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The Nicomachean Ethics

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Contents
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▸Introduction by J. A. Smith6
Smith's extended introduction situates the Nicomachean Ethics within Aristotle's larger political science, arguing that the Ethics and Politics together constitute a single treatise on human conduct. He explains the central importance of happiness as the end of all human action, outlines Aristotle's doctrines of virtue as habituation, the Doctrine of the Mean, practical wisdom, incontinence, friendship, pleasure, and the contemplative life, and offers a balanced critical appraisal of the work's enduring value and its limits.
  • The Ethics and Politics are two halves of one treatise on human conduct; the Ethics focuses on character formation, the Politics on the laws and institutions that reinforce it
  • All human activity aims at a single end — Happiness — which Aristotle defines as the active exercise of the soul's powers in accordance with virtue, not a passive state
  • Moral virtues are produced by habituation: repeated right actions fix dispositions, and the Doctrine of the Mean holds that virtue lies between excess and deficiency
  • Practical wisdom (phronesis) is the master intellectual virtue that supplies right rules of conduct and presupposes, and in turn reinforces, good moral character
  • Smith criticises Aristotle for an overly means-end framework, for confining the highest happiness to a contemplative elite, and for leaving the relation of the contemplative to the practical ideal unresolved
▸Book I: The Chief Good and Happiness29
Aristotle opens by arguing that every art, science, and action aims at some good, and that there must be one supreme good — Happiness — which is desired for its own sake and is self-sufficient. He identifies this good with the characteristic activity of man: a working of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life, and argues that Happiness requires both internal virtue and a minimum of external goods.
  • The Chief Good is that which all things aim at; since we cannot regress infinitely in desire, there must be one final end, and this is Happiness
  • Happiness is neither honour, pleasure, nor wealth, all of which are either unstable or sought for the sake of something else
  • Aristotle refutes Plato's Form of the Good as irrelevant to practical human life; any useful good must be attainable by human effort
  • The 'function argument': just as every craft has its work, Man's work is activity of the soul in accordance with reason — Happiness is doing this well over a complete life
  • Happiness belongs to the class of things 'precious and final,' not merely praiseworthy; it requires external goods (friends, resources, good birth) as necessary conditions, though virtue is its principal determinant
▸Book II: Moral Virtue, Habituation, and the Mean51
Book II establishes that moral virtues are acquired by practice and habituation, not given by nature, and defines virtue as a stable state of character disposed to choose the mean relative to us between excess and deficiency. Aristotle argues that pleasure and pain are the proper test of whether habits have formed, and closes with practical guidance on how to aim at the mean.
  • Moral virtues differ from intellectual virtues: they arise from custom and are neither natural endowments nor contrary to nature, but are formed by repeated action
  • The same actions that form a virtue can also destroy it: courage is produced and destroyed by facing the right or wrong degree of danger
  • Virtue is formally defined as 'a state apt to exercise deliberate choice, being in the relative mean, determined by reason as the man of practical wisdom would determine'
  • Some acts and feelings (adultery, theft, malevolence) are intrinsically bad and admit of no mean; the Mean doctrine does not apply to them
  • Practical rule for approaching the mean: identify which extreme your own natural bias pulls you toward, resist it firmly, and guard especially against pleasure, the hardest opponent
▸Book III: Voluntariness, Choice, and Courage and Self-Mastery68
Book III opens by distinguishing voluntary from involuntary action and then analyses Moral Choice as deliberate voluntary action aimed at means to ends; it argues that both virtue and vice are voluntary and in our power. The second half examines Courage — the mean with respect to fear and confidence, exercised for the sake of honour in the face of noble danger — and Perfected Self-Mastery, the mean regarding bodily pleasures of touch and taste.
  • Involuntary action is caused by external compulsion or by ignorance of relevant particulars (not ignorance of the right rule); mixed actions are voluntary at the time they are done
  • Moral Choice is 'a grasping after something in our own power consequent upon Deliberation' — the most revealing indicator of character
  • Because both virtue and vice are formed by our own repeated actions and are voluntary, legal punishment and praise are rational: we are the originators of our own character
  • True Courage is action from a sense of honour before noble death; Aristotle distinguishes it from five impostors: civic courage, military experience, animal spirit, sanguine temperament, and ignorance
  • Perfected Self-Mastery concerns pleasures of Touch; the self-controlled man is not pained by abstinence and desires only what reason directs, in right degree and at right times
▸Book IV: The Particular Virtues — Liberality to Shame95
Book IV catalogues the remaining moral virtues: Liberality and Prodigality (wealth), Magnificence (large-scale expenditure), Great-mindedness (honour on the large scale), the unnamed mean regarding ordinary honour, Meekness (anger), three social virtues (Complaisance, Truthfulness, and Wit), and a closing note on Shame. Each virtue is defined by its mean, its characteristic object-matter, and the two extremes that flank it.
