Nicomachean Ethics
The Nicomachean Ethics begins with one of the most ambitious first sentences in all of philosophy: everything humans do, every art, every investigation, every deliberate action and choice, aims at some good. Aristotle wrote those words in ten books, structured not as a polished treatise but as something closer to lecture notes, meant for the lecturer or for students consulting a reference. The title almost certainly refers to a person named Nicomachus. Whether that was Aristotle's son, his father, or both, nobody is certain. The work may have been dedicated to one of them, or edited by one of them, or neither.
For about a century and a half after Aristotle's death, the original manuscripts sat hidden in a cellar in the town of Scepsis, where the heirs of a man named Neleus had concealed them to prevent seizure by the Kingdom of Pergamon. The conditions underground were not ideal for parchment. When the collection finally surfaced, a collector named Apellicon bought it, returned it to Athens, had the degraded texts recopied, and filled illegible passages with his best guesswork. When the Roman general Sulla seized Athens, he took the library to Rome, where a scholar named Andronicus of Rhodes organized it into the first complete edition of Aristotle's works. Those imperfect, guesswork-filled copies are the ancestors of every edition read today.
What the text actually asks is this: how should a person live? What does it mean to flourish rather than simply to survive? Is virtue something you are born with, or something you build through daily practice? And how do courage, generosity, friendship, and justice connect to a happiness that lasts a whole lifetime? By the seventeenth century, Protestant universities still treated this work as the primary authority on ethics, with over fifty Protestant commentaries published before 1682.
Theophrastus, the man Aristotle named as successor at the Lycaeum and head of the Peripatetic school, inherited Aristotle's library after Aristotle died. When Theophrastus himself died, the collection passed to Neleus of Scepsis. What happened next was a near-catastrophe for philosophy. The heirs of Neleus hid the manuscripts underground to prevent the Kingdom of Pergamon from conscripting them for its royal library, and there they remained for roughly a century and a half.
Aspasius, writing a commentary in the early centuries of the common era, noted that even by his time the text already showed variants, with some uncertainty about the wording at a comparatively early stage. His commentary also suggests the arrangement he read closely matched what exists today. This matters because Books V, VI, and VII of the Nicomachean Ethics are identical to Books IV, V, and VI of the Eudemian Ethics, a textual puzzle scholars have debated without reaching consensus. One theory is that three books from the Nicomachean Ethics were lost and replaced by parallel books from the Eudemian Ethics. Another is that an editor, not Aristotle himself, assembled both works into their current form.
A reference within the text to a battle in the Third Sacred War provides a earliest possible date for at least part of the composition. The traditional view, associated with the scholar W. D. Ross, holds that the Nicomachean Ethics belongs to the final period of Aristotle's life in Athens. The oldest surviving manuscript, known as the Codex Laurentianus LXXXI.11 or simply Kb, dates to the tenth century. The earliest known mention of the text in the Islamic world appears in a letter by al-Kindi, though scholars believe al-Kindi was probably working from a secondary Greek source rather than from the text directly.
Aristotle proposed that the highest good for human beings is eudaimonia, a Greek word commonly translated as flourishing or happiness. His argument is teleological: every thing has a telos or end, and for that thing the final cause and the good become synonymous. Eudaimonia is what humans aim at for its own sake, never as a means to something else. Honor, pleasure, and intelligence are also pursued for their own sake, but they also lead toward eudaimonia, making it the most complete aim of all.
To define eudaimonia more precisely, Aristotle asked what the distinctive work or function of a human being is. All living things share nutrition and growth; all animals share perception. What is uniquely human is reason, including both the capacity to follow an argument and to think things through. Eudaimonia must therefore be an active exercise of the soul in accordance with virtue, not merely a potential or a passive condition. He put it plainly: one swallow does not make a spring. A single good act does not constitute a happy life; the measure is a full lifetime.
External goods matter in this account. A person without friends, good family, or basic resources may find happiness genuinely difficult to sustain. Aristotle distinguished eudaimonia from virtue: virtue earns praise, while eudaimonia is something beyond praise, blessed, chosen not because it leads to anything else but because it is the source and cause of good things. On the question of whether eudaimonia comes from learning, habit, or chance, Aristotle said it results from some kind of training, and that leaving what is greatest and most beautiful entirely to chance would be too discordant.
Aristotle distinguished two families of virtue in Books II and III: intellectual virtues, which require teaching, experience, and time; and virtues of character, which arise from cultivating good habits. Humans have a natural capacity for both, but training determines whether that capacity becomes real. A person first performs righteous actions, possibly under the guidance of teachers; those repeated actions become habits; those habits harden into stable character. The Greek word for character, ethos, is closely related to the word for habit, but Aristotle was careful not to equate the two. Character involves conscious choice. Habit alone does not.
For virtues of character, each virtue sits at a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency. This doctrine of the mean was not original to Aristotle; one of the Delphic mottoes associated with Socrates was nothing in excess, and similar ideas appear in Pythagorean thought. Courage lies between cowardice and rashness. Temperance concerns pleasure, particularly what Aristotle called the animal-like pleasures of touch and taste. The vice of excess in temperance is common; the vice of deficiency is so rare he called people who exhibit it almost imaginary characters and admitted he could find no Greek word for the condition.
For an action to develop virtue rather than merely imitate it, three conditions must hold. The person must act knowingly. They must choose the action for its own sake. And they must act from a stable disposition rather than on a whim. Aristotle compared this to the productive arts: a well-made shoe testifies to craftsmanship, but a courageous act performed by accident or under compulsion testifies to nothing about the character of the person who performed it. He later qualified his rule of thumb about steering toward the less pleasant extreme, noting in Book X that it applies mainly to bodily pleasures rather than as a universal principle.
