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Preface 
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609611.002.0005 Pages vi–ix

A book, like a man, owes many debts. In this case, the most salient are new, and old. But for a two-year
Leverhulme Fellowship from 2006 to 2008 this book would not exist; it might well have bene ted if I had
foreseen needing a third year. I remain indebted both to the Trust, and to whoever advised them. I initially
envisaged a short monograph on practical judgements; but in Greek philosophy, as in philosophy,
everything connects, and my range of coverage has extended over what might well be the matter of several
books. At the same time, I am grateful to the anonymous readers for the press who focused my mind upon
trying to make this book more explicitly of a piece. Selective readers will select within it; but I hope that
others may now nd that its pieces t together perceptibly within a jigsaw.
My older debts go back into the distant but undimmed past. As an undergraduate at Balliol, I had the good
fortune to be introduced rst to Plato’s Republic, and then to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, by Anthony
Kenny (who is celebrating his 80th birthday as I write). It must disconcert us that texts like these form the
origins of Western analytical philosophy, and yet are shown by this very style of philosophizing to be
problematic and debatable for the interpreter. The questions that they pose, and the answers that they o er,
both fascinate and elude us. This may be found frustrating, or it may bring home to us, as our
contemporaries cannot, that once we escape the ipsissima verba of a philosopher, what we took to be rock
turns out to be shingle. Of course, this disappointment makes possible a form of progress, for the twin
exercises of detecting and resolving ambiguities constitute philosophy in action, and not some distinct
activity, say ‘history of philosophy’, that is its country cousin. Kenny taught me to nd these uncertainties
exhilarating rather than exasperating, and to view alternative responses not as proof of culpable error, but
as displays of ingenuity that o er scope for a judiciousness that should never be censorious. Detective
novels are about nothing of consequence, and have a single solution; philosophical classics are about things
that matter, and invite many interpretations. Yet we at once respect the letter of the texts, the precision of
the author, our own powers of detection, and the importance of what is at stake if we always strive to
1
p. viii discover readings that best t the evidence—and also best reward the reader. It is a criterion of greatness
in philosophy that interpretations that hug the texts also advance our understanding of the issues. An
anxiety in writing so wide-ranging a book has always been that I have lacked the time or patience to cling to
the texts with the requisite tenacity.
Already in the late 1960s, Kenny delivered a British Academy lecture, on Plato’s tripartite soul, that escaped
a view of the Republic as more fallacious than fertile that was not uncommon in Oxford. (At Corpus, my twin
actually heard from Jim Urmson a suggestion that Aristotle was evidently rst rate, but Plato dubiously so.)
He also published a highly in uential paper on Aristotle’s account of acrasia. When I came to write that
week’s essay, that issue of Phronesis was missing from the Bodleian; so I could not learn better from him—
and the line I took then I obstinately still take, in its essentials. (By such accidents are views formed.) Since
then, Kenny has transformed our conception of Aristotle’s ethical corpus. Though I lack the expertise to
assess his most innovative arguments, which are statistical, I respect them in following his labelling of the
books common to the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics; at one crucial point (in chapter C 2 § V) it will
become clear that this is also motivated by awareness of one particular reason to interpret them primarily
within their Eudemian context. (Not that this generally matters for me, since I here nd the two largely in
2
agreement, and can most often cite them indi erently.)
It was also at Balliol that I met Anselm Müller (from whom I might have learned much about ethics if he had
not been more interested, at that time, in philosophical logic). By the time we met again, in the 1990s, I had
come to appreciate the depth of his re ections upon practical reason. Fortunately, many of the broader
insights of his Praktisches Folgern und Selbstgestaltung nach Aristoteles (1982) have also appeared in English. I
am indebted to him in three chapters of this book (A 2, B 2, C 2). Two other German books from which I have
learnt much are Richard Loening’s Die Zurechnungslehre von Aristoteles (1903), whose wealth of citation from
p. ix the corpus remains invaluable, and Wolfgang Wieland’s Platon und die Formen des Wissens (1982).
Whereas my Plato is undoctrinaire, Wieland’s is without doctrines; yet I owe to him my understanding of
Plato’s conception of the ultimate end of human desire. I had the luck to hear Wieland lecturing on Plato
when I was learning German at Marburg, between school and university, in 1966; the clarity of his
enunciation was as striking as his intellectual authority.
In composing this book, I have plundered a number of pieces already published. Besides Price (2006, 2010),
these are the following: ‘Was Aristotle a Particularist?’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient
Philosophy 21 (2005), 191–212; ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Practical Thinking’, in C. Sandis (ed.), New Essays
on the Explanation of Action (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 384–95; ‘The Practical Syllogism in
Aristotle: A New Interpretation’ (a mistaken one, alas), Philosophiegeschichte und logische Analyse/Logical
Analysis and History of Philosophy 11 (2008), 151–62; ‘Aristotle on the Ends of Deliberation’, in M. Pakaluk
and G. Pearson (eds), Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
135–58; review of Carlo Natali (ed.), Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII. Symposium Aristotelicum, Archiv
für Geschichte der Philosophie 93 (2011), 100–10. When I have otherwise referred to things I have written, this
is not out of an excess of self-esteem, but to save space and avoid unacknowledged repetition.
A. W. P.
Kensington, London
March 2011
Notes
1 Modern philosophers may also be richly illumined by attention not to what we are reading, but to what they were reading.
With Plato and Aristotle, we know too little of this, and have no choice but to read them as they may well have hoped to be
read eventually, not as period pieces, but as contributions to a tradition that they could start but not steer. The dialogues
of Plato already show a developed awareness that philosophical texts (such as Protagorasʼ Truth) are multiply
interpretable; he regrets this in his own case but does not expect to escape it, foreseeing the uncertainties to come with a
self-deprecating apprehension (Phaedrus 275d4–e5, 276d1–5).
However, for some significant divergences see Price (1997a: ch. 5).
2
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CHAPTER
Introduction 
A. W. Price
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Abstract
Eudaimonia is a focal concept in Plato and Aristotle. It is commonly rendered by ‘happiness’, which is alright if that term is
used in a non-determinate sense. It connotes acting well; not merely doing a thing that is to be done, but achieving a value that
inheres in action, and lends it point. Virtue is needed both to suggest subordinate goals, and to protect the agent from being led
off course by temptations.
Keywords: eudaimonia, happiness, acting well, final goal, virtue

The contemporary student of moral philosophy who turns back to Greek ethics must often be refreshed by a sense of human reality.
There are indeed great differences between our societies; yet, with a few exceptions (notably, in attitudes towards women and
slavery), these are rather technological than ethical. As we read Plato and Aristotle (it is harder to derive such a sense from the
surviving fragments of others), we are presented with a concrete picture of life that is conveyed with the use of psychological and
ethical concepts that we largely share. Aristotle, it is true, is a fount of newly precise conceptions that are half-familiar, and yet hard
to pin down, and not easily expressible in our own terms. Yet he remains close to everyday moral experience, and distant from the
abstract preoccupations of much modern ethical theory. Even Aristotelian rigour remains far from two ambitions that have been
prevalent recently: there is no focus upon the analysis of the nature of such colourlessly schematic notions as are conveyed by
‘value’, ‘obligation’, or ‘reason for action’; and there is no attempt to construct an ethical theory that could systematically determine
their proper application. Instead, there is a concern with relatively specific conceptions of virtues of character (such as courage and
temperance), and a focus upon the questions how these connect, and how they contribute to a choiceworthy life. The subject-matter
of ethics so conceived is our everyday assessments of agents and options. It is neither as metaphysical as the nature of value, nor as
prescriptive as a decision procedure for choice and action.
And yet we find at the heart of almost all Greek ethics a single concept whose content is elusive, and centrality puzzling. This is the
concept of eudaimonia, commonly translated as ‘happiness’, though almost equally often with a warning that this may be
misleading. How and to what extent the warning is needed may depend on how we think of happiness. Within modern ethics, this is
familiar as the focal point of utilitarianism, which, in its classic form, proposes pleasure as at once the natural and the proper object
p. 2 of desire. An increase in happiness is taken to involve an increase in pleasure (or, more exactly, in the balance of pleasure over
pain, or of more pleasure over less). Which is supposed to yield a quantitative rule: one option is better than another if it does more
to increase happiness, in one of these ways. However, this is evidently a revisionary conception of happiness. On our actual
conception, a certain course of action may give pleasure to an unhappy subject without making him happy: should it be pursued as
producing pleasure, or omitted as neither producing nor increasing happiness? Even if he is happy, is it evident that offering him,
say, a chocolate cream makes him happier? Hardly; and yet this might be an amiable thing to do.
It may be wiser to set premature philosophizing aside, and acknowledge the looseness and openness of the connotations of the term
‘happiness’ before we consider any distinctive theory of what it is for an agent or a life to earn it. In our everyday usage, ‘happiness’
labels a state that is desirable for a human being, but uncertainly achievable and largely indeterminate. Kant complained, ‘The
concept of happiness is such an indeterminate concept that, although every human being wishes to attain this, he can still never say
determinately and consistently with himself what he really wishes and wills’ (Groundwork 4:418). In his view, the concept derives
from experience, and cannot transcend our everyday conceptions. Yet these are multiple and partial, identifying various desiderabilia
that are dubiously compatible: he instances riches without anxiety or envy, insight without discontent, health without temptation to
excess. About common specifications Aristotle can complain very similarly: ‘Often even the same man identifies it [eudaimonia]
1
with different things, with health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor’ (Nicomachean Ethics [EN] I.4 1095a23–5). And yet
he supposes that eudaimonia is not just one of those things that everyone would like to enjoy, but constitutes an intelligible and
practicable goal in any agent’s life, and indeed, as I understand him, the ultimate goal of all his actions (in a privileged sense, AE B.2
2
p. 3 1139a17–20). He even tries to formulate a stable definition of eudaimonia fit to ground his ethical theory. So he does not agree
with Kant that eudaimonia is a determinable that resists any consistent determinations. Rather, he believes that philosophy can make
its determinable content more precise, and so clarify both its proper role within our thinking, and how it can take on acceptable
determinations from context to context—not that it is generally the task of ethical theory to ground those determinations.
It seems harmless to render the term eudaimonia by ‘happiness’ so long as we intend this term in an indeterminate sense that permits
Plato and Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia as a mode of living that is achieved in, rather than through, acting well. They take
success in life to be primarily a matter of achieving that abstract goal. They agree that it forms the goal of action, and has no further
goal beyond itself. ‘For the sake of eudaimonia’ becomes the final answer to a question ‘Why are you doing this?’—though since
whatever one chose to do would have that final goal, this answer doesn’t yet explain why one should choose to do this rather than
that. The kernel of this shared position is a certain view of choice: at least when he acts on deliberation, an agent chooses to do what
he thinks is the thing to do. This tightly links decision to practical judgement. However, that is an entirely formal claim that does
little to clarify either the agent’s choice of concrete goals, or his ultimate motivation. Perhaps he tries to identify and perform
whatever is indeed the thing to do; but it doesn’t follow that doing that has any point or purpose in itself that could make success
humanly rewarding. What the concept of acting well promises to add to that doing the thing to be done is an intelligible teleology.
Acting well needs to be characterized in ways that bring out how, though abstract, it is an end worth achieving for its own sake.
Merely insisting that no end can count as eudaimonia if it is pursued for some further goal would be a definitional full stop. It needs
to be shown how desire can find satisfaction in the achievement of eudaimonia.
In respect of ethical action Plato and Aristotle diverge characteristically, Plato identifying values that are also found, and perhaps
most saliently, outside action, Aristotle, values that are unique to action. Plato looks for a structure (taxis) that the soul both acquires
and manifests by responding to situations in ways that order it properly in relation to the world, and in itself (Gorg. 503e6–504b5).
p. 4 Aristotle looks for features that make an act in context fine or noble (kalos), such as its being done freely, with no ulterior purpose,
3
and in the face of temptations. Both incur some of the same uncertainties. Notably, are we to think of acting well as making the
best of whatever circumstances arise, however unfavourable they may be, or as exploiting occasions that a man can embrace, and so
helping to make up a life that a man would wish for himself? There may or may not be a consistent answer to be found in the early
Plato that I shall be considering. Aristotle’s answer is better developed, and leads him to significant distinctions between different
ways and contexts, more or less welcome, in which a virtue may be exercised. Finally, they locate acting well not only in ethical
action, but also, and especially, in intellectual activity. Hence each has to explain how ethical obligations are not trumped by
intellectual opportunities.
Much has been written recently about these things in Plato and Aristotle. Any addition to it will bring out certain points, and occlude
others—both transiently. What prompts me to join in is the hope of introducing a different perspective. Debate about what (in a
metaphor of J. L. Austin’s, 1968: 271) fills the bill of being happy and acting well shouldn’t distract us from asking about the bill to
be filled. Acting well as a final goal of action has at once to be abstract and attractive. What counts as acting well from context to
context is concrete and variable. Acting well is itself to be identified not with some tutti frutti compilation of subsidiary ends, but as
the ultimate target which they all subserve. Talk of an ‘inclusive’ conception of eudaimonia has been recurrent in recent discussion
of Aristotle, and can be partly translated into sense: the range of activities that can count as themselves ways of acting well may be
taken to be wide or narrow. There is then room for a secondary and derivative conception of eudaimonia as a set or sequence of such
activities, which can be viewed in this relation as components. Yet as the ultimate goal of action, eudaimonia is rather to be
understood as an abstract end that lends final point to concrete actions.
An agent who is to achieve eudaimonia needs appropriate virtues, of character and of intellect. Apart from a capacity for practical
reasoning from an end to a way of means, he needs virtue to play two roles which we may broadly distinguish as guiding and
executive. First, he must be oriented towards ends, standing or occasional, that correctly (in Austin’s metaphor) fill the bill of
eudaimonia. Such ends need not be very determinate: reasoning can consider ways of specifying a vague end (what might be
p. 5 enjoyable this evening?), as well as means towards a determinate one (how am I to get to the fleapit?). Yet with only a bare
abstraction to get it going, thought must be defeated by an excess of possibilities; so it needs to be guided by a repertory of ends that
lend some content to the bare target of acting well. Secondly, the agent must be effectively motivated to act in accordance with such
reasoning. This is virtue’s executive role. In part, it is a corollary of an aspect of its first role: not just conception of an end, but
orientation towards it, should carry down any consequent sequence of ways or means. It should not only set thought going, but
display some resistance—except as reason prescribes—to being defeated or eclipsed by rival desiderabilia prompted by perception,
or thought itself.
Aristotle’s understanding of these things builds upon ideas and structures already emergent within Plato’s. My sequential explication
of the relevant texts will hope to do justice to continuities as well as contrasts. Unfortunately, perhaps, any adequate discussion has
to be complex enough to do justice to an embarras de richesse both of primary texts and of recent treatments. Yet I hope that the
reader will trace, guiding one through the windings of my reflections, an Ariadne’s thread.
Notes
1 Dover (1974: 174) cites contexts, from history and oratory, in which eudaimonia, or eutuchia (ʻgood fortuneʼ),
e ectively connote material prosperity, even when the speaker does not hold it, in the absence of peace of mind, to be
choiceworthy. Elsewhere, it may connote social high standing. This evidences that tradition associated happiness
more closely with external luck than philosophy was to do. Di ering conceptions may evidence disagreement about
universal values (cf. EN I.4 1095a20–3). Variations may also derive from di erent contexts within which di erent values
become transiently salient (as Aristotle notes at a23–5).
2 I follow Kenny (1979) in referring to the three ʻcommon booksʼ, which constitute at once EN V to VII and Eudemian
Ethics [EE] IV to VI, as AE A to C.
3 It is true that some of Aristotleʼs central concepts have a wider application, notably that of the mean; see Tracy (1969).
However, what he presents as magnetic is not that, but the fine.
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PART FRONT MATTER
Part front matter for Part A: 


JAMES BOSWELL, Life of Johnson, ætat. 72 (1781): ‘When I in a low-spirited t, was talking to him
with indi erence of the pursuits which generally engage us in a course of action, and inquiring a
reason for taking so much trouble; “Sir (said he, in an animated tone) it is driving on the system of
life.”’
ANSELM MÜLLER, ‘Absolute Requirement’: ‘I am, by constitution, meant to lead a certain sort of
life, I cannot, therefore, be true to my innermost tendency unless I do this, and so I must, whatever
particular aims I may have, and on pain of losing myself, live this sort of life.’
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CHAPTER
A 1 Plato on Eudaimonia 
A. W. Price

Abstract
In various Platonic dialogues we meet phrases like ‘ rst friend’, ‘be happy’, ‘doing well’ used to
connote a nal end of action. Related goods may be useful instruments (but their use needs to be
guided by reason), or aspects of acting well. The nal end of action is realized in action, and is not a
consequence of action. eudaimonia is a goal set before each agent as soon as he starts to act; it is not
chosen and cannot be renounced. This conception underlies the Socratic paradox, ‘No one does evil
willingly.’ The value of acting well consists in order and structure, values also found in the universe
outside the world of action.
