Aristotle's Ethics - Happiness, Pleasure, & Friendship (History of Philosophy)

Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Goldilocks Theory, Aristotle's Ethics. There's this new branch of social science which calls itself happiness studies. I read about it in a magazine article, which related some of the surprising findings made in this field. For instance, it turns out that people who win the lottery are no happier than people who don't, and that while being poor doesn't make you unhappy, living amongst people who are richer than you does make you unhappy. Now, I know what you're thinking. How do they figure out how happy these people are? Well, it's simple. They ask. For instance, they've asked lottery winners and other people to say, on a scale of 1-10, how happy they are, and discover that the average answers are about the same. Lessons from this research are even being applied to government policy. For instance, it's useful to know, if you are running a society, that income equality may make people happier than absolute increases in wealth. Whenever I read something along these lines, I like to ask myself, what would Aristotle make of this? Would he endorse this new and exciting field of happiness studies? I guess Aristotle would say the same thing he always says, yes and no. He would certainly agree that happiness is worth studying, and even that it is of paramount importance, and the right goal to have in mind when designing a society. But he would also have a reservation, I think. He would raise a quizzical eyebrow at the suggestion that we can find out how happy people are just by asking them. Not only are people poor judges about what will make them happy, as the happiness scientists have shown by studying lottery winners, people are even poor judges about whether they are already happy, or so Aristotle thinks. Here then we have a subject of paramount importance, on which people tend to get badly confused. Looks like a job for a philosopher. Aristotle takes up the challenge in one of his best known works, the Nicomachean Ethics. This is actually one of three works he wrote on ethics, along with the Eudemian Ethics and another, rarely studied text called the Magna Moralia. The Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics share a large section in common, and there is a debate about how they relate to one another, which was written first, and so on. I'll focus on the Nicomachean Ethics, named after Aristotle's son Nicomachus, since that's by far the most commonly studied Aristotelian ethical treatise. It is quite a long work and takes in not only ethical virtue, but also the idea of voluntary action, theoretical virtue, friendship, pleasure, and the superiority of the philosophical life. As with Plato's Republic, I will be devoting two episodes to it, without even scratching the surface. As always, you should take this podcast as an invitation to go read the text for yourself, or to re-read it if you've already had the pleasure. Aristotle begins the Ethics with the surprising announcement that we are here embarking on what he calls political philosophy. The Ethics is thus explicitly linked to another work called the Politics, which I'll reach in a few episodes. His idea is that the political theorist's aim is to figure out what will make the whole community happy. To do that, we need first to understand the happiness of individual people. The Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia, which already gives us a clue as to why Aristotle believes that people can be wrong about how happy they are. The word eudaimonia relates to the word daimon, a kind of spirit or minor divinity, like the guardian spirit that whispered in Socrates' ear whenever he was about to do something wrong. For this reason, eudaimonia has the connotation of blessedness, rather than mere cheerfulness. Thus, for Aristotle, happiness consists in living a life that is blessed, a life that right-thinking people would admire and wish to lead themselves. If someone thinks they are happy simply because they are rich or famous, then they are wrong. This isn't the sort of life one should rightly admire. But why not? Couldn't we just say, to each his own, letting everyone decide how happy they are on a scale of 1 to 10? Aristotle thinks not, because there are good reasons to dismiss certain lifestyles as falling short of happiness. Take the goals I just mentioned, being rich and being famous. If you think wealth will make you happy, Aristotle cautions, you're wrong. After all, when you pursue wealth, what you really want is not wealth, it's what wealth can buy. As Socrates already pointed out, wealth is no good to you without an understanding of what to do with it. Even without the benefit of empirical happiness studies, Aristotle knew that a lottery win will not make you happy all by itself. To think that it could is a crass conceptual error, confusing the end we strive for with a means towards that end. Happiness, by contrast, could never be the means to anything. As Aristotle points out, it is the most final end we have. There is no further purpose for which we wish to be happy. Aristotle levels a similar criticism at the life of fame, or, to put it in a more Greek way, a life of honor. Many Greeks would probably have endorsed this as the most choice-worthy