THE MAIN QUESTION

‘Which among humanly practicable goods is the summum bonum or highest good?’ is the first and central question of Aristotelian ethics. As we might expect, Aristotle's answer is rather abstract. Even so, he intends it to be informative and to provide guidance for policy-making and action. The present essay will focus on the account put forward in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, chapter 7, where Aristotle equates the highest human good with ‘the rational soul's activity of virtue in a complete life’. This compact formula sets an agenda that will explicate the highest good through detailed studies of (a) the virtues, and (b) the two most philosophically controversial components of a complete life, namely friendship and pleasure. Fully spelled out, the compact formula yields a conceptually rich, and substantial, ideal.

This essay will take the compact formula as given, and will not comment on the reasoning by which Aristotle arrives at it. Nor is it my present purpose to look closely at any portion of the content of his ideal. The main question addressed here is a formal one: what does it mean in the context of Aristotelian ethics to regard X as the highest good, whatever X may be? In discussing this question, we shall be led to consider the chief components of Aristotle's ideal to see how their interrelation constitutes a whole that fits the formal account of the highest good.

PERSPECTIVES ON PRACTICALITY

The claim that X is the highest good seems to imply that X is the good that we should strive above all to realise. But is that what the claim means?