Amazon.com: Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on.
Introduction. The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's most important study of personal morality and the ends of human life, has for many centuries been a widely-read and influential book.Though written more than 2,000 years ago, it offers the modern reader many valuable insights into human needs and conduct. Among its most outstanding features are Aristotle's insistence that there are no known.
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the most important ethical treatises ever written, and has had a profound influence on the subsequent development of ethics and moral psychology. This collection of essays, written by both senior and younger scholars in the field, presents a thorough and close examination of the work.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Best Good In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes, “perhaps we shall find the best good if we first find the function of a human being” (1097b25). For Aristotle, this “best good” is the only purely non-instrumental good, happiness. He believes that for every thing that has a function.
The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle is the most influential book of the moral philosophy.From Kant to John Rawls, all philosophers have discussed the issue with Aristotle on the good life and on happiness. To summarize, Aristotle raises the question of virtue: How should we act? How to live ? The man, he said, must act according to reason. The moral of Aristotle is an ethics based on actions.
In the Nicomachean Ethics’, Aristotle begins to discuss ethics and the function of humans along with the fulfillment of happiness through virtue. In Book X, Aristotle begins to explore the ideas of the contemplative life.
However, I think Aristotles argument on how to achieve happiness is too vague. There are many other elements that help people achieve happiness and, at the end, lived a good life. Aristotles concepts of happiness may be the best explanation of the social normality and belief of that particular era and culture, but in this glorified globalization era, there exists problems in his theory.
It is the purpose of the study of ethics to discover the nature of this highest good and to find the appropriate means for its realization. Because happiness is generally regarded as an end in itself rather than a means for achieving something else it would seem quite proper to call happiness the highest good or the ultimate goal for human life.