type of virtue or excellence of the appetitive, non-reasonable part soul—that of the character (the virtue of which is , moral virtue). Now he intends to discuss the other type: that of thought.
Choice happens when an end desired by the appetitive part of the soul combines with a discovery of effective means to that end by the intellectual part of the soul. Both parts of the soul are equal partners in this; whether you choose to describe it as the desire enlisting the intellect or the intellect guiding the desire is just a matter of preference or convention.
The part of the soul with reason is divided into two parts:
one concerning things with invariable causes
one concerning variable things and deliberation about actions
Aristotle says that if recognition depends upon likeness and kinship between the things being recognized and the parts of the soul doing the recognizing, then the soul also grows naturally into two parts, each specializing in one of these two types.
Aristotle enumerates five types of (stable dispositions) that the soul can have, and which can disclose truth:
Practical judgement
The closing chapters of Book VI examine (practical judgement, practical wisdom, or prudence) more closely.
concerns practical matters, and matters that can be meaningfully influenced by human effort. Syllogistic reasoning is important to this variety of reasoning: you must be able to know the truth about the universal, the particular, and the syllogistic process that enables you to draw a conclusion from such truths.
has subcategories for different spheres of human life:
prudence for practical wisdom about governing yourself
domestic management for practical wisdom about home economics
legislation for practical wisdom about the universal principles of politics
deliberative and judicial government for practical wisdom about the case-by-case carrying out of political principles
People who apply practical wisdom to themselves and their homes are esteemed as wise, but people who apply their wisdom to other people's lives "are considered meddlesome". But Aristotle believes that such busybodies are nonetheless important to the health of the polis.
seems to require experience; it's not like mathematics where a talented child can pick it up through book learning. Aristotle thinks this is because expertise in mathematics requires an understanding of abstract universals, while practical wisdom requires encounters with real-life particulars. When you teach a young savant a mathematical truth, he or she grasps it immediately; but the same student may have reason to be skeptical about a truth of practical wisdom and to need to see that truth exemplified in real-life examples before he or she can adopt it.
Practical wisdom also concerns certain intuitively-grasped particulars (somewhat resembling , which is intuition about universals). For example, when we see a triangle and know that it's a triangle without having to count the sides and add up the angles to verify this, we're using practical wisdom in this way.
People with practical wisdom deliberate well. Deliberation is a sort of inquiry into what would be a good course of action. It is not:
scientific knowledge (which is invariable/eternal and so not amenable to deliberation)
clever guessing, just so stories, or quick-wittedness (deliberation is more careful)
truth (knowledge can be true or false, but deliberation is better or worse)
correctness (having the correct opinion is a conclusion, not a deliberation)
good reasoning toward bad ends (such as a clever but intemperate person might do)
true conclusions arrived at through mistaken logic
true conclusions arrived at through unnecessarily cumbersome and time-consuming logical tangles
good reasoning toward ends that are good, but not all that good; not good enough to contribute to .
Understanding is something like deliberation, but it is not meant to guide action but to comprehend the nature of a thing or situation (which can then aid in deliberation). You can use understanding to evaluate the knowledge offered by others, or the choices they make.
is a notoriously difficult to translate concept—perhaps grokking comes close? It is a more deep, holistic understanding of a situation. In particular, it is what allows a person to add to their virtue of Justice.
What ties understanding, deliberation, and together is something Aristotle calls (unfortunately the same word he uses for the intellectual virtue of intuition). in this sense is understanding, deliberation, and that is integrated and well-practiced to the point where it has become second-nature. It enables you to immediately identify the relevant aspects of some situation you are in and immediately identify the hypotheses that are worth considering in order to make the most of it. This is a skill that can only be acquired through experience, and is how wise elders earn their reputations.
Aristotle ends his investigation by comparing the importance of practical wisdom and philosophical wisdom. Although Aristotle describes as more serious than practical judgement, because it is concerned with higher things, he mentions the earlier philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales, as examples proving that one can be wise, having both knowledge and intellect, and yet devoid of practical judgement. The dependency of upon is described as being like the dependency of health upon medical knowledge. Wisdom is aimed at for its own sake, like health, being a component of that most complete virtue that makes happiness.
