The Nicomachean Ethics

What is the good life? How can we attain true happiness? How are we to understand the concepts of good, bad, right, wrong, virtue, and vice as they intermingle and pervade the human actions that make up society? In one of the earliest and most comprehensive attempts to offer a systematic treatment of ethics and the principles upon which it rests, the Greek philosopher Aristotle seeks to give substance and meaning to human action and to the manner in which we judge our own behavior and that of others. Here Aristotle not only offers a discussion of morality that later culminated in a full-blown analysis of political life, but he also sets forth principles and advice that served as the touchstone for many subsequent moral philosophies.