life, a life centered around political success, military conquest, and lasting reputation. Aristotle's own student, Alexander the Great, was perhaps the happiest person in the ancient world, if happiness and honor are the same thing. And like Plato, who deals with this topic extensively in the Republic, Aristotle is well aware of the allure of honor among his readers. But he sets it alongside wealth as a misguided goal to pursue, because honor as such is not good enough. We care why we are honored. If a bunch of low-life criminals admire me for my successful thievery, that is no reason to think that I am really leading a good life. Nor would we wish to be honored falsely for things we didn't actually do. So if I am seeking honor, what I must really be seeking is some kind of life that would be worth honoring. In that case, the honor seems to be secondary. What I am really after is the good life that rightfully earns me the admiration of others. Again, I think we have to admire Aristotle. His argument strikes me as persuasive, and seems to get to the heart of, for instance, the problem with contemporary celebrity culture. There is indeed something empty and absurd about being famous just for being famous. But a big question is left hanging. If what I want is a life that would rightly be honored, what would such a life look like? Aristotle, adopting an argument found towards the beginning of Plato's Republic, suggests that we can discover the answer if we think about what human beings are for. What is our purpose? What are we, as it were, designed to do? If we do have some purpose, then surely the good life will be the life in which that purpose is fulfilled to the greatest extent possible. Just as being a good flute player will consist in playing the flute well, so being a good human will consist in doing whatever humans are supposed to do, and performing that function well. But hang on a second. Why should we think that humans, in general, have a purpose or function? Aristotle answers that question with a question of his own. How could it be that the parts of my body, like my eyes, have a function, without my having a function? This would be as if my car were made of functional parts, and yet had no overall purpose. Aristotle's train of thought here runs along tracks laid in his philosophy of nature. Remember that, for Aristotle, all animals, plants, even simple things like the four elements, are pursuing some kind of goal. The goal of a plant is to grow to maturity and reproduce. The goal of a stone is to move downwards towards the center of the universe. If Aristotle believed that even these things have purposes, it's no surprise that he should think humans do too. This is not to say that Aristotle actually invokes any heavy-duty theory of nature or metaphysical considerations here in the Ethics, but the considerations would be available if we pressed him on the point. So for the sake of argument, let's grant him that humans do have a purpose. How then can we tell what the purpose of humans will be? It can't be merely being alive or having sensation, because these things are shared in common with plants and animals. If there is a human function, it must be characteristic of humans, it must be the performance of the activity that belongs to us alone. What could this be? There's only one possible answer. It must be the use of reason. For it is rationality that distinguishes us from plants and animals. This is Aristotle's so-called function argument, which provides the foundation for the rest of his Ethics. Given its importance, we're likely to feel that he should be working harder to convince us. Aristotle seems to think we'll find it immediately plausible, not only that humans do have a function, but also that our function will reside in whichever activity is unique to us. The upshot is that we cannot disentangle the question of what we humans are from the question of what we ought to be. As I've said, this is unsurprising, given Aristotle's conviction that every natural thing has a purpose, but it means that he is starting from a very different place than most modern ethicists. Perhaps the most notorious problem in Ethics nowadays is the so-called is-ought gap, pointed out by David Hume. The problem is that we have, on the one hand, a factual description of the world and the things in it, and, on the other hand, a set of notions about right and wrong. A description about how things are does not by itself give us an account of how things ought to be. For instance, we can observe that some actions cause pain and suffering without thereby showing that those actions are wrong. To do that, we'd need to explain why pain and suffering are bad, why they ought not to happen. And yet, it looks like whatever we can observe about the world just gives us factual description, so where do we get morality from? It's an intractable enough problem that it has led some to ethical skepticism, but for Aristotle, it's a problem that never arises. For him, there is no way to describe the way things are without using concepts like purpose and function. These concepts are, as philosophers say nowadays, normative. In other words, they already imply value judgments. To put it more plainly, Aristotle thinks that saying what a giraffe is involves saying something about what a good giraffe