Category: Ethics

  • Happiness as a common good

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    Suppose you’re wandering through a desert wasteland, outside of the borders of any political community, and you come across another person. Why should you care about their well-being rather than attack them or forcibly take their possessions for yourself? The aim of this post is to briefly outline an Aristotelian approach to this question.[1] As →

  • Cooperation with evil

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    When one person cooperates with the act of another they can “share” in that act in different ways. Knowing these differences is important, because the degree and manner of sharing can influence whether the cooperator is morally culpable for their cooperation. Here I wish to outline the different modes of cooperation by deriving them from →

  • Paul’s eschatological ethics

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    There was a distinct moment when it dawned on me that I had missed something important in Paul’s thinking on the Christian motivations for doing good works. During a Bible study we were busy discussing the following passage: Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled →

  • The measures of activities

    When discussing self-perfective immanent activities we gave the following analysis of activities, with which we were able to delineate three kinds: … an activity is the measured exercise of powers for the sake of some end, where the end for which the activity is done determines the appropriate measure. A thing’s powers are what determine what it can and →

  • Aristotle’s function argument

    In the course of discussing the egoist worry, we saw that Aristotle’s own proposal for what happiness is is presented as the conclusion of his so-called “function argument.” This name is a bit misleading, however, since Aristotle didn’t think about function in the way we tend to these days, and he doesn’t so much give an argument as gesture in →

  • Aristotle and the egoist worry (part 2)

    In the first part we introduced the egoist worry about Aristotle’s ethics: does his claim that happiness is the ultimate goal of human life imply that everything we do is done for selfish reasons? We also traced Aristotle’s discussion from the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics up to just before he puts forward his own proposal for what happiness →

  • Aristotle and the egoist worry (part 1)

    Aristotle famously held that happiness is the ultimate goal of human life, or — to use language more in keeping with Aristotle — that happiness is the chief good and last end of human life: Let us resume our inquiry and state… what is the highest of all goods achievable by action. Verbally there is very general agreement; for both →

  • Self-perfective immanent activity

    At the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes two ways an activity can be related to the end for which that activity is done: either the activity is distinct from its end, or they are the same. We call those activities that are distinct from their ends transient and those that are the same immanent. Now, because an →

  • Because God said so

    In a recent discussion with some friends, the question of why murder was wrong came up (actually, it was why Aquinas would say murder was wrong, but the discussion equally applies to the more general discussion to be had here). The answer “because God said so” quickly came up and, being a natural law theorist →

  • How Aristotle starts the Nicomachean Ethics

    In the opening passage of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle seeks to pick out the specific subject of his study for the remainder of the book. His discussion is often misunderstood, but a good understanding of it will serve us well in understanding the study of ethics. We will consider the passage bit by bit with →