The Role of Good Upbringing in Aristotle's Ethics

Abstract

I will challenge a prominent understanding of the nature and purpose of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Although it is well known that Aristotelian ethics focuses on the virtues and happiness (eudaimonia),' while we moderns tend to focus on what rules we ought to follow, it is a common assumption that Aristotle shares with a major strand of modem moral philosophy the aim of providing an argument to justify the objective correctness of our values-an argument that any rational agent has to accept in so far as he is rational. Famously, the Function Argument in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics is supposed to accomplish (at least in large part) this task. There Aristotle argues from the function a man has by nature to the good for man. The Function Argument, on this account, is the window to Aristotle's other, nonethical works, the De Anima and Metaphysics, which are supposed to provide the foundation and justification for the conclusions of the Nicomachean Ethics. Bernard Williams expresses such a view of the Nicomachean Ethics in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.2 Williams' eventual conclusion that Aristotle's ethics has failed, and most probably must fail, rests on the idea that we now consider false the crucial claims from the De Anima and Metaphysics upon which the Nicomachean Ethics supposedly relies. Particularly, Aristotle's famous contention that man has a function (ergon) is not something that Williams believes can now be held. The crux of the issue according to Williams is that Aristotle can give no satisfactory purely scientific (that is, extra-ethical) argument that there really is some biological inner nisus3