The Nicomachean Ethics

Every art and every enquiry, and in the same way every action and every choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the chief good has been well described as that at which all things aim.

If then there is some one end of all that we do, which we desire for its own sake, and for the sake of which we desire everything else, this must plainly be the chief good, the best thing of all; for otherwise the chain would run on without limit, and desire would be empty and vain. Surely, then, for the actual conduct of life the knowledge of it carries great weight; like archers with a mark to aim at, we shall be more likely to hit upon what is right. We must be content, in speaking of such matters and from such premises, to set out the truth roughly and in outline, for it is the mark of an educated man to look for exactness in each class of things only so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently much the same absurdity to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician as to demand strict demonstration from an orator.

Men seem, reasonably enough, to form their notions of the good and of happiness from the lives they lead. The many and the coarsest take it to be pleasure, and so are content with a life of enjoyment. For there are three lives that stand out: the one just mentioned, the life of society, and thirdly the life of contemplation. The many show themselves wholly slavish by choosing a life fit for cattle. The refined and active take the good to be honour, for that is more or less the end of public life; but honour is plainly too superficial for what we are seeking, since it is thought to rest with those who give it rather than with him who receives it. Yet virtue too falls short of being final, for it seems possible to possess it while asleep, or in a lifetime of inactivity, or in the midst of the greatest sufferings and misfortunes, and no one would call such a man happy unless he were defending a thesis. As for the life of money-making, it is a life of constraint, and wealth is obviously not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful, valued for the sake of something else.

What is never chosen with a view to anything further we call absolutely final, and happiness above all else answers to this description: happiness we always choose for its own sake and never with a view to anything further, whereas honour, pleasure, intellect and every excellence we choose partly for their own sakes but partly also for the sake of happiness, supposing that through them we shall be happy. The same conclusion follows from self-sufficiency, for by self-sufficient we mean that which, taken by itself, makes life worth choosing and lacking in nothing, not for a solitary man alone, but for his parents also, his children, his wife, his friends and fellow citizens, since man is by nature adapted to society. Happiness, then, is manifestly something final and self-sufficient, being the end of all things which may be done.

But to call happiness the chief good is perhaps a mere truism, and what is wanted is a clearer account of its real nature. This may be given if we can discover the work of man. For as with a flute player, a sculptor, a craftsman of any kind, and in general with everything that has a work or course of action, the good and the excellence of each is thought to reside in its work, so it would seem to be with man, if man has any work belonging to him. Are we then to suppose that the carpenter and the cobbler have each their work and course of action, but that man as man has none, and is left by nature without a work? Or is it not rather to be held that as eye, hand, foot, and each of his members manifestly has some special work, so the whole man, over and above all these, has some work of his own?

What, then, can this be? Not mere life, for that is plainly shared with him even by plants, and we are looking for what is peculiar to him; nor the life of sensation, for this too is manifestly common to the horse, the ox, and every animal. There remains an active life of the part that has reason. If, then, the work of man is a working of the soul in accordance with reason, or at least not without reason, and if the work of a thing and of a good thing of that kind are the same in kind, as the work of a harpist is to play the harp and of a good harpist to play it well, then the good of man turns out to be a working of the soul in the way of excellence, and if there is more than one excellence, in the way of the best and most complete.

And we must add, in a complete life. For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one fine day; and in the same way one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

To make our verdict follow the changes of a man’s fortune is plainly wrong, for the well or the ill does not stand in them: the workings in the way of virtue are what determine happiness, and the contrary workings the contrary. Small pieces of good or ill fortune plainly do not tip the balance; but great and repeated strokes, if they fall ill, crush and maim blessedness, for they bring pain with them and hinder many activities. And if activities are what give life its character, as we have said, no one who is blessed can become wretched, for he will never do what is hateful and mean. The truly good and sensible man, we hold, bears every fortune becomingly, and makes the best of his circumstances, as a good shoemaker makes the finest shoe out of the leather he is given. Why then should we not call a man happy who works in the way of complete virtue, and is sufficiently furnished with external goods, and this not for any chance period but for a complete life?

Since happiness is a working of the soul in the way of complete excellence, we must enquire about excellence; and certain things said about the soul even in the popular accounts are adequate here: that it has two parts, one irrational and one possessing reason. Of the irrational part, one division, the vegetative, the cause of nourishment and growth, has no share in the excellence that is peculiarly human.

But there seems to be another irrational nature in the soul, which nevertheless in a way partakes of reason. In the man who controls himself, and in the man who resolves to and fails, we praise the reason, for it exhorts rightly and towards what is best; but there is plainly in them something else besides reason, which fights with reason and strains against it. Just as paralysed limbs, when their owner would move them to the right, swing away to the left, so it is with the soul: the impulses of those who cannot govern themselves run contrary to reason. Yet this part also shares in reason: in the self-controlled man it obeys reason, and in the temperate and brave man it is more obedient still, agreeing with reason in everything.

The excellence of man, then, divides along the same line: some excellences we call intellectual, as wisdom, intelligence, prudence; others moral, as liberality and temperance.

Excellence, then, is of two kinds, intellectual and moral. Intellectual excellence owes its birth and growth mainly to teaching; moral excellence comes from habit, and its very name in Greek is a slight variation on the word for custom. From this it is plain that none of the moral virtues comes to be in us by nature, for nothing that exists by nature can be changed by habit: a stone, which by nature falls, could never be habituated to rise, not though you threw it upward ten thousand times to train it. The virtues, then, come to be in us neither by nature nor against nature: nature gives us the capacity to receive them, and habit brings that capacity to completion.

The virtues we get by first doing the acts, as also happens in the arts. The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them: men become builders by building, and harpists by playing the harp. Just so, by doing just acts we become just, by temperate acts temperate, by brave acts brave. In a word, states of character arise from activities of like character. That is why we must give a certain quality to our activities, for the habits that form follow the differences in these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we are trained from childhood in one set of habits or another; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.

