ussion of ethics as one of the practical sciences, which is to say that ethics is something that has application to real life beyond the merely theoretical. Ethics therefore involves action as well as a discussion about contingent ethical action. Further, any actions undertaken have a purpose beyond their ethical nature. For Aristotle, ethical action (or not) is implicated in the quality, or goodness, of life as it is experienced in practical ways, i.e., as it is experienced by human beings as social and political animals. But for Aristotle, it is not enough to produce the "good" of ethics that the individual have the purpose of acting ethically. Ethics in practice has a larger purpose, which is social and political.
For even if the end [good] is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry aims, since it is political science, in one sense of that term (Aristotle 309; emphasis added).
To put it another way, politics is implied throughout the structure and development of ethics. Ethics and the development of ethical man must precede the development of the state: "a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life" (310). The Nicomachean Ethics addresses the gap in the young man's moral education and so to prepare the way for his eventual admittance into the body politic as a productive, pract
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