would be like, and the same goes for humans. Finally, then, we have a fix on the happy life. It will be a life of reason, because that will be the kind of life that allows humans to achieve their distinctive excellence. We can now see why Aristotle thinks you can be wrong about whether you are happy. Your happiness is determined not by how you feel about yourself, but by how well you are using your rationality. Now though, we are tempted to ask what any of this has to do with ethics. When we imagine ourselves using reason, we are more apt to imagine ourselves, say, doing mathematics, than, say, helping old ladies across the street. And if we think about people who are ethically defective, we don't think they are failing in respect of rationality. In short, Aristotle has to tell us what reason has to do with virtue, and what failures of reason have to do with vice. He has a very good story to tell here, and I'll get to it in just a moment. But first, I want to point out that, for Aristotle, the excellent use of reason would include things like mathematics. He devotes a whole section of the Ethics to excellence in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. He sees understanding, in effect, as a kind of non-practical virtue. Indeed, at the risk of giving away Aristotle's punchline, it will turn out that the life of theoretical inquiry is actually the happiest life of all. For now though, Aristotle is trying to build a picture of human life in which rationality is fully exploited, including rationality in the practical sphere. Virtue arises insofar as the practical sphere is an opportunity to use our reason. But the practical sphere is the sphere in which we form preferences and perform actions, so virtue will be using reason to form the right preferences and to perform the right actions. On this point, Aristotle is admirably modest. He concedes that the range of practical situations we face is effectively infinite. There is no hard and fast set of ethical rules that can be applied to every case that might arise. Rather, practical rationality is, for Aristotle, the ability to confront each situation as it comes, and to choose the right course of action in every case. This could be something as humble as choosing the right amount to eat at each mealtime, the virtue of temperance, or choosing to fight on a battlefield, the virtue of courage. Of course, it would be disappointing if all we could say is that virtuous action is the action that would be chosen by the virtuous person. So Aristotle adds a more general observation, perhaps the most famous idea in his ethics, that the virtuous action will lie at the mean between two extremes. This is what a friend of mine likes to call the Goldilocks theory. Virtue is when you choose and enjoy what is not too much, not too little, but just right. Each kind of virtue is a mean between some excessive tendency and a tendency towards deficiency. For instance, temperance is the mean between gluttony and being overly abstemious. Courage is the mean between recklessness and cowardice. Generosity is the mean between stinginess and prodigality, and so on. Of course, this isn't to say that you should literally engage in everything in moderation. You can't do just the right amount of incest or unprovoked murder. These actions shouldn't be done at all, which perhaps poses a problem for Aristotle, unless he can convince us that such actions are excesses in relation to some other type of action, which should be done in moderation. For instance, incest might be an excessive use of one's sexual capacities. Sex, unlike incest, is something that should be pursued moderately. Though that sounds reasonable, this part of the ethics is bound to remind us that we are reading an author from a very different culture. Consider how his definition of virtuism mean would relate to Judeo-Christian morality. The Christian saints were not engaging in chastity, faith, and humility to a moderate degree, but rather striving towards perfect chastity, faith, and humility. If incest is excessive sexuality, then chastity must be deficient sexuality, so not a virtue at all, on Aristotle's theory. A nice example of Aristotle's cultural otherness here is his discussion of the man who has greatness of soul. The rather wonderful Greek word is megalosuchus. The great-souled person is perfectly virtuous, is well aware of his virtue, and acts accordingly, behaving with great dignity and seeing himself as significantly superior to those around him. Here we see that Aristotle's ethical exemplar is closer to Achilles than to Mother Teresa. Aristotle would of course admit that you can be overly prideful, but the great-souled man has earned his massive self-esteem by being massively virtuous. A normal person who behaves like Achilles isn't being virtuous, he's being an arrogant twerp. Neither, though, should Achilles act like a normal person. That would be to rate his own virtue too low. How, then, do we achieve virtue? This has already been marked as a political question. Aristotle thinks that people who do not grow up in healthy societies have effectively no chance of becoming virtuous. So, a complete answer would mean looking at Aristotle's political philosophy. But in the Ethics, he already explains why our social upbringing is so important. Virtue is achieved by