  • Liberality is measured relative to one's means, not by the absolute amount given; the Liberal man gives with pleasure and from a motive of honour
  • Magnificence demands fit proportion between expenditure, the scale of the work, and the rank of the doer; a poor man cannot be Magnificent
  • Great-mindedness is the crown of all the other virtues because it presupposes genuine excellence; it is impossible without real goodness of character
  • Meekness is the mean governing anger; both excess and defect are blameworthy — patient endurance of insults to oneself and one's friends is slavish
  • The Truthful man, the man of Tact, and the man of proper social assent are praised for calibrating expression to reality and to the dignity of the occasion; Shame, by contrast, is a feeling suited only to the young, not a genuine virtue
▸Book V: Justice119
Book V offers a sustained analysis of Justice in its several senses. Aristotle first distinguishes universal Justice (virtue in its fullest extent as exercised toward one's neighbour) from particular Justice (concerned specifically with grasping more than one's fair share). He then divides particular Justice into Distributive Justice and Corrective Justice, treats Reciprocation and Natural versus Conventional Justice, introduces Equity as a correction of rigid law, and examines the conditions for voluntary and involuntary acts.
  • Universal Justice = practising every virtue toward one's neighbour; it is the whole of virtue in social form, expressed in the proverb 'All virtue is in Justice comprehended'
  • Particular Distributive Justice operates according to geometric proportion: just shares stand in the same ratio as the persons' relevant merits
  • Particular Corrective Justice uses arithmetic proportion, treating all parties as equal before the injury and restoring the balance the judge seeks
  • Equity is not a different thing from Justice but a correction of legal Justice where the law, being a general rule, necessarily fails particular cases
  • A just or unjust act is so only when it is voluntary; involuntary hurts are either Misadventures or Mistakes, not unjust acts in the strict sense
▸Book VI: Intellectual Virtues and Practical Wisdom145
Book VI investigates what Right Reason is and enumerates the five intellectual faculties by which the soul attains truth: Art, Knowledge, Practical Wisdom, Science, and Intuition. Aristotle argues that Practical Wisdom — the capacity to deliberate well about what is good for human beings in the contingent sphere of action — is the master virtue of the practical intellect, inseparable from moral goodness and not identical with mere Cleverness.
  • The rational soul has two parts: one for necessary and eternal truths (the scientific part) and one for contingent matters that admit of deliberation (the calculative part)
  • The five truth-attaining faculties are Art, Knowledge, Practical Wisdom, Science, and Intuition; each governs a different domain
  • Practical Wisdom is 'a state of mind true, conjoined with Reason, and apt to Do, having for its object those things which are good or bad for Man'
  • Because the moral choice's correctness depends on the goodness of the person's end, Vice corrupts the practical principle and one cannot be truly Practically Wise without being morally good
  • Natural Virtue must be combined with Practical Wisdom to become Matured Virtue; Socrates was right that the virtues involve reason but wrong to think they are merely intellectual processes
▸Book VII: Self-Control, Imperfect Self-Control, and Pleasure166
Book VII begins by distinguishing three things to be avoided — Vice, Imperfect Self-Control, and Brutishness — and their opposites. The bulk of the book analyses Imperfect Self-Control (akrasia): how a person can act against what they know to be right, the difference between this state and confirmed Vice, and how passion temporarily suspends the exercise of knowledge. An appended section defends the view that Pleasure is not simply bad and is in some sense good.
  • The man of Imperfect Self-Control acts against knowledge not in the strict sense — he does not call it actively into operation under passion — but as a drunk might recite verses whose meaning he does not grasp
  • Akrasia arises when the desire-driven minor premiss overrides the universal maxim of practical reasoning, producing action contrary to Right Reason though not contrary to Opinion proper
  • Imperfect Self-Control in respect of Lust is more disgraceful than in respect of Anger, because anger partly follows reason while lust does not follow it at all
  • The incontinent man is not simply bad — his moral principle is preserved, so he is capable of remorse and therefore curable; the totally vicious man is not
  • Pleasure is not simply evil: it is the unimpeded active working of a natural state, and some pleasures — especially those of contemplation — are good in themselves without qualification
▸Book VIII: Friendship — Foundations and Political Analogies193
Aristotle opens his discussion of Friendship (philia) by arguing that it is either a virtue or closely connected with virtue and is indispensable to human life. He distinguishes three bases of friendship — pleasure, utility, and genuine goodness — and shows that only friendships grounded in mutual admiration of character are complete. The later chapters map the three forms of political constitution and their domestic analogues, showing Friendship to be co-extensive with justice in every community.
