Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I-II
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was Greek, but not an Athenian like Socrates and Plato. He
was rather a ‘foreigner’ who came to Athens from Macedonia to study with Plato at
Plato’s school, the Academy. After Plato’s death in 347, he returned to Macedonia to
become tutor to the young Alexander the Great. In 334 he founded his own
philosophical school in Athens, called the Lyceum. He was eventually forced to leave
Athens for political reasons and died in 322.
Aristotle produced many works during his lifetime, including philosophical
dialogues, most of which have been lost. What survived are more specialized or
esoteric works probably written for his students at the Lyceum. The text we’re
reading, the Nicomachean Ethics, is one of these.
Aristotle was the first to develop formal tools for doing philosophy and use them
systematically to solve philosophical problems. He also developed logic from a set
of informal procedures into a powerful formal system, insisting on the neutrality of
logic with respect to all other fields of philosophy. Unlike Plato, who thought
philosophy deals with abstract ideas, Aristotle was more interested in investigating
the nature of concrete things – the trees and tables and ships and horses we see
around us every day. He concedes that Plato’s ideas might be more knowable per se,
or in themselves, but not to us. That is because for Aristotle, human knowledge
comes from our senses and actual experience of the world, not by intuiting the
eternal forms of things with our minds.
Aristotle’s more empirical approach to philosophy is evident at the very beginning
of our text, where he remarks, “the good has rightly been declared to be that at
which all things aim” (Nicomachean Ethics I.1; online eText). This is a platitude
rather than a question or a puzzle– something he thinks everyone would accept as a
starting point; likewise, it is supposed to be totally uncontroversial when Aristotle
claims at NE I.4 that most people regard happiness as the highest good, even if they
disagree about what makes one happy. He proceeds to test these common-sense
observations, always with an eye to our nature and capacities as human beings,
almost like a modern-day scientist.
Book I
Chapter 1
• All human activities aim at some good, although some goods are subordinate
to others (bridle-making is a good for “the art of riding,” which is presumably
a good for ends like waging war, commerce, and recreation).2
o Q: Is waging war, or commerce, or recreation an end-in-itself? If not,
what is the higher end? What do we do it for?
• Aristotle thinks everything has a purpose or end or something it is for; this is
represented in his philosophy via the concept of final causality, also known as
teleology (from the Gk. or telos = end).
Chapter 2
• The science of the good for human beings is politics: by this, Aristotle means a
body of knowledge that is both practical and normative, telling us how to
organize our personal and collective lives.
• Aristotle notes that the good “of the state seems at all events something
greater and more complete whether to attain or preserve” than the good of
an individual person (NE I.2; online eText). So the good of the state is
greater than that of the individual.
Chapter 3
• Aristotle tells us not to expect more precision than the subject matter allows.
Ethics is not like mathematics and so it won’t have simple, final answers that
are completely right (or wrong).
o Q: Who is Aristotle criticizing here? If you said ‘Socrates, Plato, and
the philosophical definition crowd’, you’d be right!
• Aristotle insists that life experience is crucial for knowledge of the good;
young people are too easily swayed by passion to make good judgements in
ethics!
Chapter 4
• First platitude: everyone agrees that the highest of all goods is happiness
(Gk. eudaimonia), the activity of “living well and doing well”.
• But there is disagreement about how to achieve happiness: some say we
should seek pleasure; others say wealth, or honour. But the answer also
changes depending on the circumstances of the individual: those who are ill
identify it with health, those who are poor with wealth, and so on.
• Note that while Aristotle starts with common sense beliefs, he does not stop
with them. People’s unexamined beliefs are all over the place, and so
philosophy must be employed to examine them and find out which are true.
Chapter 5
• Aristotle identifies three kinds of human life: (i) the “life of enjoyment,” (ii)
the political life, and (iii) the contemplative life.
• He dismisses the life of pleasure or enjoyment as too “slavish” and more
“suitable to beasts”, whereas those who pursue the political life do so
because they seek to be honoured. But honour isn’t secure because it
requires other people to bestow it; still, the fact that people are honoured for
their virtue tells us that “virtue is better”, that is, a higher good than honour.3
• Aristotle pauses for a moment to consider the problem that you don’t cease
to be a virtuous person when you are asleep, or even while suffering
misfortunes that make you unhappy. So how can virtue be an activity? But
he doesn’t try to resolve this yet.