The present treatise is not undertaken, as our others are, for the sake of theory; we are not enquiring in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good. The pleasure or pain that follows a man’s acts must be taken as the test of his formed habit. He who abstains from bodily pleasures and is glad to do so is temperate; he who abstains and is sorry about it is not. For moral virtue has to do with pleasures and pains: it is pleasure that leads us to do what is base, and pain that makes us shirk what is noble. That is why, as Plato says, men should be trained from childhood to take pleasure and pain in the right objects; this is what right education is.

Someone may be perplexed by our saying that men must do just acts to become just, and temperate acts to become temperate. But acts done in the way of virtue are not justly or temperately done merely because they are of a certain quality; the doer must also be in a certain state when he does them. First, he must know what he is doing; next, he must choose the act, and choose it for its own sake; and thirdly, he must act from a firm and unchangeable character. For possessing the virtues, knowledge counts for little or nothing; the other conditions count for everything, and they come precisely from the repeated doing of just and temperate acts.

We are right, then, to say that a man becomes just by doing just acts and temperate by doing temperate ones; and without doing them no one would have so much as a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do them. They take refuge in talk, and fancy that they are philosophising and that this will make them good, behaving rather like invalids who listen carefully to the doctor and do nothing he orders. As such treatment will never bring the body health, neither will such philosophy bring health to the soul.

The mean of the thing is equidistant from either extreme, one and the same for everybody; the mean relative to us is neither too much nor too little for the particular person, and this is neither one thing nor the same for all. If ten pounds of food is too much for a man and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will prescribe six, for that also may be too much or too little for the man who is to take it: too little for Milo, too much for the beginner. Every skilled man, then, avoids excess and defect, and seeks and chooses the mean: the mean relative to us, not the mean of the thing.

It is moral virtue that I am speaking of, for it is this that concerns feelings and actions, and in these there is excess, defect, and the mean. Fear, confidence, appetite, anger, pity, and pleasure and pain generally can be felt too much or too little, and in both cases wrongly; but to feel them at the right time, on the right occasions, towards the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner is the mean and the best state, and this is the mark of virtue. There are many ways of going wrong, but only one way of going right; easy to miss the mark, hard to hit it: for men are bad in many ways, but good in one alone.

Virtue, then, is a settled state apt to choose, lying in the mean relative to us, determined by reason, and as the man of practical wisdom would determine it. It is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of defect. In respect of its essence and definition virtue is a mean; in respect of what is best and right it is an extreme.

But not every action or feeling admits of a mean. Some have names that of themselves imply badness: spite, shamelessness, envy, and among actions adultery, theft, murder. All these are blamed as being bad in themselves, not for their excess or deficiency; simply to do any one of them is to be wrong; however they are done, they are wrong.

In respect of fear and confidence, the mean is courage: the man of excessive confidence is rash, and the man who exceeds in fear and falls short in confidence is a coward. In respect of pleasures and pains, the mean is temperance and the excess self-indulgence. In respect of giving and taking money, the mean is liberality, the excess prodigality and the defect meanness; and about money there is another disposition also, a mean called magnificence, for the magnificent man deals in great sums, with tasteless vulgarity for its excess and paltriness for its defect. In respect of honour and dishonour, the mean is greatness of soul, the excess a kind of vanity, and the defect littleness of soul. In respect of anger the mean is good temper. And there are three other mean states concerning our intercourse in words and deeds: truthfulness, between boastfulness and mock-modesty; ready wit, between buffoonery and boorishness; and friendliness, between obsequiousness and quarrelsomeness.

It is a hard task to be good; for in each case it is hard to find the mean, as finding the centre of a circle is not for everyone but for the man who knows. Anybody can be angry, that is easy; and so is giving money away, or spending it. But to do these things to the right person, in the right amount, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right manner is no longer something anybody can do, nor is it easy; and that is why doing them well is rare, praiseworthy and noble.

He who aims at the mean, then, should first steer clear of the extreme that is more contrary to it, as Calypso advised: keep the ship clear of that surf and spray; for of the two extremes one leads us further astray than the other, and since hitting the mean exactly is difficult, we must choose the lesser of the evils. Next we must watch the errors to which we ourselves are most drawn, which we shall recognise by the pleasure and pain we feel, and drag ourselves off towards the opposite extreme; for by pulling well away from error we shall arrive at the mean, as men do when they straighten warped timber. And in everything, most of all, we must be on our guard against the pleasant, and against pleasure, for we are not impartial judges of her; what the elders of the people felt towards Helen, we should feel towards pleasure, and repeat their words over her on every occasion, for if we dismiss her so, we shall err the less.

It is difficult, no doubt, above all in particular cases, and the decision rests with perception. But this much at least is plain, that the mean state is everywhere praiseworthy, and that we must lean sometimes towards excess and sometimes towards deficiency, for so we shall most easily hit the mean, and what is right.

Since praise and blame arise on what is voluntary, while for the involuntary there is pardon and sometimes pity, the student of virtue must distinguish the voluntary from the involuntary. Involuntary actions are thought to be of two kinds, done under compulsion or through ignorance. An act is compulsory, properly speaking, when its origin is outside the agent and he contributes nothing: if a wind carries you somewhere, or men who have you in their power.

But when things are done from fear of greater evils, or for some honourable object, as when a tyrant who holds a man’s parents or children orders him to do something base, and they will live if he complies and die if he refuses, it is disputable whether such acts are voluntary or involuntary. Something of the same kind arises over throwing cargo overboard in a storm: no man throws away his property willingly in the abstract, but for his own safety and his shipmates’ any man of sense will do it. Such acts are mixed, but they are more like voluntary ones, for they are chosen at the time they are done. The man acts voluntarily, since the moving of his own limbs in such actions begins with himself, and where the origin is in a man, it is in his power to act or not. Yet some things, perhaps, a man cannot be compelled to do, and rather than do them he should accept the most terrible death. And it would be absurd for a man to lay the blame on outward things rather than on his own readiness to be caught by them, and to credit himself with his noble acts while charging his base ones to pleasure.

We deliberate about the things that are in our power and can be done, and not about ends but about means. A doctor does not deliberate whether he shall cure, nor an orator whether he shall persuade, nor a statesman whether he shall produce good order; they set the end before them and consider how and by what means it is to be reached. Choice, then, is a deliberate desire of things in our own power; for after deciding as a result of deliberation, we desire in accordance with our deliberation.

