Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics aims to outline a “chief good” for human life, one that is self-sufficient and pursued for its own sake and for its own sake only (NE1.1, 1.7). In pursuit of this objective two complementary approaches are taken that can be disentangled: the function argument and the fineness argument. The function argument approaches this question teleologically, building upon Aristotle’s essentialist idea that humans have an activity unique to humans, and the human function is to perform this activity well. Aristotle then continues that, “to be a good human is to perform the human function well,” and “to be a good human is to achieve what is good for humans to achieve” (Charles 106, 109). In NE 1.7, this unique activity is identified as the “life of the rational element,” culminating in the statement that “human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance to virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.” The fineness approach introduces the evaluative notion of fineness, which unifies the properties of self-sufficiency and finality the chief good must have. Fineness bridges the gap between virtuous activity and wellbeing, as “being chosen for the fine is what makes ethically virtuous activity the activity it is,” and excellent individuals (lovers of the fine) cannot “separate what is best, finest, and most pleasant” (Charles 117, 119). The two approaches are complementary in that fineness unifies what is good for a person and what a good person does, a conceptual gap the function argument by itself struggles to resolve.
A weakness of the function argument is its dependence on Aristotle’s strong theory of teleology which presupposes metaphysical assumptions on the existence of an ideal function and the unity of different excellences. NE1.7 briefly attempts to justify the existence of a human function by comparison to a “carpenter,” “tanner,” “eye, hand, [or] foot.” An occupation such as a carpenter or tanner is one that is voluntarily taken up, however, while organs do not constitute a fully-functional organism; such an attempt to generalize to humans is not well-explained. Aristotle also assumes humans have an “inner nisus” toward their ideal function, which is complicated by more modern notions of real interest (Williams 44). Imagine, for instance, an individual who is “horrible enough and not miserable at all” (Williams 46); one cannot justify it is within their real interest to adapt Aristotle’s ideal function without incorporating a prior ethical standard, undermining the value-neutrality of teleology and creating a logical circularity.
The project of the NE is rooted in the strive for personal wellbeing, prompting some to diagnose it as “incurably egoistic” (Williams 49). One may argue the pursuit of fineness collapses into an egoistic hedonism as an excellent individual experiences pleasure from choosing fine activities for the sake of the fine. This argument is flawed in two ways: first, pleasure is structurally subordinate to fineness, as pleasure plays the role of confirming the self-sufficiency of fineness after the activity is completed. Furthermore, one must not conflate desire for fineness with pleasure-seeking as there exist “self-transcending desires” (Williams 50). The critique that the pursuit of personal wellbeing is intrinsically egoistic is much more well-founded, however. One may defend Aristotelian ethics here by rejecting the conception of self prior to ethical dispositions, and thus there is no ethics-independent perspective from which one can egoistically steer ethics egoistically towards their well-being. This invites dangerous implications undermining the foundations of both arguments in the NE; if Aristotle’s assumptions aren’t metaphysically inevitable and solely rely on the “reproduction of ethical predispositions,” Aristotelian ethics collapses into a circularity (Williams 51).
Works Cited
Aristotle, and Roger Crisp. Nicomachean Ethics. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Charles, David. “Aristotle on Virtue and Happiness.” The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics. Ed. Christopher Bobonich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 105–123. Print. Cambridge Companions to Philosophy.
Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Routledge, 2015.