habituation. The very word ethics shows this, as Aristotle points out. It comes from the Greek ethos, which means habit or custom. Thus, we already develop the virtues when we are children. Parents chastise their kids for being insufficiently bold or truthful, and this inculcates in them a habit towards courage and honesty. On this point, it's traditional to draw a contrast between Aristotle and Socrates. As you'll remember, Socrates apparently thought that virtue involves some sort of intellectual knowledge, so that virtuous people must be able to give a definition of virtue. For Aristotle, this picture is far too intellectualist. As we've seen, he certainly believes that ethical action requires some kind of cognitive process. It is rational excellence, after all. But Aristotelian virtue is more like a kind of rational discernment or perception, in which I rely on my training to find the right response to any given circumstance. Again, the variation between circumstances means that no abstract definition or account can guarantee that I choose rightly. Ultimately, it's down to my ingrained habit, which not only enables me to make the right choice, but also means that I will want to make the right choice. I will take pleasure in doing what is right, since it is what I am used to. It is second nature. The difference between the virtuous, excellent man and the vicious, defective man is largely the result of training. The virtuous man enjoys and chooses the mean between extremes as a matter of course, whereas the vicious man enjoys the wrong things and has ingrained habits for making the wrong choices. Aristotle's picture is rather compelling. He's described virtue as something which brings us enjoyment and allows us to achieve our own personal excellence. My goal, as an ethical agent, is to do what I am meant to do, and do it well. Aristotle compares this to athletic pursuits, observing that we award admiration to those who actually perform virtuous deeds, just as at the Olympics, they give prizes to those who compete and win, not just those who are most fit and beautiful. This makes virtue sound really worth having, and it's obvious why it is in our interest to have it. Virtue makes us the best humans we can be. But doesn't this sort of ethical athleticism leave something out? Something that is fundamental to ethics? What about treating others well for their sake? Should I really be generous, help my friends, have healthy relationships with my loved ones, all in order to pursue my own personal excellence? Aristotle makes it sound like other people are mere tools for me to use in attaining perfection. This is a problem we'll look at next time, as I turn to Aristotle's theory of friendship and consider in greater depth how the Aristotelian virtuous man uses and enjoys both the things and the people around him. So, join me for that, my friends, next time on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps. Today's Episode The Second Self Aristotle on Pleasure and Friendship When you think of the good things in life, what springs to mind? Perhaps a nice meal? A glass of fine wine? Pleasant conversation with friends? Or maybe you're less high-minded, and will go straight for sex, fast cars, and cold hard cash. But as we saw last time, Aristotle identifies the good life as the life of reason and virtue. So, would he purse his lips in stern disapproval at us as we pursue those pleasant dinners, not to mention the sex, cars, and money? Or does he leave a place for such things in his consideration of happiness? While a modern reader of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is apt to come away with the impression that Aristotle is quite grumpy about this whole pleasure thing, towards the beginning of the Ethics, he mentions the life devoted to pleasure and dismisses it with a snort of derision. This is a life for cattle, not humans, he says. So it's surprising to discover that many ancient readers of the Ethics thought of Aristotle as a defender of the comfortable life. He wasn't as objectionable as the crassly hedonist Epicureans, but for these critics, he still fell short of the full moral rigor one would expect from a proper philosopher. The critics were comparing Aristotle to Stoic and Platonist ethical thinkers, for whom only virtue is valuable and all else is intrinsically worthless. We've seen a view like this already in the mouth of Socrates, who argued that such things as wealth and power benefit their possessors only if they are joined to wisdom and virtue. We've seen Plato, too, arguing that a virtuous man is happy even if he is hated by society and subjected to injustices and torments. Aristotle, as so often, is happy to occupy the middle ground. On the one hand, he rejects hedonism. Though pleasure has its place in the good life, it is not the primary goal of the good life. But on the other hand, he adopts the common-sense judgment that someone who is, say, tortured to death after his family has been murdered by an unjust tyrant is not happy, no matter how virtuous he is. Of course, he knew that he was disagreeing with his master Plato here, but as he says in the Ethics, we must honor truth above our friends. And, as we saw last time, the truth about the good life is that it must be admirable and enviable for right-minded men. Unless we're