Nicomachean Ethics
by Aristotle · Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια
Assigned by 7 of the 9 reading lists
- Written
- c. 340 BCE
- Form
- Treatise
- Language
- Greek
- Length
- Medium · 300 pp120 to 300 pages
- Difficulty
- Demanding3 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendNicomachean Ethics, translated by Terence IrwinHackett, 1999Precise and consistent in its key terms, with a glossary and notes most courses rely on.
Also good
- Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. The most literal English version, with an interpretive essay and a full glossary.
- David Ross. The classic readable translation, revised by Lesley Brown; good for a first pass.
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Aristotle's lecture course on how a human life goes well. He argues that every activity aims at some good, that the good for a human being must be the one we choose for its own sake, and that this is happiness, understood as activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a whole life. Ten books then work out what that means: the moral virtues as settled dispositions lying between excess and deficiency, the role of habit and upbringing, choice and responsibility, justice in its several senses, practical wisdom, weakness of will, pleasure, and two long books on friendship. The last book asks whether the best life is political or contemplative.
Why it's on the list
Almost every later attempt to answer the question how should I live is either an extension of this book or a revolt against it. Aristotle starts from a place modern ethics usually skips: not rules, not consequences, but character, the kind of person you become through what you repeatedly do. That move gives him room to treat courage, generosity, anger and friendship as serious philosophical subjects rather than as decoration. The book also founded a vocabulary still in use, including habit, choice, the mean, practical wisdom and weakness of will. Aquinas built Christian moral theology on it, the Scottish Enlightenment argued with it, and the revival of virtue ethics in the last fifty years is a return to it. Programs assign it because it trains judgement rather than supplying answers.
Key themes
- The good life
- Happiness here is not a feeling but an activity, exercised over a whole life and vulnerable to luck. Aristotle refuses to say that a good person cannot be harmed.
- Virtue and character
- Each virtue is a settled disposition to feel and act the right amount, which puts courage between recklessness and cowardice. The mean is relative to the person and the situation, not an average.
- Education
- We become just by doing just things, so upbringing and law matter more than argument. Aristotle says that a young man is not a fit student of this subject, because he lacks experience.
- Love and desire
- Two of ten books go to friendship, sorted into friendships of use, of pleasure and of character. The best kind requires that both people are good, which makes it rare and slow to form.
- Reason and passion
- Book VII on weakness of will asks how someone can know what is right and do otherwise, and answers with an account of how knowledge goes missing under appetite.
Overview
The Nicomachean Ethics is a course of lectures, not a book Aristotle wrote for readers. It is named either for his father or his son, both called Nicomachus, and it reads like notes for teaching: compressed, repetitive in places, with sudden clear examples and stretches where you can feel a distinction being drawn on a blackboard. It is in ten books, which in ancient terms means ten scrolls, and the joins between some of them are rough. Book VII and Book X both discuss pleasure, in different ways, and books V, VI and VII appear in a nearly identical form in another of Aristotle’s ethical works.
The subject is not what is right but what is good for a human being, and the enquiry is practical. Aristotle says at the start that the point is not to know what virtue is but to become good, and that a listener who has no experience of life or who follows his passions will get nothing from the course.
He also warns about the kind of precision available. Ethics is not geometry. In this field, he says, we should be content with conclusions that hold for the most part, and we should expect the answer to a question about the right amount of anger to be, in the end, a matter of judgement rather than a rule.
The argument
Book I establishes the target. Everything we do aims at some good, and some goods we want for the sake of others; if there is anything we want only for its own sake, that will be the human good. Everyone calls it happiness, but people mean different things by it, so the word is agreed and useless. Aristotle’s move is to ask what a human being characteristically does, as one might ask what a flautist does, and answer that it is to live by reason. The human good is therefore activity of the soul in accordance with reason and virtue, over a complete life, and it needs some external goods too, since you cannot act well with no friends, no money and no health.
Book II gives the theory of virtue. Virtues of character are not feelings or capacities but dispositions, formed by habit, to feel and act rightly. Each lies between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency: courage between recklessness and cowardice, generosity between waste and meanness, proper pride between vanity and small-mindedness. The mean is not a midpoint on a scale; it is the right response, which may be great anger at a great wrong.
Book III takes up choice and responsibility, distinguishing what we do voluntarily from what is forced or done in ignorance, and then begins a survey of individual virtues that runs into Book IV. Book V is a treatise on justice, separating general justice, which is the whole of virtue toward others, from particular justice, which divides into distribution and rectification and requires a theory of proportion.
Book VI turns to the virtues of thought, and introduces the one that holds the system together: practical wisdom, the capacity to see what a situation requires. Without it the other virtues are blind, and it cannot be taught by rule. Book VII examines weakness of will, the state of knowing the better and choosing the worse, which Socrates had denied was possible. Books VIII and IX give friendship, including friendship between unequals, self-love, and whether a happy man needs friends. Book X returns to pleasure and then argues that the highest happiness is contemplation, the activity of the best part of us on the best objects, before ending by handing the reader over to politics, since virtue needs laws and cities to form it.
How to read it
Read Books I and II carefully; they are the foundation and they are short. Then read Book III chapters 1 to 5 on choice, Book VI whole, and Books VIII and X. If you must cut, cut the catalogue of minor virtues in Book IV, which includes the famous portrait of the great-souled man, and come back to it, because it tells you a great deal about Aristotle’s Athens.
Two misreadings to guard against. The first is that the doctrine of the mean recommends moderation in all things. It does not; it says that the right amount is neither too much nor too little, which is nearly a truism until Aristotle puts practical wisdom in charge of deciding. The second is that the book gives you a decision procedure. It insists that it cannot, and that anyone looking for one has misunderstood the subject.
Keep asking what work the Greek terms are doing. Eudaimonia is not the cheerful feeling that “happiness” suggests, arete covers excellence in things that are not moral at all, and phronesis is closer to good sense than to cleverness. Irwin’s glossary is the reason to buy his edition.
Read Book X against Book I. The early books make the good life a life of active virtue among other people; the last book praises the contemplative life above it. Whether those two pictures fit together is the oldest question in Aristotle scholarship.
Questions it raises
- If virtue comes from habit, and habit from upbringing, how much credit or blame does anyone deserve for their character?
- Aristotle admits that a life can be wrecked by misfortune. Does that make happiness a matter of luck?
- Is the mean a real standard, or does all the work get done by practical wisdom, which the book cannot define?
- Can someone have one virtue and lack the others, or does the account require them to come as a set?
- Does Book X’s praise of contemplation contradict the earlier claim that happiness is activity in the world with others?
- Friendship of the best kind needs two good people. What follows for those who have no such friend available?
Highlights
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
The opening sentence, which sets up the search for an end wanted for its own sake.
For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.
Happiness is a verdict on a life, not on an afternoon.
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
The core of Aristotle's account of moral education, and the reason he cares about habit.
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
The sentence that justifies spending a fifth of a book on ethics on friendship.
