Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle [most read books of all time .txt] 📗

end of Chapter 5, but not connected with each other. If the author had revised the work, he would, no doubt, have fitted these links together; but as he omitted to do so, it is useless for us to attempt, by any rearrangement of the links, to secure the close connection which could only be effected by forging them anew. ↩

These are not two distinct kinds of justice; justice proper, he means to say, implies a state. ↩

Only the citizen in an ancient state could appeal to the law in his own person; the noncitizen could only sue through a citizen. ↩

See Chapter 1 (“This, too, is the reason why justice alone of all the virtues is thought to be another’s good⁠ ⁠…”). ↩

Which alone is properly just. ↩

τὸ ξυμφέρον, which is usually rendered “expedient,” means simply that which conduces to any desired end; as the end varies, then, so will the expedient vary: cf. note 44. ↩

E.g. the wine-merchant may buy in the cask what he sells in bottle (J. A. Stewart Notes on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle). ↩

Cf. below, “An accidentally unjust act and an accidentally just act are equally possible⁠ ⁠…”. ↩

I.e. he willed the act not as just, but as a means of avoiding the painful consequences; the justice of it, therefore, was not part of the essence of the act to him, was not among the qualities of the act which moved him to choose it, or, in Aristotle’s language, was “accidental.” ↩

Which leads by a natural, though by him unforeseen, sequence to his neighbour’s hurt: negligence, or error of judgment. ↩

And gives a fatal termination to an act that would ordinarily be harmless: accident. ↩

Throwing the words ὁ δ᾿ ἐπιβουλεύσας οὐκ ἀγνοεῖ into a parenthesis. The passage is easier to construe without the parenthesis, but with a stop after ἀμφισβητοῦσιν. ↩

In strictness, of course, such acts cannot be called involuntary (ἀκούσια) at all: cf. III 1, where the conditions of an involuntary act are stated more precisely. ↩

βοῦλησιν is used perhaps for will, as there is no abstract term corresponding to ἑκών. I bracket two sentences that follow (“For no one wishes to be hurt⁠ ⁠…”), as (in spite of the ingenuity of Henry Jackson, in Περὶ Δικαιοσύνης, and J. A. Stewart, in Notes on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle) the statement seems to me hopelessly confused. ↩

You can always do the acts if you want to do them, i.e. if you will them; but you cannot at will do them in the spirit of a just or an unjust man; for character is the result of a series of acts of will: cf. III 5 (“But our particular acts are not voluntary in the same sense as our habits⁠ ⁠…”). The contradiction between this and a passage earlier in III 5 (“Therefore virtue depends upon ourselves⁠ ⁠…”) is only apparent: we are responsible for our character, though we cannot change it at a moment’s notice. ↩

Cf. the opening three paragraphs of Chapter 8. ↩

Οὐ δίκαιον I have omitted (after Trendelenburg) as obviously wrong. We may suppose either that the original οὐ σπουδαῖον was altered into οὐ δίκαιον, or (more probably) that οὐ δίκαιον or δίκαιον was inserted by a bungling copyist. ↩

See Chapter 9. ↩

Whereas, says Aristotle, we cannot speak at all of justice or injustice to one’s self, and it is only by way of metaphor that we can apply the terms even to the relations of parts of the self⁠—not strictly, since the parte are not persons. ↩

I 13 (“Now, on this division of the faculties⁠ ⁠…”). ↩

This paragraph really forms quite a fresh opening, independent of the first three paragraphs of this chapter; and it is one among many signs of the incomplete state in which this part of the treatise was left, that these two openings of Book VI were never fused together. The scheme of the treatise, as unfolded in Book I (cf. especially I 7⁠—“There remains then the life whereby he acts⁠ ⁠…”⁠—and 13⁠—“Now, on this division of the faculties⁠ ⁠…”), gives the intellectual virtues an independent place alongside of, or rather above, the moral virtues; now that the latter have been disposed of it naturally remains to consider the former: this is the natural transition which we have in this paragraph. But besides this the dependence of the moral virtues upon the intellectual virtues makes an examination of the latter absolutely necessary to the completion of the theory of the former; thus we get the transition of those first three paragraphs. ↩

νοῦς: the word is used here in its widest sense. ↩

νοῦς⁠—used now in a narrower special sense which will presently be explained. ↩

Though, as we see later, induction can elicit them from experience only because they are already latent in that experience. ↩

We may know truths of science, but unless we know these in their necessary connection, we have not scientific knowledge. ↩

The conception of the end is at once a cause or source of action and a principle of knowledge; ἀρχή covers both. ↩

For it implies a determination of the