Stoics or Platonists, we will probably agree with Aristotle that virtue is no guarantee of happiness, even if it is the best route to happiness. But this forces Aristotle to admit that our happiness is, to some extent, out of our own control. A tyrant can always come along and destroy our lives. In fact, Aristotle even finds it plausible that our happiness can retroactively be destroyed after our deaths, if our close friends and descendants have horrors visited upon them. This is a reminder that, for Aristotle, being happy is more like being blessed than being content. There's another reason why Aristotle includes so-called external goods in the happy life, that is, goods like wealth, health, and family, in addition to virtue. He believes that virtues must be exercised to be worth anything. You'll have no opportunity to be generous if you have no money, or to be loyal if you have no friends. So the virtuous man needs a measure of material success just to make use of his virtue. On this point, Socrates might agree with Aristotle. Socrates, as portrayed by Plato at least, did allow that wealth and power would be valuable so long as it is in the hands of a wise and virtuous man who would use them to do good. It's just that wealth and power have no value and can even be harmful in the absence of wisdom and virtue. Silvio Berlusconi, I'm looking at you. Still, there's no doubt that Socrates and Aristotle differ in their emphasis. With Aristotle happy to accept the importance of external goods, and Socrates constantly pointing out their intrinsic uselessness. Those Stoic and Platonist critics sided with Socrates, but again, I suspect we're liable to find Aristotle's view attractive. Another attractive feature of Aristotle's ideas about happiness is something I already mentioned last time. For Aristotle, virtue itself is pleasurable to the virtuous man. This is because he is habituated to perform virtuous actions. He's used to them to the point that they come naturally to him. However fearful it might be for him to stand bravely in battle, it would be even more painful for him to run away. He is courageous and would find it excruciating, unbearable to flee from a battle when he should not. He will also find it unpleasant to overeat at a banquet, whereas a moderate repast will be just what he likes best. Well, I say this view is attractive, but maybe you'll disagree. Maybe you'll say that if virtue is really to be admirable, it should be tough going. We should have to grit our teeth and do the right thing, not because we enjoy it, but because it is the right thing. It's traditional here to draw a contrast between Aristotle and a much later philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Whereas Aristotle thinks that enjoyment of virtue is a sure sign of virtuous character, Kant insists that morality really has nothing to do with enjoyment. It's not that Kant necessarily wants you to find moral duty unpleasant. That would be rather perverse. But certainly for Kant, if you help an old lady across the street just because you get a kick out of it, this doesn't count as a properly moral act. In a way, you're just lucky. You happen to be a person who enjoys helping old ladies rather than stealing their purses. The right reason for helping the old lady is that it is your duty, and any enjoyment you take in this is morally irrelevant, even if it is a nice bonus. Now, it must be said that Kant has a point. Aristotle's theory of virtue depends heavily on the idea of habituation. You become virtuous by being trained in virtue as you grow up. This means that if you don't get the right upbringing, you will not take enjoyment in the right things, and so you will not be virtuous. Thus, Aristotle is vulnerable to what is sometimes called the problem of moral luck. That is, our ethical condition should not be a matter of happenstance, it should be up to us to control. Aristotle has a reply ready. He will say that there are indeed people who manage to do the right thing against their ingrained habit and inclination. These are people with enkrateia, which means something like self-control. Outwardly, the self-controlled man and the virtuous man seem very similar. They both will stand fast in battle, eat moderately at table, help the old lady across the street. The difference is that whereas the virtuous man enjoys doing these things and does it out of habit, the self-controlled man would rather run away in battle, eat like a pig, and ignore the old lady. Yet, he does the right thing because he knows that's what he's supposed to do. Now Aristotle will ask his usual question. Who would we admire more? And who would we rather be? I guess it's clear that we'd rather be the virtuous man, but the question of whom we admire more is trickier. When I think about this, I find myself changing my mind depending on the example. Someone who has to exert self-control to avoid snatching old lady's purses seems to me less admirable than someone who would never consider doing any such thing. But someone who fights bravely in battle, even as every fiber of his being tells him to run, or someone who has to exert willpower to stay on their diet and eat moderately, seems to me more admirable than people who do these same things naturally and with enjoyment. So it's not clear to me who has the better of