These are my exam-prep notes on Nicomachean Ethics - it seeks to build a foundational understanding of the arguments and refutations discussed within the text and some of the debates surrounding it since.
Background:
- Aristotle names this after his son, Nicomachus.
- For Aristotle, ethics and politics are continuous.
- Nicomachean ethics are not preoccupied with moral realism, relativism.
o Or deriving obligations, duties from basic principles.
o Or arriving at a decision-theoretic ‘algorithm’ for action.
- Focus instead on the good or goodness for human beings.
NE 1.6 – Critique of the form of the good:
- ‘We had…better consider the universal good and discuss thoroughly what is meant by it,
although such an enquiry is made an uphill one by the fact that Forms have been introduced
by friends of our own,’
- ‘Yet it would perhaps be thought to be better, indeed, to be our duty, for the sake of
maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely, especially as we are
philosophers; for while both are dear, piety requires to honour truth above our friends,’
- Five arguments: three logical/conceptual, two practical.
Argument One: good is Predicated in all categories:
- E.g., substance, quality, relation, quantity, time, place
- ‘The good cannot be universally present in all cases and single,’
- Platonists should distinguish goods per se and instrumental goods (the ‘useful’)
- Does a single Form cover goods per se?
- ‘Of honour, wisdom and pleasure, just in respect of their goodness, the logoi are distinct,’
- ‘The good… is not something common answering to one Idea,’
Argument Two: Same logos in one man and man ‘himself’
- So, speaking of ß ‘itself’ has no sense.
Argument Three: Eternality of Form does not contribute to sense of (e.g.,) ‘good’
Argument Four: Ideas (Forms) are correlated with sciences.
- But there are many sciences of things even in one category.
Argument Four*: Form of Good is separate and independent.
- But we are seeking good achievable by humans.
- No science refers to the good ‘itself’- this is impractical.
- ‘All of [the sciences], though they aim at some good and seek to supply the deficiency of it,
leave on one side the knowledge of the good’.
- ‘Yet that all the exponents of the crafts [technai/crafts e.g., weaving and carpentry] should be
ignorant of, and should not even seek, so great a help is not probable,’
- Ethics is a ‘science’ or area of expertise.
- Is it concerned specifically with the human good.
- Is there such a good? Is it single?
, - Yes. Aristotle calls it the ‘highest human good,’
First argument for the highest human good:
- There are experts in it: phronimoi, esp. politikoi.
- Their expertise is phronesis, or practical wisdom.
Second argument for the highest human good
- ‘Every craft and every enquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at
some good; and for this reason, the [human] good has rightly been declared to be that at
which all things aim,’
Compare: all roads lead somewhere; therefore, there is somewhere all roads lead. Fallacy?
The quoted text is the first sentence of the NE. It points ahead to further justificatory argument.
Aristotle notes that crafts form hierarchies (as in bridle-making for the sake of horse riding and
horse riding for the sake of (military) strategy). So lower goods are for the sake of higher goods.
Without the higher good, they lack explanation and justification. Is there a highest good, to which
all goods are subordinate?
Yes. ‘If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything
else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of
something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be
empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good’ (NE I.2, 1094a18-22)
- But why then must there be a single chief good and why not an irreducible plurality of goods?
- Practical reason: we need to integrate our particular interests and desires (archers having a
‘mark to aim at’,)
- Psychological reason: we want and need integrated psyches.
But what is this ‘chief good’ we all seek, ‘the highest of all goods achievable by action,’?
- ‘Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men [hoi polloi] and
people of superior refinement say that it is eudaimonia’.
NB, Eudaimonia as contentment.
- Eudaimonia is an objective condition, verifiable or falsifiable from a third-person perspective.
Thus, one can believe they have achieved eudaimonia without being so.
- Hoi polloi think eudaimonia consists in ‘some plain and obvious thing’, like pleasure, wealth,
or honour (E.g., wealth when poor, health when ill)
- ‘The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not
the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else’.
- I.e., it is merely an instrumental good (same then for health)
- We are looking for a good per se, for the sake which we seek all other goods. That is, the
ultimate and universal good.
Other contenders:
- ‘The mass of mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to
beasts,’ (i.e., life of pleasure)
- ‘People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify eudaimonia with honour …
the end of the political life’. This is too superficial, since it depends on who gives honour.
- Third main possibility is the life of contemplation (Theoria)
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