Keywords: eudaimonia, doing well, acting well, good, luck

I. Doing and Living Well
Explicit in Plato’s Lysis is the centrality of an end of action that is not identi ed, but has implicitly to be
identical to eudaimonia. Discussing what is a ‘friend’ (philos) in the sense of being an object of love or desire,
Socrates recognizes that we commonly desire one thing for the sake of another which is itself desired, as
when we desire medical expertise for the sake of health (219c1–4). Yet if that in turn is desired for the sake
of something further, we risk an in nite regress. So we must suppose that there is some starting-point
‘which is a friend rst, for the sake of which we say that the other things too, all of them are friends’ (c5–
d2). It is this rst friend that is truly a friend (d4–5). The identity of this single nal good is not speci ed.
1
However, there is no plausible candidate other than the agent’s eudaimonia. The Gorgias connects
eudaimonia and the virtues: ‘It’s necessarily very much the case…that the temperate man, because he’s just
and brave and pious,…is a completely good man, that the good man does well and admirably whatever he
does, and that the man who does well is blessed and happy’ (507b8–c5). Here temperance is justi ed
sequentially as bringing the other virtues with it, and so producing good and ne actions, and hence making
2
the agent eudaimōn.
p. 10 The nal focality of eudaimonia is set out fully within a conversation with Diotima, doubtless ctitious, that
is narrated by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium:
‘Come on, Socrates: the person who loves, loves good things; why does he love them?’
‘To have them for himself,’ I said.
‘And what will the person who has good things get by having them?’
‘That’, I said, ‘I’m better placed to answer: he’ll be happy (eudaimōn).’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘because those who are happy are happy by the possession (ktēsis) of good things,
and one no longer needs to go on to ask “And what reason does the person who wishes to be happy
have for wishing it?” Your answer seems to be nal’ (telos echein, 204e2–205a3).
The Symposium shares its moral psychology—though not its metaphysics, which assumes a theory of Forms
3
—with the early Platonic dialogues. We read similarly in the Euthydemus, but in regard to ‘doing well’ (eu
prattein),
Do all men wish to do well? Or is this question one of the ridiculous ones I was afraid of just now? I
suppose it is stupid even to raise such a question, since there could hardly be a man who would not
wish to do well…The next question, since we wish to do well, is how we are to do so. Would it be if
we had many good things? Or is this question still more simple-minded than the other, since this
must obviously be the case too? (278e3–279a4)
In the Euthydemus as in the Symposium, having good things is connected to doing well and being happy. In the
Symposium, Diotima supposes that by having good things a man becomes happy; further, that this gives a
4
further point or purpose to his having good things, whereas being happy has itself no further point or
purpose. In the Euthydemus, Socrates introduces having good things as a way or means to doing well (with
mention of having good things answering a ‘How?’ question about doing well, 279a2), which all men are
p. 11 taken evidently to desire. Here ‘doing well’ and ‘being happy’ are treated as equivalent: they occur
together with no distinction (280b6), and the statement ‘We are all keen to be happy’ (282a2) evidently
echoes ‘All men wish to do well’ (278e3). Already, however, there is a distinction between being happy/doing
well and having good things. If there was none, then one could no more say that one is happy by having good
things than that one has good things by being happy—or, indeed, that one is happy by being happy. Rather,
being happy (or doing well) is nal as a goal in a manner that having good things is not.
And yet it may be that Socrates is speaking ironically in the Euthydemus, and overstating the closeness of the
relation between the two concepts. For there ensues a series of questions and answers that leads to the
following objection:
Would the presence of good things make us happy if they were of no advantage to us, or if they
were of some?…And would they be advantageous to us if we simply had them and did not use
them?…So it seems that the man who means to be happy must not only possess such goods but
must use them too, or else there is no advantage in possessing them (ktēsis, 280b7–d7).
On the face of it, this corrects not only what Socrates initially stated as obvious in the Euthydemus, but also
what I have quoted from Diotima in the Symposium. It must be a quite di erent kind of good of which
Diotima asserts later, ‘Men only love the good’, or, more exactly, ‘their having the good’ (einai to agathon
autois, 205e7–206a8). Here, having the good must be identical to being happy. This good cannot be subject
to any distinction between having and using. It could not be that the only thing that men desired, and
desired to have, was some good, having which would be useless unless they also put it to use.
However, quite what Diotima and Socrates meant in the passages that I quoted (Symp. 204e2–205a3, Euthyd.
278e3–279a4) is unclear. When it suits him, Socrates can equivocate between goods that facilitate action,
and goods that are achieved within good action. This is evident in a passage in the Meno (77b2–79a2).
Socrates there discusses desiring good or bad things, starting from a suggestion by Meno that ‘virtue is to
desire beautiful things and have the power to secure them for oneself’ (76b4–5). He glosses desiring x as
desiring that x become one’s own (77c7–8). He then presses on Meno that being miserable is nothing else
than to desire bad things and come into the possession of them (epithumein te tōn kakōn kai ktasthai, 78a7–
p. 12 8). These evils cannot be parallel to goods that are only bene cial if put to use; if they were, they should
be harmless if not put to use. Rather, Socrates doubtless has in mind things that it is bad to do (as in the long
related discussion in Gorgias 466d6–468e5), or else bad aspects of things done. To ‘secure for oneself’ or
‘come into possession of’ an act, or aspect of an act, can be nothing but to perform the act oneself. Yet he
puts to Meno, no doubt rightly, that the good things that Meno meant were such things as health, honours,
and public o ces (78c5–7), to which he can then object that it cannot be virtue’s role to acquire such things
wickedly (78d3–79a1). Given this equivocation, one cannot be sure what Diotima or Socrates meant in the
passages that I quoted. If they had in mind goods that can be possessed without being put to use, they are
rightly corrected in the Euthydemus (280b7–d7). If they rather had in mind goods that one secures for
oneself in action, these are di erent from the goods that are there relegated to a lesser category.
It is true that, in the Euthydemus, the proposal, o ered as obvious, that we do well if we have good things
leads straight into a discussion of health and wealth, and hence to the objection (280b7–d7). Yet there may
well be an element of irony, and we have a choice of where to locate it. There is surely irony in the passage I
initially quoted, where he takes the question whether we do well if we have many good things to be ‘simple-
minded’, since the answer is ‘obvious’ (279a1–4). There is also evident irony in what follows (a4–8): ‘Well
then, what kinds of existing things are good for us? Or perhaps this isn’t a di cult question and we don’t
need an important personage to supply the answer because everybody would tell us that to be rich is a good
—isn’t that so?’ Socrates’ own view may well be that it is correct to say that one does well by having good
things—so long as one has in mind by these not vulgar desiderata such as wealth and health, and the like,
which need to be put to use, but ethical values that are realized in action. However, in the ensuing discussion
he permits the phrase ‘having good things’ to come to connote the possession of advantages or abilities that
enable a man to do well. A wide range of such things is identi ed: wealth, health, good looks, noble birth,
power, honour, the virtues of temperance, justice and courage, wisdom, and good luck (279a7–c8).
It becomes clear that the good things that enable a man to do well fall into two classes, the conditional and
5
p. 13 the unconditional. Conditional goods are resources that, used wisely, help one to do well; used badly,
they cause one to do badly; unused, they are useless. When wealth or the like is not being put to use, it does
not contribute to a man’s doing well (280b7–d7). If Achilles had decided to live quietly in Greece rather than
to die at Troy, not out of cowardice but (let us suppose) a lack of Panachæan spirit, his courage, viewed here
as a capacity, would not have been undone, but it would have been idle. By contrast, a wise man makes use of
his wisdom when it is wise to do so—or he would not count as wise; and men are placed in a world where
they need to make use of what wisdom they have. Moreover, when wealth or the like (including courage and
6
temperance) is put to use, it does more harm than its opposite if wisdom is lacking. We can think of
conditional goods as enabling a man to do more, but doing more is dangerous for a man who lacks sense: ‘If
he did less, would he not make fewer mistakes? And if he made fewer mistakes, would he not do less badly,
and if he did less badly, would he not be less miserable?’ (281b8–c3). Courage and temperance are run
together, with a single opposite cowardice (c6–7), and one can well think of courage as enabling one man to
p. 14 do what cowardice prevents another from doing. Such a capacity is ambivalent, since it enables a man to
7
do things he is wise to do, but also things that he is unwise to do. By contrast, wisdom is unconditionally a
good: possessing it cannot contribute to one’s doing badly, and must contribute to one’s doing well.
Socrates’ conclusion appears to shift from a quali ed ascription of value to conditional goods to a denial of
value to them:
It seems likely that with respect to all the things we called good in the beginning, the correct
account is not that in themselves they are by nature good, but rather as follows: if ignorance
controls them, they are greater evils than their opposites, to the extent that they are more capable
of complying with a bad master; but if judgement (phronēsis) and wisdom are in control, they are
greater goods. In themselves, however, neither sort is of any value…Isn’t it that, of the other
things, no one of them is either good or bad, but of these two, wisdom is good and ignorance bad?
(281d3–e5)
To read this passage as consistent, we must suppose that ‘good’ changes in sense within it: initially,
conditional goods count as good if wisdom is in control; nally, they do not count as good. When Socrates
denies that any of them ‘is either good or bad’ (e3–4), he evidently means that none of them is, as he has
earlier put it (d4–5), good in itself or by nature. The purpose of the switch would appear to be rhetorical, for
it cannot in consistency be meant to cancel the concept of a conditional good. On an austere view, wisdom is
the only good, and whatever it takes into account from context to context is simply a datum of which it
8
makes the best. Then no evaluative distinction in kind is made between, say, wealth and poverty: it is
equally the role of wisdom to cope with either, so that there is no advantage, with respect to doing well, in
being rich rather than poor. Such could be the meaning of the last sentence (e3–5), taken in isolation (and it
ts 282a1–4, which speaks of using ‘things’ rightly, with no special reference to aids or assets). But that
p. 15 would contradict a nice contrast just drawn: wealth (like the rest) is harmful in the service of ignorance,
and bene cial in the service of wisdom. Hence an agent who is wise is helped in doing well if he is also rich
(or whatever).
9
This is con rmed elsewhere. Thus we read in the Apology, ‘Virtue does not come from wealth, but through
10
virtue wealth and everything else, private and public, become good for men’ (30b2–4); thus free board
becomes a good if it gives Socrates leisure, despite his poverty, to exhort his fellow citizens (36d4–5). It is
best in connection to this that we can understand a claim in the Charmides: ‘All good and evil, whether in the
body or in the whole man, comes from the soul’ (156e6–8, cf. Prot. 313a7–9). It is the soul that, putting the
states in which a man nds himself, mental or physical, to good or bad use, makes them good or bad for
him. That ‘all other human activities depend on the soul’ is repeated in the Meno (88e5–6), and explained in
a way that generates a brisk argument for the identi cation of virtue with knowledge (88d4–89d2). Wealth
and the like are at times good and at times harmful—harmful if directed by folly, bene cial if directed by
wisdom (88d4–7). So, if virtue is something in the soul that cannot but be bene cial, it must be identical to
knowledge, since even the qualities of the soul are in themselves neither bene cial nor harmful, but
accompanied by wisdom or folly become harmful or bene cial. Yet among the ways in which it is bene cial
is that it enables other things to be bene cial also; it is unconditionally bene cial, they conditionally. It
follows that doing well is not simply a matter of responding wisely to whatever arises, whether this be some
external circumstance or an inner state, if that means that it can make no di erence even to the degree of an
agent’s happiness what befalls him. It must be implied that a rich man with sense is better able to do well,
and can do better, than a sensible man who is poor. Otherwise, wealth would not even be a conditional good.
Saying this leaves open whether wealth, or any other conditional good, or some disjunction of conditional
goods, is necessary for doing well. For it may be that the threshold of what counts as doing well is low
p. 16 enough—materially, if not morally, speaking—that no conditional goods are requisite for crossing it.
Any dependency of doing well upon conditional goods may be excluded by the claim, ‘If a man has wisdom,
he has no need of any good fortune in addition’ (Euthyd. 280b2–3). Compare a statement in the Apology
(41d1–2): ‘No evil can come to a good man, either in life or in death.’ But does this make it depend wholly on
his virtue just that he is happy, or also how happy he is? Socrates appears to imply the second and stronger
alternative when he remarks, in the Gorgias, that ‘the whole of happiness’ (hē pasa eudaimonia) depends on
education and justice (470e6–8)—though Vlastos attempts to neutralize that (1991: 221–2). By contrast,
virtue may not even su ce to make a man happy according to the Crito (47e3–5): ‘Is life worth living with a
body that is in bad condition and corrupted? In no way.’ Similarly, in the Gorgias, a pilot supposes that ‘if a
man a icted with serious incurable diseases did not drown, this man is wretched for not dying and has got
no bene t from him’ (512a2–5). However, what follows in both places (Apol. 47e6–7, Gorg. 512a5–b2)
shows that Socrates’ interest is in the analogical inference that this also holds, a fortiori, of the incurably
diseased soul; so one may surmise that he only posits the premise (writing o a diseased body) in order to
11
persuade his hearers of the conclusion (which condemns a diseased soul). If Socrates himself accepted the
premise, this might be with the thought (which could only complicate the inference) that crippling bodily
12
disease leaves a man alive, while preventing him from acting. It would still only be a conditional evil, since
the same prevention would bene t one if one’s intentions were wicked. Where the potential agent is good
and bodily disability an evil, a residuum of health may be needed if his wisdom of mind is to yield wisdom in
action, so that he remains a good agent in addition to retaining a good soul. Socrates can still consistently
hold of less basic conditional goods that they enhance eudaimonia without being essential to it.
This is probably con rmed by a puzzling passage in the Euthydemus. Clinias is amazed when Socrates
identi es good fortune (eutuchia)—which ensures, or involves, things turning out well for the agent—with
13
p. 17 wisdom (279d6–7). Socrates explains: wisdom excludes any mistakes, and necessarily does right and
succeeds (tunchanein)—or it would not be wisdom (280a7–8). Hence a man who possesses wisdom has no
need of good fortune as an addition (280b2–3). What counts here as ‘succeeding’? Two contrasted
14
interpretations are equally uninviting. Socrates asks, ‘What about the perils of the sea—surely you don’t
think that, as a general rule, any pilots have better luck than the wise ones?’ (279e4–6). If we leave out the
quali cation ‘as a general rule’, we seem to be left with two alternatives. One, taking success in this case to
be survival, supposes that wisdom brings maximal good fortune, so that a wise pilot is as little in danger of
15
drowning as the luckiest of men. The other, taking success to be the exercise of good judgement, supposes
that wisdom brings whatever good fortune wisdom itself imports, so that a wise pilot has the consolation in
16
disaster of being wise. The rst construal is insane, and the second insipid. Both, however, neglect the
phrase ‘as a general rule’. This indicates that, when the interlocutors nally agreed (‘I don’t know quite
how’, Socrates now admits) that ‘if a man had wisdom, he had no need of any good fortune in addition’
(280b1–3), they were overstating it. So was Socrates when he later remarked (281b2–4) that, ‘as it seems’,
knowledge provides not only good luck but ‘well-doing’ (eupragia, which appears to be equated with
success). Indeed, that statement is followed only by con rmation that one needs knowledge if one is to
bene t reliably from the goods of fortune. It would seem that Socrates is failing to de ne some mean
between claiming too much and claiming too little. Perhaps Plato has in mind that wisdom is the closest
17
approximation to good fortune among the goods that an agent can try to achieve; or else that, by comparison
with the unwise, the wise are more successful in the long run than the unwise, so that they do not need to rely
18
on luck.
p. 18 Even after some such injection of good sense, the question remains: for what do the wise not need to rely on
luck? There is a crucial point here to keep in mind. When a pilot exercises his wisdom, this is not barely and
abstractly in order to act well, but in order to save his ship from ‘the perils of the sea’ (279e4–5). It is in
pursuing that goal wisely, even (if it chances) unsuccessfully, that he acts wisely and well. External
contingencies enter in several ways. Situations, or predicaments, require or invite certain concrete goals of
agents. (It is not an option of the pilot to try to save the ship; but often agents have options, in ends as in
means.) External goods may be a necessary precondition of a goal’s existing for an agent, since a goal has to
be possibly achievable as well as apparently desirable; or, without being indispensable, they may facilitate
its achievement. Thus they give an agent a better chance of achieving requisite goals (such as saving a ship
of which one is the pilot), and a wider range of optional goals. Of all of which the wise agent is properly
appreciative. As I have already proposed, the best way of accommodating all this within what is explicit in
Plato’s texts is to understand that, while the wise man will always be able to act wisely, and to that extent
well, he will be at once (like any agent) better able to act, and (as a wise agent) able to act better, if external
goods improve his range of options, or his chances of achieving a preferred option. The threshold of acting
well is no higher (or lower) than that of acting wisely; yet, beyond that threshold, acting well admits of
19
degrees.