Aristotle closes by arguing that when one considers the virtues in their highest form, they all exist together.
Book VII. Impediments to virtue
This book is the last of the three books that are identical in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics (it is Book VI in the latter). It extends previously developed discussions, especially from the end of Book II, in relation to the vice of and the virtue of .
This book shows signs of having been cobbled together from multiple fragmentary sources; it is sometimes repetitive.
Aristotle names three impediments to virtue:
These stand in a sort of hierarchy:
heroic greatness (near-divine)
virtue (habitually good, not badly tempted in the first place)
continence (habitually capable of resisting temptation)
endurance (able to resist temptation for sufficient reward)
passion (sometimes overcome by anger or other very strong emotion)
incontinence (often overcome by mere desire)
vice (habitually bad)
brutishness (nearly subhuman)
Self-control and hedonism
According to Aristotle, self-control and (incontinence) are not "identical with Virtue and Vice, nor yet as different in kind from them". Temperance is distinct from self-control, both because self-control could be used to restrain good desires as much as bad ones, and because a temperate person would not have bad desires that need restraining in the first place.
Another way of stating the difference between lack of self control and intemperance is that intemperance is a choice and a habit of character — an exercise of the will — while incontinence is contrary to choice — a failure of will. By analogy, the incontinent person is like a city that has good laws on the books but that doesn't enforce them; the intemperate person is like a city with bad laws.
Aristotle reviews various opinions held about self-control, including one he associates with Socrates. According to Aristotle, Socrates argued that incontinent behavior must be a result of ignorance, as people only choose what they think to be good: it's not that the unrestrained person does things that they know to be bad, disregarding their knowledge under the influence of passion, but that they are ignorant about what is good and bad. Aristotle says at first that "this view plainly contradicts the observed facts", but comes to conclude that "the position that Socrates sought to establish actually seems to result".
His way of accommodating Socrates relies on syllogistic reasoning. Aristotle suggests that an incontinent person has competing universal premises, for example "χ would be unjust" and "χ would satisfy my sensual desire." When they then encounter a particular "α is an example of χ" the universal premise that has a sensual payoff associated with it crowds out the one that does not when it comes time for the incontinent person to choose a course of action ("α would satisfy my sensual desire" ∴ "I shall α!"). The incontinent person therefore remains in ignorance about what they should be able to know ("α would be unjust").
Aristotle says that someone who lacks self-control is typically influenced either by "necessary" pleasures or pains, like those associated with food and sex, or by more supererogatory pleasures and pains like those associated with victory, honor, or wealth. Lack of self-control in the first case is simple lack of self-control, and is a sort of vice (in a similar domain to intemperance). Lack of self-control in the second case is somewhat different: pursuing good things, but in an excessive, unrestrained way.
There are also those who have unusual desires or aversions as a result of being victimized as children or of some sort of psychopathology or other malady. Aristotle says that "every sort of senselessness or cowardice or dissipation or harshness that goes to excess is either animal-like or disease-like".
For Aristotle, ("incontinence"), is distinct from animal-like behavior because it is specific to humans and involves conscious rational thinking about what to do, even though the conclusions of this thinking are not put into practice. When someone behaves in a purely animal-like way, then they are not acting based upon conscious choice.
Returning to the question of anger, Aristotle distinguishes it from desires because he says it listens to reason, but often hears wrong, like a hasty servant or a guard dog. He contrasts this with desire, which he says does not listen to reason. Someone overcome by anger is conquered by flawed, crude reason, but at least by an argument; someone overcome by desire is conquered by desire alone. He also says that anger is more natural and less blameworthy than desire for excessive unnecessary pleasure. Acts from anger are more likely to be sudden and unpremeditated, while those motivated by desire are more likely to be craftily plotted. Furthermore, acts of never result from anger, but always have a connection to pleasure-seeking, whereas angry people act from pain, and often regret it.
