Roy C. Lee

When the story of the history of ethics is told, the ancient Greeks are often grouped together as eudaimonists. This usually means that an individual’s happiness or well-being is the ultimate justification for or against any action. Iakovos Vasiliou would like to change our telling of this story. The Greeks, too, he believes, did not seek to reduce what is moral or virtuous to what is beneficial.

Should anyone ever rule above the law? Interpreters have thought that Aristotle makes an exception to the rule of law for an absolute king outstanding in virtue. By charting the dialectic of Politics 3.15–16, this paper shows that Aristotle in fact rejects the arguments for absolute kingship: (1) Plato's crafts analogy and (2) the law's need for particularistic, equitable exceptions. This weighs against counting Aristotle a particularist about political and, perhaps also, practical wisdom.

This paper argues that in Eudemian Ethics 8.3, virtue’s mean between excess and deficiency is defined by the standard of promoting the most contemplation. Promotion is indirect and constrained by virtue’s other essential features. The chapter’s apparent restriction of the standard to actions concerning natural goods actually serves a dialectical, not a restrictive, purpose. This paper proposes to unify the chapter’s argumentative arc.

This paper reconstructs the function argument of Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics 2.1. The argument seeks to define happiness through the method of division; shows that the highest good is better than all four of the goods of the soul, not only two, as commentators have thought; and unlike the Nicomachean argument, makes the highest good definitionally independent of the human function.