The Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle's central work on ethics, compiled from lecture notes and named, most likely, for his son Nicomachus, who is thought to have edited the text after Aristotle's death. The work argues that the highest human good is eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness or flourishing, and that eudaimonia consists in activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life, not a fleeting feeling. Its most influential single idea is the doctrine of the mean, the claim that each moral virtue is a disposition to feel and act in a way that lies between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency, so that courage, for instance, stands between recklessness and cowardice. The work also distinguishes practical wisdom, the capacity to judge correctly what a particular situation requires, from theoretical knowledge, and closes by arguing that the contemplative life of philosophical study is, in the end, the highest form of human happiness. It remains the founding text of what is now called virtue ethics.