However, certain of Socrates’ examples may put us in mind of a quite di erent conception. He cites as
enjoying the best luck wise pilots when there are perils to be escaped at sea (279e4–6), and wise doctors
when there are patients to be cured (280a2–4). But what of their fellow sailors or patients? These recipients
of expertise share the goal common to all men of ‘doing well’ (eu prattein, 278e3), but in a di erent sense:
the sailor who reaches his home port safely, or the patient who is cured of an illness, can be described as
doing well, but only in the sense of faring well if it was none of their own doing. For a Greek, that could still
count, idiomatically, as a way of being eudaimōn. Moreover, escaping a danger or illness, through one’s own
p. 19 skill or another’s, might be taken to shed indirect light on what is involved in actively achieving some
consequent good through one’s own action: through skill, one achieves as a product of one’s action the good
that one desires. This is one possible conception of how action relates to happiness, or acting well to doing,
i.e., faring, well. Was it ever Plato’s?
It was at least familiar to Plato, for he provides a model of it in the hedonism of the central argument in the
Protagoras against the possibility of acratic action, that is, action contrary to judgement. The hedonism is
introduced through a close connection between ‘living well’ (eu zēn) and pleasure or the absence of pain.
Negatively, no one counts as living well if he lives in pain (351b3–6); positively, to have lived well is to have
lived a pleasant life to the end (b6–c1). A pleasure can only be wrong if it has bad consequences, producing
eventual and greater pains (353c4–354d3). Contrariwise, something painful may be good if it produces later
pleasures:
Do you call them [athletic training and warfare and medical treatment by cautery and amputation
and drugs and starvation diet] good because at the time they cause the most extreme su ering and
anguish, or because later on they produce things like health and good bodily condition and the
safety of the city and rule over others and wealth?…And are these things good for any other reason
than that they result in pleasures and the relief from and avoidance of pains? (354a7–b7)
No account is given here of the nature of pleasure and pain. One might suppose that among the
consequences of an action may be other actions that are themselves pleasures, or instances of pleasure, in
being enjoyable. Among such pleasant actions, or active pleasures, may be those that are healthy in the
sense not of causing health, but of displaying it. However, that point is not made; and the natural
implication of 354a7–b7 is rather that action may cause pleasure or pain, either at the time or subsequently,
where the pleasure is itself passive rather than active. This is clearly true of the pains that are listed (354a5–
6), for they are evidently sensations. When we read of ‘pleasure and the relief from and avoidance of pains’
(b6–7), are we to understand that this conjoins an escape from passive pains and an enjoyment of active
pleasures? Hardly without any indication. We must rather suppose that, if living well is a matter of securing
pleasures and avoiding pains, these are a consequence of action, by reference to which action is to be
assessed.
So glossed, this passage of the Protagoras provides a concrete exempli cation—the only one, to my
knowledge, that Plato ever o ers—of a structure within which eudaimonia is identi ed not with action, but
20
p. 20 with the desirable consequences of action for the agent. Whether the reader is to suppose that Socrates
honestly accepts the hedonism, or is just exploiting it illustratively for his immediate purposes, has been,
and is still, debated. The hedonism that he clearly rejects elsewhere (like that of Callicles in the Gorgias)
overvalues the pleasure of the moment, and cultivates an excess of appetite. Here, we rather have a
temperate hedonism that looks to the agent’s long-term interests, and is concerned to maximize his
pleasures and minimize his pains over a lifetime. This is a variety of eudaimonism, and not a rejection of
eudaimonism (such as that of the Cyrenaics) on behalf of a xation upon the passing moment.
However, it is most unlikely that Plato himself ever accepted such a hedonist view of the human good, and
its relegation of acting well to being a cause of a happiness that itself is passive. For it is not easy to reconcile
even this sober hedonism with what is certainly a feature of early Platonic ethics, which is a focus upon the
ethical character of action itself. In the Apology, Socrates ascribes priority, possibly even a monopoly, within
deliberation to a consideration of the ethical quality of an action. Thus he professes, ‘O man, you don’t
speak well, if you believe that a man worth anything at all would give countervailing weight to danger of life
or death, or give consideration to anything but this when he acts: whether his action is just or unjust, the
action of a good or of a bad man’ (28b5–9, cf. d9–10). Very similarly, he explains his refusal to comply with
the Thirty’s attempt to implicate him in the arrest of Leon as follows: ‘I showed again, not in words but in
action, that…death is something I couldn’t care less about, but that my whole concern is not to do anything
unjust or impious’ (32d1–3).
21
Little is said explicitly in the Apology to connect this moralism with eudaimonism. That omission is made
good in the Crito:
The most important thing is not living, but living well…Does it stand that living well, living nely,
p. 21 and living justly are the same?…So we must examine whether it is just for me to try to get out of
here when the Athenians have not acquitted me, or unjust. If it is seen to be just, we will try to do
so; if it is not, we will abandon the idea…For us…the only valid consideration…is whether we should
be acting justly…or whether in truth we shall be acting unjustly in doing all this. If it is evident that
we shall be doing unjust things, then we have no need at all to take into account whether we shall
have to die if we stay here…rather than act unjustly (48b5–d5).
This reiterates what was stated in the Apology, but with greater care and precision. Note that it is not said
here that the only relevant question, in respect of any option for an agent, is whether it would be unjust or
impious. Very likely, Socrates had in mind in the Apology only contexts in which what would otherwise be an
option is ruled out of consideration as being one or the other. Now, the restriction is evident. That ‘For us
the only valid consideration is whether we should be acting justly’ (48c6–8) is not meant universally, but in
application to the option of ‘doing all this’ (d2–3), namely, taking whatever steps would be necessary to
encompass Socrates’ escape from prison. If these show up on re ection as unjust, then they fall out of
consideration (d3–5). The thought is that ‘It would be unjust to ϕ’ is decisive against ϕing, not that
considerations of justice are the only reasons for action. On occasion, it might be right to ϕ because ϕing is
the sensible thing to do. If Socrates could escape execution in a just way, as he o ered to the jury when he
proposed a large ne as an alternative penalty (Apol. 38b4–5), that could be the right thing for him to do,
because it was sensible, even if it would not have been unjust for him to stick with his initial provocative
22
suggestion of being fed in the Prytaneum (36d1–37a1).
Crucial for us is a di erent feature of the Crito passage. As I have noted, the phrase ‘do well’ is ambiguous
(as eu prattein is in Greek): it may mean ‘act well’, or ‘fare well’. The same holds of ‘live well’ (eu zēn): this
may mean ‘lead a good life’, which is a function of one’s choices and actions, or ‘have a good life’, which
could be a matter of external luck. Yet what links the Apology and Crito passages just cited is that the latter
equates ‘living well’ with ‘living nely’ and ‘living justly’ (48b8). This makes living well a matter of agency.
p. 22 Now to live well is to be happy (for which the Greek is indi erently eudaimonein, or eudaimōn einai). Yet
the phrase ‘do well’ is often used in a way that equates it with ‘be happy’. So ‘do well’ and ‘live well’ tend to
23
be assimilated. There remains the contrast that eupragia can be glossed or quali ed in ways that
eudaimonia cannot: it can take on the narrow restriction ‘in respect of utes’ (Euthyd. 279e1–2), or the wide
extension ‘in every case of possession or action’ (281b4, cf. Charm. 172a1–2); in context, it may signify just
success in medicine (Prot. 345a3). Yet usually ‘do well’ and ‘live well’ are not di erentiated.
It is often made clear that ‘do well’ signi es ‘act well’ rather than ‘fare well’, as in the Crito passage just
cited. The Charmides links in turn ‘do nely and well’ in all one’s doings, a simple ‘do well’, and ‘be happy’
24
(171e7–172a3). It also connects ‘act knowledgeably’ with ‘do well’ and ‘be happy’ (173d3–4). And we read
in the Gorgias, ‘So there is every necessity that the temperate man who, as we have seen, will be just and
brave and pious, will be a perfectly good man, and the good man will act well and nobly in whatever he does
(eu te kai kalōs prattein ha an prattēi), and he who acts well (ton eu prattonta) will be blessed and happy, and
25
he who is wicked and acts badly (ton ponēron kai kakōs prattonta) will be miserable’ (507b8–c5).
This is signi cant. In contrast to the hedonist model (at least as I understood it), being happy is identi ed in
these passages not with a consequence of action, but with action itself. The claim that one cannot become
happier by acting unjustly has still to be made out. Prioritizing the ethical hardly restricts the range of
possible reasons for action in advance of delimiting the ethical. What it does privilege is action itself, which
can both be characterized in the language of the virtues and vices, and identi ed with eudaimonia as the
agent’s nal end.
p. 23
II. The Final End of Action and Desire
So there is a non-match between the maximizing hedonism of the Protagoras, and the ethical eudaimonism
that we can trace through the Crito, Charmides, Euthydemus, and Gorgias. If it is granted that these are
incompatible, there can be no real question which is authentically Socratic and Platonic: this has to be the
second. And yet a critic may wonder whether there was not a real cost. (What I am about to discuss may
seem a digression, but it will soon bring us back to Plato; and the points it raises are equally important for
Aristotle.) Acting well is a determinable in search of determination. Suppose that, whenever an agent acts,
he aims to be acting well, and upon a true answer to the question ‘What, here and now, is the thing for me to
do?’ It wouldn’t follow that we, or he, could correctly identify the thing for him to do in the context by
re ection upon what it is to act well, or through deliberation’s taking the goal of acting well as a starting-
point. Indeed, one might argue that the question ‘Why are you ϕ’ing?’ is never answered by saying ‘Because,
here and now, to ϕ is to act well.’ For if every agent acts as he does in order thereby to be acting well, acting
well is the universal goal of action, whatever form it takes, and fails on its own to distinguish ϕ’ing from an
alternative, say χ’ing. A reason for ϕ’ing rather than χ’ing should rather be a concrete feature of the context
that di erentiates ϕ’ing from χ’ing and thereby makes it the case that by ϕ’ing, but not by χ’ing, the agent
26
can count as acting well. ‘In order to act well’ is rather a universal lter upon reasons than itself a reason.
Compare the relation of belief to truth. We may take it that, by its very nature, any belief is oriented towards
truth: truth is its inherent goal, so that to believe well is to believe truly. Suppose that a subject believes that
p and not that q, where either (say) could explain some phenomenon, and either might be true, but not both.
The question ‘Why do you believe that p, rather than that q?’ is not happily answered by replying ‘Because it
is true that p, but not that q.’ The subject couldn’t coherently reason to himself: ‘Shall I believe that p, or
that q? Well, it is true that p, and not that q; so I will believe that p.’ For in judging that it is true that p, he is
p. 24 already believing that p. Suppose that, analogously, any human action, by its very nature, is oriented
towards acting well. Then ‘Why do you choose to ϕ, rather than to χ?’ is not happily answered by ‘Because,
here and now, ϕ’ing, but not χ’ing, is acting well’; for to judge that is already to choose to ϕ. To justify a
belief, or an action, where the agent has options, we need rather to cite some other fact, often a fairly
concrete one, that makes it likely in context that the belief will be true, or the action good.
And yet truth as the goal of belief is not idle in the justi cation of belief. It is only if a consideration r tells in
favour of the truth of p that it is successfully citable on the side of the belief that p. We can distinguish the
background goal of believing truly, which is invariant, from foreground considerations that vary from case
to case. Is there an analogue within the justi cation of action? Presumably it would run as follows. It is only
if a consideration tells in favour of the goodness of ϕ’ing that it is properly citable in justi cation of the
choice to ϕ. Again, we can distinguish a xed background from a variable foreground that depends upon the
facts of the particular case.
The analogy is fair, so long as a di culty can be surmounted. If a belief has a determinate content, say that
27
p, its truth or falsity is equally determinate; for ‘It is true that p’ is true if and only it is true that p. By
contrast, even if it is determinate in context what it is to ϕ, it may be indeterminate whether to ϕ is in
context to act well. How may this be determined? It might be thought that this question becomes
unanswerable once we identify eudaimonia, which is the agent’s ultimate goal, with acting well. If acting
well is his ultimate goal, it may be argued, we can o er no determination of acting well to settle whether he
is acting well, since that determination would then replace acting well as his ultimate goal.
Actually, that is too quick. Suppose, to return to the apparent theory of the Protagoras, that to act well in
ϕ’ing is to ϕ in a context where ϕ’ing does more than any alternative to achieve pleasure for the agent and
escape pain. On that conception, whether an agent acts well in ϕ’ing on some occasion becomes as
determinate as whether in then ϕ’ing he does as much as he can to achieve pleasure and escape pain. This
can illustrate that it would be possible both for his ultimate goal to be acting well, and for the question
p. 25
whether he achieves it to be determined by some consequence of his action. We would be contradicting
ourselves if we said both that acting well is his nal goal, and that he acts well in order thereby to gain
pleasure and escape pain. But the claim can rather be that he ϕ’s in order thereby to gain pleasure and escape
pain, with the ultimate goal of ϕ’ing with that e ect, and hence of acting well. It is ϕ’ing that, hopefully, will
have more pleasure and less pain as its consequence; if it does, then ϕ’ing with that e ect will constitute
acting well. This would be a mixed theory, consequentialist in its calculations, non-consequentialist in its
evaluations.
One might initially suppose such a position to be irrefutable but idle: it restructures a simple hedonism that
it still accepts. In fact, there is an easy test. If the agent’s ultimate goal is pleasure, he should be as grateful
for pleasures he passively receives as for pleasures he actively creates. If, on the other hand, his ultimate
goal is to act in ways that give him pleasure, he should care about creating pleasures rather than receiving
them. However, there is no evidence of the latter position in the Protagoras. Socrates opens its nal section
by putting to Protagoras the following suggestions (which he doesn’t actually endorse himself): ‘In so far as
things are pleasant, are they not to that extent good, leaving their other consequences out of account? And
again it’s the same with painful things; in so far as they are painful, are they not bad?’ (351c4–6). This is not
restricted to the actions of the agent or their consequences. When Socrates proceeds to urge the point, it is
with reference to ‘athletic training and warfare and medical treatment by cautery and amputation and drugs
and starvation diet’ (354a4–6), painful at the time but overridingly bene cial later, with no distinction
between what the agent does and what he undergoes. And Socrates’ nal invitation is quite general: ‘Don’t
you call su ering pain itself good when it gets rid of greater pains than it has in itself, or when it leads to
pleasures which are greater than the pains?’ (d5–7).
So, in pursuit of something Platonic, we have to return to a conception of eudaimonia as acting well that is
abstract and determinable. This may give rise to the following worry. Take acting well as the ultimate end of
action; and suppose—as we most likely wouldn’t, but Socrates did—that for an agent to choose to ϕ is for
him to judge that for him, in his situation, ϕ’ing is the thing to do. Would it follow that an agent’s ultimate
end is always simply this: to do the thing that is to be done? Surely not. We cannot extract an ultimate end of
choice out of so bare a conception of choice. Rather, we need a conception of acting well that, though
determinable rather than determinate, captures some intelligible end of acting, some good achievable by
p. 26 and in action. Moreover, if the end is not to be idle, it must meet a further condition: it must be in
principle detectable—if not always, nor by everyone—whether or not it is being achieved. It could not be
that we all really wanted something of which we could in principle never tell whether we were getting it or
not. For then we would have no reason deriving from experience to pursue it in one way rather than another.
Here we come to one of the fundamental presuppositions of Socratic, Platonic, and indeed Aristotelian
ethics. I shall rst simply state it, and then connect it with central Socratic sayings. Socrates supposes that
there is an ultimate object of choice that is common to all human agents. For none of us is it an option
whether to pursue it in the choices that we make, for to choose is to choose for its sake. The practical
judgements that we make that inform our choices are ultimately judgements about how to achieve this end.
Our particular goals are variable and often erroneous. What is best from occasion to occasion varies
concretely with the details of the case. What appears best varies concretely with the apparent details of the
situation, and the agent’s values and principles. Yet what agents ultimately intend to achieve does not vary,
either within an agent’s life, or between agents. Though their values and principles di er, these provide no
independent speci cation of what they really want. Rather, they encapsulate di erent conceptions of what
that is. And here there is room for two kinds of error, or rather for a single error that has two aspects.
Objectively, an agent may misconceive what is best achievable in and by human action. This is a mistake
about the potential value of human action. Subjectively, he may misconceive what it is in his nature, as a
28
man, to pursue as his nal end. This is a mistake about the natural orientation of human beings.
