Book: Nicomachean Ethics

Highest Good and the Aim of Ethics

Aristotle opens by identifying a highest human good that orders all choices and crafts. He calls it eudaimonia, usually rendered as happiness or flourishing: an activity of soul in accordance with complete virtue over a complete life. Happiness is final and self-sufficient, not a means to anything further, and it sets the standard by which other goods are ranked.

The Function Argument and Virtue

To clarify happiness, Aristotle asks what function is distinctive of humans. Not mere life or sensation, but rational activity, using reason to guide action and contemplation. If a thing is good when it performs its function well, human good is rational activity performed excellently. Excellence here is virtue, of two kinds: moral virtues formed by habituation and intellectual virtues cultivated by teaching. Moral virtue is a stable disposition to feel and act rightly, determined by the mean relative to us, as discerned by a person of practical wisdom.

Moral Responsibility, Choice, and the Mean

Aristotle distinguishes voluntary from involuntary actions, grounding praise and blame. Voluntary actions have their origin in the agent with knowledge of particulars; involuntary actions stem from force or ignorance coupled with regret. Choice (prohairesis) concerns the means to ends, formed through deliberation. The moral mean is not a mathematical midpoint but what right reason prescribes in context, avoiding excess and deficiency in emotions and actions.

The Mosaic of Virtues

He illustrates the mean with familiar states: courage between rashness and cowardice; temperance between licentiousness and insensibility; generosity and magnificence in giving and spending appropriately; magnanimity, the crown of virtues, rightly sizing one’s worth; proper ambition, gentleness, truthfulness, wittiness, and friendliness, all calibrated by circumstance. Shame is treated as fitting for the young but not a virtue in the strict sense.

Justice in the Polis

Justice appears both as complete virtue in relation to others and as a particular virtue about distribution and rectification. Distributive justice allocates honors and resources by proportion to merit; rectificatory justice restores equality in transactions and wrongs, operating arithmetically. In exchange, money emerges as a common measure that enables commensuration. Equity supplements law, correcting its generality when special cases demand.

Practical Wisdom and Weakness of Will

Practical wisdom (phronesis) is the intellectual virtue that perceives the right end in particulars and steers the virtues. Without it, moral traits misfire. Aristotle examines akrasia, acting against better judgment, arguing that desire can overwhelm reason’s command in the moment, though one retains knowledge in a qualified sense. Habituation and sound upbringing align appetite with reason to prevent such failure.

Friendship as a Mirror of the Good

Friendship is necessary for life and for cities. Aristotle distinguishes friendships of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue. Only the last is complete, founded on mutual recognition of good character and wishing the friend’s good for their own sake. Such friendships are rare, require time, reciprocity, equality, and living together, and they serve as mirrors in which one comes to know oneself.

Pleasure and the Contemplative Life

Pleasure is not a mere bodily surge but the completion of an activity, like the bloom on youth. Good activities have good attendant pleasures; bad ones carry corrupt pleasures. Happiness requires external goods to some extent, yet Aristotle argues that the highest and most self-sufficient activity is contemplation, the exercise of intellect on what is most divine and unchanging. Still, the human good also calls for moral virtue and just citizenship.

Law, Education, and the Political Frame

Because character is shaped by practice, law and education are essential. A good lawgiver crafts institutions and habits that habituate citizens to find pleasure and pain in the right things. Ethics thus culminates in politics, the architectonic science that aims at the common good by cultivating virtuous lives.