Perhaps the chief distinction of the good man is that he sees the truth in each case, being himself, as it were, the rule and measure of these things.

The end, then, being what we wish for, and the means what we deliberate about and choose, actions concerning means will be done by choice and voluntarily. But the exercise of the virtues is concerned with means. Therefore virtue is in our power, and so likewise is vice. For where it is in our power to act, it is in our power not to act, and where we can say no, we can say yes; so that if acting, when it is noble, is in our power, then not acting, when it is base, is in our power too; and if this is so, being good men or bad is in our power. Indeed the lawgivers punish a man for the very ignorance, if he is thought responsible for it: penalties are doubled for the drunken, because the origin lay in the man himself, for it was in his power not to get drunk, and his drunkenness was the cause of his ignorance.

But perhaps he is the sort of man who cannot take the trouble. Even so, men make themselves such by living carelessly, for it is activities exercised on particular objects that make the corresponding character. If a man does knowingly the things that will make him unjust, he is unjust voluntarily; yet it does not follow that if he wishes it he can stop being unjust and be just, any more than the sick man can be well by wishing, who is voluntarily ill through loose living and disobeying his doctors: just as a man who has let a stone out of his hand can no longer take it back, though it rested with him to hold or to throw, for the origin was in himself. So too the unjust man and the dissolute might at the beginning have not become such, and are therefore voluntarily what they are; but now that they have become so, it is no longer in their power not to be.

The brave man is unshaken, so far as a man may be. He will fear such things, but he will withstand them as he ought and as reason directs, for the sake of what is noble, for that is the end of virtue. He, then, is brave who fears and withstands and is bold about the right things, from the right motive, in the right manner and at the right time. The man who exceeds in confidence is rash, and rash men are impetuous, eager before the danger comes and falling away when it arrives, while the brave are keen in the moment of action and quiet beforehand. The man who exceeds in fear is a coward: he fears the wrong things and in the wrong way, and he is fainthearted, for he fears everything. And dying to escape poverty, or love, or anything merely painful, is the act not of a brave man but of a coward; for it is softness to fly from hardship, and the suicide endures death not because it is noble but to escape an evil.

Temperance and self-indulgence have to do with the pleasures that the other animals also share in, which is why these appear slavish and brutish: they are touch and taste. And even taste plays little part; the pleasure of the self-indulgent comes wholly through touch, in eating, in drinking and in what are called the pleasures of love; hence the prayer of a certain glutton that his throat might be made longer than a crane’s, showing that it was the touch he delighted in.

In the desires that are natural and common few men go wrong, and only in one direction, towards too much: to eat or drink whatever is at hand until one is overfull is to exceed the natural limit, and such men are called slaves of the belly. The temperate man holds the middle position in these things. He takes no pleasure in what most delights the self-indulgent, but rather dislikes it; nor does he feel pain at its absence, nor desire it, except in moderation, and not more than is right, nor at the wrong time. But such pleasant things as make for health and good condition he will desire moderately and as he should.

As the child ought to live by the direction of its tutor, so ought the appetitive part of us by the direction of reason. In the temperate man, then, the desiring element must be in harmony with reason; for the mark at which both aim is what is noble, and the temperate man desires what he ought, in the right manner and at the right time, which is exactly what reason directs.

The liberal man is praised in regard to the giving and receiving of wealth, and above all the giving; for it is more the mark of virtue to do good than to have good done to one, and thanks and praise go to him who gives. He will give from the motive of what is noble, and rightly: to the right people, the right amounts, at the right time, and with pleasure, or at least without pain. The man who gives with pain would prefer the money to the noble act, and that is not liberal. And liberality is judged relative to a man’s substance, for it lies not in the quantity given but in the state of the giver, and the giver gives according to his means: nothing prevents the man who gives less being the more liberal, if he gives from less. Nor is it easy for the liberal man to be rich, since he is not apt at taking or at keeping, but apt at parting with money, and values it not for itself but for the sake of giving; hence the reproach against fortune, that those who most deserve wealth have least of it.

Magnificence too is a virtue concerned with wealth, but it does not, like liberality, extend to every transaction; it applies only to those of great expense, for it is, as the very name suggests, fitting expenditure on a great scale. The magnificent man is like a man of skill, for he can see what is fitting and spend great sums with good taste; and he will consider how a work may be done most nobly and most fittingly rather than for how little. Honourable expenditures are such as concern the gods, and every public object of honourable ambition, as equipping a chorus splendidly, fitting out a warship, or feasting the city; and regard is had to the man and his means, so a poor man cannot be magnificent, and if he tries, he is a fool. The man of vulgar excess spends beyond what is right, and for show: he feasts his club as if it were a wedding, and when he equips a chorus for a comedy brings the actors on in purple, spending little where much is called for and much where little. The paltry man falls short in everything; after spending the most, he ruins the whole for some trifle, contriving how he may spend least, lamenting even that.

The great-souled man is thought to be one who claims much and deserves much; for he who claims much without deserving it is a fool, and no one of virtuous character is a fool. And desert is spoken of with reference to external goods; and the greatest of external goods is honour. The great-souled man, then, is concerned above all with honour and dishonour. At great honours given by good men he will be moderately pleased, as getting what is his own, or rather less than his own, for no honour can be adequate to complete virtue; yet he will accept it, since they have nothing greater to give him. But honour from ordinary people, and on trivial grounds, he will utterly despise, for that is not what he deserves; and dishonour likewise, for in his case it cannot justly attach.

Being worthy of the greatest things, he must be the best of men; for with what object will he do base acts, he to whom nothing is great? Greatness of soul seems a kind of crown of the virtues, for it makes them greater and does not arise without them; and for that reason it is hard to be truly great-souled, for it is impossible without complete goodness.

