Nicomachean Ethics

The question

Aristotle taught in Athens in the fourth century BCE, first as a student in Plato’s Academy for some twenty years and later in his own school, the Lyceum. The Nicomachean Ethics, probably named after his son Nicomachus, who may have edited it, is thought to come from his lectures there. It is not a polished book. It reads like notes for teaching, full of qualifications, examples and returns to earlier points. It has nonetheless been one of the most influential works of moral philosophy ever written.

Its question is practical. Aristotle is not asking what rules people should follow but what kind of life is best, and what kind of person one must become to live it. He says early on that the study aims not at knowledge for its own sake but at becoming good, and that it can give only as much precision as its subject allows. Human life is variable, so ethics deals in what holds for the most part.

The path through it

Aristotle begins by asking what all our activities aim at. Every action seeks some good, and most goods are sought for the sake of something else. Money is sought for what it buys; health for what it allows. There must be something sought for its own sake and never for anything further. Everyone agrees, he says, on its name, eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness or flourishing, but they disagree about what it is: pleasure, honour, wealth.

To find out, he asks what the distinctive function of a human being is. A flute-player’s good lies in playing the flute well. A human being’s good, then, must lie in doing well what is distinctively human, which is living by reason. Flourishing is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, over a complete life. He adds that a good life cannot be judged by a moment: “it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”

He then asks what virtue is and how it is acquired. Intellectual virtues are learned by teaching. Moral virtues, such as courage, generosity and justice, are acquired by habit. “By doing just actions we come to be just,” he writes; by doing brave actions, brave. We are not born virtuous, but we are born able to become so, and we become so through practice, starting in childhood. This is why upbringing and laws matter so much.

Next he asks what kind of thing a virtue is. His answer is that it is a settled state of character concerning choice, lying in a mean relative to us. Courage lies between cowardice and rashness; generosity between meanness and extravagance. The mean is not arithmetic, a fixed midpoint, but the right response to the particular situation: feeling and acting at the right times, about the right things, toward the right people, for the right reason and in the right way. It is determined, he says, “as the man of practical wisdom would determine.”

That points to practical wisdom, phronesis, the intellectual virtue that allows a person to see what a situation requires. It cannot be reduced to rules, because situations differ endlessly. It is learned through experience. The site’s idea page Practical Wisdom develops it.

The later books take up responsibility and choice, the individual virtues, justice, weakness of will, pleasure and, at length, friendship. Friendship, Aristotle argues, is necessary for a good life. Friendships of utility and of pleasure come and go, but friendships between good people, who love each other for who they are, are lasting. A friend, he says, is “another Self”. In the final book he argues that the highest form of flourishing is contemplation, the activity of the intellect, and then turns to politics, since the city shapes the habits through which virtue is formed.

Where it arrives

Aristotle arrives at a picture of a good life as an activity rather than a feeling. Happiness is not something one has but something one does, the exercise of virtue over a whole life. It requires character, practical wisdom, friends and a community, and it also depends to some extent on fortune: health, sufficient resources and a decent upbringing. He accepts that great misfortune can damage a good person’s happiness, though not destroy their goodness.

The idea that character is built through practice, and that ethics is about becoming a certain kind of person, is the heart of what later came to be called virtue ethics.

What remains open

Aristotle’s account of function assumes that human beings have a distinctive purpose, an assumption many modern philosophers reject. His treatment of the mean has been criticised as too vague to guide action, though defenders reply that vagueness is unavoidable in a subject that depends on judgement.

His ethics was also written for free male citizens of a Greek city, and his own views on slavery and women, expressed in the Politics, excluded most people from the full life he described. Modern virtue ethicists, from Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre to Martha Nussbaum, have revived his approach while rejecting those exclusions.

And the tension between the two ideals at the end, the active life of virtue among others and the contemplative life of the mind, has never been fully resolved.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks what kind of person your decisions are making you. Aristotle’s point that we become what we repeatedly do applies to leaders and organisations: habits of honesty or evasion, courage or caution, are formed one decision at a time.

It asks whether you are looking for a rule where judgement is needed. Many hard decisions involve finding the right response to a particular situation, between two failures. Practical wisdom, built through experience and reflection, is what makes that possible, and no policy can replace it.

And it asks whether your life, or your organisation, has room for friendship in Aristotle’s sense, relationships valued for themselves rather than for their usefulness. He thought no one would choose to live without friends, even with every other good.