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• Preface to the Fifth Edition.
• Book I.: The End.
• 1.: In All He Does Man Seeks Same Good As End Or Means.
• 2.: The End Is the Good; Our Subject Is This and Its Science Politics.
• 3.: Exactness Not Permitted By Subject Nor to Be Expected By Student, Who Needs Experience and Training.
• 4.: Men Agree That the Good Is Happiness, But Differ As to What This Is.
• 5.: The Good Cannot Be Pleasure, Nor Honour, Nor Virtue.
• 6.: Various Arguments to Show Against the Platonists That There Cannot Be One Universal Good.
• 7.: The Good Is the Final End, and Happiness Is This.
• 8.: This View Harmonizes Various Current Views.
• 9.: It Happiness Acquired, Or the Gift of Gods Or of Chance?
• 10.: Can No Man Be Called Happy During Life?
• 11.: Cannot the Fortunes of Survivors Affect the Dead?
• 12.: Happiness As Absolute End Is Above Praise.
• 13.: Division of the Faculties and Resulting Division of the Virtues.
• Book II.: Moral Virtue.
• 1.: Moral Virtue Is Acquired By the Repetition of the Corresponding Acts.
• 2.: These Acts Must Be Such As Reason Prescribes; They Can’t Be Defined Exactly, But Must Be Neither Too Much Nor Too Little.
• 3.: Virtue Is In Various Ways Concerned With Pleasure and Pain.
• 4.: The Conditions of Virtuous Action As Distinct From Artistic Production.
• 5.: Virtue Not an Emotion, Nor a Faculty, But a Trained Faculty Or Habit.
• 6.: Viz., the Habit of Choosing the Mean.
• 7.: This Must Be Applied to the Several Virtues.
• 8.: The Two Vicious Extremes Are Opposed to One Another and to the Intermediate Virtue.
• 9.: The Mean Hard to Hit, and Is a Matter of Perception, Not of Reasoning.
• Book III.
• Chapters 1–5.: the Will.
• 1.: An Act Is Involuntary When Done (a) Under Compulsion, Or (b) Through Ignorance: (a) Means Not Originated By Doer, (b) Means Through Ignorance of the Circumstances: Voluntary Then Means Originated With Knowledge of Circumstances.
• 2.: Purpose, a Mode of Will, Means Choice After Deliberation.
• 3.: We Deliberate On What We Can Do—Not On Ends, But Means.
• 4.: We Wish For
• 5.: Virtue and Vice Are Alike Voluntary, Our Acts Are Our Own; For We Are Punished For Them; If This Be Our Character, We Have Made It By Repeated Acts; Even Bodily Vices Are Blamable When Thus Formed. We Cannot Plead That Our Notion of Good Depends On Ou
• Chapters 6—12: the Several Moral Virtues and Vices.
• 6.: Of Courage and the Opposite Vices.
• 7. Of Courage (continued)
• 8. Of Courage Improperly So Called.
• 9.: How Courage Involves Both Pain and Pleasure.
• 10.: Of Temperance.
• 11. Of Temperance (continued)
• 12.: How Profligacy Is More Voluntary Than Cowardice.
• Book IV.: The Several Moral Virtues and Vices— Continued.
• 1.: Of Liberality.
• 2.: Of Magnificence.
• 3.: Of High-mindedness
• 4.: Of a Similar Virtue In Smaller Matters.
• 5.: Of Gentleness.
• 6.: Of Agreeableness.
• 7.: Of Truthfulness.
• 8.: Of Wittiness.
• 9.: Of the Feeling of Shame
• Book V.: The Several Moral Virtues and Vices— Concluded. Justice.
• 1.: Preliminary Two Senses of Justice Distinguished Justice (l) = Obedience to Law = Complete Virtue.
• 2.: Of Justice (2) = Fairness, How Related to Justice (1). What Is Just In Distribution Distinguished From What Is Just In Correction.
• 3.: Of What Is Just In Ditribution and Its Rule of Geometrical Proportion.
• 4.: Of That Which Is Just In Correction, and Its Rule of Arithmetical Proportion.
• 5.: Simple Requital Is Not Identical With What Is Just, But Proportionate Requital Is What Is Just In Exchange; and This Is Effected By Means of Money. We Can Now Give a General Definition of Justice (2).
• 6.: ( One Can Act Unjustly Without Being Unjust. ) That Which Is Just In the Strict Sense Is Between Citizens Only, For It Implies Law.
• 7.: It Is In Part Natural, In Part Conventional.
• 8.: The Internal Conditions of a Just Or Unjust Action, and of a Just Or Unjust Agent.
• 9.: Sundry Questions About Doing and Suffering Injustice
• 10.: Of Equity
• 11.: Can a Man Wrong Himself?
• Book VI.: The Intellectual Virtues.
• 1.: Must Be Studied Because (a) Reason Prescribes the Mean, (b) They Are a Part of Human Excellence. the Intellect Is (1) Scientific, (2) Calculative: We Want the Virtue of Each.
• 2.: The Function of the Intellect, Both In Practice and Speculation, Is to Attain Truth.