He is not a man to run into small dangers, nor does he court danger, because there are few things he cares much about; but he will face great dangers, and in the hour of danger he is unsparing of his life, knowing that there are terms on which life is not worth having. He is the sort of man to do kindnesses, but he is ashamed to receive them, for the one is the part of a superior, the other of an inferior; and such men seem to remember the good they have done, but not what they have received, and to hear of the former with pleasure and of the latter with none. It is his way to ask for nothing, or almost nothing, and to give help readily; to be dignified towards men of position and fortune, and unassuming towards those of middle station, for loftiness among the humble is as vulgar as parading strength against the weak.

He is open in hate and open in love, for concealment belongs to fear; he cares more for truth than for what men think, and speaks and acts openly. He cannot live at the will of another, unless it be a friend, for that is slavish; which is why all flatterers are servile, and the low-minded are flatterers. He is not given to admiration, for nothing is great to him; nor does he bear grudges, for it is not like a great soul to remember things against people, least of all wrongs. He is no gossip: he will not talk about himself, nor about anyone else, for he cares neither to be praised himself nor to have others blamed. And a slow step is thought proper to the great-souled man, a deep voice and a level way of speaking; for the man who takes few things seriously is not the man to hurry, and he to whom nothing is great is not the man to be vehement.

Good temper is a mean concerned with anger. The man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, in the right manner and at the right time, is praised. He is thought to err, if anything, on the side of deficiency, for the good-tempered man is not given to revenge, but rather to making allowance. Yet the deficiency is blamed all the same: those who are not angered by what ought to anger them are thought fools, and to endure insult in one’s own person, and look on while it falls on one’s friends, is slavish. Of the excess, the quick-tempered are soon angry, but they soon cool, which is the best thing about them, for they do not hold their anger in but pay it out openly and are done with it. The bitter-tempered keep their anger long, for they press it down; and it ceases only when they have repaid the wrong, for revenge puts an end to anger, substituting pleasure for pain. Such men are the greatest nuisance to themselves and to their closest friends.

The boaster is given to claiming creditable things that do not belong to him, or more of them than belong to him; the mock-modest man denies or diminishes what he really has; while the man in the middle, being what he is and nothing else, owns to what belongs to him and neither adds nor subtracts. Such a man would seem to be a good man, for the lover of truth, who is truthful where it makes no difference, will be truthful all the more where it does. He leans, if anywhere, towards understatement, for that appears in better taste, exaggerations being wearisome; and it was chiefly received opinions that Socrates, in this manner, used to disclaim.

Since life includes rest as well, and in rest there is pastime and amusement, here too there is a kind of fitting intercourse. Those who exceed in raising laughter are thought buffoons and vulgar, straining after the ridiculous at any cost; those who will not say anything laughable themselves, and are annoyed by those who do, are thought boorish and stiff. But those whose play is in good taste are called witty, for such sallies seem to be movements of a man’s character, and characters are judged, like bodies, by their movements. The jesting of the liberal-minded differs from that of the slavish, and the educated man’s from the uneducated’s: one may see this in the old comedies and the new, for in the former the fun was obscenity, in the latter rather innuendo, and this makes no small difference in decency. The refined and liberal-minded man, then, will bear himself so, being as it were a law to himself.

Justice in this sense is complete virtue, though not absolutely, but in relation to others. And therefore justice is often thought to be the greatest of the virtues, and neither evening star nor morning star so worthy of wonder; and in the proverb we say, in justice is every virtue gathered into one. It is complete virtue in the fullest sense because it is the exercise of complete virtue; and it is complete because he who possesses it can practise his virtue towards another and not only in his own case, for many men can be virtuous in their private affairs and yet cannot be so in their dealings with a neighbour. Hence the saying of Bias is thought a good one, that rule will show the man, for a ruler is of necessity in relation with others. For the same reason justice alone of the virtues is thought to be another’s good, because it stands in relation to another: the just man does what is advantageous to someone else. Justice in this sense, then, is not a part of virtue but the whole of it: the same state, differently regarded; in relation to one’s neighbour it is justice, and simply as a certain state of character it is virtue.

The just in transactions between man and man is a sort of equality, but by arithmetical proportion, not geometrical. It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad man a good one: the law looks only to the character of the injury, and treats the parties as equals, asking only whether one has done and the other suffered wrong. This kind of injustice being an inequality, the judge tries to restore the equality, taking away the gain. That is why, when men dispute, they go to the judge; and to go to the judge is to go to justice, for the judge is meant to be, as it were, living justice. The judge’s part, then, is to equalise: as if a line had been cut into unequal parts, he takes from the greater part the amount by which it exceeds the half, and adds it to the less; and when the whole is divided evenly, then each is said to have his own.

Political justice exists among men who share a common life with a view to self-sufficiency, and who are free and equal. This is why we do not permit a man to rule, but the principle of law, for a man rules in his own interest and becomes a tyrant.

Of political justice, part is natural and part conventional: natural, that which has the same force everywhere and does not depend on its being accepted or not; conventional, that which at the outset could as well be one way as another, but once laid down is binding, as that a ransom shall be a fixed sum, or that a goat shall be sacrificed rather than two sheep. Some think that all justice is of this second kind, on the ground that what is by nature is unchangeable and has the same force everywhere, as fire burns both here and in Persia, whereas they see notions of justice change from place to place. This is not so, though in a way it is: with us, though there is such a thing as natural justice, all of it is changeable; but still some justice is by nature and some not, and it is plain enough which is which, among things that can be otherwise.

Men suppose that acting unjustly rests entirely with themselves, and conclude that being just must therefore be easy. But it is not so. To lie with a neighbour’s wife, to strike whoever is beside one, to hand over money, is easy and rests with ourselves; but to do these things as the outcome of a certain settled state is neither easy nor in our power at will. In the same way men think that knowing what is just and what unjust takes no great wisdom, because it is not hard to understand what the laws say. But the actions the laws prescribe are only accidentally just acts; to be just, they must be done and distributed in a certain manner, and that is a harder matter than knowing what conduces to health. There too it is easy to know honey and wine and hellebore, cautery and the knife; but to know how they should be administered with a view to health, and to whom, and when, is as great a task as being a physician.

