Nicomachean Ethics: What Is Aristotle's Treatise on Virtue

Per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aristotle wrote two ethical treatises: the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics. The names come from their respective editors — the Eudemian Ethics from Eudemus, a friend of the philosopher, the Nicomachean Ethics from his son Nicomachus.

Aristotle writes within the intellectual frame of Ancient Greece, picking up questions the pre-Socratic philosophers had already raised about the nature of things. But the Nicomachean Ethics shifts the focus from nature to human action, toward the question of what makes a life good.

At the heart of the work is the theory of virtue as a middle state, widely known as the golden mean. Aristotle compares virtues to a craft: just as a skilled craftsman avoids too much and too little in the work itself, a person with an ethical virtue avoids the two opposite extremes in behavior. That middle point isn’t a fixed value, the same for anyone in any situation: it has to be set according to the particular circumstances of the person acting, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds.

Every moral virtue, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, is itself an “extreme,” in the sense that it represents excellence. The same source notes that what sets courage apart is that a courageous act is always done for the sake of the noble.

The same principle applies to temperance, the virtue concerned with bodily pleasures.

Practical example: temperance toward bodily pleasures, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, comes from finding a mean between two opposite extremes: someone who gives in to every pleasure without restraint sits at one end, someone who denies every bodily pleasure sits at the other. Virtue lies in the middle measure between the two, calibrated to the situation of the person acting.

The ultimate point of this whole structure is eudaimonia. Per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the supreme good has three traits: it is desirable in itself, not for the sake of anything else, and every other good is desirable for its sake. Eudaimonia, for Aristotle, is the correct use of reason sustained across an entire life. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that the proper task of a human being is to put the capacity for reason into practice, and that a virtuous life is pleasant in itself. To exercise that capacity, Aristotle distinguishes two families of virtue: intellectual virtues belong to the reasoning part of the soul, while character virtues belong to the part that follows reason without generating it on its own, again per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Books VIII and IX of the work are devoted entirely to friendship (philia). Aristotle observes that people don’t treat justice as seriously as friendship, and states that friends don’t need to be just toward each other as well: a sign, for him, of how much more fundamental friendship is than justice itself. It’s a question that, within Greek philosophy, recalls the method of Socrates, who spent his life testing the moral definitions his interlocutors took for granted — a different approach from what the sophists practiced in the same Athens.

The MIT Internet Classics Archive’s full digital edition of the text divides it into ten books, I through X.