  • No one would choose a life without friends even if they possessed every other good; friendship is implanted by nature and is the bond of political communities
  • Complete Friendship is that of good men who are alike in virtue; it is rare, requires time and familiarity, and alone combines all three grounds of liking
  • Friendships of pleasure and utility dissolve when the pleasure or utility ends; only virtue-friendship is permanent because goodness is stable
  • The three good constitutions (Kingship, Aristocracy, Timocracy) each have a corrupt form; Despotism admits the least Friendship because ruler and ruled share nothing in common
  • Friendship between unequal parties requires proportionate, not equal, return — the superior deserves more respect, the inferior more material benefit
▸Book IX: Self-Love, Benefactors, and the Necessity of Friends for Happiness218
Book IX continues the analysis of Friendship by examining quarrels arising from mismatched expectations, the nature of self-friendship in the good man, and why the truly happy person still needs friends. It distinguishes genuine self-love (directing oneself toward what is truly noble) from the base variety, and argues that since existence and its conscious perception are good and pleasant, sharing life with a good friend is essential to complete happiness.
  • Friendships break down when parties seek different goods from the relationship; the remedy is explicit agreement at the outset about what is being exchanged
  • The good man entertains toward himself all the marks of friendship, and a friend is a 'second Self' in whom these same attitudes are mirrored
  • Bad men cannot be friends even to themselves: their soul is torn by faction between the rational and appetitive parts, producing remorse that makes solitude unbearable
  • True self-love means assigning to oneself the greatest share of what is genuinely noble, even at the cost of wealth, honour, or life; this is not selfishness but the highest form of virtue
  • The happy man needs friends because happiness is a Working, not a passive state, and contemplating the fine actions of a good friend is itself a source of the purest pleasure
▸Book X, Chapters I–IV: The Nature and Kinds of Pleasure241
Book X opens with a systematic examination of Pleasure, reviewing and refuting earlier theories before offering a positive account. Pleasure is shown to be neither a Movement nor a Generation but a 'whole' complete at any moment, analogous to a single act of sight. It perfects the Working it accompanies as a supervening finish, like bloom on a person in their prime, and different Workings have specifically different Pleasures.
  • Eudoxus argued that Pleasure is the Chief Good because all rational and irrational creatures aim at it; Aristotle accepts it as a genuine good but denies it is the highest
  • Pleasure is not a Movement (Kinesis) because Movements take time to complete and admit of degrees of speed, whereas pleasure is whole at any instant
  • Pleasure perfects its associated Working not as an ingredient but as a 'supervening finish,' inseparable in time from the Working itself
  • Pleasures proper to a Working intensify and sustain it; alien Pleasures crowd it out, much as pain destroys it
  • The good man is the standard of real Pleasure, just as he is the measure of what is truly good; pleasures that appeal only to the corrupt are not genuinely pleasant
▸Book X, Chapters V–VIII: Contemplation, the Highest Happiness, and the Bridge to Politics252
The treatise reaches its culmination: perfect Happiness is identified with the Working of pure Intellect in contemplation, because this is most continuous, most self-sufficient, most pleasurable, and aimed at no end beyond itself. A secondary happiness belongs to the life of moral virtue. The book closes by arguing that since argument alone cannot make men good, law and public habituation are indispensable — pointing forward to the Politics.
