Aristotle

Aristotle

Answer # 1

All human activities aim at some end that we consider good. Most activities are a means to a higher end. The highest human good, then, is that activity that is an end in itself. That good is happiness. When we aim at happiness, we do so for its own sake, not because happiness helps us realize some other end. The goal of the Ethics is to determine how best to achieve happiness. This study is necessarily imprecise, since so much depends on particular circumstances.

One by one, Aristotle discusses the various moral virtues and their corresponding vices. Courage consists of confidence in the face of fear. Temperance consists of not giving in too easily to the pleasures of physical sensation. Liberality and magnificence consist of giving away varying amounts of money in appropriate and tasteful ways. Magnanimity and proper ambition consist of having the right disposition toward honor and knowing what is one's due. Patience is the appropriate disposition toward anger, though it is sometimes appropriate to show some degree of anger (Rowe, 1971). The three social virtues of amiability, sincerity, and wit make for pleasant and engaging interaction with others. Modesty is not properly a virtue, but an appropriate disposition toward shame, which is admirable in the young.

Leviathan rigorously argues that civil peace and social unity are best achieved by the establishment of a commonwealth through social contract. Hobbes's ideal commonwealth is ruled by a sovereign power responsible for protecting the security of the commonwealth and granted absolute authority to ensure the common defense. In his introduction, Hobbes describes this commonwealth as an "artificial person" and as a body politic that mimics the human body (Hobbes, 1995). The frontispiece to the first edition of Leviathan, which Hobbes helped design, portrays the commonwealth as a gigantic human form built out of the bodies ...