Only the agent who has a general understanding of the end towards which men are oriented by nature can
29
count as observing the Delphic precept, which Socrates made his own, ‘Know thyself.’ Nothing in the
contexts of his reiterations of this, nor within his ethics in general, suggests that he is prescribing a grasp of
anything distinctive or idiosyncratic, anything that is peculiar to oneself. He is speaking not as a romantic
who cultivates individuality, but as a moralist who believes that ethical errors come of general
p. 27 misunderstandings of a shared teleology that is natural to us as human subjects and agents. Indicative of
this is his admission in the Phaedrus that he cannot yet count as observing the precept (229e5–6). There he
dismisses less material questions, and inquires ‘not into these but into myself, to see whether I am actually
a beast more complex and more violent than Typhon, or both a tamer and a simpler creature, sharing some
divine and un-Typhonic portion by nature’ (230a3–6). These are not the introspective doubts of a Byronic
hero, but a philosophical uncertainty about the true nature, simple or complex, of the human soul, such as
30
was not resolved in the Republic.
Nowadays, we may tend to suppose that what a man really (or ultimately) desires is a personal and empirical
question whose answer is independent of any truths about human nature or objective value. Socrates
31
presumes otherwise. Also indicative of this is a connection that he twice makes between desire and
de ciency. Thus he reasons as follows in the Lysis: ‘A thing desires what it lacks…And it becomes lacking of
what it is deprived’ (221d7–e3). And he corrects Agathon in the Symposium by insisting ‘What desires
desires what it lacks, or, if it doesn’t lack it, it doesn’t desire it’ (200a9–b1). Focal here is the notion of an
objective de ciency (cf. ‘lacking’, endeēs, four times in Lysis 221d7–e2, twice in Symp. 200a9–b1). On this
conception, one fundamentally desires what one needs, not in order to satisfy some contingent desire, but as
32
a result of a lack that originates from a loss that in some way made one imperfect and incomplete. It is not
that desires are being reconceived as needs (which would change the subject). Rather, each of us has
fundamental desires that arise out of an implicit (Plato would say innate) awareness of needs; being a
function of one’s true nature, these desires are no more a matter of choice than that is.
It is against the background of this teleology that we can best understand what is perhaps the best known of
all the Socratic paradoxes, ‘No one does evil willingly’ (e.g., Prot. 345d6–e4). The Gorgias makes a
distinction: orators and tyrants do what they think best, but not what they desire (boulesthai, 466d6–
467b9). Unsurprisingly, this amazes Polus: ‘This is shocking and monstrous stu you’re saying, Socrates’
(b10). Socrates supports his claim with the thesis that, when an agent does one thing for the sake of another,
p. 28 what he desires is the second and not the rst, or (as we may put it) the end and not the means. This is
later restated (468b8–c1), but at once quali ed: we may allow that the agent does desire a means, yet not
‘just like that’ (haplōs houtōs), but only if it is bene cial in promoting a desirable end; for we desire good
things, but not things either neither good nor evil, or evil (c2–7). The quali cation shows that Socrates is
not simply playing Humpty Dumpty, and deciding to use ‘desire’ as equivalent to ‘desire for its own sake’. It
is rather that he is connecting what I really desire and what really bene ts me. What makes this non-arbitrary
is that it extends to mean a way of thinking that is already assumed for an ultimate end. An agent may
intelligibly pursue a means that he believes will lead to a desired end. That end may itself be pursued for the
sake of a further or wider end. However, it couldn’t be that he pursued his nal end under a
misapprehension that it would achieve some good; for then it would be this good, and not the end, that was
nal. So it would seem that a genuinely nal end can only be pursued at once for its own sake, and for the sake
of its true nature, i.e., for the sake of something, whatever that may be, that does indeed constitute its nature.
Such desiring might be called ‘truly desiring’: anticipating a way of speaking that we meet in the Philebus
(where it is applied to pleasures), we may call such desires ‘true desires’, in contrast to ‘false desires’ that
are explained by a false conception of the object. Socrates then extends the notion of a true desire from a
nal end to a means qua means: truly desiring an end, I may come truly to desire a means for the sake of the
end, or conditionally upon its being a means to it. We may then say that I desire the means as a means to the
33
end—so long as it would actually promote it.
p. 29 Much changes in the Republic, and notably in two ways: eudaimonia is interiorized, so that its eld becomes
the soul’s internal activities rather than the agent’s external actions; and only rational, in contrast to non-
rational, desires are ultimately oriented towards a single nal good. Yet we may be struck by what is
retained, as when we read this:
With justice or beauty, lots of people might settle for the appearance of them. Even if things aren’t
really just or beautiful, they might choose to perform and possess them (and to be taken to be
doing so) anyway. When it comes to things that are good, on the other hand, no one has ever yet
been satis ed with the appearance. They want things that really are good; they all treat the
appearance of it with contempt…This is what every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does
34
all it can (VI 505d5–e2).
Even desires for the just or the beautiful (in the sense of ‘ ne’ or ‘honourable’, which is an aspect of the
ethical) can be corrupted by an overriding concern to keep face, so that reputation can be preferred to
reality. (Contrast the ‘simple and honourable man’ who ‘wants, in Aeschylus’ words, not to appear to be
good, but to be good’, II 361b6–8. To be good is to be, for example, just; and the just man desires to act
justly, whereby, if he succeeds, he achieves the good.) Yet every man has a fundamental desire that is
oriented by nature towards realizing what is good in his own life. This must be why, though men may
occasionally do what they recognize as wrong, constant wickedness must be seconded by a false conception
35
of what is best; for this remains the real goal even of a wicked agent.
A con rmation of this is that the Socratic paradox ‘No one does evil willingly’ recurs even in dialogues that
have discarded a Socratic psychology for a distinctively Platonic one. Thus we read this, in Republic IX, of the
tyrannical city and soul: ‘The slave city, the city ruled by a tyrant, is the one least able to do what it wants…
In which case, the soul which is ruled by a tyrant will also be least able to do what it wants—at any rate if we
are talking about the entire soul’ (hōs peri holēs eipein psuchēs, 577d10–e1). Within the perspective of his
p. 30 mature moral psychology, Plato cannot deny that, notably in respect of his disorderly appetite, a tyrant
has and satis es non-rational desires. These are not directed towards the good, nor even towards the
maximal satisfaction of appetite: they may well frustrate other appetites, and yet do not count as not
achieving what they want for that reason—only as frustrating what he wants, as a subject of other appetites,
and of would-be rational desires that aim at the good, but radically mistake it. The tyrannic soul ‘will be
forever driven onward by a gad y, and lled with confusion and dissatisfaction’ (e1–2), which Plato takes to
con rm that deeper desires are misled and disappointed.
Plato recurrently conceives appetite as being by nature insatiable. In the Gorgias, Socrates says that
creatures of appetite ‘carry water to this leaky jar with another leaky thing, a sieve’ (493b5–7). Appetite’s
insatiability is con rmed in the Republic (IV 442a6–7), and later explained on the ground that even the
unreal cannot be satis ed by the unreal (IX 586b3–4). Even an unreal desire could only be stilled by the real
object of desire; in my earlier phrase, only what is truly desired can fully satisfy any desire. We have to recall
that, within Plato’s picture, appetites are not emergent by natural necessity out of the body’s physical
nature, but derivative by way of descent from the soul’s authentic desires once it has fallen from heaven and
come to animate a human body. In the Timaeus, the immortal and rational soul is the principle and origin
(archē) of the mortal animal (42e7–8), whose soul it generates through, as it were, impregnating the body.
That all human desire shares a single source is a presumption of Plato’s picture of the rechannelling of
desire (Rep. VI 485d6–12): a desire that becomes stronger is thereby (toutōi, d7) drawing its strength from
other desires. It may be true to the phenomena to say that ‘simple thirst is naturally of drink only’, not of
good drink, or of drink as a good (Rep. IV 439a4–7). Thirst qua thirst is satis ed by drink. Yet thirst is not
what thirst originally was: all desire was originally for the good, and takes on concrete objects in
independence of the good only through the degrading and unselving e ect of incarnation. Since appetite
derives from rational desire, it must fail to nd nal satisfaction in anything less than the ultimate object of
rational desire; hence by its true nature, it cannot be fully satis ed by the new objects that it has taken on in
becoming appetite.
So much to show that Plato presumes that there is a good that is the primordial object of all human desire—
a view that is overlaid, but not discarded, in the Republic. Does he give us any clues as to its nature, and how
it is unquestionably desirable? For each agent it is identical to his or her eudaimonia, construed as activity
p. 31 that possesses certain structural and aesthetic properties. Indicative is a passage in the Gorgias that starts
by sketching how craftsmen, of whatever kind, aim to impose order upon their material: ‘Each of them
arranges in a structure (taxis) whatever he arranges, and compels one thing to be tting and suitable to
another, until he composes the whole thing arranged in a structure and order (tetagmenon te kai
kekosmēmenon)’ (503e6–504a1). Physical trainers and doctors impose structure and order upon the human
body (504a3–4, b2–3); analogously, a soul becomes worthy if it acquires a certain structure and order (b4–
5). Plato nds here a parallel between a healthy body and an ethical soul: within the body the structure is
termed ‘healthy’, within the soul ‘lawful’ (nomimon), and the structure and ordering are justice and
36
temperance (c7–d3). In every case, the virtue or excellence (aretē) of a thing is not produced at random,
but is owed to structure and correctness and skill (506d5–7). Thus ‘the virtue of each thing is something
structured and ordered by a structure’ (e1–2). This carries over from the personal to the interpersonal: the
man who does not control his appetites is incapable of community, and so of friendship (507e3–6). And
even from the interpersonal to the cosmic: heaven and earth are held together by community and
friendship, which is why the world is called a kosmos, not akosmia or akolasia (507e6–508a4). Socrates
concludes by reproaching Callicles, who had advised a life of unrestrained sensual indulgence, for preferring
taking all one can to ‘geometrical equality’ (508a5–7), that is, for preferring arithmetical equality, whereby
all desires are satis ed equally, to ‘proportional distribution according to some standard’ (as Alfonso
Gómez-Lobo puts it, 1994: 135, n. 241).
Plato thus nds a universal value in eudaimonia, when this is conceived ethically. It then becomes an
intelligible object of fundamental human desire. We can now hope to resolve the worry that opened this
section. Acting well takes on a substantive content that it would lack if it came to no more than the doing
what is to be done that one intends (he assumes) simply in intending to act. Rather, to act well is to act in a
way that achieves within action a structural value that also exists outside action, being a feature of nothing
37
less than the natural but structured kosmos. Even if this content is left in place by the newly complex
p. 32 conception of the human soul in the Republic, that will demand a new articulation. And nothing has yet
been said to show how an agent might rationally decide in one way rather than another in order to achieve
such eudaimonia (which will be a topic of Part C). And there is then the question of whether an agent who
has so decided is still liable to act otherwise (which will be the subject of Part D). However, rst we must
turn to Aristotle’s treatment of eudaimonia, which we shall nd to be the development of a similar
conception.
Notes
1 So Vlastos (1991: 224), Price (1997a: 8). It may well be because he has this privileged and capacious first friend in mind that
Socrates fails to note that, in principle, desires might be given point by a plurality of ultimate ends.
2 More equivocal are passages in the Gorg. such as this: ʻPolus and I both thought…that we must, surely, do all things for
the sake of good things. Do you also think as we do that the end of all actions is the good, and that we must do all other
things for its sake, but not it for their sake?ʼ (499e6–500a1, cf. 468a5–c1). It could be that ʻthe goodʼ at 499e8–9 (as at
468b7) signifies an ultimate goal common to all an agentʼs actions; thus Vlastos (1991: 224) glosses it by ʻhappinessʼ. Yet in
these contexts, ʻthe goodʼ could alternatively be the specific good of a particular course of action which ʻall other thingsʼ
constitute as component acts; so Russell (2005: 40). Socrates earlier asserted of instances of walking, standing still, killing,
expelling, and expropriating that ʻit is for the sake of the good that those who do these things do them allʼ, meaning that
as equivalent to ʻthinking that it is better for us if we do it than if we donʼtʼ (468b1–8). That again could refer either to the
standing goal of oneʼs own good, or to the balance of advantage on each occasion. Thus Socratesʼ meaning is o en
ambiguous. Yet when it is said in the later passage that it is ʻfor the sake of goods that we should do other thingsʼ (500a2–
3), and in the earlier that ʻpeople do these intermediate things for the sake of the good thingsʼ (468a5–6), the plural
ʻgoodsʼ suggests a multitude of goods, each of which is the end of some action or other, rather than a single overarching
good.
3 See Price (1995: 8–14, 27–9; 1997a: 254–5).
4 Note especially the words hina ti? or ʻIn order that what?ʼ (205a2), which request a reason in the form of an end to be
achieved.
5 This is the terminology of Gómez-Lobo (1994: 85). Daniel Russell uses the same terms to make a di erent distinction
(2005: 23): unconditional goods are goods whose ʻgoodness is not conditioned by something elseʼs bringing goodness
about in themʼ, being instead ʻresponsible for bringing about goodness in other thingsʼ; conditional goods are goods
ʻwhich have goodness brought about in them by unconditional goodsʼ. A good is unconditional ʻbecause of its active role
in the production of goodness in other thingsʼ (25); hence unconditional goods are di erentiating, whereas conditional
goods have been di erentiated. It ought to follow that virtue itself is an unconditional good, whereas acting virtuously is
not. (Nor is it a conditional good; what would be a conditional good is, say, advancing in battle when and because it is
brave to do so.) Yet Russellʼs position appears to be studiedly out of focus, as when he writes, ʻ“Virtuous activity” is used
synonymously with “virtue”, the addition of “activity” serving only to clarify that by virtue we understand a specific
psychic constitution which is essentially practical and activeʼ (33–4). This derives from a distinctive translation: ʻWhen it
comes to using the things we said earlier were the good things—wealth, health, beauty—the correct use of all these sorts
of things is knowledge, which leads and directs our behaviorʼ (281a6–b1). Here the addition of a comma, and the
rendering of two participles by a relative clause, confuses what I take to be the clear meaning of the Greek: ʻThe correct
use of all such things is the guidance and correction of action by knowledge.ʼ It is the activation of knowledge that can
consist in the correct use of conditional goods.
It is true that Vlastos (1991: 232 n.) berates Brickhouse and Smith (1987) for importing a distinction between virtue as a
condition of soul, and virtuous activity as its manifestation, that was inexpressible in Greek before Aristotle introduced the
terms hexis (ʻstateʼ) and energeia (ʻactivityʼ). Yet the distinction is a commonplace of ordinary ways of speaking and
thinking, and did not await the construction of a philosophical terminology. It is evidently present when Socrates says,
ʻThe good man does well and admirably whatever he does, and the man who does well is blessed and happyʼ (Gorg.
507c2–3); this distinguishes virtue and activity, and links the first to eudaimonia by way of the second. When Socrates
counts ʻthe best possible state of the soulʼ (Apol. 29e1–2) as among ʻthe most worthy thingsʼ (30a1), only over-
interpretation could read into that either a denial of the distinction, or an identification of eudaimonia with a state of soul.
6 Vlastos (1991: 220, n. 74) was alerted by John Ackrill to similar observations in Aristotle (AE A.1 1129b2–4, EE VIII.3
1248b26–34).
7 As I shall discuss in ch. B 1, this is not Socratesʼ own view of courage. In the Meno he speaks as follows of ʻcourage when it
is not wisdom but a kind of confidenceʼ (tharros): ʻWhen a man is confident without understanding, he is harmed; when
with understanding, he is benefitedʼ (88b3–6). Contingently, this can also hold of temperance of a kind: many projects,
good and bad, demand moderation in regard to the pleasures of the flesh; if a man is distracted by a minor indulgence
from a major crime, he is saved from a great evil by intemperance—so he is better o not temperate. To such quasi-virtues
—which Gómez-Lobo (1994: 84) calls ʻnatural conditionsʼ, in contrast to ʻdeveloped moral habitsʼ—there applies no
doctrine of the unity of the virtues.
8 Irwin (1995: ch. 4, § 40) reads the passage so; contra, see Vlastos (1991: 227–31).
9 Indeed in the Gorg., where he is interested in making a di erent contrast, Socrates counts health and wealth unreservedly
as goods, alongside wisdom, in contrast to sitting, walking, running, and sailing, which are sometimes good and
sometimes bad (467e4–468a2).
10 Grammatically, the Greek is more naturally construed as follows: ʻThrough virtue come about wealth and all the other
goods for men, private and public.ʼ However, even that could only mean that it is qua goods that wealth and other things
owe their origin to virtue (so Brickhouse and Smith, 1987: 6–7), which itself states contortedly what my version states
straightforwardly.
11 Alternatively, one might take such passages to imply not that a wise man may cease to be happy through acute disability,
but rather that, faced with such a state, he will keep his life happy by departing it; yet it would appear that, for religious
reasons, Socrates does not allow ʻthose for whom it is better to die…to help themselvesʼ (Pdo 62a6–7).