• 3.: Of the Five Modes of Attaining Truth: (1) of Demonstrative Science of Things Invariable.
• 4.: Of Knowledge of Things Variable, Viz. (2) of Art In What We Make;
• 5.: And (3) of Prudence In What We Do, the Virtue of the Calculative Intellect.
• 6.: (4) of Intuitive Reason As the Basis of Demonstrative Science.
• 7.: (5) of Wisdom As the Union of Science and Intuitive Reason. Comparison of the Two Intellectual Virtues, Wisdom and Prudence.
• 8.: Prudence Compared With Statesmanship and Other Forms of Knowledge.
• 9.: Of Deliberation.
• 10.: Of Intelligence
• 11.: Of Judgment of Reason Or Intuitive Perception As the Basis of the Practical Intellect.
• 12.: Of the Uses of Wisdom and Prudence. How Prudence Is Related to Cleverness.
• 13.: How Prudence Is Related to Moral Virtue
• Book VII.
• Chapters 1–10.: Characters Other Than Virtue and Vice.
• 1.: Of Continence and Incontinence, Heroic Virtue and Brutality. of Method. Statement of Opinions About Continence.
• 2.: Statement of Difficulties As to How One Can Know Right and Do Wrong.
• 3.: Solution: to Know Has Many Senses; In What Sense Such a Man Knows.
• 4.: Of Incontinence In the Strict and In the Metaphorical Sense.
• 5.: Of Incontinence In Respect of Brutal Or Morbid Appetites.
• 6.: Incontinence In Anger Less Blamed Than In Appetite.
• 7.: Incontinence Yields to Pleasure, Softness to Pain. Two Kinds of Incontinence, the Hasty and the Weak.
• 8.: Incontinence Compared With Vice and Virtue.
• 9.: Continence and Incontinence Not Identical With Keeping and Breaking a Resolution.
• 10.: Prudence Is Not, But Cleverness Is, Compatible With Incontinence.
• Chapters 11—14.: of Pleasure.
• 11.: We Must Now Discuss Pleasure. Opinions About It.
• 12.: Answers to Arguments Against Goodness of Pleasure. Ambiguity of Good and Pleasant. Pleasure Not a Transition, But Unimpeded Activity.
• 13.: Pleasure Is Good, and the Pleasure That Consists In the Highest Activity Is the Good. All Admit That Happiness Is Pleasant. Bodily Pleasures Not the Only Pleasures.
• 14.: Of the Bodily Pleasures, and the Distinction Between Naturally and Accidentally Pleasant.
• Book VIII.: Friendship Or Love.
• 1.: Uses of Friendship. Differences of Opinion About It.
• 2.: Three Motives of Friendship. Friendship Defined.
• 3.: Three Kinds of Friendship, Corresponding to the Three Motives Perfect Friendship Is That Whose Motive Is the Good.
• 4.: The Others Are Imperfect Copies of This.
• 5.: Intercourse Necessary to the Maintenance of Friendship.
• 6.: Impossible to Have Many True Friends.
• 7.: Of Friendship Between Unequal Persons and Its Rule of Proportion. Limits Within Which This Is Possible.
• 8.: Of Loving and Being Loved.
• 9.: Every Society Has Its Own Form of Friendship As of Justice. All Societies Are Summed Up In Civil Society.
• 10.: Of the Three Forms of Constitution.
• 11.: Of the Corresponding Forms of Friendship.
• 12.: Of the Friendship of Kinsmen and Comrades.
• 13.: Of the Terms of Interchange and Quarrels Hence Arising In Equal Friendships.
• 14.: Of the Same In Unequal Friendships.
• Book IX.: Friendship Or Love— Continued.
• 1.: Of the Rule of Proportion In Dissimilar Friendships.
• 2.: Of the Conflict of Duties.
• 3.: Of the Dissolution of Friendships.
• 4.: A Man’s Relation to His Friend Like His Relation to Himself.
• 5.: Friendship and Goodwill.
• 6.: Friendship and Unanimity
• 7.: Why Benefactors Love More Than They Are Loved.
• 8.: In What Sense It Is Right to Love One’s Self.
• 9.: Why a Happy Man Needs Friends.
• 10.: Of the Proper Number of Friends.
• 11.: Friends Needed Both In Prosperity and Adversity.
• 12.: Friendship Is Realized In Living Together.
• Book X.
• Chapters 1–5.: Pleasure.
• 1.: Reasons For Discussing Pleasure.
• 2.: Arguments of Eudoxus That Pleasure Is the Good.
• 3.: Argument That It Is Not a Quality; That It Is Not Determined; That It Is a Motion Or Coming Into Being. Pleasures Differ In Kind.
• 4.: Pleasure Defined: Its Relation to Activity.
• 5.: Pleasures Differ According to the Activities the Standard Is the Good Man.
• Chapters 6–9.: Conclusion.
• 6.: Happiness Not Amusement, But Life.
• 7.: Of the Speculative Life As Happiness In the Highest Sense.
• 8.: Of the Practical Life As Happiness In a Lower Sense, and of the Relation Between the Two. Prosperity, How Far Needed.
• 9.: How Is the End to Be Realized?

