In the book Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle summarizes how ethics can be used to determine the best way for an individual to achieve happiness. After reading the text, there were a couple of themes that stood out the most to me. Happiness is a choice and with this happiness, friends are needed most of all.…
This quiz consist of 15 multiple choice questions and covers the material in Chapter 1. Be sure you are in Chapter 1 when you take the quiz.…
How would you explain Aristotle's main points in his Ethics to the average person: In Aristotles ethics he explains that we have to find out what makes something flourish or what makes something good at what it does. There are all sorts of examples that can be used but we will use a hammer as an example. What makes a hammer a good hammer, a hammer should not break when you use it to pound a nail into wood, it should not deform or bend when used, and if it is a good hammer you might get a life times use out of it. And Aristotle uses these kinds of examples to get people to understand what we are trying to figure out is what makes a good person. We know what makes a good hammer or other inanimate objects, but these are simply to easy to figure…
not teaching them better. While one might have been raised to know the difference between the right and wrong, who the person begins to associate himself with could change his/ her moral character. In The Nicomachean Ethics without virtues one can not be happy so a life lived making morally wrong decisions is a life that will not see happiness according to Aristotle. An example that best proves Aristotle’s thinking is one of a man losing his dog at a local park. The man searches all over for his dog, but his dog is nowhere to be seen. After hours of searching the man returns home. The dog did in fact run away, but a young mom and her two daughters stopped the dog before it can go any further. Attempting to find who the owner of the dog is,…
Though Aristotle does not explicitly speak of meaning, he surely considered the reality of impartial values and meaning. While his primary concern was on the happiness gained by accounting for these values, he does not say that the happy life means the meaningful. However, we can infer that he thought that the good life and the meaningful life are equals. Therefore, Aristotle’s plan in order to live a good life is understandable, and is a guide to a meaningful life.…
Aristotle accepts the individual choices and experiences of people and was more concerned with virtue ethics. He doesn't have an idea of free will. Along with Socrates, Aristotle believes that someone may know what the best outcome is and still do wrong, but draws the line between happiness and moral virtue. This includes depression and unhappiness. The world has moral meaning. He explains that moral virtue does not mean the end of life. His theory is that happiness is the end of life, which comes together with reason. Virtue is a state of personality that has to do with someone’s choice.…
Aristotle believed that we as humans have natural obligations that provide happiness. Happiness consists of pleasure and the capacity to develop reasoning.…
Nicomachean Ethics Book III, Chapters 69 In Chapter 6 of Book III of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle teaches of how fear is not something that can be easily described. He talks about what fear means in terms of courage.…
In this essay, with all the information I have gathered from the readings and lectures, I will be discussing an essential concept of Aristotle’s virtue ethics; his “doctrine of the mean”. I will provide a detailed explanation of Aristotle’s mean, how it is meant to be applied when making decisions, provide arguments from various sources that agree with the main concept of the “doctrine of the mean” and with all of the information gathered, I will prove that this doctrine is extremely useful to people when it comes to making moral decisions in life.…
In Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics book one, he starts of describing “good”. He believes that every activity humans do is to achieve a good. The satisfactory goals we have are to achieve a greater good. And our highest good is classified as the supreme good. Politics is a form of this good. But it cannot be classified as the supreme good because what is good for one may not be good for another.…
Aristotle one of a great thinkers left a great philosophical logic that is still being learned today. Born in Stagira, Greece Aristotle started as a student of Plato to become a tutor of Alexander the Great. In Nicomachean Ethics, book written by Aristotle’s, he explains virtues and how happiness is the means by which human beings have moral virtues. The debate whether virtue or vice should determine happiness is what Aristotle simplifies for us. Happiness should be determined by the activities human beings, virtuous or not, do in order to be happy within themselves.…
Virtues, according to Aristotle, are those strengths of character that promote 'eudomania' (human flourishing). A good action is a product of these virtues. A person is virtuous in so far as he acts with the goal of human flourishing in view.…
QUESTION #1: After having viewed Harvard Justice.org, Episode #9, do you agree with Aristotle’s perspective? For example, when you look around at our American culture, do you think our government is supporting justice for all? For example, is it fair for a university to consider race or ethnicity as a factor in admissions rather than solely on the basis of merit? Explain your thinking.…
Happiness is the goal that everyone seeks. Some people think that they seek honor, wealth, or any number of things. For example, if someone claims that they seek wealth in actuality they are seeking what they can do with that wealth. The same is for honor; they seek what other is giving them by being honored. Happiness is more like contentment. We do not make choices for the sake of something else; we make them for our own sake. The highest form of good which will create the most happiness must be something final. Happiness is the final goal that we want to reach. We reach happiness sometimes but it is something that cannot be achieved all at once. It is something that must be achieved by constantly striving for it. “Happiness is self-sufficient”, it needs nothing else because it has everything it needs. What gives someone happiness is relative to that person and different for everyone. If our ultimate goal is happiness then we have everything that we need. So striving for happiness is actually striving for everything we want and need. Therefore if we have happiness we need something else. (Book 1 Ch. 2 p.48, Ch. 7, p.50, Ch. 7 p.51-52)…
Aristotle’s virtue ethics attempts to make peace with crime and restore justice to society by reminding us of the importance of virtue, which enables us to overcome negative emotions such as anger, revenge, and hatred (Williams & Arrigo, 2012). Furthermore, Aristotle implies that the virtue of forgiveness does not mean that a victim has to no longer be angry, but that they overcome their desire to seek revenge that stems from their emotional experience with being angry (Williams & Arrigo, 2012). Moreover, justice can only emerge when we acknowledge that there is a uniqueness to all human situations as well as the people it involves (Williams & Arrigo, 2012).…