12 As it happens, this is precisely consistent with the wording of Gorg. 507c3–4: ʻThe good man does well and admirably
whatever he does.ʼ We can understand how being incapacitated might make a man wretched (Gorg. 512a4–5), although
being killed does not harm him (Apol. 30b6–8): the disabled su er from an awareness of their incapacity as the dead do
not; all human lives come to an end, but only some, so to speak, outlive themselves.
13 The relation of good fortune to luck or chance (tuchē) is defined in Aristotleʼs Rhet.: ʻeutuchia is the acquiring and
possessing or all (or most, or most important) goods of which the cause is tuchēʼ (I.5 1361b39–1362a2). This appears to
identify eutuchia with success within a certain kind of context. Elsewhere, it is unclear whether eutuchia is success itself, or
some condition of success; in my text I take Socrates to intend the second, which makes better sense of any identification
with wisdom.
14 A reader for the press made this point to me.
15 Cf. George Herbert (The Temple, ʻProvidenceʼ): ʻThe windes, who think they rule the mariner,/Are rulʼd by him, and taught
to serve his tradeʼ—which can only be generally true.
16 Cf. Victor Hugo (LʼAnnée terrible, Juillet XII): ʻLa plainte est un vain cri, le mal est un mot creux;/Jʼai rempli mon devoir, cʼest
bien, je sou re heureux.ʼ [ʻLament is a vain cry, evil is a hollow word; I have fulfilled my duty, it is well, I su er happily.ʼ]
17 So Brickhouse and Smith (1987: 21, n. 29).
18 So Taylor (2008a: 160, n. 19).
19 Thus we may agree that to be the one thing su icient for happiness is to be beneficial par excellence without being
persuaded by Irwinʼs (1986a: 88, n. 5) collocation of passages within the Euthyd. (relating 288e1–2 to 289c7–8, 291b6–7,
292b8–c1, e5) that being beneficial simpliciter is equivalent to being alone happiness-making; for the conception in my
text permits a thing to enhance happiness without being the thing that ensures it.
20 Conceptually, there is room for another structure: perhaps eudaimonia is identical to acting well, and yet the criteria of
acting well are passive pleasures and pains. Yet this would be an insecure position, given that eudaimonia commonly
connoted living well, and so took in faring well. It is Plato and Aristotle who identify it restrictively with acting well—and to
what purpose, on this view? To produce a semblance of privileging the ethical without the reality? (I return to this, calling
it a ʻmixedʼ theory, in my next section.)
21 Socrates does tell the jurors, ʻThe Olympian victor makes you think yourself happy; I make you be happyʼ (36e9–37a1).
22 Elsewhere, Socrates may identify the virtues with one another, with the implication that to act out of justice is to act out of
good sense, and vice versa. That thesis may lie behind Crito 48b8; however, it is not argued in the present passage. All this
demands is a weaker thesis of unity: if an act is unjust, it is wrong; no act could be unjust, and yet alright overall in view of
other considerations.
23 See Charm. 172a3, 173d4, 174b12–c1; Gorg. 470e2, 5, 507c4–5. The Euthyd. links doing well with being happy (280b6), and
doing badly (kakōs prattein) with being miserable (athlios, 281c2). As we saw, Euthyd. 278e3–6 ascribes just the same
finality as an end to doing well that Symp. 205a1–3 ascribes to being happy.
24 Charm. 174b12–c1 is very similar but with ʻlive knowledgeablyʼ.
25 It is true that such passages might be taken, as in Irwin (1977, 1995), to permit the thesis that acting well does not
constitute eudaimonia, but is rather the one necessary and su icient condition of it, whatever it may be supposed to be
itself—possibly pleasure. Thus it might be that, by a kind of providential coincidence, though calculations of pleasure are
generally irrelevant to considerations of justice, the just act will always turn out to maximize the agentʼs pleasure. Briefly
against any view with such a structure, see Vlastos (1995b), Price (1996b).
26 Essentially the same point has received much attention in current theorizing about reasons for action under the label
ʻbuckpassingʼ. That φʼing is the thing to do, or even a good thing to do, is not an additional reason for φʼing; it is rather
made true by reasons in context for φʼing.
27 However, truth-value gaps complicate the relation between p and ʻIt is true that p.ʼ If it is neither true nor false that p, then
it is false that it is true that p, though not false that p.
28 For reflective expositions of this, see Wieland (1982: 263–80), Kamtekar (2006).
29 See Charm. 164d4, Prot. 343b3, Phdr. 229e6, Phil. 48c10; and o en in the dubious Alc. I take the Delphic warning to have
been meant against any presumption that is unfitting for a mere mortal. Socrates goes further, demanding not just
humility, but insight.
30 Cf. X 611b1–612a5, on which see, e.g., Price (1995: 73–4).
31 So does Aristotle (AE C.13 1153b30–2): ʻAll pursue pleasure—and perhaps not the pleasure they think or would allege, but
the same pleasure; for all things have by nature something divine in them.ʼ (I shall draw on this remark in ch. A 2 § I.)
32 On this conception, see Price (1997a: 100) a er Kosman (1976: 64–5).
33 As I shall discuss in ch. C 1 § II, Socrates does not consistently keep to using ʻdesireʼ (boulesthai) in the sense of ʻtruly
desireʼ. What I have argued here is that this is a special sense of ʻdesireʼ that arises intelligibly out of a conception of a fully
final end which can only be the object of a true desire. I am not persuaded by Penner and Rowe (2005) that Plato is
consistently adopting a radical and distinctive general theory of desire which excludes there being any sense in which one
could desire anything that in fact is not beneficial for one.
Later in the Gorg., as Devereux notes (2008: 152), Socrates speaks of desires for things not good (503c6–d3, 505a6–b12),
though now using the term epithumein. This may confirm that the Gorgias is a dialogue of transition, which moves
towards Platoʼs later recognition of a distinction between reason that desires the good, and appetite that desires the
pleasant (cf. Price 1995: 33–6). Yet one should not suppose that desire must be either for the truly good or for the
apparently pleasant, for that would be arbitrary. A contrast between boulesthai the good and epithumein the pleasant
(such as we already meet at Charm. 167e1–5, but with no necessary implication of two genera of desire, cf. Price 1995: 30),
no more strongly suggests a conception of truly boulesthai, whose object is really good, than one of truly epithumein,
whose object would be really pleasant. (Think how easily in either case, when someone chooses some food under a
misapprehension, one might remark ʻYou donʼt want to be eating that.ʼ)
34 This is a di icult passage, to which I shall return in ch. C 1 § II, n. 15, and ch. D 1 § II. 505d6–7 (tauta prattein kai kektēsthai
kai dokein) is over-concise, and its sense and syntax are unclear. What Plato must mean here in the case of acts, I think, is
this: many agents are happy to perform acts that have the appearance of the just or fine without the reality; they are
happy to be taken to be thereby acting justly or finely, even if they really are not.
35 On Platoʼs attitude to so-called ʻhardʼ acrasia, whereby the agent turns consciously away from what he conceives to be
good or best, see Price (1995: 102–3), which concludes thus: ʻThe hard acratic becomes a marginal character within Platoʼs
moral melodrama.ʼ
36 We equally find an analogy between physical health and virtue of soul in the Crito (47d7–48a1), though there the contrast
between ʻbeing improvedʼ and ʻbeing ruinedʼ was not spelled out in a way that articulated a universal value.
37 This is one reason, among others, why Plato cannot anticipate Aristotle in detaching theoretical wisdom from phronēsis.
A.W. Price
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CHAPTER
A 2 Aristotle on Eudaimonia 
A. W. Price

Abstract
Eudaimonia as the nal goal of action is abstract, being equivalent to ‘acting well’. We should not view
it as the totality of the goods that a life contains, which leads to insoluble problems. A life can contain
incidental goods that are good in themselves, and marginally enhance a day, but are not aspects of
action; these do not contribute to eudaimonia. Aristotle demands a modicum of external goods for
eudaimonia, a context of action that is not simply unwelcome, and a ‘complete life’ that may be less
than a lifetime. His privileging of the life of intellectual contemplation is problematic, but does not
entail that one should sacri ce everything (and everyone) else to doing more mathematics.
Keywords: eudaimonia, living well, acting well, whole, parts, final end, complete life, external goods,
contemplation
I. Two conceptions of Eudaimonia
A purely ethical conception of eudaimonia must be restrictive of what can count as making a man eudaimōn.
In certain ways, Plato and Aristotle take a wider view: notably, we shall have to take into account intellectual
activity. Yet some exclusions may have to be accepted. Let us rst recall one way in which we tend to re ect
upon our lives. Then we may relate that to debates about how best to interpret Aristotle. My discussion of
this will eventually lead us to an understanding of Aristotle as being faithful to Plato as I have expounded
him.
A concept that is important to us is of how well a life is going. An easier variant is in play when one re ects, at
night, how well one’s day has gone. It seems here to be true that nothing of positive or negative value,
however trivial, is ruled out as simply irrelevant. If I recall delivering a lecture, I can also recall giving a
passing greeting; if I recall listening to Wagner’s woodbird, I can also recall catching the song of a thrush.
Thus the question ‘How has my day gone?’ is open to a plethora of di erent inputs. To an extent, a
favourable or unfavourable answer is additive: one may add up goods one has enjoyed, and subtract ills one
has su ered. One may also have structural preferences: idle reading at the end of the day is commonly
thought better than idle reading at its start.
I deliberately included within possible recollections of a day a piece of passivity (catching a thrush’s song),
as well as two clear pieces of activity (delivering a lecture, giving a greeting), and one of activity-cum-
passivity (listening to a performance). What is in question is more general than what Baudelaire imagines us
recalling in ‘L’Examen de Minuit’, which is ‘quel usage/Nous fîmes du jour qui s’enfuit’, that is, what use we
made of the past day. Indeed, one may hearken to a thrush’s song, which involves the activity of directing
p. 34 one’s attention—but one may enjoy hearing it without having the time or the interest to pause as one
passes. Much, but not all, is lost by a failure to pay attention; a pleasure of a kind may still be felt. And that is
a plus, however trivial, within the total record of a day.
Conoscenti of recent debate will recognize in this conception of how well a day or a life goes one familiar
interpretation of the nature of Aristotelian eudaimonia. Viewed all-inclusively, eudaimonia is a life that goes
well enough to count as going well, with every intrinsic good that it contains contributing in itself, however
1
marginally, to its so doing. Aristotle certainly had the conception of a sum of goods that has a value that
exceeds the value of any proper subset by the goods that it contains, and that lacks. So the Rhetoric: ‘A
greater number of goods is a greater good than one or than a smaller number, if that one or that smaller
number is included in the count; for then the larger number surpasses the smaller, and the smaller quantity
is surpassed as being contained in the larger’ (I.7 1363b18–21; cf. Top. III.2 117a16–17, EN X.2 1172b23–8).
Yet whether he takes the sum of all the goods that a eudaimōn enjoys through his life to constitute his
eudaimonia is debatable. He may, if W. D. Ross translated a debated passage correctly: ‘We think it [sc.
eudaimonia] most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing among others—if it were
so counted it would clearly be made more desirable by the addition of even the least of goods; for that which
is added becomes an excess of goods, and of goods the greater is always more desirable’ (EN I.7 1097b16–
20). Ross’s condition ‘if it were so counted’ is explicitly counter-factual, as Aristotle’s Greek is not. The line
of thought is thereby taken to be the following: given that eudaimonia is indeed ‘most desirable of all
things’, it is not to be counted ‘as one good thing among others’. If it were, we would only have to add to it
‘the least of goods’ in order to create a set of goods more desirable, however marginally, than eudaimonia
itself—which is excluded. On an all-inclusive conception of eudaimonia, the prohibition is well motivated:
any good enjoyed by a man automatically falls within his eudaimonia (if he is eudaimōn); hence it cannot also
be counted alongside it without the error of double counting.
p. 35 As I have stated this interpretation, it carries no implication that a life is only eudaimōn if it couldn’t have
been improved. It is one thing to say, absurdly and impracticably, that a man’s eudaimonia must contain all
possible goods—even, in Stephen Clark’s happy example (1975: 154), a constant supply of chocolate creams.
It is another to say, unabsurdly, that every single one of the goods that a man enjoys contributes, if he is
2
eudaimōn, to his eudaimonia. Once we make this distinction, we can interpret eudaimonia as all-inclusive
without taking it to be unimprovable. How high we place the threshold of eudaimonia, that is, what quantity
of goods, and balance of goods over evils, a man needs to enjoy if he is to count as eudaimōn, is not a
3
question that the inclusivist should hurry to answer.
Another issue is far more complex. In both the Eudemian Ethics (I.2 1214b26–7), and the common books (AE
A.1 1129b18), as also in the Rhetoric (I.5 1360b6–7), Aristotle writes of the ‘parts’ (merē or moria) of
eudaimonia. (It is, however, striking that he does not do so in the EN outside the common books.) He is then
concerned to distinguish a part of eudaimonia from a necessary condition that is not a part (EE I.2 1214b11–
27). This language conveys that eudaimonia is a concrete whole, a whole that is made up of speci c parts.
How does the value of such a whole relate to the values of the parts? Two extremes here are atomistic and
holistic: on a purely atomistic view, the value of the whole derives from the sum of the values of the parts
and of their interrelations; on a purely holistic view, the values of the parts and of their interrelations derive
from the value of the whole.
We might hope for clari cation from John Ackrill’s in uential statement of inclusivism. He writes, ‘That the
primary ingredients of eudaimonia are for the sake of eudaimonia is not incompatible with their being ends
in themselves; for eudaimonia is constituted by activities that are ends in themselves’ (1980: 19). His denial
of any incompatibility may be right, but the ‘for’ is puzzling. eudaimonia’s being ‘constituted by activities
that are ends in themselves’ leaves open that it might be a ragbag (an unstructured and heterogeneous
collection) that adds nothing to the miscellaneous values of what it contains; so it cannot itself explain how
p. 36 its elements may also exist, or be good, ‘for the sake of’ eudaimonia. Equally confusing is a later passage:
‘One can answer such a question as “Why do you seek pleasure?” by saying that you see it and seek it as an
element in the most desirable sort of life…[This] does not imply that pleasure is not intrinsically worthwhile
but only a means to an end. It implies rather that pleasure is intrinsically worthwhile, being an element in
eudaimonia’ (1980: 21). How is this last sentence to be understood? It might just mean, though not easily,
that pleasure is independently worthwhile for its own sake, and, for that reason (alongside any others), is
actually or potentially a constituent of eudaimonia (actually if the subject is eudaimōn, only potentially if it is
not). But that would neither entail, nor be entailed by, the claim that the question ‘Why do you seek
4
pleasure?’ permits an answer by reference to eudaimonia as an end more nal than pleasure itself.
Now, it is possible that Ackrill intends the following claim: at least one way in which a thing may have value
is if it is a component of a whole that has global value. It might be suggested that the global value of a
complex whole resides in its components and their relations (though not in their causal preconditions), and
thereby bestows upon them a value that may count as theirs, so long as this does not suggest, falsely, that
they could be detached from the whole and yet retain it. We might then try to distinguish, within the value of
the elements, value that is independent of the whole (cf. EN I.6 1096b16–19), and value that is dependent
upon the whole and derivative from it. If this is Ackrill’s intention, his claim ‘Pleasure is intrinsically
worthwhile, being an element in eudaimonia’ (1980: 21) is meant to convey that pleasure is valuable for the
sake of eudaimonia in a way that involves its being part of eudaimonia, and hence makes the value of
eudaimonia in part its own. However, it is doubtful whether his way of making the point makes sense. Take a
di erent example that is not of part and whole: the symbolic value of an object (say, of a ring that takes on
p. 37 the role of a wedding ring) is a value that it has, and yet it is surely an extrinsic and not an intrinsic value. It
5
is better to say that the global value of a whole is intrinsic to itself, and extrinsic to its parts. I conclude that
Ackrill’s discussion is imperfectly clari catory.
In fact, it seems that Aristotle cannot be thinking of eudaimonia as a concrete whole when he makes certain
6
strong claims about its nality. He tells us that eudaimonia, being ‘ nal without quali cation’, is always
desirable in itself, never for the sake of anything else (I.7 1097a30–34, cf. b4–5); again, it is ‘the rst
principle and cause of goods’ (I.12 1102a3–4). A holistic reading of this as a claim about eudaimonia as a
concrete whole would be that everything that has value within the whole derives it from the prior value that
attaches to the whole as a whole. By contrast, an atomist would hold that eudaimonia, as a whole consisting
of parts, derives its value from the values of its constituent parts and their relations. A middle position
would be that the value of the concrete whole is in part emergent out of the pattern created by its elements,
and in part derivative from those elements themselves. It is partly new, being realized only when the pattern
of life is complete, and partly old, annexing already existent values. Then this instance of eudaimonia would
be desirable at once for a unitary value proprietary to itself, and for an additive value that it derives from the
values of its elements (values that only contingently nd their resting place within this instance of
eudaimonia, but then help to constitute it). And then it would appear to follow, as I once asserted, ‘If its
[eudaimonia’s] components are partly good on their own, then we must partly pursue eudaimonia for the
sake of those components’ (1980: 343). But this Aristotle appears to deny (I.7 1097b5–6).
