The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle David; Ross David; Brown Lesley

Author:Aristotle, David; Ross, David; Brown, Lesley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

PLEASURE

Three views hostile to pleasure and the arguments for them

11. The study of pleasure and pain belongs to the province of the

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political philosopher; for he is the architect of the end, with a view to which we call one thing bad and another good without qualification.* Further, it is one of our necessary tasks to consider them; for not only did we lay it down that moral virtue and vice are concerned

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with pains and pleasures,1 but most people say that happiness involves pleasure; this is why the blessed man is called by a name derived from a word meaning enjoyment.*

Now (1) some people think that no pleasure is a good, either in itself or incidentally, since the good and pleasure are not the same; (2) others think that some pleasures are good but that most are bad.

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(3) Again there is a third view, that even if all pleasures are goods, yet the best thing in the world cannot be pleasure. (1) The reasons given for the view that pleasure is not a good at all are (a) that every pleasure is a perceptible process to a natural state, and that no process is of the same kind as its end,* e.g. no process of building of the same kind as a house. (b) A temperate man avoids pleasures. (c) A man of practical wisdom pursues what is free from pain, not what

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is pleasant. (d) The pleasures are a hindrance to thought, and the more so the more one delights in them, e.g. in sexual pleasure; for no one could think of anything while absorbed in this. (e) There is no art of pleasure; but every good is the product of some art. (f) Children and the brutes pursue pleasures. (2) The reasons for the view that not all pleasures are good are that (a) there are pleasures

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that are actually base and objects of reproach, and (b) there are harmful pleasures; for some pleasant things are unhealthy. (3) The reason for the view that the best thing in the world is not pleasure is that pleasure is not an end but a process.

Discussion of the view that pleasure is not a good

12. These are pretty much the things that are said. That it does

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not follow from these grounds that pleasure is not a good, or even the chief good, is plain from the following considerations. (A) (a) First, since that which is good may be so in either of two senses (one thing good simply and another good for a particular person), natural constitutions and states of being, and therefore also the corresponding movements and processes, will be correspondingly divisible. Of those which are thought to be bad some will be bad if taken without qualification but not bad for a particular person, but worthy of his choice, and some will not be worthy of choice even

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for a particular person, but only at a particular time and for a short period, though not without qualification; while others are not even pleasures, but seem to be so, namely, all those which involve pain and whose end is curative, e.

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