Nicomachean Ethics

Citation

Aristotle. (2019). Nicomachean Ethics (3rd ed.; T. Irwin, Trans., with introduction, notes, and glossary). Hackett Publishing Company.

Chapter Summary

The Ethics has ten books, which Aristotle's editors treat as one half of a single enquiry whose other half is the Politics. The Hackett edition adds Irwin's introduction, headings that help the reader follow the argument, explanatory notes, a glossary of technical terms, and, new in the third edition, an appendix of translated selections from related texts by Aristotle. The summaries below follow the ten books; the numbering of chapters within books differs between translations, so they are described by book.

Book I: Happiness

The book begins from the observation that every art, enquiry, action and choice aims at some good, and asks what the highest good for human beings is. Aristotle sets aside the popular candidates of pleasure, honour and wealth and argues that the good for humans is happiness, understood as an activity of the soul in accordance with excellence, in a complete life. The book also considers whether the fortunes of descendants and friends affect happiness, and it prepares the division of the soul that the next books use.

Book II: Moral Virtue and the Mean

Excellence is of two kinds, intellectual and moral. Moral virtue, the book argues, is acquired by habituation, by doing the corresponding actions. It is defined as a state of choice that lies in a mean relative to us, determined by reason, between an excess and a defect, and the book applies this to a list of particular virtues.

Book III: Responsibility, Courage and Temperance

The first part of the book treats voluntary and involuntary action, which matter for praise and blame, then choice, deliberation and wish. The rest takes up courage and what the translation calls self-mastery, the virtues concerned with fear and bodily pleasure.

Book IV: The Further Virtues of Character

A survey of other virtues in turn, with their corresponding excess and deficiency: liberality, magnificence, great-mindedness and the right attitude to honour, meekness about anger, friendliness, truthfulness and wit. The book ends by asking whether shame is a virtue.

Book V: Justice

Justice in the sense of lawfulness is separated from justice as a particular part of virtue. The particular kind is divided into distributive and corrective justice, and the book discusses reciprocity, the question of acting unjustly toward oneself, and equity as a correction of the law.

Book VI: Intellectual Virtues and Practical Wisdom

Aristotle turns from virtues of character to those of intellect, discussing the faculties by which the soul grasps truth, including scientific knowledge and practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is deliberating well about what is good for human life, and it is the virtue that connects intellectual and moral excellence.

Book VII: Self-Control, Lack of Self-Control and Pleasure

The book examines how a person can know what is right and still fail to do it, and who counts as having self-control. It also takes up arguments about whether pleasure is good, which Book X resumes from a different angle.

Books VIII–IX: Friendship

Two books on friendship, with discussion of its kinds (grounded in utility, pleasure or goodness), friendship in political constitutions and within the family, and questions such as whether to love oneself best and whether the happy person needs friends.

Book X: Pleasure, Happiness and the Contemplative Life

Returns to pleasure, argues that it accompanies and perfects activity, then comes back to happiness. The highest happiness is found in the activity of contemplation, which the book distinguishes from the life of the moral virtues. The book ends by asking how people become good and by turning toward legislation and the Politics.

Key Concepts

Books I–III

• Happiness (eudaimonia): the highest good, an activity of the soul in accordance with excellence over a complete life.
• Habituation: the way moral virtue is acquired, by repeatedly doing the actions that express it.
• The mean: the state between excess and deficiency that is determined by reason and relative to the person.
• Voluntary action and deliberation: the conditions for responsibility, and the process of choosing means to ends.

Books IV–VII

• Particular justice: the part of virtue concerned with fair distribution and the correction of wrongs.
• Practical wisdom: excellence of deliberation about human good, bound up with good character.
• Self-control and its lack: the condition of acting against what one judges best.

Books VIII–X

• Friendship: the three grounds of friendship and the place of friends in a good life.
• Pleasure: treated as the accompaniment of perfect activity, not as the good itself.
• Contemplation: the activity that Book X names as the highest form of happiness.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A heavily supported edition. The publisher describes more aids to the reader than are found in other modern English translations: an introduction, headings that track the argument, explanatory notes on difficult passages and a full glossary of technical terms. The third edition adds revisions to the translation and expanded notes, glossary and introduction.
• A faithful and readable translation. Reviewers of the first edition quoted by the publisher call it highly readable and remarkably accurate (Jonathan Barnes, Oxford), and the stated aim was to be clear enough to show how the argument proceeds yet literal enough to show what grounds the text offers for different interpretations. Reviewers of the third edition praise the improved translation and the notes (Peter Tumulty, St. Michael's College).
• Extra texts for context. James Klagge (Virginia Tech) singled out the roughly forty pages of supplementary texts by Aristotle.
• A work with a clear overall design. The ten books move from happiness (I), through virtues of character (II–V) and of intellect (VI), to self-control and pleasure (VII), friendship (VIII–IX) and a final return to pleasure and happiness (X). A reader who knows this plan can keep track of the argument.

Limitations

• Not a complete theory by itself. J. A. Smith's introduction to the public-domain edition stresses that the Ethics is half of a single treatise with the Politics, whose last chapter points forward to it.
• Difficult parts remain. Smith describes the treatment of justice in Book V as a source of great difficulty, finds Aristotle's account of self-control perplexed and obscure at the end, and observes that the relation of the contemplative ideal in Book X to the practical life is left somewhat obscure.
• Interpretation and annotation. Headings, notes and glossary guide the reader toward one reading of a text whose interpretation is disputed; a student who wants alternatives must consult other translations or commentaries.
• Length with the apparatus. The published volume runs to some 440 to 480 pages, depending on the listing, so the apparatus adds substantially to what a student must read.

Where It Fits in the Course

The Ethics is the ethical counterpart to Plato in the ancient philosophy course. Plato's Complete Works contains the dialogues, such as the Republic, that Aristotle is responding to; in the Ethics Aristotle sets aside the idea of a good that is the end of the whole universe in favour of a good that is attainable by human action. Peter Adamson's Classical Philosophy covers the earlier thinkers and the setting for both, and Long and Sedley's The Hellenistic Philosophers follows with the Epicureans, Stoics, sceptics and Pyrrhonists after Aristotle. The Presocratic books in the list precede both Plato and Aristotle.

How to Use This Book

The edition is for undergraduates in ancient philosophy and ethics, for graduate students who need an annotated version, and for readers who want technical terms translated consistently. Some exposure to introductory philosophy helps.

A practical plan:

• Read Book I first and Irwin's introduction, then Book II.
• Core: Books I, II, the opening discussion of voluntary action and choice in Book III, Book VI on practical wisdom, Book VII on self-control, Books VIII–IX on friendship and Book X on pleasure and happiness.
• Selective reading: Book IV's catalogue of virtues and Book V on justice can be read in part or assigned in sections; Book III's treatments of courage and temperance work as illustrations.
• Use the headings and glossary to keep track of the technical vocabulary, and cite by the standard page-and-line numbers if the edition prints them, because chapter numbering varies between translations.
• After Book X, read the closing pages again together with the Politics to see how the enquiry is meant to continue.

Edition and Sources

This guide draws on a public-domain English translation of the Nicomachean Ethics with an introduction by J. A. Smith (the Everyman text distributed by Project Gutenberg, #8438), including its ten books and Smith's introduction. Irwin's translation, introduction, notes, glossary and appendix were not read; what is said about them follows the publisher's page and the Google Books record for ISBN 9781624668159.