The equitable is just, but not the just of the written law; it is rather a correction of it. The reason is that all law is universal, and about some things it is not possible to speak rightly in universal terms. Where the law must speak universally and cannot do so rightly, it takes the usual case, well aware of the error involved; and it is none the less right, for the fault is not in the law nor in the lawgiver but in the nature of the thing. So when a case arises that the universal statement does not cover, it is right to correct the omission, ruling as the lawgiver himself would rule if he were present, and as he would have enacted had he known of the case. This is the very nature of the equitable: a correction of law where law is defective owing to its universality. For where the thing is indefinite the rule too must be indefinite, like the leaden rule used by the builders of Lesbos, which does not stay rigid but bends to the shape of the stone; so the decree bends to the facts of the case. It is plain, too, who the equitable man is: he chooses and does acts of this sort, and is no stickler for his rights to the last farthing, but is content to take less though the law is on his side. And that settled state is equity, a kind of justice, and not some different state of character.

By metaphor and resemblance there is a kind of justice, not of a man towards himself, but between certain parts of him; for the rational part of the soul is set over against the irrational, and looking to these, men think there can be injustice towards oneself, because in them a man can suffer something against his own real desires: a kind of justice between the parts, as between ruler and ruled.

Let there be two parts of the soul that possess reason: one with which we contemplate the things whose first causes cannot be otherwise than they are, and one with which we consider the things that can be otherwise; and let the first be called the scientific part and the second the calculative, for deliberating and calculating are the same, and no one deliberates about what cannot be otherwise. The excellence of each will be the state in which each best attains truth, and that is relative to its proper work.

The origin of moral action is choice, and the origin of choice is desire together with reason directed to an end. Thought by itself moves nothing; only thought directed to an end and concerned with action. And so choice is either intellect set desiring, or desire set thinking, and such a cause is man. Nothing past is an object of choice: no one chooses to have sacked Troy; and Agathon is right, that of this alone is even God deprived, to make undone what has once been done.

We may arrive at the nature of practical wisdom by considering to whom we ascribe it. It is thought the mark of a practically wise man to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect, as what makes for health or strength, but about living well as a whole. But no one deliberates about what cannot be otherwise, nor about what he cannot do. Practical wisdom, then, cannot be knowledge, for the field of action can be otherwise; nor art, for making has an end beyond itself, but doing cannot, good doing being itself the end. It remains that it is a true state, joined with reason, apt for action, concerned with what is good and bad for man. For this cause we think Pericles and men like him practically wise, because they can see what is good for themselves and what is good for men in general, and we count as such those who are skilled in managing households or states.

Pleasure and pain do not destroy or distort every judgement, that the angles of a triangle equal two right angles, for instance, but they do destroy the judgements that bear on action. For the first principles of action are the ends for which we act; and to the man corrupted by pleasure or pain the principle at once fails to appear, and he no longer sees that this is the end for the sake of which everything should be chosen and done; for vice tends to destroy the principle.

Practical wisdom is concerned with human affairs, and with what can be deliberated about. Nor is it concerned with universals only: it must recognise the particulars as well, for it issues in action, and action deals with particulars. This is why some men who lack general knowledge are more effective in action than others who have it, above all men of experience. If a man knew that light meats are digestible and wholesome, but not which meats are light, he would not produce health; the man who knows that the flesh of birds is light and wholesome is more likely to. Since practical wisdom is a thing of action, then, a man needs both sorts of knowledge, but the particular sort the more.

This is confirmed by the fact that the young become geometricians and mathematicians, and wise in such matters, but a young man of practical wisdom does not seem to be found. The cause is that practical wisdom is of particulars, which become familiar from experience, and a young man has no experience, for it is length of time that gives it.

There is a faculty called cleverness, which is such as to be able to do the things that tend towards any mark we have set ourselves, and to hit it. If the mark is noble, the faculty is praiseworthy; if base, it is mere unscrupulousness. Practical wisdom is not this faculty, but it does not exist without it. And this eye of the soul does not reach its proper state without goodness; for the reasonings about action have a starting point, the end and the chief good, and this does not appear except to the good man, for vice distorts the vision and makes men go wrong about the principles of action. So it is plain that a man cannot be practically wise without being good.

We must therefore reconsider virtue also. As practical wisdom stands to cleverness, not identical but alike, so does virtue in the full sense stand to natural virtue. Everyone thinks that each type of character belongs to us in some sense by nature, for we are just, temperate, brave and the rest from the moment of birth; yet the natural states belong to children and to beasts as well, and without intellect they are plainly harmful, as a powerful body moving without sight comes down with a powerful fall. But let the man once acquire intellect, and his action is transformed, and his state, while still like the natural one, will then be virtue in the full sense. This is why some say all the virtues are forms of practical wisdom, and why Socrates was in one way right in his enquiry and in another wrong: wrong in thinking that all the virtues are forms of wisdom, right in saying that they do not exist without it. Socrates thought the virtues were reasonings, that they were all forms of knowledge; we say they involve reason. It is clear, then, that a man cannot be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral virtue.

One may ask in what sense a man judges rightly when he behaves without self-command. That he can do so knowing, in the strict sense, what is right, some say is impossible: for it would be strange, as Socrates thought, that while knowledge is present in a man something else should master it and drag it about like a slave. Socrates, indeed, fought against the whole account, holding that there is no such thing as weakness of will: no one, he said, acts against what is best while judging it to be best; men do so only through ignorance of what is best. Now this account is at variance with the plain facts, and we must enquire about the affection: if it comes about through ignorance, what manner of ignorance is it?

The word know is used in two senses: the man who has knowledge but is not using it, and the man who is using it, are both said to know. And a man may have knowledge in yet another fashion: within having but not using, we see a state that includes both having and not having, as in the man asleep, or mad, or drunk. This is exactly the condition of men under passion, for fits of anger and desire visibly alter the body too, and in some men even cause madness. Plainly, then, we must say the weak-willed are in a state like theirs. Their saying the words of knowledge proves nothing: men in these states recite demonstrations and verses of Empedocles, and learners string sentences together before they know what they mean, for knowledge must grow into a man, and that takes time. The man behaving without self-command, then, must be supposed to speak his moral lines as an actor speaks.