So there are two ways that people lose mastery of their own actions and do not act according to their own deliberations. One is through excitability, where a person does not wait for reason but follows their imagination, often not thinking ahead. The other, worse and less curable case, is that of a weak person who has thought things through, but fails to do as they deliberated because they are carried in another direction by a passion. Nevertheless, it is better to have than the true vice of , in which intemperate acts are deliberately chosen for their own sake. People with such a vice do not even know they are wrong, and feel no regrets. These are less curable.
Aristotle compares self-control (resisting the temptation of the pleasant) with endurance (resisting the temptation of the unpleasant), and he describes the nebbish (who wilts in the face of moderate displeasure) as a sort of counterpart to the person wholly without self control (who lets themselves go for middling pleasures).
Finally Aristotle addresses a few questions raised earlier:
Not everyone who stands firm has self-control. Stubborn people are actually more like a person without self-control, because they are partly led by the pleasure that comes from exhibiting confident decisiveness or by avoiding the pain of admitting they were mistaken.
Not everyone who fails to stand firm has a true lack of self-control either. As an example Aristotle gives the case of Neoptolemus (in Sophocles' Philoctetes) who feels honor-bound both to lie to Philoctetes for the sake of Odysseus, and not to lie for the sake of being an honest person.
A person with practical judgment cannot have . It might sometimes seem so, but only in the sense that someone with mere cleverness can sometimes recite words that make them sound wise, like an actor or a drunk person reciting poetry. A person lacking self-control can have knowledge, but not an active knowledge that they are paying attention to.
Hedonism and pleasure
Aristotle discusses pleasure in two separate parts of the Nicomachean Ethics (VII.11–14 and X.1–5). Plato discussed similar themes in several dialogues, including the Republic and the Philebus and Gorgias.
He begins this section by rebutting the arguments of Speusippus who opposed the idea that pleasure is a (or the) good.
According to Aristotle's way of analyzing causation, a good or bad thing can either be an activity or a stable disposition. The pleasure that comes from being restored into a natural are accidental and not natural, for example the temporary pleasure that can come from a bitter taste. Things that are pleasant by nature are activities that are pleasant in themselves and involve no pain or desire. The example Aristotle gives is contemplation. Such pleasures are activities that are ends themselves, not just processes of coming into being aimed at some higher end.
Pain is clearly bad, either in a simple sense or as an impediment to things. Aristotle argues that this makes it clear that pleasure is good. He rejects the argument of Speusippus that pleasure and pain are only different in degree, because this still does not make pleasure bad, nor stop it (or at least some pleasure) from being the best thing. Aristotle points out that if pleasure is not good then a happy person will not have a more pleasant life than another, and would have no reason to avoid pain.
Any level of pain is bad, while it is only excessive bodily pleasures that are bad. Aristotle considers why people are so attracted to bodily pleasures. Apart from natural depravities and cases where a bodily pleasure comes from being restored to health, Aristotle asserts a more complex metaphysical reason, which is that for humans change is sweet, but only because of some disequilibrium in us, which is because part of every human is perishable, and "a nature that needs change... is not simple nor good". God, in contrast, "enjoys a single simple pleasure perpetually".
Books VIII and IX: Friendship
Book II Aristotle discussed friendliness. Here Sachs discusses Aristotle's ideas about friendship (philia).
Friendship, says Aristotle, is a virtue, or at any rate it implies virtue. And it is necessary for eudaimonia; indeed, if you had everything else but had no genuine friends, life would not be worth living. It is also an important consideration in justice and politics, as friendship is what holds states together.
Friendship exists when two people each wish for each other's good, and are both aware of this mutual relationship of goodwill. There are two sorts of friendship: friends who love each other because (and to the extent that) they are useful or pleasant to each other, and friends who love each other because they are good and virtuous and wish good things for each other for each other's sake. The first sort is inferior to the last because of the motive (friendships of utility and pleasure do not regard friends as people, but for what they can give in return) and also because they are more fragile (likely to disintegrate if the utility or pleasure goes away).
