PHIL5505 · Philosophy

The Aristotelian Ethics

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

The Nicomachean Ethics challenges the modern reader, in terms of its organization and coherence. Topics, like pleasure, receive different treatments that some scholars have taken as contradictory. Looking at their contexts gives a key to this discrepancy and reveals the trajectory of Aristotle's argument. An examination of ends presents another key for linking parts together. In a way, all human activities are ends, but as ordered to other ends, often related to whether the activity promotes the welfare of the body or the soul. The examination of the moral virtues begins in terms of pain and pleasure in the body, then moves to social interactions relative to the soul. In addition, as the moral virtues concern the good of the individual, justice emerges as their end for the common good. The intellectual virtues examine activities more exclusively of the soul, with practical wisdom singled out for its central role in the exercise of the moral virtues and the character of the agent, introducing moral weakness and strength as on the way to virtue or vice, with another look at pleasure to fit this context. Friendship is to justice as that was to moral virtue, as the end of justice that allows for and encourages individuals to form a range of social bonds where both the moral and intellectual virtues can be exercised. Finally, pleasure is examined once more, but now as giving the structure for understanding happiness. Contemplation, as the activity of wisdom, presumes moral and intellectual virtues, but is the activity that is constitutive of human happiness. Satisfies the following distribution requirements for Philosophy: Ancient, History of Philosophy.