12.

Answers to arguments against goodness of pleasure. Ambiguity of good and pleasant. Pleasure not a transition, but unimpeded activity.

But that these arguments do not prove that pleasure is not good, or even the highest good, may be shown as follows.

In the first place, since “good” is used in two senses (“good in itself” and “relatively good”), natures and faculties will be called good in two senses, and so also will motions and processes: and when they are called bad, this sometimes means that they are bad in themselves, though for particular persons not bad but desirable; sometimes that they are not desirable even for particular persons, but desirable occasionally and for a little time, though in themselves not desirable; while some of them are not even pleasures, though they seem to be—I mean those that involve pain and are used medicinally, such as those of sick people.

In the second place, since the term good may be applied both to activities and to faculties, those activities that restore us to our natural faculties [or state] are accidentally pleasant.

But in the satisfaction of the animal appetites that which is active is not that part of our faculties* or of our nature which is in want, but that part which is in its normal state; for there are pleasures which involve no previous pain or appetite, such as those of philosophic study, wherein our nature is not conscious of any want.

This is corroborated by the fact that while our natural wants are being filled we do not take delight in the same things which delight us when that process has been completed: when the want has been filled we take delight in things that are pleasant in themselves, while it is being filled in their opposites; for we then take delight in sharp and bitter things, none of which are naturally pleasant or pleasant in themselves. The pleasures, then, which these things give are not real pleasures; for pleasures are related to one another as the things that produce them.

Again, it does not necessarily follow, as some maintain, that there is something else better than pleasure, as the end is better than the process or transition to the end: for a pleasure is not a transition, nor does it always even imply a transition; but it is an activity [or exercise of faculty], and itself an end: further, it is not in becoming something, but in doing something that we feel pleasure: and, lastly, the end is not always something different from the process or transition, but it is only when something is being brought to the completion of its nature that this is the case.

For these reasons it is not proper to say that pleasure is a felt transition, but rather that it is an exercise of faculties that are in their natural state, substituting “unimpeded” for “felt.”

Some people, indeed, think that pleasure is a transition, just because it is in the full sense good, supposing that the exercise of faculty is a transition; but it is in fact something different.*

But to say that pleasures are bad because some pleasant things are unhealthy, is like saying that health is bad because some healthy things are bad for money-making. Both are bad in this respect, but that does not make them bad: even philosophic study is sometimes injurious to health.

As to pleasure being an impediment to thinking, the fact is that neither prudence nor any other faculty is impeded by the pleasure proper to its exercise, but by other pleasures; the pleasure derived from study and learning will make us study and learn more.

That there should be no art devoted to the production of any kind of pleasure, is but natural; for art never produces an activity, but only makes it possible: the arts of perfumery and cookery, however, are usually considered to be arts of pleasure.

As to the arguments that the temperate man avoids pleasure, that the prudent man pursues the painless life, and that children and brutes pursue pleasure, they may all be met in the same way, viz. thus:—

As we have already explained in what sense all pleasures are to be called good in themselves, and in what sense not good, we need only say that pleasures of a certain kind are pursued by brutes and by children, and that freedom from the corresponding pains in pursued by the prudent man—the pleasures, namely, that involve appetite and pain, i.e. the bodily pleasures (for these do so), and excess in them, the deliberate pursuit of which constitutes the profligate. These pleasures, then, the temperate man avoids; but he has pleasures of his own.

[* ]Cf. infra, 14, 7. I have frequently in this chapter rendered ἕξις by faculty, in order to express the opposition to ἐνέργεια, activity or exercise of faculty; but no single word is satisfactory.

[* ]The argument in full would be thus: pleasure is good; but good is exercise of faculty (ἐνέργεια), and this is a process or transition (γένεσις); ∴ pleasure is a transition. But according to Aristotle the highest ἐνέργεια involves no transition or motion at all (cf. 14, 8), and in every true ἐνέργεια, even when a transition is involved, the end is attained at every moment. Cf. Met. ix. 6. 1048b.