The Nicomachean Ethics

Ten lectures on what a good life consists in, named for a Nicomachus nobody has been able to identify with certainty.

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια
First published: 335 BCE(aged 49)
Original language: Ancient Greek

Overview

The question is what a life goes well as, and the answer these ten books give is eudaimonia, doing well at being human — an activity rather than a feeling, and one that cannot be assessed until a life is over. They were not written for publication, and they are named for a Nicomachus: Aristotle's son, who died too young to have edited them alone, or his father, who had the same name, or neither. Virtue is a settled state learned by practice, the way a craft is learned, sitting between two opposite ways of getting it wrong — courage between cowardice and recklessness — and located not by any rule but by the judgement of someone who already has it, which is either the honest answer or a circle; readers have divided on that for centuries. Two of the ten books go to friendship, more than to any other single subject. Around 1246 Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, put the whole of it into Latin, and with it the Greek commentaries that accompany the text in twenty-one known manuscripts. His version is what the Middle Ages read and what Aquinas built on. Elizabeth Anscombe's paper in Philosophy in January 1958 argued that moral philosophy should be set aside until someone had produced an adequate account of human psychology, that the modern vocabulary of duty and obligation is the residue of a law whose lawgiver nobody now believes in, and that the ancients had been asking the better question — and what she was pointing back at was this. That paper and Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue in 1981 put the treatise back at the centre of the subject, and Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse built out from there.

Key concepts

Why can someone know what is right and still act against it?

Akrasia is the failure to act on a judgement one possesses when appetite pulls the other way. Aristotle distinguishes knowing a proposition from having that knowledge active in the moment: the akratic person can recite the right answer, yet desire makes the relevant practical judgement unavailable for action. The failure is therefore neither simple ignorance nor deliberate wickedness.

How does deliberate choice differ from wanting, guessing, or acting voluntarily?

Choice is a deliberate commitment to an action within the agent’s power, formed after deliberation about means. A person may wish for an end, hold an opinion about what is true, or act voluntarily without having chosen in this precise sense. Choice reveals character because it settles what the agent will do, not merely what the agent hopes or believes.

What makes justice different from Aristotle’s other virtues?

Justice is both complete virtue in relation to other people and a particular virtue concerned with fair shares and corrections. In its broad sense, it gathers the virtues as they affect a community; in its narrower sense, it governs distributive equality and the repair of wrongful gains or losses. Aristotle therefore treats justice as both comprehensive and specific.

How does practical wisdom differ from knowing general moral principles?

Practical wisdom is the capacity to deliberate well about action in particular circumstances, not merely to possess universal rules. It must identify what matters here, at this time, for this purpose, and connect that judgement to conduct. Aristotle separates it from technical skill: making an excellent product can follow a plan, while living well requires judgement about changing situations.

When does an action count as voluntary enough for praise or blame?

An action is voluntary when its origin lies in the agent, who knows the relevant circumstances; coercion and ignorance can make it involuntary. Aristotle also examines actions performed under threat: although such acts are regrettable, the agent chooses them at the moment to avoid a greater danger. Responsibility therefore depends on control and knowledge, not on whether the outcome was welcome.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Flourishing through practiced virtue

After ten books, what can make a human life go well rather than merely feel pleasant, and who can judge that success without reducing it to a rule? Ethics must guide action.

Aristotle answers that flourishing is an activity: a person does well at being human by exercising reason through stable virtues, not by possessing a passing mood. Virtue grows through repeated action, as a craft does, while practical wisdom judges what the situation requires; courage, for example, avoids both cowardice and recklessness. Practice changes the agent. The account resists both rule-following and unformed desire, yet its appeal to the judgement of the already virtuous may be circular. Two books on friendship extend the good life beyond private achievement, before the final page turns to politics.

virtue ethics
ethics
practical wisdom
character
friendship
virtue
agency
justice
moral psychology
self-control
human nature
moderation
rationality
moral responsibility
pleasure
moral character
happiness
reciprocity
character development
fairness
human flourishing
habit
emotional regulation
desire
political philosophy
vice
practical reasoning
deliberation
temperance
incontinence

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 374
distinct concepts: 481
by passages held, corpus-wide: #202

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “friendship” and “virtue”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
friendship	virtue	20
happiness	virtue	20
pleasure	virtue	17
friendship	pleasure	10
happiness	pleasure	10
moral psychology	virtue	10
friendship	justice	8
desire	pleasure	6
friendship	happiness	6
justice	virtue	5
moral psychology	pleasure	4
moral psychology	virtue ethics	4
pleasure	virtue ethics	4
desire	moral psychology	3
friendship	moral psychology	3
friendship	virtue ethics	3
justice	moral psychology	3
desire	virtue	2
desire	virtue ethics	2
justice	virtue ethics	2
happiness	virtue ethics	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

-350 The Organon, or Logical Treatises, of Aristotle (Ὄργανον)
The medieval schools came at these six through Porphyry's Isagoge. The rest of the corpus simply uses them: the Physics, the Metaphysics and the biological works take the syllogism and the ten kinds as given.
EN
-345 Eudemian Ethics
One of three ethical treatises transmitted under Aristotle's name, alongside the Nicomachean Ethics and the Magna Moralia — the last of the three being the one whose authenticity is disputed.
EN
-340 Metaphysics
Form, matter and cause are argued out in the Physics, not here, and the works on animals and the soul are built on the framework it lays down; what this book asks is what it takes for anything to be at all. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna, Averroes and Aquinas each built a commentary on it.
EN
-335 The "Art" of Rhetoric
The published title keeps the quotation marks around Art from Freese's 1926 Loeb edition. Its subject is public life — the assembly, the court, the funeral oration — but its form is the school's, like everything else of his that survives.
EN
-335 The Nicomachean Ethics (Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια) you are here EN
-330 Constitution of Athens (Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία)
Historians use it as a source rather than as a text to interpret, which is true of nothing else under Aristotle's name. It belongs beside the Politics, as the surviving piece of the survey that fed it.
EN
-330 Politics: A Treatise on Government (Πολιτικά)
Not a finished book but lectures, with shorter pieces and marginal notes worked in — and the place where the Nicomachean Ethics was heading when it closed by saying that the study of character runs on into the study of constitutions.
EN
-330 The Art of Poetry (Περὶ Ποιητικῆς)
The Rhetoric is its nearest neighbour in the corpus: nowhere else does Aristotle take an art apart from the maker's side, and nowhere else does he discuss poetry at any length.
EN
-320 Economics
Aristotle treats the same ground himself in the household economics of Politics I. These three books keep their place in his corpus on the strength of the name alone; scholarship removed them without settling on anyone else.
EN

— or open another of their works