When there is in the mind a universal judgement forbidding to taste, and another that everything sweet is pleasant, with its particular, this is sweet, and this last is the one at work, and desire happens to be present, then the one judgement says avoid this, but desire leads on, for desire can move each of our members. So it comes about that a man behaves without self-command under the influence, in a sense, of reason and opinion, an opinion not in itself contrary to right reason but only accidentally so, for it is the desire, and not the opinion, that is contrary. And thus the position Socrates sought to establish comes out after all: the affection does not arise in the presence of what is thought to be knowledge in the strict sense, nor is it that knowledge which is dragged about by passion, but knowledge of the perceptible particular.

The man without self-restraint is not given to remorse, for he stands by his choice; but the weak-willed man is all remorse. So the case is not as we put it earlier: the first is incurable, and the second can be cured. For wickedness is like the chronic diseases, dropsy and consumption, while weakness of will is like the acute: the one a continuous evil, the other not. The self-indulgent man is the worse, for he is unaware of his own state, but the weak-willed man is not. And weakness of will is not vice in the full sense, though in a way perhaps it is, for it acts against choice, where vice acts from it. In the actions, at any rate, they are alike; it is as Demodocus said of the Milesians: the Milesians are not fools, but they do the very things fools do. So the weak-willed are not unjust, but they do unjust things.

The same man cannot be at once practically wise and weak-willed, for a man of practical wisdom is at the same time good in character, and it is not knowing only but being apt to act that makes him what he is; and the weak-willed man is not apt to act. The weak-willed man is like a city that votes every right measure and has excellent laws, but uses none of them, as in the gibe of Anaxandrides, the city willed it, that cares nothing for laws; whereas the bad man is like a city that does use its laws, but bad ones.

Pleasure is wrongly described as a felt process of becoming. It should rather be called an activity of our natural state, and instead of felt, unimpeded. Since every state may have unimpeded activities, and whether happiness be the activity of all of them or of some one, that activity, if unimpeded, must be most worthy of choice; and this is what pleasure is. So the chief good will be a kind of pleasure, whatever may be true of most pleasures. And for this reason all men suppose the happy life to be a pleasant one, and weave pleasure into happiness, reasonably enough, for no impeded activity is complete, and happiness is a complete thing. Hence the happy man needs the goods of the body, and external goods, and fortune besides, so that he may not be hindered in these ways. As for those who say that the man broken on the wheel, or fallen into great misfortunes, is happy so long as he is good, they are talking nonsense, whether they mean it or not. And that all creatures, beasts and men alike, pursue pleasure is some sign of its being in a way the chief good; perhaps what they pursue is not the pleasure they think, nor the pleasure they would name, but one and the same all the while, for in everything there is something of the divine.

After this it would naturally follow to treat of friendship, for it is a virtue, or at least involves virtue, and it is most necessary to life. Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all the other goods; indeed it is those who possess wealth and station and power who are thought to need friends most of all, for what is the use of such prosperity if the power of conferring benefit is taken away, which is exercised towards friends above all? In poverty, too, and in every other misfortune, men think friends their one refuge; and friendship helps those in their prime towards noble action, for two going together, as Homer says, are better able both to think and to act.

Friendship seems also to hold cities together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice: for concord seems akin to friendship, and this they aim at most, while faction, its enemy, they drive out above all. When men are friends they have no need of justice; when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a matter of friendship.

The kinds of friendship are three, equal in number to the objects of affection, for in respect of each there can be mutual love, known to both parties. Those who love each other for utility do not love each other for what each is in himself, but only in so far as some good comes to them from one another; and likewise those who love for pleasure, for they care for the witty not as being men of a certain character but as being pleasant to themselves. So those who love for utility love for the sake of what is good to themselves, and those who love for pleasure for the sake of what is pleasant to themselves, and the friend is loved not for being what he is, but as useful or agreeable. These friendships, then, are accidental, and easily dissolved: utility is nothing permanent, but varies from season to season; so, the ground of the friendship being gone, the friendship dissolves with it, having existed only in relation to that ground.

Friendship of this kind seems to arise chiefly among the old, for at that age men pursue the profitable rather than the pleasant. The friendship of the young is thought to rest on pleasure, for they live by feeling, and pursue chiefly what is pleasant to themselves and near at hand; and as their age changes, so what pleases them changes too. Hence they are quick to make friendships and quick to drop them, for the friendship shifts with the pleasant object, and pleasure of that sort is quick to change. The young are amorous besides, love being for the most part a thing of feeling and of pleasure; so they love and soon cease to love, changing often within a single day.

Perfect friendship is that between the good, and those alike in virtue: for these wish each other’s good alike in so far as each is good, and each is good in himself. And those who wish good to their friends for the friends’ own sake are friends most of all, for they feel so towards each other because of what each is, and not accidentally; so their friendship lasts as long as they are good, and virtue is a lasting thing. Each is good absolutely and good to his friend, for the good are both good without qualification and useful to one another, and pleasant likewise. Such friendship is, as one would expect, lasting, for in it are joined all the things friends should have; and it is naturally rare, for such men are few. Besides, it needs time, and the habit of living together; for as the proverb has it, men cannot know one another until they have eaten the requisite salt together, nor accept one another as friends until each has shown himself worthy of love, and won the other’s trust. Those who are quick to treat each other as friends wish to be friends, but are not, unless they are worthy of love and know it of one another; for the wish for friendship comes quickly, but friendship does not.

Most men, through love of honour, seem to wish to be loved rather than to love, which is why most men love flattery; but friendship seems to lie in the loving rather than in the being loved. A sign of this is the delight of mothers in loving: some give their children to others to bring up, and love them and know them without seeking to be loved in return, if both are not possible; it seems enough to them to see the children doing well, and they love them even if the children, in their ignorance, render nothing of what is due to a mother. Since friendship, then, stands rather in loving, and those who love their friends are praised, loving seems to be the virtue of friends; so that where this exists in due measure, there men are lasting friends, and their friendship endures. In this way, too, those who are unequal may best be friends, for so they may be equalised.

