Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

The purpose of this research is to examine Aristotle's account of moral habituation and responsibility as articulated in the Nicomachean Ethics. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which Aristotle's description of private virtue and social responsibility emerges, and then to discuss Aristotle's reasons for claiming that the habits of moral excellence (virtue) are formed in childhood on one hand and how that view can be reconciled with the view that virtue involves choice on the other.

To appreciate Aristotle's explanation of virtue and responsibility as aspects of ethics, it is first necessary to realize the world view from which that explanation arises. Aristotle views ethics as a so-called practical science, which is to say that ethics is something that has application to real life beyond the merely theoretical. That means ethics entails action and behavior and that any actions undertaken have a purpose beyond their ethical nature. Action itself aims at what eventually comes to be called a good, and the good is something not simply to be thought about but rather to be experienced directly and practically by human beings. "It makes no difference," Aristotle says, "whether the activities themselves are the ends of the action, or something beyond the activities" (I.i.87). As a practical science, the central figure of the human being as the actor or the practitioner of the science is important. But for Aristotle, it is not enough that the individual be

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t guarantee that one will behave virtuously. In other words, virtue must be proactively nurtured and developed in one's youth, and the youth must practice behaving in a virtuous way. While it is the case that virtue does not simply happen but has to be built, it is only when something happens that potential for ethical conduct or for analyzing the content of happiness present itself. Divorced from man in action in the real world, and more specifically action within the context of the political community, virtue is meaningless. The situational connection is critical. Happiness, the highest good, or moral virtue, the means to the highest good, is not a unitary notion but must be directed and formulated within the context of a specific situation. It is because the character of virtue is many-faceted, offering crisis and decisions at unexpected moments, that it cannot be defined in absolutist or universalist terms. The notion in the abstract in this view has no validity because it has no historic-narrative content, which is to say it lacks specific referents. Ethics requires events, happenings, and although the events may themselves seem to lack coherence, the choices they imply must be informed by rationality, or at any rate by the p

Category: Philosophy - A