At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle makes the following, very democratic observation:
Persons of low tastes (always in the majority) hold that happiness is pleasure … The utter vulgarity of the herd of men comes out in their preference for the sort of existence a cow leads. Their view would hardly get a respectful hearing.
And so he dismisses the perceived view of the majority and focuses on ethics for the well-born, i.e. the propertied class.
24 December, 2009 at 8:12 am
Aristotle’s classism aside, I would agree with his statement that happiness isn’t the same as pleasure. And I think history might show that the majority isn’t always who you want to ask when it comes to questions of ethics.
24 December, 2009 at 8:48 am
‘Aristotle’s classism aside’ – that is precisely the problem. Alasdair MacIntyre, in his effort to recuperate an Aristotelian ethics against the rarified approach of metaethics, suggested that such classism is ‘unnecessary and objectionable’. Not so, for it is fundamental to the whole ethics.
24 December, 2009 at 12:23 pm
As I understand it, Aristotle’s ethics unconsciously assumes that pleasure is necessary for happiness (after all, the propertied fellows have all the food they need, nice wine, wood to fuel their fires, a nice home, etc., while the poor do not have such easy access to these things). Since for Aristotle, the good life is one of contemplation, all that money (pleasure) is required in order to be good, and since the unpropertied folks don’t have all that money the only pondering they tend to do is concerning how they will get their next meal. Since I’m really not a scholar or anything, I could be wrong, but it seems that part would be easy to rehabilitate: simply wed Aristotelian ethics to an ethic of social/class consciousness that recognizes the humanity of the lower classes. Essentially, the idea that the wealthy aren’t entitled to happiness any more than the poor are and ought to spread the pleasure in hopes of spreading happiness along with it.
Of course, I suppose I’d also change that bit about the good life being the contemplative life. I don’t buy into the idea at all that the best people around are academics that spend all their time pondering the workings of the universe. I think when people are normally at their best when they are doing something creative, like my mother’s scrapbooking. Of course, there’s a good deal of thinking that goes into being creative, but I don’t think that’s the kind Aristotle refers to.
24 December, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Aristotle is far more appealing for many, since he’s not afraid to deal with practical matters of everyday life, and there have been plenty of attempts to break his ethics out of the restricted zone in which he applied them, but the problem runs deeper than that, since the key terms he used were inseparable from class assumptions. So we find that moral, physical, economic and social terms all overlapped: good vs. bad, wealthy vs. poor, noble vs. ignoble, brave vs. cowardly, well-born vs. ill-born, blessed vs. cursed, lucky vs. unlucky, upright vs. lowly, elite vs. masses, pillars of society vs. dregs, beautiful vs. ugly. When you get an apparently innocent question like, ‘what is good?’ or ‘what is happiness?’ it evokes this whole web of associations.