My argument is that, if Aristotle combines his conceptions of eudaimonia as nal without quali cation, and
as a concrete whole, he commits himself to an extreme holism. I once tried to illustrate this as follows: ‘The
p. 38 readiest illustration of such holism is aesthetic. A picture (a pattern of colours), or a piece of music (a
pattern of sounds), are compounded out of elements none of which, perhaps, need have any value in
isolation (nor even within a fragment of the pattern). The role of these elements may be solely to realize a
certain structure, so that the whole value of each element is its contribution to the value of the structured
complex’ (1980: 344). That was never plausible as a claim about traditional paintings and compositions. It is
more plausible of works of conceptual art, which exist in order to embody a single, indivisible idea.
Unfortunately for any analogy with Aristotle, a life is utterly unlike such a work, and much more analogous,
for example, to a pictorial cycle depicting the life and death of a martyr or a rake; for such cycles form an
aesthetic whole, but lack that unity of focus.
We need to ask again how rightly to conceive eudaimonia if it is to be an end ‘ nal without quali cation’ (I.7
7
1097a33)—indeed, the only such end (X.6 1176b30–1). This is the conception that was evident in Plato. As I
reported from the Symposium, Diotima relates erōs and eudaimonia as follows: love is a desire for the
possession of good things; it is by the possession of good things that eudaimones are eudaimōn; the question
‘Why do you want to be eudaimōn?’ makes no sense (204e2–205a3). The immediate implication is that the
question ‘Why do you want to possess good things?’ is permissible, and that the answer is ‘In order to be
eudaimōn.’ It is inexplicit how (a) being eudaimōn relates to (b) possessing good things. (a) is not to be
reduced to (b); for (a) gives point to (b), whereas there is nothing else, not even something notionally
distinct, which gives point to (a). We might distinguish (a) and (b) as follows: (a) is the ultimate but abstract
goal of desire; (b) is what, stated in the most general terms, achieves that goal. Success in a human life has
two aspects. There is (a) an ultimate goal achieved through living such a life; and there is (b) the subsidiary
goals whose realization achieves (a). In what does the point of (b) consist? At least partly in their subserving
(a), but additionally in whatever independent values attach to the subgoals. On any realistic view, part of the
value of a eudaimōn life is focal upon the eudaimonia that it realizes, whereas part of its value is plural, and
derives from the goods that constitute it. In any case, we must not confuse eudaimonia as the most nal end
with a eudaimōn life that realizes that end in some determinate way.
p. 39 I introduced the conception of eudaimonia as a concrete whole with the notion, already familiar to us, of how
well a life goes. Aristotle’s focal conception of eudaimonia as ‘ nal without quali cation’ is di erent (I have
argued). It derives from Plato, and coincides, I believe, with a notion of ‘an overall aim’ of action that
Anselm Müller sets out as follows:
An overall aim would be one I could not but have…All my striving would be towards this aim,
whatever my particular purpose in a particular action, somewhat as the tendency of a body under
the in uence of gravitation is towards a state of equilibrium, whatever the direction of its
particular movement, and very much as the tendency of someone having a question on his mind is
for truth whatever the content of the particular judgement he is about to form…It would not be up
to me not to tend towards this aim; for any option I took would already be inspired by it (1989:
236).
Such an aim is a pure object of the will that is constant between di erent situations of action; in this it
di ers from ‘any particular aim’, which ‘is, so to speak, adulterated by limiting conditions which are not
objects of my wanting’ (238). The overall aim is neither contingent upon circumstance, nor optional: ‘It is
an aim I do not set myself. It is there as soon as I am there; it is as little of my choosing as my existence is; it
is somehow set before me’ (ibid.). Yet for better or worse, this orientation is only somewhat like the force of
gravitation: to achieve its end it is not enough to let oneself go. Whereas ‘the stone which by nature moves
downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards’ (II.1 1103a20–1), agents can be habituated to become
virtuous or vicious; and acquiring virtue requires not just the absence of bad habituation, but the presence of
good habituation.
In Aristotelian terminology, any choice, or chosen action, ipso facto aims at eudaimonia. eudaimonia is the
good of choice and action (in the rich sense of praxis in which all action is chosen, AE B.2 1139a18–20). It is ‘a
rst principle’ (archē), ‘for it is for the sake of this that we do all else that we do’ (EN I.12 1102a2–3). While
all agents pursue this, they conceive of it very variously: everyone equates eudaimonia with ‘living well and
doing well’ (I.4 1095a18–20), but this gloss is ambiguous between getting what one wants, and acting as
one should. Yet Aristotle surmises that all creatures ‘pursue not the pleasure they think or would allege, but
the same pleasure; for by nature all things have something divine’ (AE C.13 1153b31–2). There is a true and
unquali ed object of desire (EN III.4 1113a23–4) that is not itself ambiguous, and constitutes the natural
p. 40 goal even of agents who appear benighted (X.2 1173a4–5, EE VII.2 1238b1–5, 9–14). This he identi es
with eudaimonia as he abstractly conceives of it, which is as acting well (eupragia or eupraxia, Pol. VII.3
1325a22–3, EN I.8 1098b20–2). Possibly the senses of these words di er in nuance: the term eupraxia may
lack the connotation, which the term eudaimonia carries, of the activity of a complete life (I.7 1098a18)—
whatever that means. (I found some evidence for such a distinction in Plato between eu prattein and eu zēn,
though often the phrases are used interchangeably.) We read in the common books that eupraxia is the nal
end of human action (which subsumes production) and the focus of desire (AE B.2 1139b1–4, cf. B.5 1140b6–
7). eupraxia is the nominalization of act well (eu prattein, cf. EN I.4 1095a19), just as action (praxis) is the
nominalization of act (prattein). What one performs is an act (in a privileged sense that excludes lower
animal behaviour, cf. AE B.2 1139a20, and even non-rational human reactions), and what one pursues is
eupraxia or eudaimonia. So construed (and not, say, as identical to something ‘concrete or easily
recognizable’, such as pleasure, wealth, or honour, EN I.4 1095a22–3), eudaimonia isn’t a reason for doing
one thing rather than another, since whatever one did would be done for its sake. Analogously, truth isn’t
the reason for judging one way rather than another, since whatever one judged one would judge to be true.
Yet eudaimonia is the inherent goal of action, just as truth is the inherent goal of judgement. Reasons for
8
action are eudaimonia-regarding, just as reasons for belief are truth-regarding.
Such a conception can help us to understand how eudaimonia is the most choiceworthy of ends, in the sense
of always being chosen for itself and not for anything else (EN I.7 1097a34–b1). Take a set of acts {x, y, z}. I
can shift from choosing {x, y, z} for the sake of eudaimonia, to choosing {x, y, z + taking a chocolate cream}
for the sake of eudaimonia; but that cannot count as choosing {eudaimonia + taking a chocolate cream} for
the sake of eudaimonia—which would be nonsense. Essentially, the same point can be made in relation to
the determinable ‘acting well’. For those who rightly identify it with eudaimonia it constitutes, as Aristotle
p. 41 puts it, ‘a mark to which the man who has the logos looks, and heightens or relaxes his activity
9
accordingly’ (AE B.1 1138b22–3). In an example from the Posterior Analytics, a man comes to a place in order
to get a sum of money, and therewith pay a debt, and thereby avoid acting unjustly (I.24 85b27–35).
Nothing more needs to be said, for not acting unjustly is invariably a condition of acting well. Here we can
distinguish: coming to a place is a means towards getting a sum of money, which is itself a means towards
paying a debt; paying a debt is a way of avoiding acting unjustly, which itself (though this is left implicit) is a
way of acting well. Now it is evidently a mistake—and often evident nonsense—to reverse a means-end
chain. Could one avoid acting unjustly in order thereby to be paying a debt? Hardly. Could one act well in
order thereby to be avoiding acting unjustly? Certainly not. This is partly a matter of the speci c and
generic: compare that one may paint a wall scarlet in order thereby to be painting it red, but not paint it red
in order thereby to be painting it scarlet. It is also a matter of the end-like (or Aristotle’s ‘perfect’ or ‘ nal’,
teleios): acting well is the point of not acting unjustly, rather as not acting unjustly is the point of paying a
debt; and ‘being the point of’ is no more a symmetrical relation than ‘being instrumental towards’.
Thus eudaimonia’s primary role is as the nal and inherent end of each deliberate human action; and in
acting deliberately I by nature aim at acting well, which is what it really is to be eudaimōn. Precisely in this
form, eudaimonism captures what is arguably an essential feature of morality. Any ethical agent must be
centrally concerned, as he acts, to be acting well and not badly. This is what it is to take responsibility for
one’s own actions—a responsibility that one cannot have for the free actions of others. Such a concern was
manifested by Socrates when he preferred to risk his own life than to join in causing the death of an
innocent man (Apol. 32c4–e1). He did not reason that, since in all likelihood an innocent man would die
anyway (and why not then one rather than two?), he was free to save his own skin. Instead, he decided to act
justly, where ‘acting justly’ denotes a way of acting open to him that he ranked incomparably above other
10
p. 42 ways. By contrast, inclusivism interprets the agent as having an overriding concern that his life contain
more that is good and less that is bad (e.g., more pleasure and less pain), where ‘his life’ denotes a concrete
whole that he ranks incomparably above other such wholes. Which would display not personal
responsibility, but the partiality of an egoist. It is true that, wherever ethical gains and losses are supposed
to outweigh others, the practical upshot will accord with morality. And yet there remains an aspect of
11
amoral egocentricity that is displeasing, and (we must hope) alien to Aristotle.
Derivatively from that basis we can count a set of such actions, through or within the life of some agent, as
constituting an instance of eudaimonia as a concrete whole. And no doubt he will have a special concern
about that (even though, impartially viewed, two such concrete wholes are of a kind). As interpreters of
Aristotle, we should not overemphasize this second notion: as I noted, it is absent from the Nicomachean
Ethics outside the common books. (Its prominence within his theory looks like an unhappy invention of the
inclusivists.) The two conceptions are consistent; indeed, the rst generates the second. It is if we confound
the two that we need recourse to unclarity if we are to evade the charges of unreality and egocentricity.
II. Eudaimonia and its components
In its primary sense, then, eudaimonia is the ultimate and abstract goal of deliberate human actions, one
that can be identi ed with acting well. An agent who acts for the sake of eudaimonia is oriented, wittingly or
unwittingly, in acting as he does towards acting well. If he succeeds, and his action falls within a pattern of
success, it counts as a component within his eudaimonia, reconceived now as an act‐sequence forming, as a
concrete whole. Thus paying a debt typically derives its value from acting justly, which in turn derives its
value from acting well: one pays a debt in order thereby to be acting justly, and this in order thereby to be
acting well. Here, paying a debt is an instance of acting justly, and hence also an instance of acting well. This
ts it to be an element within the agent’s eudaimonia, taken concretely.
p. 43 It is a complication that other things may derive value from acting well (as a nal end) without constituting
instances of it (within a concrete whole). This appears to be the message of a di cult and debated passage:
We call nal without quali cation that which is always selectable in itself and never for the sake of
something else. Now such a thing eudaimonia, above all else, is held to be; for this we select always
for itself and never for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, intelligence, and every
virtue we select indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we would select each of
them), but we select them also for the sake of eudaimonia, judging that through them we shall be
eudaimōn (EN I.7 1097a33–b5).
The word that I have here translated as ‘select’ is haireisthai, which is general, and not prohaireisthai, which
Aristotle later adopts speci cally to signify deliberative choice. (At points below, where it is more natural, I
shall use the term ‘value’, though it fails to imply that the object is viewed as a good open to an agent.) We
must be careful in drawing inferences from Aristotle’s concession that we would select each of ‘honour,
pleasure, intelligence and every virtue’ even if ‘nothing resulted from them’; for it is evident elsewhere that
the term ‘result from’ (apobainein) connotes consequences (such as a bene t or loss to others), and not
12
immanent ends (such as being eudaimōn in acting justly, and acting justly in paying a debt). Hence it is not
excluded that the values of these things might derive from an abstract end that they help to realize. What is
rather striking is that ‘honour, pleasure, intelligence and every virtue’ are ascribed intrinsic value, even
13
though none of them can itself be an instance of acting well. It is possible that Aristotle is writing loosely,
and has in mind not possessing ‘intelligence and every virtue’, but exercising it; but that suggestion does not
apply to honour. So he seems to be granting that many things may be worth having in themselves, though
they are not of a kind to be instances of acting well.
At the same time, he asserts of ‘honour, pleasure, intelligence and every virtue’ that ‘we select them also for
the sake of eudaimonia, judging that through them (dia toutōn) we shall be eudaimōn’ (1097b2–5). One way
p. 44 of reading ‘through’ here is that they have acting well as a consequence that, more precisely, is a product.
In the case of virtue, and indeed intelligence, we can cite a later passage: ‘The state of mind may exist
without producing any good result, as in a man who is asleep or in some other way quite inactive’ (I.8
14
1098b33–1099a2). When a man is awake and active, his virtue can be said to ‘produce’ action that not only
15
accords with virtue, but constitutes acting virtuously (II.4 1105a28–33). Something analogous holds of an
art or craft, but the relation of virtue to activity di ers from that of a craft to its product, and in two ways
(among others, cf. AE B.2 1139b1–3). First, the exercise of a craft is two-way: medical expertise can supply
16
both a poison and an antidote. Second, a craft can be idle not just in sleep, but as the craftsman pleases;
but an ethical virtue isn’t the sort of thing that an agent can decline to exercise at will. Aristotle may have
the rst point in mind when he says that to activate a virtue is to act well (EN I.8 1099a3), and the second
when he says of virtue that ‘activity in accordance with virtue belongs to it’ (1098b31).
It is less clear how honour and pleasure could have acting well as a product or consequence. However,
Aristotle will observe much later that one role of pleasure is to ‘increase’ the activity in which a man takes
pleasure by helping him to progress in it (X.4 1175a30–5). Honour could well be viewed as a means to
political in uence (which itself is a kind of instrument, cf. I.8 1099a33–b2); but what Aristotle actually
suggests is that men pursue honour from wise acquaintances as a source of moral reassurance (I.4
1095b26–9).
So read, the passage has the following gist: we value virtue (like the rest) for its own sake, for we value it
even when it has no consequences; but we also value it for having acting well as a consequence. Aristotle
remarks in AE B that philosophic and practical wisdom (sophia and phronēsis) are worth having (hairetos)
just because each is a virtue of some part of the soul, even apart from their exercise (B.12 1144a1–3, cf. B.13
1145a2–4). Presumably, he would extend this thought to virtues of character. However, Aristotle had ground
not to think in this way. For he has a general view that potentiality exists for the sake of actuality, as is stated
in Met. Θ.8:
p. 45 Everything that comes to be moves towards a principle (archē), i.e., an end. For that for the sake of
which a thing is, is its principle, and the becoming is for the sake of the end; and the actuality is the
end, and it is for the sake of this that the potentiality is acquired. For animals do not see in order
that they may have sight, but they have sight that they may see (1050a7–11).
Hence he should hold that virtues exist for the sake of acting virtuously, even when they are not being
exercised. Consequently, their value derives from the value of acting well. They exemplify a way in which
something may derive value from acting well, even existing ‘for the sake of it’ in a sense, even though it is
not an instance of acting well, and even on occasions when no acting well takes place.
Alternatively, Aristotle may mean a di erent and still closer relation with action. He may have in mind that,
when intelligence and a virtue are being exercised, we value them because of a relation to eudaimonia that is
17
not consequential. And this is most likely what he means in the case of pleasure, which is not a capacity or
disposition. Honour we can set aside: Aristotle presumably mentions it here because he is describing the
structure of our valuings, and many decent people take honour to be integral to eudaimonia—mistakenly, as
he has already argued (EN I.5 1095b22–30). But the other three, virtue, intelligence, and pleasure, are linked
internally to acting well within Aristotle’s own theory: he requires of acting well that it display a rm
character (II.4 1105a32–3), that it involve ‘a logos for the sake of something’ (AE B.2 1139b32–3), and that it
be pleasant (EN I.8 1099a21, IX.9 1170a8–10, X.6 1176b25–6)—indeed, with the speci c pleasure proper to
the activity (see X.5). In this respect, while virtue, intelligence, and pleasure are not indeed instances of
acting well, they are essential aspects of it. And thus it can be said that we act well through them, where
‘through’ indicates not the relation in which a cause stands to a consequence, but one in which a formal
cause stands to what it helps to de ne. Paying a bill takes on extra value as a way of acting well; virtue,
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intelligence, and pleasure can take on extra value as essential aspects.