Friendships of utility are relationships formed without regard to the other person at all. With these friendships are classed family ties of hospitality with foreigners, types of friendships Aristotle associates with older people. Friendships of pleasure are based on fleeting emotions and are more associated with young people. While such friends do like to be together, such friendships also end easily whenever people no longer enjoy the shared activity, or can no longer participate in it together.
Friendships based upon what is good are the perfect form of friendship, in which both friends enjoy each other's virtue. As long as both friends keep similarly virtuous characters, the relationship will endure and be pleasant and useful and good for both parties, since the motive behind it is care for the friend themselves, and not something else. Such relationships are rare, because good people are rare, and bad people do not take pleasure in each other.
Aristotle suggests that although the word friend is used in these different ways, it is perhaps best to say that friendships of pleasure and usefulness are only analogous to real friendships. It is sometimes possible that, at least in the case of people who are friends for pleasure, familiarity will lead to a better type of friendship as the friends learn to admire each other's characters. Perfect friendship may be incidentally utilitarian (it is in fact pleasant and useful) but is not primarily so. It requires trust, and it is difficult to put your trust in someone who isn't virtuous. The lesser, utilitarian species of friendship is also worthy of attention, but it's only a shadow of the real thing.
There are real-world friends, and then there are "Facebook friends." Genuine friendship seems to require regular face-to-face time. You need to be amiable to be a friend, and to enjoy spending time together (though mere amiability and admiration are not sufficient). Genuine friendship cannot be spread too thinly: you may have many utilitarian friendships or people you are friendly towards, but only a few perfect friends.
Friendships between people of differing status can have issues. People in authority sometimes have quick-witted friends of the pleasurable sort, and obedient friends of the useful sort, but since quick-witted ones tend not to be obedient, and obedient ones tend not to be quick-witted, rarely do you find the two united. And good, virtuous people tend not to make friends with people above their station (except with rare examples who are also exceptionally good and virtuous).
However, there is a sort of friendship between unequals: like the friendship of a father and son. Rulers can have a sort of friendly regard for their subjects. In such cases, friendship is a sort of respect that should be proportioned, like justice, according to the relative status of the parties: a child should respect the father more than the father respects the son; subjects should love their king more than the king loves any subject; and so forth. This is another way such friendship differs from genuine friendship, in which love and respect is equal, regardless of status, and in which it is loving rather than being-loved that is valued. This makes it difficult for differently-situated people to become genuine friends, or for a genuine friendship to survive a unbalancing in status between the friends. In friendships between unequals, the superior person thinks their status should qualify them for a superior share of its benefits; the inferior person thinks that they should be able to expect more benefits as they have less to give. Aristotle thinks one way to resolve this is to allow the inferior person to have a larger share of actual goods and assistance, while the superior person gains the larger share of honor from such beneficence, so they both win. This is true of the polis in general as well: some people contribute little and take much, other people contribute much and take little but are repaid in honor. This is also how mortals behave towards gods, and children towards parents. The relationship between benefactors and those they benefit also has a sort of paradoxical friendship dynamic; the giver may enjoy the gift-giving more than the recipient enjoys the gift, and the giver may be more fond of the recipient than vice-versa.
Friendship is a form of love, best exhibited in the giving rather than in the receiving.
Associations and friendships bind the together. Different relationships can be compared to the different types of constitution, according to the classification system Aristotle explains in his Politics (Monarchy, Tyranny, Aristocracy, Oligarchy, Timocracy, and Democracy). The difference between the good and bad types has to do with how virtuous, or self-serving, are those in power. A monarch cares for his kingdom and subjects; a tyrant, for himself. An aristocracy looks out for the good of the polis; an oligarchy tries to accrue more power and wealth for itself. A timocracy has the good of everyone in mind; a democracy is always trying to rob the minority to feed the majority. Similarly, a good friendship between a man and his wife in a patriarchy is like the friendship between an aristocracy and the commoners; a good friendship between brothers is like the friendship between timocrats.
