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The Final Good in Aristotle's Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

W. F. R. Hardie
W. F. R. Hardie
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
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Aristotle maintains that every man has, or should have, a single end (τλος), a target at which he aims. The doctrine is stated in E.N. I 2. ‘If, then, there is some end of the things we do which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life ? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim t, be more likely to hit upon what is right?’ (1094a 18–24). Aristotle does not here prove, nor need we understand him as claiming to prove, that there is only one end which is desired for itself. He points out correctly that, if there are objects which are desired but not desired for themselves, there must be some object which is desired for itself. The passage further suggests that, if there were one such object and one only, this fact would be important and helpful for the conduct of life.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 40 , Issue 154 , October 1965 , pp. 277 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1965

References

page 277 note 1 Here, and in quoting other passages, I have reproduced the Oxford translation. I refer to the Nicomachean Ethics as E.N. and to the Eudemian Ethics as E.E.

page 292 note 1 I owe this point, and less directly much else in my discussion of the criticism of Aristotle's ethical system as egoistic, to Professor G. A. Campbell's British Academy Lecture (1948), ‘Moral Intuition and the Principle of Self-Realisation’ (especially pp. 17–25). Professor Campbell's lecture discusses the ethical theory of T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley, and I do not know whether he would think of his arguments as being relevant to the interpretation of Aristotle. But I have found his defence of ‘self-realisation’ as a moral principle helpful in my attempt to separate the strands of thought in Aristotle's doctrine of the final good.