Virtue and Happiness Essay - 1462 Words

Happiness is the goal of every human beings according to Aristotle, however what does happiness imply? It is in his attempt to define happiness and to find a way to attain it that Aristotle comes across the idea of virtue. It is thus necessary to explain the relationship between these two terms. I will start by defining the good and virtue and then clarify their close link with the argument of function, I will then go into more details in explaining the different ways in which they are closely related and finally I am going to give an account of the apparent contradiction in Book X which is a praise of the life of study. Before describing the close relationship between the good and virtue, we have to define these terms. Virtue has a†¦show more content†¦A good is complete when it is intrinsic, indeed if the good was instrumental then it would serve another good which would consequently be more valuable. Moreover to be complete the good must be why we pursue all the other goods. For example a simple intrinsic good, such as love, cannot be considered as complete since it is not the cause of the search for other goods. The second craterion is self-sufficiency (1097b15), a good is self-sufficient if it suffices to make a life choiceworthy. For example let us take health, we would not choose a given life just by knowing that it contains good health, we can thus conclude that health is not self-sufficient and that it is not the highest good. It is now necessary to find the good that best fits this definition. It seems like happiness is the good since it is both complete and self-sufficient, indeed happiness is an intrinsic good and is the cause of other goods, furthermore it is self-sufficient as we would choose a life just by knowing that it contains happiness. However happiness is a vague concept which needs to be clarified. In order to do so Aristotle uses the argument of the function, the latter can be define as the specific distinction of a genre. For example the good for a flutist is to exercise his function which is playing the flute (1097b26). In trying to find the function of human beings, Aristotle makes a distinction between the life of nutritionShow MoreRelatedAristotle on Happiness and Virtue Essay1749 Words   |  7 Pagesdescribed by Greek philosopher Aristotle. He had an excellent command on various subjects ranging from sciences to mathematics and philosophy. He was also a student of a famous philosopher. His most important study on ethics, personal morality and virtues is ‘The Nicomachean Ethics’, which has been greatly influencing works of l iterature in ethics and heavily read for centuries, is believed to be written 2000 years ago. 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