Summary
Book I: The human good
Every action, craft and inquiry aims at some good. Ends form hierarchies, and political science directs the activities of a community. The highest practical end is happiness, sought for itself rather than as a means to something else.
Aristotle reviews lives organised around pleasure, honour and contemplation. Wealth cannot be the final end because it is pursued for use. Honour depends too much upon those who bestow it, while pleasure alone does not express the distinctively human good.
The function argument identifies rational activity as characteristic of human beings. Happiness is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, especially the best and most complete virtue, over a complete life. External goods and good fortune remain relevant because severe deprivation can obstruct excellent activity.
Book II: Moral virtue and habituation
Intellectual virtue develops through teaching; moral virtue through habit. Natural capacities make virtue possible, but repeated actions form stable dispositions. Legislation is important because communities train citizens through patterns of conduct.
Pleasure and pain reveal and shape character. A temperate person takes appropriate pleasure in restraint, while someone merely forcing compliance may still possess disordered desires.
Moral virtue is a disposition involving choice. It seeks a mean relative to us between excess and deficiency, determined by reason and practical wisdom. Some actions, such as adultery or theft, are wrong in kind and do not possess a virtuous mean.
Book III: Choice, responsibility, courage and temperance
Aristotle distinguishes voluntary from involuntary action. Compulsion and relevant ignorance may reduce responsibility, though mixed actions performed under threat require careful judgement.
Choice differs from appetite, emotion, wish and opinion. People deliberate about means that are possible through their agency, then choose what deliberation identifies. Because actions form character, individuals are responsible not only for isolated choices but also, within limits, for the dispositions their choices establish.
Courage is the mean concerning fear and confidence, most clearly displayed in facing death for a worthy reason. Temperance concerns bodily pleasures, especially touch and taste, and orders appetite under reason.
Book IV: Virtues in wealth, honour and social life
Generosity governs giving and taking wealth on an ordinary scale, while magnificence concerns appropriate large expenditure. Both avoid wastefulness and meanness by attending to purpose, resources and occasion.
Greatness of soul concerns justified claims to high honour. Aristotle also discusses the appropriate pursuit of lesser honours, gentleness regarding anger, truthfulness about oneself, pleasant wit and friendliness in social relations.
Book V: Justice
Justice in a broad sense is complete virtue directed towards other people. Particular justice concerns fair shares and fair treatment. Distributive justice follows proportional equality, while corrective justice restores balance in transactions and injuries.
Political justice exists among people who share a community under law. Aristotle examines reciprocity, money, natural and conventional justice, responsibility for injustice and the possibility of treating oneself unjustly.
Equity corrects the rigidity of a universal legal rule when an exceptional case falls outside what the legislator could state precisely. The equitable judgement fulfils the law’s purpose rather than mechanically applying its wording.
Book VI: Intellectual virtue
The rational soul includes capacities concerned with necessary truths and with variable matters of action and production. Aristotle distinguishes scientific knowledge, craft, practical wisdom, intuitive reason and theoretical wisdom.
Practical wisdom deliberates well about the good life as a whole. It requires both general understanding and perception of particulars. Cleverness can discover effective means, but it becomes practical wisdom only when joined with morally good ends.
Moral virtue makes the goal right; practical wisdom makes the means right. Full virtue and practical wisdom consequently depend upon one another.
Book VII: Self-control, weakness and pleasure
Aristotle examines continence, incontinence, vice and brutishness. The continent person has conflicting desires but follows reason; the incontinent person acts against a better judgement; the vicious person wrongly judges the bad action to be good.
Weakness of will is explained through different senses of knowing. A person may possess knowledge without actively using it, or may repeat a principle while appetite controls perception of the particular case.
The Book also examines pleasure and criticises the claim that every pleasure is bad. Some pleasures complete natural activity, while corrupt states can generate merely apparent pleasures.
Book VIII: Forms of friendship
Friendship is necessary for life and contributes to both private flourishing and civic unity. Friendships may be based on utility, pleasure or the good character of the friends.
Utility and pleasure friendships change when the relevant benefit changes. Complete friendship exists between good people who wish good to one another for the other’s sake. It requires reciprocal recognition, familiarity and time.
Different relationships involve equality or proportion, as in friendships between parents and children or rulers and citizens. Justice and friendship vary together across forms of association.
Book IX: Friendship, self-love and shared life
Aristotle explores disputes arising when friends value exchanges differently. Friendship requires an appropriate relation between intention, benefit and the type of association involved.
A good person’s relation to a friend resembles the person’s relation to himself: wishing good, sharing awareness and living together. Proper self-love belongs to someone who chooses noble action, not someone who merely takes excessive wealth or honour.
Even a happy person needs friends. Friendship provides opportunities for excellent activity, understanding and shared perception. Friends become partners in a life rather than optional additions to private sufficiency.
Book X: Pleasure, contemplation and education
Pleasure is not simply a process of filling a lack. It completes an activity when the relevant capacity and object are in good condition. Different activities have corresponding pleasures, and good pleasures belong to good activities.
Happiness must be an activity chosen for itself. Contemplation is presented as the highest activity because it exercises intellect, is comparatively continuous and self-sufficient, and aims at truth rather than an external product.
Moral and political life nevertheless remains necessary for embodied human beings. External resources, habits and social conditions support both moral action and contemplation.
The work concludes that argument alone does not form character. Education and law must train desire from youth. This transition prepares the investigation of constitutions and legislation developed in Aristotle’s Politics.