The reason this can be so is that the ethical problems that human beings confront in their lives have not changed one bit over the centuries. Moral virtue and the blessings of good fortune are today, as they have always been in the past, the keys to living well, unaffected by all the technological changes in the environment, as well as those in our social, political, and economic institutions. The moral problems to be solved by the individual are the same in every century, though they appear to us in different guises. Here, instead of trying to expound Aristotle's Ethics in summary fashion, I am going to state the indispensable conditions that must be met in the effort to develop a sound moral philosophy that corrects all the errors made in modern times. First and foremost is the definition of prescriptive truth, which sharply distinguishes it from the definition of descriptive truth.
Descriptive truth consists in the agreement or conformity of the mind with reality.
When we think that that which is, is, and that which is not, is not, we think truly. To be true, what we think must conform to the way things are. In sharp contrast, prescriptive truth consists in the conformity of our appetites with right desire. As a result, we have the twentieth-century mistake of dismissing all ethical or value judgments as noncognitive. These must be regarded only as wishes or demands we make on others.