Happiness In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethic

The main idea of Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethic is that happiness is the end of all human beings’ action, which in today, still qualified to be a big idea. The whole society today is getting better comparing with the ancient time from all aspects, such as technology, culture or economic. But when we tend to the measure the level of happiness, it seems that people nowadays are not tending happier than the era of material scarcity; meanwhile, there is an increasing number of people try to find out what the true happiness is and also how to attain it. Besides the idea of Nicomachean, Aristotle also has a theory called Telos, which means ultimate purpose. As the view of Aristotle, happiness is what we aim at in the end, which is our telos. This
Aristotle thought every action conducted by human being which is aiming at some good. And this good must be a self-sufficient thing and independent from the actions undertaken, because if not, the actions which aim to some kinds of good would not get to the end. According to this view, Aristotle first thought political science should be this ultimate good of human’s action, whereas political is made to regulate citizen’s behavior and to influence it into a good way, so it obviously is not the end we expected. Then, Aristotle considered the happiness as human’s ultimate goal of all actions. First, happiness is self-sufficient and all actions undertaken for the sake of happiness, which is not like political science that aims at something else. However, then, Aristotle realized that different people have different perspectives of happiness; some people believe that happiness is virtue, and others thinks is honor, both of these two can be regarded as the end of political life. Honor is not a thing that can be controlled by person who receive it but the person who grant it. On the other hand, we believe good will accompany a person through his/her whole life, so obviously that virtue is better to
The fundamental idea of this is that happiness is not a state or just a feeling, but it is ultimate goal of one’s whole life. So he believed that a little boy definitely will not be happy, because his age is too young and also has no ability of using instrument to help him achieve happiness. As what Aristotle believed that happiness is virtue, as a infant, he/she totally has no idea of virtue, so have no chance to get in touch with happiness. When infant grow up to be a child, most of them still do not know specifically what is virtue, till as adolescent, the start build a system of moral attitude, they start getting to know virtue and behave virtuously. Because human in different stages of life have different acknowledge of virtue, so is too broad if we just consider whole life period to decide one is happy or not. Therefore in my opinion, it is better to decide whether a person is happy or not during each stages of life, which are infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, cause if we follow the idea of Aristotle that happiness is virtue, the whole period in life to judge if one is happy or not is only the period after childhood (infant and child have no idea about moral (virtue), which actually is not whole-life in Aristotle’s theory. For example, as an infant, knowing nothing about virtue, so there is no point to decide whether he/she is happy or not. Infants have no conscious of