Friendship and justice seem to concern the same objects and to be found among the same persons: in every community there is thought to be some form of justice, and some friendship as well. Men address as friends their shipmates and fellow soldiers, and so too those associated with them in any other kind of community. The proverb says rightly, what friends have is common, for friendship rests on community. And the demands of justice grow with the friendship: it is a worse thing to rob a companion than a fellow citizen, to refuse help to a brother than to a stranger, to strike one’s father than anyone else at all.

In each constitution friendship appears to the same extent as justice. That of a king for his subjects lies in superiority of benefit, for a king does good to his subjects, if he is a good king and cares for them as a shepherd for his sheep; hence Homer called Agamemnon shepherd of the people. In the corrupt forms, as justice is scanty, so is friendship, and least of all in the worst: in a tyranny there is little or no friendship. For where ruler and ruled have nothing in common there is no friendship, as there is no justice: towards a slave as slave there is nothing in common, for a slave is a living tool, and a tool a lifeless slave. As slave, then, there is no friendship towards him; but as man there is, for there seems to be some justice between any man and any other who can share in law and covenant, and therefore friendship also, in so far as he is a man. In democracies, on the other hand, friendship counts for most, for where the citizens are equal they have much in common.

Every mark by which men define a friend belongs to the good man in relation to himself. He is at one with himself, and desires the same things with his whole soul; he wishes himself to live and be preserved, and above all the part with which he thinks, for existence is a good to the good man. And he wishes to spend time with himself, for he does it with pleasure: the memories of what he has done are delightful, his hopes for the future are good, and his mind is well stocked with things to contemplate.

Since each of these marks belongs to the good man in relation to himself, and he stands to his friend as to himself, the friend being another self, friendship is held to be some one of these things, and friends those in whom they are found. The wicked have no share in them, being at variance with themselves. Bad men seek out company to spend their days with, and run from themselves, for alone they remember too much that is ugly and expect more of the same, but with others they can forget. Having nothing lovable in them, they have no friendly feeling towards themselves; their soul is torn by faction, one part pulling this way and one that, as if tearing the man apart. If to be so is utter misery, then we should strain every nerve to flee wickedness and to be good; for so a man may be a friend to himself, and become a friend to another.

There is a question, too, whether a man ought to love himself most or someone else, for men reproach those who care most for themselves, and call them self-loving as a term of disgrace. But the conditions by which friends are marked are found first of all in a man’s relation to himself: he is his own best friend, and so ought to love himself best. The question is which sense of the word we mean.

Those who make self-love a reproach give the name to men who assign themselves the larger share of money, honours and bodily pleasures; for these are what most men grasp at and busy themselves about as the best things, and hence they are fought over. Such self-lovers are justly reproached. But if a man were always claiming the noble course for himself, doing above all what is just, or temperate, or whatever else accords with virtue, no one would call him self-loving, and no one would blame him. Yet such a man would seem to be the truer self-lover. He assigns to himself what is noblest and best, and gratifies the most authoritative part of himself, obeying it in everything; and he loves this part and pleases it most who is most a lover of self. So the good man ought to be self-loving, for by doing noble acts he will both profit himself and benefit his fellows; and the bad man ought not, for he will hurt both himself and his neighbours, following as he does his base passions.

It is true of the good man that he does much for his friends and his country, and dies for them if need be: he will surrender money, honours and all the goods men fight for, keeping for himself the noble; for he would rather live nobly one year than indifferently many, rather do one great and noble action than many small ones. This, no doubt, is the case with those who die for others: they choose a great nobility for their own. He will give away money that his friends may have more, for the friend gets the money, but he himself gets the noble, so that he assigns the greater good to himself; and it is the same with honours and offices. In everything praiseworthy, then, the good man plainly assigns himself the larger share of the noble. In this sense one ought to be self-loving; in the vulgar sense, not.

It is disputed, too, whether the happy man will need friends, since the blessed and self-sufficient may seem to have all good things already. But it is surely absurd to make the happy man a solitary, for no one would choose to possess all the goods in the world on condition of being alone, since man is a social creature, and formed by nature for living with others.

Happiness, we said at the outset, is a kind of activity, and an activity plainly comes into being, and is not there to be owned like a piece of property. If being happy lies in living and being active, and the activity of the good man is excellent and pleasant in itself, and if we can study our neighbours better than ourselves, and their actions better than our own, then the actions of good men who are their friends are pleasant to the good. The man at the height of happiness will therefore need such friends, since he chooses to contemplate actions that are good and his own, and the actions of a good friend are both. Besides, life is hard for a solitary, for it is not easy to keep up continuous activity by oneself, but with others and towards others it is easier. And as Theognis says, there is a training of virtue too in living with the good.

Should a man, then, make as many friends as he can? For friends of use, to repay the services of many is laborious, and life is not long enough to do it; of friends for pleasure, a few are enough, like seasoning in food. But of good friends, is there a measure of the company, as there is of a city? Ten men do not make a city, and a hundred thousand are a city no longer. The right number of friends is presumably the largest number one can live with, for living together we found to be the surest mark of friendship, and it is obvious that one cannot live with many and share oneself out among them.

It is well, then, not to seek to have as many friends as possible, but as many as suffice for living together; indeed it would seem impossible to be a great friend to many, as one cannot be in love with many at once. So it appears in practice: the friendships of comrades are between few, and the famous ones are sung of pairs. The man of many friends, who greets everyone as an intimate, is thought to be a friend to none, except as fellow citizens are, and men call him obsequious.

As lovers prize the sight of the beloved above all, so to friends the most desirable thing is living together, for friendship is communion. And whatever it is that each man counts his existence, whatever makes life worth choosing to him, in that he wishes to share his days with his friends. So some drink together, some dice together, others train together, or hunt, or study philosophy together, each sort spending their days in whatever they love best in life. The friendship of the bad, then, turns to wickedness, for they are unstable, and share what is bad, and grow like one another in evil; but the friendship of the good is good, and grows with their company; and they seem to become better by exercising their friendship and by correcting one another, for each takes the stamp of what pleases him in the other; whence the saying, from the good, good things you shall learn.

