Nicomachean Ethics

The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's account of what it means to live well. It begins with a claim that sets the terms for the entire tradition of virtue ethics: every action and inquiry aims at some good, and the highest good for a human being is eudaimonia, happiness or flourishing. The question is what this consists in.

Aristotle's answer is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, carried out over a complete life. Book I establishes this definition and its consequences: happiness is not a feeling but an activity, it requires both moral and intellectual virtue, and it cannot be fully achieved without some measure of external goods. Books II through V take up the moral virtues one by one. Virtue is a settled disposition (hexis) to choose the mean between two extremes, the mean relative to the person and the situation. Courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness; temperance between self-indulgence and insensibility. Justice receives its own extended treatment in Book V as the virtue concerned with fair distribution and fair exchange. Books VI and VII examine practical wisdom (phronesis), the intellectual virtue that discerns the right action in particular circumstances, and distinguish it from theoretical wisdom (sophia). Books VIII and IX turn to friendship, which Aristotle ranks among the greatest of external goods and analyzes into three kinds: friendship of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue. Book X returns to happiness and argues that the highest form is the contemplative life, the activity of the best part of the soul directed at the best objects.

The Nicomachean Ethics does not offer rules to follow. It offers an account of the kind of person one must become. That emphasis on character, habituation, and practical judgment has made it the central reference point for every subsequent ethics of virtue.