  • Contemplative activity (theoria) is the highest happiness because it exercises the highest faculty (Intellect) on the highest objects, is most continuous, most self-sufficient, and chosen for its own sake alone
  • The contemplative life is, in a sense, more than human; a man lives it 'not in so far as he is man but in so far as there is in him a divine Principle'
  • Moral virtue provides a secondary happiness appropriate to composite human nature, requiring external goods, social relations, and embodied circumstance
  • Since the mass of men obey fear and punishment rather than reason and shame, law is the necessary instrument for forming virtue: words without habituation are powerless
  • The Nicomachean Ethics closes by pointing beyond itself — the study of legislation and constitutions is needed to complete 'Human Philosophy,' providing the transition to the Politics
Overview

The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's most sustained and influential work in moral philosophy, composed in the fourth century BCE and addressed to a politically active audience in Athens. It forms one half of what Aristotle conceived as a single science of human conduct — the other half being the Politics — and its guiding question is deceptively simple: what is the good life for a human being? Aristotle's answer, developed across ten books with extraordinary care and frequent revision, is that the highest good is Happiness (eudaimonia), understood not as a pleasant feeling or a lucky circumstance but as a sustained activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete lifetime. Everything else — wealth, honour, pleasure, power — is either a necessary condition for this activity or merely a means to it, and nothing else is chosen for its own sake alone.

The bulk of the work is an anatomy of the virtues, both moral and intellectual. Moral virtues — courage, temperance, liberality, justice, and the rest — are treated as stable dispositions of character acquired by habituation: we become just by performing just actions repeatedly, until the disposition is fixed. Each virtue is defined as the mean between excess and deficiency, but the mean is not a mechanical midpoint; it is relative to the person and the situation, and identifying it requires the master intellectual virtue of Practical Wisdom (phronesis). Books III through V catalogue the particular virtues in exhaustive detail, examining everything from how courage relates to fear and confidence to how equity corrects the rigidity of written law. Book VI then turns to the intellectual virtues, distinguishing Art, Knowledge, Practical Wisdom, Science, and Intuition, and arguing that Practical Wisdom and moral virtue are inseparable: vice corrupts the very end at which practical reasoning aims, so a clever scoundrel is not wise but merely cunning.

Books VII through IX address three phenomena that bear directly on living well: the puzzle of moral weakness (how a person can act against what they know to be right), the nature and varieties of friendship (philia), and the question of whether the happy person needs friends at all. Aristotle's treatment of akrasia — the condition in which passion temporarily suspends the exercise of knowledge without destroying it — is among the most psychologically nuanced passages in ancient philosophy. His account of friendship, which distinguishes bonds based on pleasure, utility, and genuine mutual admiration of virtue, establishes philia as not merely a personal luxury but as the cement of political communities and an indispensable component of a fully human life.

The work reaches its climax in Book X with an account of Pleasure as the supervening completion of excellent activity, and then an argument that the highest happiness available to human beings is the contemplative life — the uninterrupted exercise of pure intellect on the noblest objects. This life exceeds ordinary human capacity and is, Aristotle acknowledges, more divine than human; nevertheless, human beings should aspire to it as far as they can. A secondary happiness belongs to the life of moral and civic virtue, which is fully human but depends on external goods, social relations, and embodied circumstance. The treatise closes not with a triumphant conclusion but with a practical turn: since argument alone cannot make men good, and most people are governed by fear and habit rather than reason, law and public education are essential, and the study of legislation is required to complete the whole of Human Philosophy.

The Nicomachean Ethics endures because it refuses to separate the question of how to live from the question of what kind of person one is becoming. Its deepest single insight is that character is destiny: virtue is not an episode of good behaviour but a stable disposition formed by the accumulated weight of choices freely made, which is why it is hard to acquire and harder to lose. By insisting that happiness is active, social, and expressed in a life rather than a moment, Aristotle offers a vision of the good that is richer than hedonism and more earthly than Platonic idealism. Two and a half millennia after it was composed, it remains the foundational text of virtue ethics and the unavoidable starting point for any serious inquiry into moral character, human flourishing, and the kind of life that is genuinely worth living.
Key Concepts
Happiness (Eudaimonia) p.37
The supreme end of all human action, defined by Aristotle not as a feeling but as a sustained activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life. It is self-sufficient, chosen always for its own sake, and is the only thing we never pursue with a view to something further.
The Function Argument (ergon argument) p.38
Aristotle's argument that just as every craftsman has a characteristic work, Man as such has a function — activity of the soul in accordance with reason — and that the Good of Man is performing this function well, i.e. in accordance with the best and most complete excellence, sustained over a whole life.
The Doctrine of the Mean p.59
Aristotle's principle that moral virtue is a stable state disposed to choose the middle point between excess and deficiency relative to us (not an arithmetical midpoint), as a person of practical wisdom would determine. Goodness is a kind of hitting the mark that is difficult because one can miss in many ways.
Moral Choice (Prohairesis) p.77
Deliberate voluntary action: the grasping by the will of something in our own power after a process of deliberation about means to an end. Distinguished from wish, lust, anger, and opinion, it is the truest index of a person's moral character.
