The purpose of this research is to examine the ideas of the good in human experience in the Confucian and Aristotelian traditions. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the Greek and Chinese versions of the concept emerged, and then to compare and contrast the content of the views of Confucius and Aristotle.
Aristotle's conception of what makes a good man or woman surfaced in the fourth century B.C., just following the Periclean Age of Greece, and partly in response to the views of his teacher Plato. The conception is elaborated in his theory 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 decisions. Just as ethics involves something beyond theory, any actions undertaken have a practical purpose beyond their mere ethical nature. Actions on this view point in the direction of what eventually come to be called goods. "It makes no difference," Aristotle says, "whether the ends of the actions are the activities themselves or something apart from them." It is in that sense that Aristotle's conception of the good can differentiate between the good person and the good citizen, even as there may be a connection between the two. Along the same lines, throughout much of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle seems concerned to eliminate what is apparent about ethics with a view toward identifying what is essential or self-sufficient about ethics that points in the direction of happiness as the highest good as Aristotle describes it. Hardie summarizes this as follows:
In the first [chapter section] he argues that the 'good achievable by action' must be final (teleion), self-sufficient (autarkes) in the sense of being something which 'when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing', and 'most desirable of all things, without ...