Saturday, 14 December 2024

Book review: the Nicomachean Ethics

PXL_20241214_211539197 The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle. You may have heard of it. My Pingouin edition calls it just "The Ethics of Aristotle". The word "Nicomachus" is merely the name of his father; or perhaps his son; either way it is just a label. To put my prejudices up front: I didn't like it. Unlike Aristotle's physics it isn't total junk; but it also isn't good, and shares much of the discursive unedited nature of the Physics and I presume all his writings. He is also incorrigibly inclined to divide things up into types and make lists of them, and unable to restrain his pedantry in pursuing the most unimportant and uninteresting quibbles. More than anything else the book needs to be boiled down, perhaps to as little as one fifth of its present word-count.

Leaving all that aside, I shall try to make some sense of it. My main complaint is that it is very "flat" and hard to summarise; try reading wiki's article, for example. My own reference is The Foundations of Morality, which provides a correct theory of morality. Big A, I think, doesn't have a correct theory. One problem he has is that the only morality he knows of, or can conceive of as being right, is the Greek one he knows. He does know that the fundamentals underdetermine any given moral code - he is aware of the difference between areas where there are fundamental rules, like though shalt not kill, and mere conventional morality. But he makes little of that.

Quite often, he takes "the good" as semi-assumed, and so his account becomes circular. Towards the end - but alas I cannot be bothered to look up exactly where - he does say that the good is what a good man would want and do. FFS. There is some discussion of, well, effectively whether a "good man" is a thing, or whether a good man is merely a bundle of choices-of-doing-good-things, if you see what I mean. Big A doesn't state it any more clearly, if I recall correctly, though I think is very much on the side of there being "good men". Some of the value is in the discussion around this; effectively, excellence is a habit, not a virtue. By repeatedly doing good deeds, we form ourselves into the sort of people that do good deeds, for the right reasons, because we want to.

From nowhere, he derives an ultimate good, and this must be what moral actions are aiming for. Since this is wrong, it gets in the way, but I don't think he uses it much, except to muddy his thinking.

There's a long discussion of continence and incontience - the moral sort, obvs, not the affair of bladders - and the old Socratic puzzle of how people can intentionally do what is wrong. Totally missing from this is the economic insight of time-preference: incontinent folk have a strong preference for immeadiate gratification and strongly discount the future.

Big A is keen on moderation. I think at one point he discovers that virtue is a mean: you must neither want too much, or too little. Whilst this is an excellent principle for life, I don't think it fits ethics well.

In the end, he drifts from morality to politics. This could be interesting, but in his hands it isn't. To what extent is the law intended to provide merely a framework for free citizens to live their lives in peace and security - without the state forcing them to also be "good" in the ways that morality extends beyond the law - and to what extend should the state try to enforce what-it-considers-moral on its citizens? Big A touches on these questions, but he doesn't really formulate them clearly or have any answers, other than education.

Russell


Uneasily sensing that I haven't been entirely fair to Big A, I bolster my case with some quotes from Russell:
The views of Aristotle on ethics represents, in the main, the prevailing opinions of educated and experienced men of his day. They are not, like Plato's, impregnated with mystical religion; nor do they countenance such unorthodox theories as are to be found in the Republic concerning property and the family. Those who neither fall below nor rise above the level of decent, well-behaved citizens will find in the Ethics a systematic account of the principles by which they hold that their conduct should be regulated. Those who demand anything more will be disappointed. The book appeals to the respectable middle-aged, and has been used by them, especially since the seventeenth century, to repress the ardours and enthusiasms of the young. But to a man with any depth of feeling it is likely to be repulsive. 
and
There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind, in so far as he is aware of them, do not move him emotionally; he holds them, intellectually, to be an evil, but there is no evidence that they cause him unhappiness except when the sufferers happen to be his friends. More generally, there is an emotional poverty in the Ethics, which is not found in the earlier philosophers. There is something unduly smug and comfortable about Aristotle's speculations on human affairs; everything that makes men feel a passionate interest in each other seems to be forgotten. Even his account of friendship is tepid. He shows no sign of having had any of those experiences which make it difficult to preserve sanity; all the more profound aspects of the moral life are apparently unknown to him. He leaves out, one may say, the whole sphere of human experience with which religion is concerned. What he has to say is what will be useful to comfortable men of weak passions; but he has nothing to say to those who are possessed by a god or a devil, or whom outward misfortune drives to despair. For these reasons, in my judgment, his Ethics, in spite of its fame, is lacking in intrinsic importance.


Refs


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