Aristotle's Ethics Flashcards
We study ethics in order to improve our lives, and therefore its principal concern is the nature of human well-being.
Aristotle follows Socrates and Plato in taking the virtues to be central to a well-lived life.
He rejects Plato’s idea that a training in the sciences and metaphysics is a necessary prerequisite for a full understanding of our good.
Practical wisdom, as Aristotle conceives it, cannot be acquired solely by learning general rules. We must also acquire, through practice, those deliberative, emotional, and social skills that enable us to put our general understanding of well-being into practice in ways that are suitable to each occasion.
- Preliminaries
Aristotle wrote two ethical treatises: the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics. These two works begin with a discussion of eudaimonia (“happiness,” “flourishing”), and turn to an examination of the nature of aretê (“virtue,” “excellence”) and the character traits that human beings need in order to live life at its best. Both treatises examine the conditions in which praise or blame are appropriate, and the nature of pleasure and friendship; near the end of each work, we find a brief discussion of the proper relationship between human beings and the divine.
No one had written ethical treatises before Aristotle. Plato’s Republic, for example, does not treat ethics as a distinct subject matter; nor does it offer a systematic examination of the nature of happiness, virtue, voluntariness, pleasure, or friendship. To be sure, we can find in Plato’s works important discussions of these phenomena, but they are not brought together and unified as they are in Aristotle’s ethical writings.
- Human Good and the Function Argument
The principal idea with which Aristotle begins is that there are differences of opinion about what is best for human beings, and that to profit from ethical inquiry we must resolve this disagreement.
He insists that ethics is not a theoretical discipline: we are asking what the good for human beings is not simply because we want to have knowledge, but because we will be better able to achieve our good if we develop a fuller understanding of what it is to flourish.
The biological fact Aristotle makes use of is that human beings are the only species that has not only these lower capacities but a rational soul as well. The good of a human being must have something to do with being human; and what sets humanity off from other species, giving us the potential to live a better life, is our capacity to guide ourselves by using reason. If we use reason well, we live well as human beings; or, to be more precise, using reason well over the course of a full life is what happiness consists in.
Aristotle’s conclusion about the nature of happiness is in a sense uniquely his own. No other writer or thinker had said precisely what he says about what it is to live well.
He says, not that happiness is virtue, but that it is virtuous activity. Living well consists in doing something, not just being in a certain state or condition.
One’s virtuous activity will be to some extent diminished or defective, if one lacks an adequate supply of other good.
Someone who is friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly will simply not be able to find many opportunities for virtuous activity over a long period of time, and what little he can accomplish will not be of great merit.
To some extent, then, living well requires good fortune; happenstance can rob even the most excellent human beings of happiness.
- Methodology
- 1 Traditional Virtues and the Skeptic
Aristotle’s assertion that his audience must already have begun to cultivate the virtues need not be taken to mean that no reasons can be found for being courageous, just, and generous.
His point, rather, may be that in ethics, as in any other study, we cannot make progress towards understanding why things are as they are unless we begin with certain assumptions.
To make progress in this sphere we must already have come to enjoy doing what is just, courageous, generous and the like. We must experience these activities not as burdensome constraints, but as noble, worthwhile, and enjoyable in themselves.
Then, when we engage in ethical inquiry, we can ask what it is about these activities that makes them worthwhile. We can also compare these goods with other things that are desirable in themselves—pleasure, friendship, honor, and so on—and ask whether any of them is more desirable than the others.
What is not inevitable is that our early experience will be rich enough to provide an adequate basis for worthwhile ethical reflection.
3.2 Differences from and Affinities to Plato
Aristotle’s goal is to arrive at conclusions like Plato’s, but without relying on the Platonic metaphysics that plays a central role in the argument of the Republic.
He rejects the existence of Plato’s forms in general and the form of the good in particular; and he rejects the idea that in order to become fully virtuous one must study mathematics and the sciences, and see all branches of knowledge as a unified whole.
His project is to make ethics an autonomous field, and to show why a full understanding of what is good does not require expertise in any other field.
Virtuous activity makes a life happy not by guaranteeing happiness in all circumstances, but by serving as the goal for the sake of which lesser goods are to be pursued.
As a rule, to live well is to have sufficient resources for the pursuit of virtue over the course of a lifetime.
- Virtues and Deficiencies, Continence and Incontinence
Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of virtue: those that pertain to the part of the soul that engages in reasoning (virtues of mind or intellect), and those that pertain to the part of the soul that cannot itself reason but is nonetheless capable of following reason (ethical virtues, virtues of character).
Ethical virtue is fully developed only when it is combined with practical wisdom.
A low-grade form of ethical virtue emerges in us during childhood as we are repeatedly placed in situations that call for appropriate actions and emotions; but as we rely less on others and become capable of doing more of our own thinking, we learn to develop a larger picture of human life, our deliberative skills improve, and our emotional responses are perfected.
Like anyone who has developed a skill in performing a complex and difficult activity, the virtuous person takes pleasure in exercising his intellectual skills.
Aristotle assumes that when someone systematically makes bad decisions about how to live his life, his failures are caused by psychological forces that are less than fully rational.
His desires for pleasure, power or some other external goal have become so strong that they make him care too little or not at all about acting ethically. To keep such destructive inner forces at bay, we need to develop the proper habits and emotional responses when we are children, and to reflect intelligently on our aims when we are adults.
Myles Burnyeat on Aristotle on Happiness (Philosophy Bites)
Children cannot be happy. Happiness is something you can attribute to a person, only in respect of their whole life.
Solon (Athenian statesman): ‘Call no one happy until they’re dead’
Happiness in antiquity was much more about what you succeeded in doing, whereas now it’s about how you’re feeling. Happiness is only said of one in respect of a complete life.
Pyrrho: ‘Happiness is tranquility’
What makes you happy is practising the virtues, not in a monkish way, but in a social way. The philosophical life could regarded as virtuous in addition to the political life.
The life of the practical and intellectual virtues hold more weight than pleasure.
The intellectual virtues are as superior to the ordinary virtues as God is to Man. The divine intellect exists apart from humanity. When you achieve supreme scientific understanding in some domain you are simply thinking the same thoughts as God. You are literally becoming God.
Happiness is not a psychological state but something measured over a whole life.
Aristotle offers us a much more serious notion of happiness.