The friendship between relatives is tighter than that of fellow-citizens. And the closeness of such friendship is related to the closeness of kinship, as well as to the nearness-in-age of the friends, and the extent to which they have been brought up together. The friendship of parents and children is a special sort, akin to the relationship between the gods and mortals. The friendship between husband and wife is natural and fundamental — even more so than that of the tendency of people to come together in communities. Marriages may be utilitarian friendships or genuine ones.
Genuine friends don't have reason to complain about the justice of their friendship, because if they love more than they are loved, that's okay: it is the loving more than the being loved that is the valuable thing in such a friendship. In utilitarian friendships complaints of whether one of the friends is keeping up his or her end of the friendship come up, and each friend is eager to be getting the better bargain: giving less and getting more. These sorts of conflicts aren't best handled by some formal model of objective justice, but, as a rule of thumb in such cases, the value of favors received (and therefore how much return is due) ought to be determined by the recipient.
If your obligations to friends conflict with each other, or with other obligations, there are no hard-and-fast rules for what to do, but a set of heuristics may help: repay debts, prefer kin to non-kin, prefer friends to others, respect your elders, and so forth. It is not that there is no right answer, but that there is no simple formula that can apply to all of the complex cases in real-life.
Utilitarian friendships are only expected to last as long as the mutual utility or pleasure does. Genuine friendships can also end, for instance if only one of the parties consider it a genuine friendship, or if one of the parties descends into vice, or, on the contrary, ascends far beyond the other in virtue.
A virtuous person will seek out friendships that resemble the sort of relationship he has with himself. A virtuous person has integrity, and wishes what is actually good for himself, for his own sake. In this way he is like a genuine friend to himself, for a friend will wish for a friend what is actually good for the friend's sake. Vicious people, on the other hand, are in conflict even with themselves (their appetites conflict with their reason, and so forth), and so they don't have a good foundation on which to build genuine friendships.
Enlightened self-regard (of the sort that makes you pursue virtue) is an important prerequisite for loving others. But the sort of self-love practiced by the intemperate is worse than useless. For this reason a good person ought to be encouraged in self-love, while a wicked person ought to be discouraged in it, since he or she doesn't know how to do it properly.
In times of bad fortune, it is good to have friends who can help you out; in times of good fortune, it is even better to have friends you can help out. We should not hesitate to go to the aid of a friend in bad straits, even if they have not asked, but we should not go out of our way to try to be the objects of our friends' kindnesses.
Book X: Pleasure, happiness, and upbringing
Aristotle discusses pleasure throughout the Ethics, but gives it a final, more focused and theoretical, treatment in Book X. Aristotle starts by questioning the rule of thumb accepted in the more approximate early sections, by which people think pleasure should be avoided—if not because it is bad simply, then because people tend too much towards pleasure-seeking. He argues that people's actions show that this is not really what they believe but is a "noble lie" taught because it is supposed to have salutary effects (Aristotle doesn't think much of that way of teaching).
He reviews some arguments of previous philosophers, including Eudoxus (who considered pleasure to be the good) and Plato & Speusippos (who did not), to advance his own middle-way argument: that pleasure is clearly a good pursued for its own sake even if it is not The Good in a Platonic or an ultimate sense.
Even if pleasure and pain were entirely orthogonal to virtue and vice, because these sensations are powerful goads of behavior, particularly in the young but throughout life, it would be important for the ethicist to keep them in mind.
To define what pleasure is, Aristotle applies his theory of motion as an as explained in his Physics and Metaphysics. In this approach, pleasure is not a movement or because unlike the movement of walking across a room, or of building a house, or a part of a house, it has no end point when we can say it is completed. It is more like seeing, which is either happening in a complete way or not happening. "Each moment of pleasurable consciousness is a perfect whole."
A sense perception like sight is in perfect activity when it is in its best conditions and directed at the best objects. When any sense is in such perfect activity, then there is pleasure; similarly thinking and contemplation have their associated pleasures. But seeing, for example, is a whole, as is the associated pleasure. Pleasure completes the seeing or thinking, in a way, but as an additional supervening activity that crowns it, rather than as something necessary to it.