So far I have been considering the value that a way of acting, or an aspect of acting, or a potentiality of
p. 46 acting, can derive from the value of acting well. All these values may be viewed as derivative from that of
eudaimonia, though in di erent ways. So interpreted, the passage that we have been considering all goes to
con rm the nality of eudaimonia: pleasure, intelligence, and every virtue (even honour, if one seriously
wants to bring that in) are valued for its sake, while it is valued for nothing other than itself (I.7 1097b4–6).
Yet it is important that acting well, though a highly determinable end, is not an umbrella term of inde nite
extent. Even if enjoying doing what one does is an aspect of thereby acting well, the enjoyment is not itself
an instance of acting well, nor a member of a sequence of acts wherein living well is achieved. However, it is
not simple to draw a boundary.
Acts performed for the sake of eudaimonia contrast sharply with those which the agent performs against his
own judgement. Also di erent, though less contrasted, are cases in which he acts spontaneously, neither in
accordance with judgement, nor contrary to it. Yet some actions in this category will still be virtuous, and
not by accident. This may be true when he acts both in accordance with virtue and even out of virtue, yet not
out of reasoning and logos (III.8 1117a18–22). Should we deny that he is acting well if, in such cases, he is
failing to satisfy all the clauses of Aristotle’s de nition of what it is to act virtuously (II.4 1105a28–33)?
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Which he is if, as is debated, he is not acting on choice.
What, indeed, of choices themselves? Making a choice, like deliberating itself, is distinctive: unlike merely
conceiving a desire it is purposive, being inherently a route towards the achieving of an end through its
20
enaction. Yet choices cannot satisfy the de nition of acting virtuously. There is partly the danger of an
in nite regress: evidently, not all choices could themselves be chosen. More signi cantly, the very notion of
choosing to choose needs care: I can certainly choose to make up my mind now about a pressing practical
question (which will involve choosing one way or another); but I cannot intelligibly choose to choose to φ
(where the content of the chosen choice is already de ned), and then act on the rst choice in making the
p. 47 second. And yet surely choice, as much as action, can be ‘activity of soul in accordance with virtue’, which
is how I.7 characterizes ‘the human good’ (1098a16–17), i.e., eudaimonia.
There is anyway good reason not to demand that any instance of acting well should also be one of acting
virtuously, and so essentially involve choice. This arises with Aristotle’s preferred mode of eudaimonia,
which is intellectual contemplation. In the Politics he counts contemplating as active par excellence,
containing its own end and being for its own sake, explaining ‘For acting well (eupraxia) is the end, and
therefore a certain kind of action (praxis tis) is also the end’ (VII.3 1325b16–21). He does not count
contemplation as action because it is subject to practical questions about when and how to engage in it; thus
it is not as being a way of acting virtuously that contemplation falls within eudaimonia. Rather, Aristotle
conceives of it as being purposive in its own manner: so, in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘The activity of nous
seems…to aim at no end besides itself’ (X.7 1177b19–20). As appears to be the train of thought in the Politics,
it aims itself to realize the end of acting well; hence it must itself count as ‘a certain kind of action’
(1325b19–21)—it cannot be something other than action that subserves acting well in some subordinate
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way. It is true that it is usually actions that Aristotle counts as according with virtue, meaning by ‘virtue’
22
virtue of character. But contemplation is an exception: ‘Of activities in accordance with virtue that in
accordance with wisdom is agreed to be the pleasantest’ (EN X.7 1177a23–5).
This indicates that we should not exclude choosing from qualifying as a way of acting well simply because
choice is not itself chosen. It is true that choosing is very di erent from contemplation in its teleological
structure: it is inherently directed towards an end other than itself, being one of those mental activities
‘which we have in order to get results from action’ (Pol. 1325b18–19). Yet this contrast also holds between
contemplation and ethical action itself. It is a familiar crux that Aristotle can say, within consecutive
chapters, both that ‘doing ne and good acts is among the things desirable for its own sake’ (EN X.6
1176b8–9), and that, ‘among virtuous actions, political and military ones are pre-eminently ne and great,
p. 48 but are unleisurely and aim at a certain end and are not desirable for their own sake’ (X.7 1177b16–18).
The crux can perhaps be resolved analogously for actions and choices. It is, for example, staying at one’s
post in battle when this helps (or is such as to help) hold up the enemy that is courageous, and so ne.
Equally, perhaps, it is making a choice that will lead (or is such as to lead) to such an action that is
courageous, and so ne. If this is right, we can with equal right count acting courageously, and choosing
courageously, as ways of acting well (and so as possible elements within eudaimonia construed as a concrete
whole).
What, next, of desire? Does desiring rightly equally fall under the same formula ‘activity of soul in
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accordance with virtue’ (I.7 1098a16–17)? We nd no certain indication of this in I.7 itself, but supporting
evidence elsewhere. Thus mature agents ‘desire and act in accordance with logos’ (I.3 1095a10), while
virtuous desires fully ‘obey’ and ‘chime with’ the logos (I.13 1102b26–8); and praise and blame are bestowed
on voluntary actions and passions (pathē, III.1 1109b30–1). We might resist this further extension of eupraxia
by contrasting merely conceiving a desire with actively making a decision or forming an intention on the
other. But that may be dubiously Aristotelian, for Aristotle concludes his analysis of choice in III.3 as
follows: ‘Choice will be deliberate desire of things in our own power; for when we have decided as a result of
deliberation, we desire in accordance with our deliberation’ (1113a10–12). However, we have no argument
for viewing human desires as generally components of eudaimonia; possibly they may become so as and
when they are obedient to the logos.
We must wonder whether and where a clear line is to be drawn. I have argued that Aristotle can consistently
allow that virtue, intelligence, and pleasure derive a further value through their relations to eudaimonia,
though instances of none of them can count as instances of eupraxia. I take enjoyment to be an occurrent
mental state that may be an aspect, even a necessary aspect, of acting well, but is not itself a case of acting
p. 49 well. What, however, should we say about perceiving (which can be an object of enjoyment as much as
acting)? Terence Irwin has argued that even this can become part of eudaimonia through being subject to
reason. This seems to me an extension too far. First, I shall deny that an enjoyable perceptual experience
may fail to be valuable, even in a way, if phronēsis would forbid it in context. Second, I shall deny that it may
come to be part of eudaimonia though being permitted in context by phronēsis. In these two ways, I wish to
keep with my claim that there are elements within a man’s life that inherently enhance it but cannot help
constitute his eudaimonia.
Is there a simple answer to the question ‘Is pleasure good’? In a way there is: ‘The fact that all things, both
brutes and men, pursue pleasure is an indication of its being somehow the chief good’ (AE C.13 1153b25–6).
And yet Aristotle denies that all pleasures are good: ‘Since activities di er in respect of goodness and
badness, and some are desirable, others to be avoided, and others neutral, so, too, are the pleasures; for to
each activity there is a proper pleasure. The pleasure proper to a worthwhile activity is good and that proper
to a worthless activity bad’ (EN X.5 1175b24–8). This is not a piece of free- oating moralism, but a plausible
inference from a central principle within his account of pleasure, which is, as he then restates it, that ‘as
activities are di erent, so are the corresponding pleasures’ (b36). Note that he is speaking about pleasures
of certain general kinds. Once we have described some good and enjoyable activity su ciently to identify
what pleasure is taken in it by the agent, that pleasure will have invariant valence: it will be a good, and
count in favour, most obviously, of the activity itself. If the activity is by nature bad, then any pleasure
proper to it will be characteristic of a bad agent, and make it worse. Such remarks relate rather to the type of
the activity than to the context of the token. Nothing just cited implies, say, that if I take a gourmet’s
pleasure in eating a marron glacé on an occasion when I should abstain, the pleasure not only fails to be good
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in itself, but makes the eating worse.
p. 50 What might be Aristotelian is not that, but a thesis that even a passive pleasure may become not just a good,
but a component of eudaimonia, just so long as phronēsis permits it. How much of a restriction is it that
acting well involves acting ‘in accordance with virtue’? Irwin distinguishes a narrow from a wide reading of
this (1991: 390): in ‘a narrow, “prescriptive” sense’, it means that eudaimonia ‘consists solely in actions
that are fully characteristic of, and prescribed by, the di erent virtues’; in ‘a broad, “regulative” sense’, it
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‘refers to regulation by virtue, as distinct from full manifestation of the virtues’. This is part and parcel of
an extended reading of Aristotle’s conception of man’s proper function (I.7): ‘To claim that the human
function consists in a life according to reason is to claim that human behaviour is teleologically explicable as
the product of practical reason guiding other activities’ (1988: 364). Accordingly, even perception can count
as part of man’s function; and a case of perceiving can be part of ‘the human good’ just so long as it falls
within ‘activity of soul in accordance with virtue’ (1098a16–17) in the sense of being regulated by practical
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reason.
One might ask what goings-on could not be so regulable, and wait for an answer. Possibly, for example, a
p. 51 boy may be unable to escape a pleasant if implicit awareness that he is growing—but then one may be
presupposing a possibility of regulation in specifying that the awareness is implicit (rather, say, than self-
conscious). The position is still of interest; yet I believe it to be unevidenced in Aristotle, and actually lacking
in point. First, Aristotle repeatedly uses the phrase ‘in accordance with virtue’ in a prescriptive sense (e.g.,
I.8 1099a10–11, a21, IV.1 1120a23–4, X.6 1176b7–9, 1177a9–11); we need clear evidence that it can also be
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used in a purely regulative sense. Thus, as I noted, we are told that desires can be ‘in accordance with
logos’ (I.3 1095a10), but also that they can fully ‘obey’ and ‘chime with’ the logos (I.13 1102b26–8). Yet it
would be nonsense to say that perceiving, conceived simply as an exercise of one’s sense-organs and so in
abstraction from paying attention, could be obedient. Secondly, as the distinction I have just made
anticipates, even talk of regulation only makes sense when it is open to the agent to act intentionally.
Hearing a thrush singing cannot even be regulated by phronēsis until it becomes listening—and this can
actually be prescribed. Perceiving is not itself a way of acting (though action a ects what one perceives, and
perception guides—but does not direct—action). And yet an enjoyable instance of perception—enjoyable,
say, because both the organ and the object are good in their way (which supplies a paradigm of pleasure at
X.4 1174b20–31)—surely enhances a life, however minimally. Of course, in cases where perceiving is a good
and a pleasure, one may well pause to pay attention (e.g., in looking or listening), which is (or may be)
deliberate activity for an end, and so contribute to acting well (or badly). Yet even a transient glimpse, of a
butter y or a bluebell, is surely already a good, albeit a trivial one. And, if one stops to get a better look, the
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look that one takes retains a value qua perception even as it assumes a further value qua action.
On my view, therefore, transient and passive pleasures—catching a ray of sunshine, or a thrush’s song—
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p. 52 enhance a life without counting as ways or means of living well, as Aristotle chooses to understand that.
To add the values of virtue, intelligence, or pleasure to some instance of acting well would involve double
counting: an instance of acting well is essentially an exercise of virtue and intelligence that is enjoyable as
such; and we have seen that virtue and intelligence are valuable for the sake of acting well even when there is
no acting well. It is di erent with perception. There are momentary, or purely passive, perceptions that do
not connect with acting well, and yet transiently enhance a life. So, if we take an action that constitutes
acting well, and add such a perception, we have a new totality that has more value than the action taken by
itself.
Thus acting well, as the ultimate goal of deliberate action, enjoys a unique nality, and yet the value of
acting well is not the only source of the values that enhance human life. As an end of action, acting well is
one aspect of an action among others; it is abstract, and not concrete. Not all the values associated with an
action come with, or derive from, that particular aspect, privileged though it is within the end-directedness
that is distinctive of human activity.
Passive pleasures make problematic Ross’s translation of a famous and debated passage already quoted:
‘We think it [sc. eudaimonia] most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing among
others—if it were so counted it would clearly be made more desirable by the addition of even the least of
goods; for that which is added becomes an excess of goods, and of goods the greater is always more
desirable’ (I.7 1097b16–20). Suppose, to vary Clark’s example, that one day, as I lie supine in the sun, a
chocolate cream drops into my mouth, like manna from heaven, and begins, delectably, to dissolve on my
tongue: this would be a minor good that minutely enhances my life without (at least directly) contributing to
my eudaimonia, as Aristotle explicitly conceives that. So we have reason to adopt an alternative reading,
which is not counterfactual: ‘When it is so counted it is clearly made more desirable by the addition of even
p. 53 the least of goods’ (b17–18). eudaimonia is the most desirable of things for a man—so long as we don’t
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compare it to a heterogeneous set such as {eudaimonia + the passive reception of a chocolate cream}.
Acting well may be the end of action, and the most nal of goods, but we enjoy some activities or
experiences—though, in Aristotle’s own view, these should not be very signi cant for us—whose value falls
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outside its value.
It is a good question why Aristotle should wish to restrict the range of eudaimonia in this way. If there is a
practicable totality of goods that includes elements extraneous to eudaimonia, shouldn’t it be this totality
that deliberation takes as its target? Shouldn’t this be the concern of the political art, being the most
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authoritative and architectonic (I.2 1094a26–8)? However, this complaint confuses distinct deliberative
roles. When an agent is deliberating how best to act, he is ipso facto, on Aristotle’s conception of his true
end, trying to act well; if and only if he does act well, he will have succeeded qua agent. Aristotle’s
introduction of virtue and the virtues in I.7 (1098a16–18) is no more than an indication of the complexities
that attach to the goal of acting well in the case of human beings who bring a complex make-up to a
complicated world. (A provisional articulation will follow in I.13.) Acting well may alone be ‘ nal without
quali cation’ (1097a33); yet as a goal it remains abstract. In order to achieve it, an agent needs to take into
account whatever signi cant values and disvalues he can produce or prevent by the options open to him. It is
only through considering what needs attention, and weighing it properly, that he can achieve his abstract
goal. The materials of choice and action are as multiple as the goals, opportunities, and obstacles that are of
concern to human agents. Nothing entails that a man need only take into account possible components of
his own eudaimonia (which, among other things, would be a form of egoism). Nor can only possible
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p. 54 components of someone’s eudaimonia be relevant to decision-making. One’s nal goal can only be
achieved through attending to concrete considerations, and nothing in Aristotle’s structural sketch of
eudaimonia in I.7 provides criteria of relevance for those.
III. ʻIn a complete lifeʼ
In EN I.7, after de ning the human good, which is eudaimonia, as virtuous activity of a kind, Aristotle
continues, ‘But we must add “in a complete life”. For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one
day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy’ (1098a18–20). This is a
puzzling addition. For one thing, as Austin once complained, if a life is to come in, it shouldn’t be as an
afterthought. (Nothing in the so-called function argument has explicitly prepared for it.) Moreover, it is
unclear what Aristotle means here by a ‘complete life’ (bios teleios). The alternatives appear to be these: on a
lifeslice reading, a ‘complete life’ is whatever stretch of life is su cient for the assessment of the prudence
of some action; on a lifespan reading, a complete life is the whole of a lifetime (at least from maturity, cf. I.9
1100a1–3). In short, as people ask about terms of imprisonment, does ‘life’ here mean life?
Apparently in favour of the lifespan reading is I.9 1100a4–9, which referring back (presumably to I.7
1098a18), justify the requirement of ‘a complete life’ by allusion to Priam’s misfortunes in old age. This
prefaces discussion of Solon’s advice, stated and endorsed in the Eudemian Ethics as follows: ‘One should not
felicitate a man on being happy when he is alive, only when his life attains completion; for nothing
incomplete is happy, as it does not form a whole’ (II.1 1219b6–8). Here, rather surprisingly, a life is only
counted as reaching its goal once it has reached its terminus (which are two senses of telos distinguished in
Met. Δ.16). EN I.10 is hardly single-minded or decisive, but nally suggests requiring of the happy man,
p. 55 though apparently as an addition to the connotations of ‘complete life’ that is required by taking
eudaimonia to be ‘a telos and something in every way teleios’ (my italics), that he be already actively virtuous
and also ‘about to live thus and die as be ts his life’ (1101a17–19). This becomes problematic once we bear in
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mind that the future is not merely ‘unclear to us’ (a18), but in part undetermined. This may demand that
an ascription of eudaimonia can only strictly be true if it is retrospective (which may be the Eudemian Ethics’
meaning when it endorses Solon).
And yet there is evidence in Aristotle of a di erent conception, which orients particular actions towards a
goal equally abstract, but less long term. It has long been a concern of commentators how Aristotle can both
make eudaimonia an aspect of ‘a complete life’, and insist that acting well involves performing an act for its
own sake. This is required of the man who is not merely to do the just thing, but do it justly (II.4 1105a28–
32). Yet how can an action that amounts itself to acting well or eupraxia, but not to living well or eudaimonia
(which demands, in some sense, ‘a complete life’), be pursued for its own sake if its only fully nal goal is
eudaimonia?
