What is 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 properly. Aristotle thus believes that ethics and politics are intertwined. In medicine, this is health, in strategy victory, in architecture a house, in any other sphere something else. If there is an end to everything we do, this will be the good achievable by action, and if there is more than one, these will be the goods achievable by action. Honor, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose for ourselves, but we choose them also for the sake of happiness.
             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 self-sufficient and is the end of the action. We must examine the nature of actions, namely how we ought to do them, for these also determine the nature of the states of character produced. Actions are called and temperate when they are, or the temperate man would do.
             I would define virtue as a particularly efficacious, good, or beneficial quality; advantage: a plan with practical virtue. Virtue, then, the being of two kinds, intellectual and moral; intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching, while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit. I think virtue is good because you can always benefit from it.
             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 Father's view of natural law. As Harry Jaffa states: "The conditions of happiness are seldom if ever within the abil...