this dispute between Aristotle and Kant. Of course, Aristotle recognizes that not everyone does the right thing. So he identifies two other character types in addition to the virtuous and self-controlled men. Completely opposed to the virtuous man is the vicious man, who does bad things the way the virtuous man does good things. He naturally, and out of habit, runs away from battles, snatches purses, and gobbles up cakes. He's not very interesting, really. His only use is to serve as a bad example. More fascinating is the bad twin of the self-controlled man, the weak-willed man. Aristotle calls this condition of weak-will akrasia, often translated as incontinence. Someone with this defect of character knows what he should do, unlike the vicious man, but he is unable to do it because he is overcome by his desires and the prospect of pleasure or avoiding pain. Akrasia is precisely the phenomenon that Socrates claimed was impossible when he said that no one does wrong willingly. If you recall, his reasoning went like this. When we make choices, what we are doing is trying to choose what is good or what is best. So there is something self-defeating, even contradictory, about consciously choosing what is bad. It is tantamount to thinking, I reckon the best thing to do is this bad thing. Aristotle explicitly refers to Socrates and admits that he has leveled a powerful challenge against the possibility of akrasia. But again, defending a more commonsensical position, he says that akrasia obviously does exist. The question is how? Aristotle suggests that Socrates is right in a way because the akratic man is indeed suffering from a failure of reasoning. He knows, for instance, that this cake is unhealthy and that he shouldn't eat unhealthy things. But the prospect of the delicious cake makes him temporarily unable to make use of this knowledge, so he pops it into his mouth. In this case, I am less persuaded by Aristotle. He must be right that akrasia genuinely exists, but I'm not sure he's right that akrasia resides in some kind of thoughtlessness and being swept away by pleasure. No doubt that does happen, but I would say people sometimes consciously, in full awareness, do things they know are bad. If that really does happen, it is clearly not what Aristotle is trying to explain in his theory of akrasia. We've seen, then, that Aristotle thinks the good life includes quite a lot of pleasure, and for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the total absence of pleasurable goods apart from virtue, like wealth and family, will destroy our happiness. For another, we'll need such things just in order to exercise our virtue. And finally, virtue itself will bring us pleasure as we exercise it. The good life is starting to look pretty pleasant after all. But now, I know what you're thinking. Why can't Aristotle just go ahead and be a hedonist? Why can't he say that the best life is simply the most pleasant life, perhaps by insisting that the virtuous man is the one who gets the most pleasure out of his activities? In that case, he was wrong to dismiss the life of pleasure as a life fit for cows. Far from it. It is actually a life fit for the best, most admirable man among us, and, in short, is the happy life. And so we should organize our lives around the pursuit of pleasure. Aristotle does come back to the topic of pleasure later in the Ethics, and when he does so, he makes it clear why he is not a hedonist. For him, devoting one's life to pleasure is not only a mistake, it is downright incoherent. To see why, we need to think a bit about the nature of pleasure itself. Pleasure always involves enjoying some activity, whether it is eating, driving a fast car, or simply feeling at peace with yourself. So, pleasure is a kind of secondary phenomenon, which comes along on top of some primary activity or experience. This seemingly innocuous fact spells doom for the hedonist. It means that, when we ask whether a certain pleasure is worth pursuing, the answer will always depend on the activity to which the pleasure is attached. If you take pleasure in doing mathematics, and also in eating cake, then the question of which pleasure is more worthwhile will depend on whether mathematics or cake is intrinsically better. This allows Aristotle to insist that even if pleasure in itself is always good, it is to be avoided when it accompanies an activity which is bad. Again, notice how he has staked out a compromised position. He's not denying that pleasure is good, and neither is he saying that it is THE good. Rather, it is in itself a good thing, and sometimes accompanies other good things, but sometimes it arises from bad things, and this makes all the difference. The hedonist might try responding that we should try to maximize pleasure, that is, choose between pleasures, not on the basis of their associated activities, but on the basis of what is most pleasant. To this, Aristotle might say that there is no reason to suppose that we are able to compare, say, the pleasure of mathematics and the pleasure of cake. Nonetheless, you might well have to choose, for instance, if you were invited both to a birthday party and a mathematics seminar, and then Aristotle will insist that the choice should not depend on the quantity of pleasure each activity would provide, but on which activity is