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Reason and Human Good in Aristotle

In this interesting book John Cooper deals with two topics in Aristotle's moral philosophy on which he finds existing studies inadequate, practical reason and eudaimonia. He concentrates on the Nicomachean Ethics, but also uses the Eudemian Ethics, which he thinks is the earlier work and originally included the disputed books, and the Magna Moralia, whose doctrines he has elsewhere argued to be Aristotelian. On practical reason, he treats as separate deliberation, which works out means to ends and stops when it reaches a conclusion like 'Chicken is light meat', which can be acted on, and the 'practical syllogism', which takes the last step in deliberation as its major premiss, and so brings the action about. On human good, he translates eudaimonia as 'flourishing', and argues that it is a 'comprehensively inclusive second-order end'. In the greater part of his writings Aristotle regards it as involving the practice of both' intellectual and moral virtue, but in Nicomachean Ethics X, under the influence of his new psychology of the active intellect, he arrives, at the end of his career, at the view that the intellectual virtue of contemplation alone is the highest good. Cooper's approach is scholarly, but he seems to assume without discussion that Aristotle held a coherent ethical theory which would in most respects be acceptable to modern moral philosophers. Rawls figures as prominently in his pages as Plato, and Socrates is only mentioned once. With this viewpoint, he approaches those passages of Aristotle which seem to be inconsistent with one another, or otherwise unacceptable to modern thinkers, in a spirit of sweet reasonableness that sometimes leads to strange results. Further, if Aristotle's views were really so coherent and sensible, it is surprising that other people have found so many difficulties in what he says. The following call for comment: (i) p.42, to put 'the means' for TOV evbexpyevov is interpretation, not translation. (ii) p.50, on the most difficult passage about the practical syllogism, at 1147, his interpretation, which involves a second major premiss on the lines of 'Avoid chocolate', would help to give a consistent theory, but has little connection with the actual Greek. (iii) His translation of eudaimonia as '(human) flourishing' while bringing out aspects of the Greek term which are missed by using 'happiness', completely obscures its derivation and leads to some strange expressions. Thus of the claim that a person's eudaimonia can be affected by what happens to his descendents after his death, Cooper remarks that it is natural to say that, if a man's children fare worse than he had expected, his life was not as flourishing as it had seemed. (iv) p. 135. The suggestion that Aristotle had a conviction that 'the principles of the moral virtues are such as will, under normal conditions and for normal persons, lead to the achievement of the maximum combination of first-order goods', anachronistically ignores the whole background oipolis and paideia against which his ideas must be set.