Against that, one may try to identify eudaimonia in respect of actions with eupraxia. Is that contrary to the
Eudemian requirement for ‘felicitating on being happy’ (which is Woods’ rendering of eudaimonizein, II.1
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1219b7)? There is a way of steering clear of any incompatibility. The object of eudaimonizein is a man, and
this may permit a distinction. A single action may achieve eudaimonia in the sense of eupraxia, without this
su cing to make it true that its agent is eudaimōn. One might distinguish two theses, one applying to an
agent unquali edly, the other to an agent qua author of a certain action. It may be that every man would
wish to count as eudaimōn without temporal restriction, which requires that he remain eudaimōn for a
lifetime, or at least from the time of assessment until his death. (This is the apparent implication of a
tentative piece of re ection at I.10 1101a14–21.) Yet the end inherent in any action of his is that it constitute
acting well, and thereby make its agent eudaimōn in respect of itself; and this is a narrower goal. If so, we
can understand how, in I.4, Aristotle was willing, without sorting things out, to o er as a commonplace an
identi cation of eudaimonia indi erently with ‘living well’, and ‘acting well’ (1095a18–20).
p. 56 Hence we have to be cautious about the phrase ‘in a complete life’, glossed by the analogy of the single
swallow that does not make a summer, and the remark that ‘one day, or a short time, does not make a man
blessed and happy’ (I.7 1098a18–20). We need to tread a narrow line, interpreting it as making a point not
already made, yet not adding a requirement not already justi ed. As I noted, there is the alternative not of a
lifespan but of a lifeslice reading, which requires an assessment whether an agent acts well in respect of a
given action to take into account as long a stretch of time is relevant. If so, talk of a ‘complete life’ makes
explicit what was already implicit in talk of eudaimonia as the most nal of ends (1097a25–34). Twice in the
ensuing discussion in I.10 a complete time or life is less than a lifespan (1101a12–13, a16). Only so, indeed,
can we understand a concession that within the course of a lifetime eudaimonia may be lost, and recovered
(1101a9–12).
Illuminating here may be the discussion in the Poetics of the requirements of a satisfactory plot, whether in
tragedy or epic. Aristotle declares, ‘Tragedy is an imitation of a complete, i.e., whole, action, possessing a
certain magnitude’ (teleias kai holēs praxeōs mimēsin echousēs ti megethos, 7 1450b24–5). To count as a
whole, it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end (b26–7). He then explicitly rejects any idea that a
single life, just in being the life of a single man, counts as a whole:
A plot is not (as some think) uni ed because it is concerned with a single person. An
indeterminately large number of things happen to any one person, not all of which constitute a
unity; likewise a single individual performs many actions, and they do not make up a single
action…Just as in other imitative arts the imitation is uni ed if it imitates a single object, so too the
plot, as the imitation of an action, should imitate a single, uni ed action—and one that is also a
whole (1451a16–19, 30–2).
Striking here is the use of the term praxis to signify what we would count as a sequence of actions, and one
which is likely (as within a tragedy) to take in the actions of several agents. We may compare, of course, our
talk of ‘the action’ of a play.
Clearly this cannot be the sense of praxis that Aristotle intends in his Ethics; yet it does suggest a notion in
between that of an individual action, viewed in isolation, and that of a lifetime of activity. Such a notion
follows on much more easily within the context of EN I.7. On the eld of battle, for example, particular
actions may at the time be ambiguous. (Consider: ‘He appears to be running away. What is going on? Has he
p. 57 lost his head, or is he up to something?’ Only a certain period of time will tell.) It may only be in the light
of a man’s conduct throughout the battle that we can identify some movement as an instance of courage, and
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so as achieving the end of acting well.
Thus I propose that we resolve Aristotle’s apparent wambling between a lifespan and a lifeslice meaning of
‘a complete life’ (1098a18) by identifying eudaimonia in respect of actions with acting well or eupraxia, while
distinguishing this from the unquali ed eudaimonia of an agent. A full assessment of an agent as eudaimōn
has to pay regard to his actions and fortunes through a lifetime (that is until death, and either from maturity
or from the time when the assessment is made). An assessment of an agent as eudaimōn in respect of a given
action has to look at enough of a life for it to be determinate that he was thereby acting well; this may
involve attending to a long period, or a short one, depending on how widely signi cant ripples from the
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action spread.
It must be safer if my proposal is consistent with a statement that occurs within a debated passage that may,
or may not, belong within Aristotle’s Metaphysics (see Burnyeat, 2008). Within one manuscript tradition, we
read the following within Θ.6: ‘At the same time one gets and has got a good life, and wins and has won
eudaimonia’ (1048b25–6). How can this be true, on either reading of ‘a complete life’, if only a period of
time, or a lifetime, can show whether an act or an agent achieves eudaimonia? Here we need to distinguish
what we are assessing from the full basis of the assessment. If an agent’s life, taken as a whole, passes some
threshold of assessment, we can say unquali edly, of any time within his life, that he is happy, and has been
happy, then. If some action of his passes an assessment that may or may not require its repercussions to be
traced through a long stretch of time, it can count both as being, and as having been, an instance of acting
p. 58 well in respect of which its agent achieves eudaimonia. In either case, it is crucial to distinguish processes
and corollaries that enter into the assessment from the content of the nal verdict: achieving eudaimonia
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may supervene upon processes that take time, but it is never itself a further process.
IV. Some further questions
Aristotle concludes a stretch of argument within EN I.7 with the words, ‘The human good turns out to be
activity of soul in accordance with virtue’ (1098a16–17). The meaning of that has already exercised us. Yet at
least two questions remain. Does acting well need favourable circumstances, or does it only require
responding wisely to whatever circumstances obtain? And are all gains and losses relevant to identifying
what accords with virtue?
Do actions count as according with virtue if they make the best of limited capacities or opportunities, and
even of dire predicaments? What is it, in short, to act well? Is it just to act in one’s situation as phronēsis
prescribes, and in the right state of mind (cf. II.4.1105a30–4)? Or is it to act so in a situation that an agent
may welcome in that it enables him to act as a good man would wish? Aristotle might well have argued for
the former and austerer thesis: thus he writes, ‘The term “liberality” is used relatively to a man’s
substance; for liberality resides not in the multitude of gifts but in the state of character of the giver, and
this is relative to the giver’s substance. There is therefore nothing to prevent the man who gives less from
being the more liberal man, if he has less to give’ (IV.1 1120b7–11). However, he also remarks, ‘The liberal
man will need money for the doing of liberal deeds’ (X.8 1178a28–9). What for? Apparently, not just in order
to be able to act as he would prefer, but ‘if he is going to accomplish any of the actions that accord with the
virtue’ (a32–3). If so, it would seem, the widow fails to be liberal, or is barely liberal, in o ering her mite.
For she is unable to achieve the inherent goal of liberality by doing good (eu poiein, IV.1 1120a11–14), since
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she cannot a ord to be useful (a22).
p. 59 Demanding in a di erent way is a discussion in Politics VII.13. There Aristotle de nes eudaimonia as ‘the
actualization and perfect employment of virtue—not conditionally, but absolutely’ (1332a7–10). What
follows (a10–21) sets aside ‘just penalties and punishments’ as displays of virtue that fail to fall within
eudaimonia since they ‘remove something bad’ instead of being ‘preparatory to and productive of good
things’. In several ways, the passage is puzzling: it makes a cross-reference to ‘the Ethics’ (en tois Ēthikois,
40
a8) that is either untraceable or inexact; it identi es what is conditional with what is necessary, and what
is absolute with what is ne or noble (a10–11), and yet allows that the noble may come about ‘from
necessity’ (a11–14); further, it nds ‘absolutely noblest’ actions that ‘aim at (epi) honours and abundance’
(a15–16), though the Nicomachean Ethics deprecates honour as a goal on the ground that ‘it is thought to
41
depend on those who bestow it rather than on him who receives it’ (I.5 1095b24–5). There is the further
non-match that it nds supreme nobility in laying down one’s life in battle for others (IX.8 1169a18–26),
although ‘no one chooses to be at war for the sake of being at war’, which would seem ‘absolutely
murderous’ (X.7 1177b9–11). However, all these uncertainties surely leave one general point standing: doing
what virtue requires can fail to amount to acting well, if the action is not of a kind that a virtuous agent
42
would wish to be performing.
p. 60 There is recurrent evidence that Aristotle thinks that a modicum of good fortune is necessary if an agent is
43
to count as happy. In I.8, he writes of eudaimonia as follows:
(A) Yet it appears to need external goods as well, as we said; for (B) it is impossible, or not easy, to
do ne acts without resources. For, on the one hand, (C) many actions make use of friends and
riches and political power as instruments; and, on the other hand, (D) there are some things
lacking which we stain blessedness, such as good birth, being blessed in one’s children, beauty; (E)
for the man who is altogether ugly or ill-born or solitary and childless is not very likely to be
happy, and perhaps a man would be still less likely if he had thoroughly bad children, or good
44
friends who have died …Therefore it appears to need such prosperity in addition; which is why
some people identify eudaimonia with good fortune, but others with virtue (EN I.8 1099a31–b8).
The structure of the passage makes it clear that (E) illustrates (D), (C) and (D) together ground (B), and (B)
grounds (A). So Aristotle wishes to distinguish two di erent ways in which external goods are requisite as
‘resources’ for acting well. It is a complication that he appears to shift from a focus upon actions to one
upon agents: he rst identi es a miscellaneous set of ‘instruments’ (organa) that are often required for
action; he then identi es various desiderabilia in whose absence the agent’s blessedness is stained (‘lacking
which we stain blessedness’). It is unclear whether or not ‘happy’ and ‘blessed’ di er in sense and
45
p. 61 extension. The same distinction appears to be present when I.10 describes two ways in which major and
multiple pieces of good fortune make life more blessed: they naturally add lustre (sunepikosmein) to life, and
can be made use of (chrēsis) in ne action (1100b25–8). Contrariwise, major ill fortune can ‘crush and maim
46
blessedness’ in two ways: it brings pains, and impedes many activities (b28–30). In part, bringing pains is
the converse of adding lustre, and impeding many activities the converse of being put to use in ne action.
However, the presence of pain may be bad in two ways—both as an unwelcome context for action, and as a
context within which action is harder.
Already potentially puzzling are the words ‘as we said’ (1099a32). Susemihl went so far as to suppose a
lacuna at I.7 1098a20, where Aristotle might have added to his de nition of eudaimonia just such a
requirement. Ross more plausibly refers back to I.8 1098b26–9, where Aristotle expressed no opinion of his
own, but reported with explicit respect that ‘others include also external prosperity’. The puzzle dissolves
once we take it that what Aristotle takes himself already to have said about external goods is that they
appear, namely, to some who earn respect, to be needed in addition.
However, Susemihl had a point. Aristotle’s question is what is needed for eudaimonia, or, more precisely (as
is clear through I.8) for eudaimonia as he de ned it in I.7. How are we to take a requirement of external
47
goods to be implicit in the de nition ‘activity of soul in accordance with virtue’ (1098a16–17)? A rst thing
to get right is a statement in II.4: ‘If the acts that are in accordance with the virtues have themselves a
certain character it does not follow that they are done justly or temperately’ (1105a28–30). That does not
mean that for acts to be ‘in accordance with the virtues’ is just for them ‘to have themselves a certain
character’, as is clear from comparison with a27–8 (where ‘having a certain character’ cannot su ce to
make things ‘products of the arts’, rather, say, than objets trouvés). So it is entirely open that the conditions
p. 62 that are stated for an act to be done virtuously are here also conditions for it to count as being done in
accordance with virtue (despite the di erent use of this phrase at X.7 1177b16–18). Among these is that the
agent choose what he does for its own sake (1105a32), which connects with his acting for sake of the ne (cf.
IV.1 1120a23–4). This condition is evidently not met, according to Politics VII.13, by acts that only have the
ne ‘through necessity’, since they ‘remove something bad’ without being ‘preparatory to and productive
of good things’ (1332a13–18).
How then, above all in the light of Pol. VII.13, are we to understand EN I.8? It gives two di erent grounds for
requiring external goods for eudaimonia, the rst viewing them as ‘instruments’, the second more loosely
as ‘resources’. (Presumably an external good couldn’t fail to fall under the second.) The rst thought I take
to be the following: agents need instruments—we might say, instrumental means—if they are to display the
48
virtues in ways that achieve their characteristic goals. Thus, even if we count the widow as doing a liberal
thing in handing over her mite, she fails to act fully ‘in accordance with liberality’ in that she cannot
contribute signi cantly to what liberality would wish to achieve—which is at the very least making a
di erence. Hence (like the non-happy agents of Pol. VII.13, though for a di erent reason) she is precluded,
however innocently, from doing what is ne, and so choiceworthy for its own sake (cf. EN X.6 1176b8–9).
The second thought may be less clear. In what sense are good looks, good children, and good friends
‘resources’ for action in accordance with virtue? One may compare what Aristotle writes about ‘external
resources’ (chorēgia) later at X.8 1178a23–b3: an example is the money needed for liberality and even justice
(a28–9), but also the ‘power’ needed to show courage, and the ‘opportunity’ (sc. to be intemperate) needed
for a display of temperance (a32–3). There, as here, the term ‘resources’ covers instrumental means, but
also other types of external precondition. This distinction may be alive in X.7 1177a30–1: ‘The just man
needs people towards whom and with whom he shall act justly.’ We can think of those with whom he acts
justly as instruments (like friends through whom we act), those towards whom he acts justly as recipients
p. 63 (who are equally necessary). John Cooper distinguishes between ‘those external goods that provide the
normal and expected contexts for the exercise of the virtues’ and those ‘that are used instrumentally as a
mean to the ends aimed at in virtuous activities’ (1999b: 300). However, Aristotle seems to have in mind not
just ‘the normal and expected’ (which surely includes contexts that Pol. VII.13 would set aside, such as
illness or bereavement), but what Christof Rapp states as follows: ‘For each virtue there are, so to speak,
49
preferred circumstances in which the optimal exercise of the virtue is possible’ (2009: 224). Children and
friends who are good, or (perhaps still better) potentially good, provide opportunities not (or not just) as
instruments, but as recipients, of bene cence (on which see EN IX.7). Mention of good looks is perhaps less
expected in this context. As it chances, X.8 suggests one particular explanation: by increasing opportunities
for sexual indulgence, they better enable one to display temperance (cf. 1178a33). More generally, they make
their possessor an object of goodwill even to those who hardly know him (IX.5 1167a18–21); and goodwill is
a beginning of friendship (a3–4).
Unwelcome circumstances, thereafter, can prevent an agent from being eudaimōn either in general, or in
respect of a particular action. First, if he has had, through misfortunes like those of Priam, to give up his
hopes of being eudaimōn in general, he cannot act in order to be eudaimōn. Yet this need not deny him a goal
in life, for we may follow Heinaman (1993: 31) in citing a sentence of the De Caelo: ‘While it is clearly best for
any being to attain the end, yet, if that cannot be, the nearer it is to the best the better for it’ (II.12 292b17–
19). So he can still aim to get as close to being eudaimōn as his situation allows. Secondly, if he is eudaimōn,
or can reasonably hope to become so, he acts in favourable circumstances so as to be thereby acting well,
creating or enhancing his own eudaimonia. In unfavourable circumstances, he still acts for the sake of his
own eudaimonia, but by what Heinaman has called ‘indirection’ (1993: 50): if, instead, he acted badly, he
would be making himself kakodaimōn. Here, his doing what has to be done (at least if the matter is grave) is
a condition of his being eudaimōn, though not a component of it. eudaimonia remains privileged as the end of
ends: no one deliberately turns his back on it. It inspires some actions that count as acting well (Pol. VII.13),
and other actions that may be necessary to living well (or not living badly). Ideally, one acts in order to be
p. 64 thereby acting well; less ideally, one can still count as acting for the sake of living well, as if stretching out
towards it.
About dying in battle, Aristotle expresses contrasting attitudes, each of which he appears to endorse. Take a
pair of passages from the Nicomachean Ethics:
Death and wounds will be painful to the brave man and against his will, but he will face them
because it is noble to do so or base not to. And the more he possesses the whole of virtue and is
happy, the more he will be pained at the prospect of death; for life is most valuable to such a man,
and he is knowingly losing the greatest goods, which is distressing. Yet he is brave none the less,
and perhaps even more so, because he accepts nobility in battle at this cost (III.9 1117b7–15).
It is true of a good person, moreover, that he does many things for the sake of his friends and his
fatherland, even, if necessary, dying for them, since he will give up money and honours and, in a
word, the ‘fought-over’ goods, acquiring what is noble for himself. For he would prefer to enjoy
himself intensely for a brief while rather than slightly for a long time; and to live nobly for a year,
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‘To have them for himself,’ I said.