Francisco Bravo

En vez de considerar el principio de individuación como principio formal –estático– por el que el individuo es lo que es, busco en Platón el principio de individuación como principio eficiente –dinámico– por el que el individuo se constituye como tal. Y sostengo que tal es el deseo, que genera, no sólo los caracteres y las acciones, sino también las partes del alma y los placeres que les son propios. Se trata de determinar cómo ejerce su causalidad, no sólo en relación con el placer, sino también con la constitución del individuo humano

In his attempt to define again the subject-matter of ethics, “unsatisfactorily” determined by his ancient and modern predecessors, G.E. Moore has sustained, at the beginning of the XX Century, that the “scientific ethics”, the only true one, is the investigation of what is good. My main concern in this paper is to outline the Aristotle’s view in this crucial matter. Is Aristotle’s ethics an ethics of good, as some contemporary Aristotelians have uphold? After criticizing this interpretation, probably influenced by the author of the Principia Ethica, I conclude with words of the Eudemian Ethics that “neither the Idea of good nor the good as universal is the good per se that we are actually seeking”; I argue that the generic field of the Aristotelian ethics is the good human action, while its specific domain are the causes of good action: its final cause, which identifies with the human happiness ; its formal cause, that is virtue ; and its efficient cause, that is the choice of right means for the final end. The Aristotelian ethics is then an ethics of the good human action, including specifically an ethics of happiness and an ethics of virtue.