After the long recent domination of Kantian and Utilitarian thinking among professional ethicists, Aristotelian ethics has been enjoying an overdue resurgence.
Aristotle’s ethics is brilliant. It is especially brilliant for the way it starts from nearly absolute scratch. It doesn’t start with the moral concepts Kant and Mill inherited from their Judeo-Christian culture. It just starts with the obvious questions: ‘What is the smart way to live?’ ‘What should we do?’ And it makes observations about what sorts of behaviour are conducive to achieving the most general goals we all share. Anyone from any culture or background can usefully start with Aristotle’s ethics when considering how to live. Aristotle’s ethics is the best starting point I know apart from an explicitly religious one.
Aristotle’s most important insight was this:
One cannot have an excellent life without being an excellent person.
This is easily seen through a simple thought experiment:
Suppose you were choosing between
1) a life where everything went well for you, but you were a crappy person, and
2) a life in which everything went well for you, but you were also an excellent person.
Which would you choose?
The answer is obvious, of course.
Further, would you think you had had a good life—would you think you were a success—if you only had the former? –i.e., if things went well for you but you were a lousy person?
Of course not. All else being equal, we’d all want things to go well for us, of course. But just as obviously, we’d also prefer to be excellent people. We haven’t achieved our ultimate goal unless we’re admirable persons.
Aristotle was brilliant for observing that being an excellent—”virtuous”—human being is not only conducive to having things go well for us. It is also an essential constituent of the good life. One cannot have the latter without being the former.
It is literally impossible to have a good life without being a good person.