ARISTOTLE
What is the good? What is virtue? What is happiness? Aristotle believes that the good, for human beings--- what humans properly desire for its own sake---is happiness, which he thinks has its highest form in contemplative activity. Aristotle holds that people can attain virtue and happiness, however, only in the context of a good state governed in the proper way. Aristotle thus believes that ethics and politics are interwined. In medicine this is health, in strategy victory, in architecture a house, in any other sphere something else. If there is an end fo
Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, not, in general, for anything other than itself. Happiness, then, is something final and selfsufficient, and is the end of action. We must examine the nature of actions, namely how we ought to do them; for these determine also the nature of the states of character that are produced. actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do. I would define virtue as a particularly efficacious, good, or beneficial quality; advantage: a plan with the virtue of being practical. It is Aristotle's view of the purpose of society and how to achieve it that forms the basis of his Nicomachean Ethics and, derivatively, his Politics, and, in turn, establishes a beginning point for understanding the Founding Fathers' view of natural law. Virtue, then, the being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the mail owes both its birth and its growth to teaching, while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit. Honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose for themselves, but we choose them also for the sake of happiness. As Harry Jaffa states: "The conditions of happiness are seldom if ever within the ability of one man to control. r everything we do, this will be the good achievable by action, and if there are more than one, these will be the goods achievable by action. I think virtue is good because you can always benefit from it. Only good men can be happy (although they may not be), but good laws make good men, and good government makes good laws.
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