Why doesn't pleasure last? Why does it fade as if from fatigue? Aristotle proposes that this is for two reasons: because pleasure accompanies activity and we indeed become too fatigued to keep up any pleasurable activity indefinitely, and because sensation requires some novelty and any pleasurable stimulus will stop being pleasant if it is repeated too often. Life is an activity made up of many activities such as music, thinking, and contemplation, and pleasure brings supervening completion to each of these, leading to fulfillment and the life worth living. Aristotle says we can dismiss the question of whether we live for pleasure or choose pleasure for the sake of living, for the two activities seem incapable of being separated.
Different activities—the various sense perceptions, thinking, contemplating—bring different kinds of pleasure, and these pleasures make the activities intensify. For example a flute player gets better at playing as they also get more pleasure from it. But these pleasures and their associated activities also impede each other, just as a flute player cannot participate in an argument while playing. This raises the question of which pleasures are more to be pursued. Some pleasures are more beautiful and some are more base or corrupt. The pleasure a virtuous person feels from practicing virtue is a good pleasure; the pleasure a vicious person feels from practicing vice, not so much (such "pleasures" hardly deserve the name).
Aristotle also argues that each type of animal has pleasures appropriate to it, and in the same way there can also be differences between people in which pleasures are most suitable to them. Aristotle proposes that the person of serious moral stature is the appropriate standard, with whatever things they enjoy being the things most pleasant.
Happiness
Finally, Aristotle returns to , the aim of the whole Ethics. According to the original definition of Book I it is an activity, good in and of itself, and chosen for its own sake (not instrumentally for some other goal). Aristotle has argued that virtues fit this definition, but perhaps recreational activity also fits the bill (a tennis game, for example, is an activity done for its own sake).
But Aristotle thinks that would trivialize . Anybody can enjoy recreation, even a slave, and no one would want to be a slave. He believes recreation is not an end in itself, but a way of relaxing in preparation for (or to recover from) more noble activity: in other words it is instrumental after all.
Aristotle says that if perfect is activity in accordance with the highest virtue, then this highest virtue must be the virtue of the highest part of the soul. He says this must be the intellect "or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine". This highest activity, Aristotle says, must be philosophical contemplation. This is also the most sustainable, pleasant, self-sufficient activity; and it is clearly aimed at for its own sake. To achieve it means to live in accordance with something immortal and divine which is within humans, and, "so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us". According to Aristotle, contemplation is the only type of happy activity it would not be ridiculous to imagine the gods engaging in. The intellect is indeed each person's true self, and this type of happiness would be the happiness most suited to humans, with both happiness and the intellect being things other animals do not have. Aristotle also claims that compared to other virtues, contemplation requires the least in terms of possessions and allows the most self-reliance, "though it is true that, being a man and living in the society of others, he chooses to engage in virtuous action, and so will need external goods to carry on his life as a human being".
What distinguishes humans from other animals is that we reason. This is a hint to our purpose. And that in turn tells us how to fulfill our . "That which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest." Indeed, itself is something peculiar to human beings, and this is no coincidence:
Happiness extends... just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not as a mere concomitant but in virtue of the contemplation; for this is in itself precious. Happiness, therefore, must be some form of contemplation.
The need for education, habituation, and good laws
Aristotle reiterates that the Ethics has not reached its aim if it has no effect in practice. The point is not just to learn how one ought to live, but to actually live that way. Theories are not enough.
The practice of virtue requires good education and habituation from an early age. Young people otherwise do not get to experience the highest forms of pleasure and are distracted by the easiest ones. While parents often attempt this sort of education, it is critical that there are also good laws in the community.
Concerning this need for good laws and education, Aristotle says that there has always been a problem, which he is now seeking to address: unlike in the case of medical science, theoreticians of happiness and teachers of virtue such as sophists never have practical experience themselves, whereas good parents and lawmakers have never theorized and developed a scientific approach to analyzing what the best laws are. Furthermore, very few lawmakers, perhaps only the Spartans, have made education a focus of law-making, as they should. Education needs to be more like medicine, with both practice and theory, and this requires a new approach to studying politics. Such study should, he says, even help in communities where the laws are not good and the parents need to try to create the right habits in young people themselves without help from lawmakers.
