In Defense of the Grand EndEthics with Aristotle.Sarah Broadie

Abstract

Sarah Broadie's book, Ethics with Aristotle, is a splendid in-depth treatment of an extensive portion of the Nicomachean Ethics. Following the arrangement of Aristotle's treatise, she comments in great detail on his discussion of human well-being, the nature of virtue, voluntariness, deliberation, practical wisdom, weakness of will, pleasure, and the philosophical life. (The two major topics that she omits are the specific ethical virtues-courage, temperance, justice, etc.and friendship.) Because of the book's wide scope, and the philosophical depth and originality of its author, Ethics with Aristotle deserves to be recognized as one of the best and most important works on Aristotle's moral philosophy written in recent decades. Broadie's book is densely argued and not easily summarized. Rather than present a catalog of the interpretive theses she defends, I will focus entirely on one aspect of her work that I consider particularly important and provocative: her attempt to discourage students of Aristotle's moral philosophy from reading into him an exalted conception of practical wisdom, one which she finds philosophically questionable and textually unsupported. According to this misguided conception, which she labels the view, practical wisdom is like a craft such as medicine: it seeks to realise, not health, but the human good without restriction; and in this it takes its cue from an explicit, comprehensive, substantial vision of that good, a vision invested with a content different from what would be aimed at by morally inferior natures. This blueprint of the good guides its possessor in all his deliberations, and in terms of it his rational choices can be explained and justified (p. 198). I suspect that few students of Aristotle who read these words will immediately agree with Broadie that it is a misdescription of practical wisdom. In any case, I was a believer in the Grand End view before I read her book; and, having considered her arguments against it, I remain a believer. Nonetheless I welcome her