• Aristotle also sets aside discussion of the contemplative life until later, in
Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Chapter 6
• Aristotle’s criticism of Plato: “Forms have been introduced by our friends
<i.e., Plato and his followers at the Academy>”, but they’re abstract and
eternal, whereas the good we’re looking for is here and now, a quality of
particular things. That good should also be attainable by us.
• Plato didn’t show how the Forms or ideas are related to each other, whereas
Aristotle wants to figure out how goods are ordered: which ones we seek to
get other things we desire and which ones we seek for themselves.
o For more on Plato’s ideas or Forms, watch the short film “The Cave”
posted on our eClass site.
Chapter 7
• Lots of things are instrumentally good because they get us something else
that is good (consider money, which has almost zero value in itself but which
is valuable for acquiring other goods). But the ultimate or final good is that
for the sake of which everything else is done.
• What kind of good is “always desirable in itself and never for the sake of
something else”? Answer: happiness. All other things are chosen for the
sake of happiness (eudaimonia). For this reason, happiness is also said to be
self-sufficient.
• The Human Function Argument: Aristotle contends that we can get a
“clearer account” if we figure out what our function is. This function must be
proper or “peculiar” to us as humans, not shared with other things (which
excludes the life of sensory pleasure, since it is common to us and non-human
animals). Our proper function must be unique to us.
• The function of human beings is an “activity of the soul” according to reason;
this is our particular excellence, or virtue (Gk. arete – Plato used this word
too!)
• Aristotle emphasizes that he is merely providing an outline here and that
he’ll fill in the details in later books. He is a careful, methodical philosopher.
Book II
Chapter 1
• Aristotle says, “states of character arise out of like activities” (NE II.1; online
eText). Nobody becomes good without actually doing something.
• This is a crucial point: moral virtue is something we acquire, by
practicing it, and the same is true of vice, or moral badness.4
• Acting morally is accordingly like being a good builder or lyre-player; these
involve know-how rather than know-that (where what comes after the ‘that’
is a philosophical definition).
Chapter 2
• Again, Aristotle emphasizes that he is not after a philosophical definition:
“ the present inquiry does not aim at theoretical knowledge like the others
(for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to
become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use)” (NE
II.2; online eText)
• Ethics from this practical perspective involves figuring out how to produce
habits, or states of character, that are praiseworthy: virtues like courage and
temperance
• Aristotle gives us a hint: usually the good lies on a mean between excess
and deficiency; for example, courage is the state of character between
cowardice (too little) and rashness (too much)
Chapter 3
• Aristotle turns to the question of motive or what causes us to act (he is
nothing if not a good observer of the natural world, including human
society): virtues (and vices) are established and reinforced by the pleasures
and pains that result from activity. So, “the man who abstains from bodily
pleasures and delights in this very fact is temperate, while the man who is
annoyed at it is self-indulgent, and he who stands his ground against things
that are terrible and delights in this or at least is not pained is brave,
while the man who is pained is a coward” (NE II.3; online eText)
• How an action feels determines whether we do it again.
• This offers an important clue about how to make someone good or virtuous:
we must make what is noble or advantageous pleasant to do!
Chapter 4
• Aristotle here gives a kind of philosophical definition of virtue, but it is also
contextual (he thinks circumstances are important in ethics and that Plato
missed this): The agent must be “in a certain condition” when acting
virtuously: “in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must
choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action
must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character” (NE II.4; online
eText). Note: knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for virtue!
• Another dig at Plato: “most people …do not do these [good actions], but take
refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good
in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their
doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will
not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not
be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy” (ibid.).5
Chapter 5
• Virtue is a state of character in the soul, rather than a passion or faculty;
we can’t help feeling passions like joy, envy, hatred, or pity, and in the same
way, it doesn’t make sense to praise or blame people for their ability to feel
these passions; therefore, virtue must be about how we choose to act on the
basis of such feelings. How are we moved by what we feel?
Chapter 6
• Further, virtue is a state of character that makes us good and makes us do
our work well. Virtue is also said to be on a mean, or ‘intermediate’ between
two extremes (see ch. 2 above), and will vary relative to the subject, just as
the right amount of meat for Milo the wrestler is more than for you or me.
• Aristotle’s official definition of virtue: “Virtue, then, is a state of
character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us,
this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which
the man of practical wisdom would determine it” (NE II.6; online eText)
o Q: What limitations are introduced when Aristotle defines virtue in
this way? Is the right thing to do always on a mean?