Aristotle closes the Nicomachean Ethics therefore by pitching his sequel, the Politics. (However, the Politics as we have it today is significantly different from the promised discussion of politics Aristotle alludes to here.)
Influence and derivative works
The Eudemian Ethics is sometimes considered to be a later commentary or paraphrase of the Nicomachean Ethics. The Magna Moralia is usually also interpreted as a post-Aristotle synthesis of Aristotelian Ethics including the Nicomachean and Eudemian, though it is sometimes also attributed to Aristotle himself.
Parts of a commentary about the Nicomachean Ethics by Aspasius exist. This is the earliest extant commentary on any of Aristotle's works, and is notable also because Aspasius was a paripatetic, that is, of the Aristotelian scholastic tradition.
Aristotelian ethics was superseded by epicureanism and stoicism in Greek philosophy. In the West it was not reinvigorated until the 12th century, when the Nicomachean Ethics (and Averroes's 12th-century commentary on it) was rediscovered. Thomas Aquinas called Aristotle "The Philosopher", and published a separate commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics as well as incorporating (or responding to) many of its arguments in his Summa Theologica.
Domenico da Piacenza relied on Aristotle's description of the pleasures of motion in Book X as an authority in his 15th-century treatise on dance principles (one of the earliest written documents on the formal principles of dance that eventually become classical ballet). da Piacenza, who taught that the ideal smoothness of dance movement could only be attained by a balance of qualities, relied on Aristotelian philosophical concepts of movement, measure, and memory to extol dance on moral grounds, as a virtue.
In G. E. M. Anscombe's 1958 essay "Modern Moral Philosophy", she noted that ethical philosophy had diverged so much since Aristotle's origins of the discipline that people who use modern ethical notions when discussing Aristotle's ethics "constantly feel like someone whose jaws have somehow got out of alignment: the teeth don't come together in a proper bite." Modern philosophy had, she believed, in discarding Aristotle's human (and in its skepticism toward divine law as an adequate substitute), also lost a way of making the study of ethics meaningful. As a result, modern moral philosophy was floundering, unable to recall how its intuitions of good and bad could possibly be grounded in facts. She suggested that it might be possible for us to backtrack and recover an Aristotelian ethics, but that to do this we would need to update some of Aristotle's metaphysical and psychological assumptions that are no longer plausible: "philosophically there is a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human 'flourishing.'"
The modern virtue ethics revival has taken up this challenge. Notably, Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (1981) explicitly defended an Aristotelian ethics against modern ethical theories. He claimed that Nietzsche had shown the varieties of modern moral philosophy to be hollow and had effectively refuted them. But he says Nietzsche's refutations do not apply to "the quite distinctive kind of morality" found in Aristotelian ethics. So to recover ethics, "the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments."
Editions
Greek text
(in two volumes: 1 and 2)
(Books I–IV and part of X)
(Greek text and English translation in parallel)
Translations
(With commentaries and glossary)
(Translation, with interpretive essay, notes, glossary)
(Translation, with introduction and notes.)
(Translation, with Introduction and Notes.)
Re-issued 1976, revised by Hugh Tredennick.
See also
Aristotelian ethics
Corpus Aristotelicum
Economics (Oeconomica)
Potentiality and actuality
Ethics
Eudaimonia
Eudemian Ethics (Ethica Eudemia)
Hexis
Intellectual virtue
Lesbian rule
Magna Moralia (Great Ethics)
Moral character
Nous
On Virtues and Vices (De Virtutibus et Vitiis Libellus)
Phronesis
Politics
Protrepticus
Summum bonum
Virtue
Virtue ethics
Footnotes
Further reading
(in two volumes: 1 and 2)
External links
H. Rackham translation plus Greek version (The Perseus Project)
PDFs of several (now) public domain translations and commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics
Books about friendship
Ethics books
Works by Aristotle