Seeing seems complete at any moment, lacking nothing which could come later to complete its nature; and pleasure resembles it. Pleasure is a whole, and at no moment could one take a pleasure whose nature would be completed by its lasting longer. For this reason it is not a motion, for every motion takes time and is for the sake of an end, and is complete only when it has produced what it aims at, as building is complete only when the house is built. But the nature of pleasure is complete at any moment whatever.

Pleasure completes the activity not as the formed state in us does, but as a sort of crowning grace, like the bloom of youth on those in their prime.

The pleasure proper to an activity increases that activity: men become geometers by delighting in geometry, and lovers of music, or of building, or of any other pursuit, improve in their own work through the pleasure they take in it. The alien pleasures, on the other hand, ruin an activity, much as its own pains would. Lovers of the flute cannot attend to an argument if they overhear someone fluting, for they enjoy the fluting more than their present activity; the pleasure of the flute destroys the activity of the argument. This is why, when we enjoy anything greatly, we scarcely do anything else, and why we turn to a second occupation only when we are but mildly pleased with the first, as people eat sweets in the theatre most when the acting is bad.

Each animal is thought to have its own proper pleasure, as it has its own work; as Heraclitus says, an ass would choose fodder before gold, for food is pleasanter to asses than gold. The pleasures, then, that complete the activities of the complete and blessed man are in the proper sense the pleasures of man, and the rest in a secondary way, as the activities are.

If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should accord with the highest virtue, and that will be the virtue of the best part of us: the part thought naturally to rule and guide us and to take cognisance of things noble and divine, being itself divine or the most divine element in us. Its activity in accordance with its proper virtue will be complete happiness; and this activity is contemplative. For it is the highest activity, since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and its objects the highest that can be known; and it is the most continuous, for we can contemplate more continuously than we can do anything else; and it is the most pleasant, for philosophy is thought to hold pleasures marvellous for purity and permanence. Self-sufficiency, too, belongs most to contemplation, for the just man needs people towards whom and with whom to act justly, while the wise man can contemplate even by himself. And this activity alone would seem to be loved for its own sake, for nothing comes of it beyond the contemplating, whereas from the practical activities we look for something over and above the action.

Such a life will be higher than man’s; for a man will live it not in so far as he is man, but in so far as something divine is in him. If the intellect, then, is divine compared with man, the life of the intellect is divine compared with human life. Nor should we listen to those who tell us that, being men, we should think human thoughts, and mortal thoughts, being mortal; rather we should make ourselves immortal so far as we can, and strain every nerve to live by the best thing in us; for small as it is in bulk, in power and worth it surpasses everything. What is proper to each thing is by nature best and pleasantest for it; and for man that is the life of the intellect, if the intellect above all is man. This life, then, is the happiest.

Second comes the life in accordance with the other kind of virtue, for the activities of that virtue are human: just acts and brave acts and the rest we do towards one another, in contracts and services and actions of every sort, observing what befits each. This kind of happiness, then, is human; but that of the intellect is separate and apart. And that complete happiness is a contemplative activity may appear also from this, that we suppose the gods most blessed and happy of all; and what sort of actions ought we to attribute to them? Just acts? Will they not appear ridiculous, making contracts with one another and restoring deposits and the like? Yet all men suppose them to live, and therefore to be active, for surely they do not sleep like Endymion. Now if action is taken from a living being, and production besides, what is left but contemplation? So the activity of the god, surpassing in blessedness, will be contemplative. As far as contemplation reaches, then, so far does happiness; for it is precious in itself.

Being a man, however, the contemplative will need external prosperity too: our nature is not sufficient of itself for contemplating, and the body must be healthy, and fed, and cared for. Yet it must not be thought that because a man cannot be blessed without external goods, he will need many of them, or great ones, in order to be happy: one can do noble deeds without ruling land and sea, for a man can act virtuously from moderate means. And he who is active in accordance with intellect, and cultivates it, seems to be both in the best state and dearest to the gods; for if the gods take any care for human things, as men think they do, it would be reasonable for them to delight in what is best and most akin to themselves, and to reward those who most love and honour it. All this belongs most of all, plainly, to the wise man. He is dearest to the gods, then; and the same man, in all likelihood, is also the happiest.

If, then, on these matters and the virtues, and friendship too and pleasure, we have said enough in outline, is our undertaking to be counted complete? Or is it rather, as men say, that in things done the end is not to have contemplated each of them but to do them? Concerning virtue, then, it is not enough to know; we must try to have it and use it, or take whatever other road there is to becoming good. Arguments seem to have power to encourage and stir up the generous among the young; but they are powerless to turn the many towards what is good and noble, for the many do not naturally obey a sense of shame, but fear, and of the noble and the truly pleasant they have not so much as a notion, never having tasted it. What argument could remake such men? It is not possible, or not easy, to change by argument what has long been fixed in the character. The hearer’s soul must first have been worked on by habits, to delight and hate rightly, like ground that is to nourish seed; for passion, in general, seems to yield not to argument but to force.

But to get right training for virtue from youth up is hard unless one is brought up under laws of the right kind, for a temperate and hardy life is not pleasant to most men, least of all to the young. Their nurture and pursuits, therefore, should be ordered by law, for they will not be painful once they have become habitual. A father’s command has no strength or compulsion in it, nor has any one man’s, unless he is a king or the like; but law has compulsory power, and it is at the same time a rule proceeding from a certain practical wisdom and intellect. And while men hate any person who opposes their impulses, even when he is right to do so, the law is not resented for prescribing what is good.

Yet only in Sparta, or nearly so, does the lawgiver seem to have concerned himself with nurture and pursuits; in most cities each man lives as he pleases, ruling wife and children in the manner of the Cyclops. Since the public neglects these matters, it would seem to fall to each of us to help our own children and friends towards virtue; and this a man will best be able to do if he learns the legislator’s art. Since our predecessors have left the subject of legislation unexamined, it is better, presumably, that we examine it ourselves, and the whole question of the constitution, so that the philosophy of human things may be completed as far as lies in us. First, then, let us try to review whatever has been soundly said in part by those before us; then, from the constitutions we have collected, consider what preserves and what destroys cities, and from what causes some are well governed and others ill; for after considering all this we shall perhaps see better what constitution is best, and how each must be ordered, and what laws and customs it must use.