more worthwhile, which activity will do more to contribute to my overall well-being and flourishing. As appealing as all this sounds, there is still a problem lurking. I mentioned it at the end of the last episode. Aristotle's ethics seems to be all about my own personal flourishing and excellence. I am trying to achieve happiness, and the way to do it is to engage in the activities distinctive to me as a human, the use of reason in both the practical and theoretical spheres. It's an ethical theory that is demanding, that calls us to achievement and great deeds, be they political, military, or, best of all, philosophical. But isn't it also a little selfish? What if my friends and family get in the way of my excellence? Of course, Aristotle has said that no one can be happy without friends and family, and perhaps I need them around to exercise some of my virtues like generosity and loyalty, but surely these are the wrong reasons to value my loved ones. I shouldn't be keeping them around for my own benefit. If anything, I should be seeking to promote their good above my own. Aristotle's answer comes in books 8 and 9 of the Ethics, which are devoted to friendship. The Greek term, which I already mentioned when discussing Plato's erotic dialogues, is philia. It's worth emphasizing that two out of the ten books of the Ethics are about this topic. Clearly, this is something Aristotle took seriously, though I don't think it is necessarily because he felt that Ethics needs to be other-regarding rather than self-regarding. His ethical theory is fundamentally eudaimonist, meaning that it seeks to ground Ethics in the eudaimonia, or happiness, of the ethical agent rather than in some kind of responsibilities or duties the agent owes to other people. But Aristotle definitely thought the virtuous person would have friends. In fact, he thought something much stronger than this. He thought that in the strict and proper sense, only the virtuous person can have friends. According to Aristotle, there are three kinds of relationship that we count as friendships. Some friends spend time together simply because it is useful to both parties. These utility friendships may be long-lasting and deeply valued. Think, for instance, of two business partners who might work together for their whole career and help to make one another rich and successful. But such relationships are also vulnerable to circumstance. If you and I are friends in this way, I may just drop you like a hot potato as soon as your usefulness ends. Similar are friendships of pleasure, which are predicated on some shared activity the friends enjoy. The drinking buddy is the ultimate example of this. Again, the friendship is based on something incidental to the actual friend, and this makes the friendship vulnerable. Suppose I give up drinking. I'll give up my drinking buddies too. Although these two kinds of friendship are in a sense defective, we can nonetheless call them friendship because of their resemblance to true friendship. This sort of friendship is grounded not in something incidental to the friend, like their usefulness or shared pleasures, but rather in the character of the friend. If I am really and truly friends with you, it must be because I admire and value your character, and you admire and value my character. This is why, in a sense, only virtuous people can really be friends, because they are the only ones who really have admirable and valuable characters. In the ideal case, the two friends will be equal in virtue. Inequality, for Aristotle, is inimical to friendship, and he comments rather unpleasantly that this is why men can't be friends with women, even with their wives, because women are intrinsically inferior. It also explains, as he says in a striking passage, why we cannot be friends with God. So Aristotle can explain why virtuous people are not selfish egotists. They may not cherish the worth of all other humans, indeed, it sounds like they will have little but scorn for most people, an impression we'll see confirmed when we get to Aristotle's thoughts about slavery in a future episode. But other people who are more or less virtuous will be valued by the virtuous person, and for their own sakes. In the ideal case of virtue friendship, Aristotle even says that the virtuous man considers the friend a second self, and will consider his deeds to be effectively his own. This, again, is a noble idea, though one might worry that it collapses back into egotism after all. If, in an ideal virtue friendship, my friend is, for all intents and purposes, another me, doesn't that show that virtue is really selfish? It is all about me, me, me, and there are as many me's as I have virtuous friends. The problem becomes even more pressing when we get to the notorious end of the ethics, in which Aristotle suddenly announces that the best life is not, after all, a matter of political activity, but, rather, a life devoted to philosophical contemplation. Where does this leave interpersonal relationships, or, for that matter, virtuous practical activity? This is just one topic I'll be looking at next time with someone who is far better than a second me, in fact a leading expert on Aristotelian ethics. So be a pal and join me for an interview with Dominic Scott next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.