The first is to remember that every sort of inquiry has its...

The first is to remember that every sort of inquiry has its own standards and possibilities of precision. In ethics we are guided by general considerations to general conclusions, which nonetheless admit of exceptions. Courage and wealth are good, for example, but wealth sometimes causes harm and men have died as a result of being brave. What is required is a kind of judgment altogether different from that of mathematics.

Moreover, young men will be no good at “politics”: they lack experience and hence they lack judgment. I mention these dicta of Aristotle only because they are so often quoted; certainly there is something very middle-aged about the spirit which Aristotle breathes. But we ought to remember that what we have now is the text of lectures, and we ought not to treat what are clearly lecturer’s asides as if they are developed arguments.

Aristotle’s next move is to give a name to his possible supreme good: the name εὐδαιμονία is badly but inevitably translated by happiness, badly because it includes both the notion of behaving well and the notion of faring well. Aristotle’s use of this word reflects the strong Greek sense that virtue and happiness, in the sense of prosperity, cannot be entirely divorced.

The Kantian injunction which a million puritan parents have made their own, “Do not seek to be happy, seek to be deserving of happiness,” makes no sense if εὐδαίμων and εὐδαιμονίa are substituted for happy and happiness. Once again the change of language is also a change of concepts. In what does εὐδαιμονία consist?

Some say in pleasure, some say in wealth, some say in honor and reputation; and some have said that there is a supreme good over and above all particular goods which is the cause of their being good. Aristotle dismisses pleasure rather brusquely at this point-“The many in choosing a life fit for cattle exhibit themselves as totally slavish”-but later on he is to deal with it at great length.

Wealth cannot be the good, for it is only a means to an end; and men prize honor and reputation not as such, but they prize being honored because they are virtuous. So honor is envisaged as a desirable by-product of virtue. Does happiness, then, consist in virtue? No, because to call a man virtuous is to talk not of the state he is in, but of his disposition. A man is virtuous if he would behave in such and such a way if such and such a situation were to occur.