Justice, Aristotle argued, is the one virtue that looks like someone else's good. Book V, which is identical to Book IV of the Eudemian Ethics, gives justice a different shape from other virtues. Ronna Burger points out that justice does not fit neatly as a mean between two opposing passions; the proposed counterpart, greed, refers more to injustice itself than to a passion that justice moderates.
Aristotle distinguished two meanings of justice: being law-abiding and being equitable or fair. These coincide only when the laws are themselves good. He divided particular justice into distributive justice, which allocates shared goods among community members, and restorative justice, which remedies harm caused in private transactions. Distributive justice requires that if two persons stand in some ratio by an accepted standard, their shares must preserve that ratio. Democrats favor equal shares; partisans of oligarchy or aristocracy favor shares proportionate to wealth, birth, or honor.
On retaliation as justice, which he associated with the Pythagoreans, Aristotle objected that an eye for an eye ignores the reasons behind a crime and fails to respect the prior standing of the parties. His example was pointed: if an officer strikes a man, it is wrong for the man to strike him back; if a man strikes an officer, it is not enough for the officer to strike him back, because he ought to be punished as well.
The treatment of voluntary action is central to how Aristotle assigns blame. Ignorance of what is generally good or bad is itself blameworthy, a sign of bad character. Ignorance of the particular facts of a situation is excusable once those facts are learned. He illustrated the distinction with a syllogism about a poisoned glass of wine: knowing the general rule but not the specific fact produces a forgivable mistake, while knowing the specific fact but not the general rule produces depravity.
Albertus Magnus laid the groundwork for the most consequential synthesis between Aristotelian ethics and Christian theology in the medieval period. Thomas Aquinas produced what became the definitive version of that synthesis, and in his writings Aristotle earned the title the Philosopher, used without qualification to refer to him alone. Other Aristotelians working in the Averroist tradition, including Marsilius of Padua, extended Aristotle's influence in political directions.
At Protestant universities the Nicomachean Ethics remained the primary authority on ethics well into the seventeenth century. The resistance came from Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, who argued that the medieval and Renaissance Aristotelian tradition in practical thinking was actively blocking philosophy. Bacon made this case in his Novum Organum; Hobbes made it in De Cive.
Philosophers associated with the virtue ethics revival brought renewed attention to Aristotle's framework. Alasdair MacIntyre, G. E. M. Anscombe, Mortimer Adler, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martha Nussbaum are among those the source identifies in this field. Ronna Burger's reading of the Ethics draws attention to something easy to miss: the book does not end at its apparent peak, the identification of perfect happiness with a life devoted to contemplation. Instead it turns outward, arguing that knowing about virtue is not sufficient and one should try to put that knowledge to use. Burger argues that the thoughtful reader comes to understand that the end we are seeking is what we have been doing while engaging with the text. That self-referential quality, built into the structure of a book about how to live, is one reason Andronicus of Rhodes's assembled edition continues to generate commentary in the twenty-first century.
Common questions
What does 'Nicomachean' mean in the title?
The title most likely refers to Nicomachus, either Aristotle's son or his father, both of whom bore that name. One theory is that the work was dedicated to his son; another is that the son edited it, though he is believed to have died young. A third possibility is that it was dedicated to Aristotle's father. Scholars agree it was probably not prepared by Aristotle himself for publication, but rather resembles lecture notes.
What is eudaimonia?
Eudaimonia is a Greek word Aristotle used for the highest good for human beings. It is often translated as flourishing or happiness, but it refers to an active way of living in accordance with reason and virtue across a full lifetime, not a passive emotional state. Aristotle argued it must be measured over a whole life, not judged by any single moment.
What is Aristotle's doctrine of the mean?
Aristotle proposed that each virtue sits at a mean between two corresponding vices, one of excess and one of deficiency. Courage, for example, lies between cowardice and rashness. He acknowledged this idea predated him; the Delphic motto 'nothing in excess' was much older than Socrates. He also noted that people tend to drift toward the more pleasurable vice, so it helps to steer deliberately toward the less pleasant extreme when seeking the mean.
How did the manuscripts of the Nicomachean Ethics survive?
After Aristotle's death, his library passed to Theophrastus and then to Neleus of Scepsis, whose heirs hid the collection in a cellar to prevent seizure by the Kingdom of Pergamon. The texts stayed there for roughly a century and a half in poor preservation conditions. A collector named Apellicon purchased the library, returned it to Athens, and had the degraded texts recopied with guesswork filling the gaps. When Sulla seized Athens, he took the library to Rome, where Andronicus of Rhodes organized it into the first complete edition of Aristotle's works.
Why did the Nicomachean Ethics matter so much in the Middle Ages?
Albertus Magnus introduced the synthesis of Aristotelian ethics with Christian theology, and Thomas Aquinas produced the most important version of that synthesis. Aristotle became known simply as 'the Philosopher' in Aquinas's writings. Protestant universities still treated the Nicomachean Ethics as the main authority on ethics well into the seventeenth century, with over fifty Protestant commentaries published before 1682.
How does Aristotle define justice?
Aristotle distinguishes two main senses of justice: being law-abiding and being equitable or fair. He divides particular justice into distributive justice, which allocates shared goods in a ratio that respects the relative standing of the parties, and restorative justice, which remedies harm in transactions. He rejects the Pythagorean idea that simple retaliation constitutes justice, arguing it ignores the reasons behind an act and fails to respect the prior status of the parties.