Nicomachean Ethics

The founding text of virtue ethics, and the first attempt to answer the question of how to live without appealing to a law, a commandment or a calculation. Aristotle's answer is that being good is a skill acquired by doing, that it consists in hitting a mean between two ways of getting it wrong, and that nobody can be counted happy on the strength of a single day.

Date: c. 340 BC
Author: Aristotle
Region: Athens; Macedon
Language: Ancient Greek

The translation record

1547 English, John Wilkinson From an Italian version, not the Greek Consensus
1925 English, W. D. Ross Public domain in most jurisdictions; the most reprinted Attested
2019 English, Terence Irwin 3rd edition with notes and glossary; in copyright Attested

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Reply — Answers a named earlier work
Form: Lectures
Method: Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
Transmission: Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
Standing: Revived — Out of circulation and read again
Years back to what it answers: 35 years

Displaced for most of the modern period by duty-based and consequence-based ethics, and restored to the centre of the subject after 1958.

What the book says

An enquiry into what a human life is for, conducted as if the answer could be worked out rather than declared. Everything we do aims at some good, Aristotle begins, and if there is an end we want for its own sake, that is the highest good. Everyone agrees on its name - eudaimonia, doing well, living well - and nobody agrees what it consists of, so he examines the candidates: pleasure, honour, wealth, and Plato's Form of the Good, which he sets aside on the ground that a good existing separately would be no use to anyone trying to act. His own answer is that a thing's good lies in performing its characteristic activity well, and that the characteristic human activity is a life of reasoned action. Virtue then turns out to be a settled disposition, learned by practice like a craft, lying between two failures - courage between recklessness and cowardice, generosity between waste and meanness. The middle books examine particular virtues, then voluntary action and responsibility, then justice in its several senses, then practical wisdom, which is the capacity to see what a situation requires. Two books on friendship follow, longer than anything else in the work. It closes by arguing that the highest happiness is contemplative, and turns to the training of citizens, where the Politics takes over.

What it argues

That the good for a thing is bound up with what that thing characteristically does, and that for a human being this is activity of the reasoning part performed well over a complete life. Virtues of character are dispositions formed by repetition, not knowledge that can be transmitted - you become just by doing just acts, the way you become a builder by building. Each lies between an excess and a deficiency, though the mean is relative to the person and the occasion rather than an average. Knowing the general rule is not enough: what does the work is practical wisdom, the trained perception of what this situation calls for, which cannot be reduced to a procedure.

What it answered

The Republic, and the Platonic account of the good behind it. Aristotle had spent twenty years in the Academy, and Book One takes up the Form of the Good directly and sets it aside: even granting that such a thing exists, it is not the kind of good a doctor or a general could use, and ethics is an enquiry for people who have to act. The deeper disagreement is about method. Plato's ethics ascends from the particular to a single unified object of knowledge; Aristotle's stays at the level of the particular and denies that this subject admits of the precision found in mathematics. He says so explicitly, and it is the founding statement of a whole style of moral philosophy.

How it argues

By starting from what people actually say and testing it. Aristotle's method is to collect the reputable opinions on a question, show where they conflict, and keep as much of each as can survive - an approach that treats ordinary moral judgement as evidence rather than as raw material to be corrected. He states at the outset that this subject admits only the precision its material allows, and that demanding proofs here is as unreasonable as accepting mere likelihood from a mathematician. The prose is compressed lecture notes rather than composed writing, which is why it is harder going than Plato and why almost every sentence rewards slowing down.

The moment

Aristotle was not an Athenian, could not own property there, and taught in a rented gymnasium outside the walls. He had been Plato's student for two decades, left when Speusippus was chosen to head the Academy, spent years doing biology in the eastern Aegean, tutored Alexander, and returned to found the Lyceum. The Ethics belongs to that mature teaching, and it reads like what it is: lecture material, revised, addressed to adults who already have some experience of acting well and badly.

How it travelled

Lost, recovered, and translated twice over. Aristotle's school treatises were not published in the modern sense and their survival ran through a famously tangled history of private libraries before an edition was assembled in the first century BC. The Ethics reached the Islamic world in Arabic, where al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd commented on it, and returned to Latin Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries - Robert Grosseteste's complete Latin version of the 1240s put it into the universities, where Aquinas built on it immediately. Nearly every route by which this book reached its later readers ran through a language Aristotle did not write in.

The strongest objection

That the doctrine of the mean tells you nothing you did not already know. To be told that courage lies between recklessness and cowardice is not to be told where the line falls in this case, and Aristotle openly hands that judgement to practical wisdom - which is possessed, on his own account, by the person of good character. The charge is circularity: virtue is what the virtuous person has, and what they have is the ability to see what virtue requires. Aristotle would answer that ethics cannot be a decision procedure and that expecting one is the mistake. Whether that is an answer or a graceful refusal to give one is still argued.

Why read it

Because it is the most practical book in ancient philosophy and it takes the reader seriously. It assumes you have already been generous and mean, brave and cowardly, and are trying to do better - not that you need a system installed. The two books on friendship are the best thing written on the subject in any period, and the account of practical wisdom describes something everyone recognises and almost nobody else in philosophy has tried to name.

Where to read it

First printed: 1495
First in English: 1547
Digitised: Yes

Bywater's 1894 Oxford Classical Text remains standard. The book divisions and the Bekker page numbers are the universal reference.

Ross's 1925 translation is the most widely reprinted; Irwin's and Rowe-Broadie's are in copyright and are what teaching now uses.

Where it stands

Revived, and the revival is datable. Anscombe's 1958 attack on modern moral philosophy argued that duty and obligation were the debris of a legal framework nobody still believed in, and that ethics should return to character. Within a generation virtue ethics was the third major position in the field alongside Kantian and utilitarian theory, and the Nicomachean Ethics was its text.

On quoting this book

Greek public domain; the usable English translations are in copyright. No passage is quoted.

Contested

The title's reference to Nicomachus is unexplained in the text; ancient reports variously make him Aristotle's son and his father, and neither is secure. The relation to the Eudemian Ethics is unresolved, including which came first and which treatise the three shared books belong to. The unity of the work is questioned: there are two discussions of pleasure that do not obviously agree, and the final turn to contemplation as the highest happiness sits awkwardly with the practical account developed for nine books. Whether that closing move completes the argument or contradicts it is one of the standing disputes in Aristotelian scholarship.