Practical Wisdom (Phronesis) p.149
The intellectual excellence of the calculative part of the soul; a true, reasoned state apt to act regarding human goods and bads, inseparable from moral virtue, concerned with particular contingent facts. It is the master virtue of the practical intellect, opposed to mere Cleverness, which pursues ends effectively but without reference to what is truly good.
Distributive and Corrective Justice p.124
Two species of particular Justice: Distributive Justice allocates honours and wealth in geometric proportion according to merit; Corrective Justice restores arithmetical equality in voluntary and involuntary transactions. Together they exhaust the domain of particular justice as distinct from universal justice.
Equity (Epieikeia) p.141
A correction of legal Justice that rules as the lawgiver would have ruled had the particular case been foreseen; it is not different in kind from Justice but better than one form of it, supplying the gap left by the unavoidable universality of written law.
Imperfect Self-Control (Akrasia) p.167
The condition of acting against one's best judgment under the influence of passion; distinguished from confirmed Vice by the preservation of the right moral principle and from Brutishness by its specific object-matter. The akratic person is capable of remorse and therefore potentially curable, unlike the thoroughly vicious person.
Friendship (Philia) p.193
A relationship either itself a virtue or closely bound to virtue that is essential to human life; Aristotle distinguishes three bases (pleasure, utility, complete virtue-friendship) and shows philia to be the bond of social communities, more fundamental even than Justice for sustaining political life.
Contemplation (Theoria) as perfect Happiness p.254
The thesis that the highest human happiness consists in the uninterrupted exercise of pure Intellect upon the noblest objects. Contemplation is self-sufficient, continuous, aimed at no end beyond itself, and most closely kin to the activity of the gods; it is what human beings should aspire to as far as they can.
Themes
Happiness as active excellence, not passive feelingVirtue as habituation and the formation of characterThe Doctrine of the Mean and the difficulty of goodnessPractical wisdom as the master of moral lifeJustice in its distributive, corrective, and social dimensionsFriendship as essential to human flourishingMoral weakness and the tension between knowledge and desireThe contemplative life as the highest human aspirationThe inseparability of ethics and politicsExternal goods as necessary conditions, not constituents, of happiness
Notable Passages
Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good: for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the Chief Good is, 'that which all things aim at.'
p.29 The opening sentence of the Ethics, establishing the teleological premise — that every human activity is oriented toward a good — on which the entire argument for Happiness as the supreme end depends.
And so it is hard to be good: for surely hard it is in each instance to find the mean, just as to find the mean point or centre of a circle is not what any man can do, but only he who knows how: just so to be angry, to give money, and be expensive, is what any man can do, and easy: but to do these to the right person, in due proportion, at the right time, with a right object, and in the right manner, this is not as before what any man can do, nor is it easy; and for this cause goodness is rare, and praiseworthy, and noble.
p.66 Aristotle's most vivid statement of why virtue is an achievement rather than a default: hitting the mean in all its contextual dimensions — person, degree, time, motive, manner — is as skilled as geometric construction and equally rare.
Now this Justice is in fact perfect Virtue, yet not simply so but as exercised towards one's neighbour: and for this reason Justice is thought oftentimes to be the best of the Virtues … and in a proverbial saying we express the same; 'All virtue is in Justice comprehended.'
p.121 The famous formulation in which universal Justice is identified with complete virtue in its social dimension, explaining why justice uniquely benefits another person rather than merely the agent.
It remains then that it must be 'a state of mind true, conjoined with Reason, and apt to Do, having for its object those things which are good or bad for Man:' because of Making something beyond itself is always the object, but cannot be of Doing because the very well-doing is in itself an End.
p.150 The definitive formula for Practical Wisdom, distinguishing it sharply from Art (which makes something external) by the claim that good action is its own end — a cornerstone of Aristotle's practical philosophy.
How to Read This
Read Books I and II first to grasp the architecture: the function argument, the definition of happiness, and the doctrine of the mean are the load-bearing premises of everything that follows. Books III through V can be read selectively — the chapters on courage, justice, and equity repay close attention; the finer catalogue of social virtues in Book IV can be skimmed on a first pass. Book VI on intellectual virtues and Book VII on akrasia are philosophically dense but essential; pausing to re-read a paragraph is better than pressing on. Books VIII and IX on friendship are the most humanly immediate and can be read almost like essays. Save Books X for last: the culminating account of pleasure and contemplation lands with far greater force once the whole preceding argument is in place.