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In this paper, I examine the treatments of law contained within Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Plato’s Minos. I find that both offer powerful and complementary critiques of law, while recognizing law’s power and promise in shaping the character and opinions of each citizen. The Minos, though, goes further than the Ethics in describing and examining the possibility of divine law that transcends the limitations of merely human laws. / text

In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX provide A philosophic examination of friendship. While these Books initially appear to be non sequiturs in the inquiry, a closer examination of the questions raised by the preceding Books and consideration of the discussion of friendship's position between two accounts of pleasure in Books VII and X indicate friendship's central role in the Ethics. In friendship, Aristotle finds a uniquely human capacity that helps readers understand the good is distinct from pleasure by leading them to think seriously about what they can hold in common with their friends throughout their lives without changing who they are. What emerges from Aristotle's account of friendship is a nuanced portrait of human nature that recognizes the authoritative place of the intellect in human beings and how its ability to think about an end and hold its thinking in relation to that end depends upon whether it orders or is ordered by pleasures and pains. Aristotle lays the groundwork for this conclusion throughout the Ethics by gradually disclosing pleasures and pains are not caused solely by things we feel through the senses, but by reasoned arguments and ideas as well. Through this insight, we can begin to understand how Aristotle's Ethics is a work of political philosophy; to fully appreciate the significance of his approach, however, we must contrast his work with that of Thomas Hobbes, his harshest Modern critic. Unlike Aristotle, Hobbes is nearly silent on friendship in his political philosophy, and examining his political works especially Leviathan reveals the absence of friendship is part of his deliberate attempt to advance a politics founded on the moral teaching that pleasure is the good. Aristotle's political philosophy, by way of contrast, aims to preserve the good, and through friendship, he not only disentangles the good from pleasure, but shows a level of human community more suitable for preserving the good than political regimes because these communities have more natural bonds than any regime can hope to create between its citizens.

Thesis advisor: Marina McCoy / In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the project of developing virtue and of being virtuous is always realized in one's immediate, particular circumstances. Given that perception is the faculty that gains access to the particular, Aristotle seems to afford perception a central role in ethical life. Yet Aristotle does not provide an account of ethical perception: he does not explain how the perceptual faculty is able grasp ethically relevant facts and how the perceptual capacity can do so well, nor does he explain the manner in which perception influences ethical decisions and actions. It is the project of this dissertation to provide such accounts. There are two main difficulties in the notion of ethical perception in Aristotle's thought: first, perception appears ill-suited to ethical life because the objects of perception are always perceived with respect to the individual's subjective condition--her desires, fears, etc. The information relayed by perception is always relative to the perceiver, i.e. merely the apparent good. Second, virtue is the excellence of the rational soul, while perception is a faculty shared by non-rational animals. It appears, then, that perception must be limited to playing an instrumental role in ethical reasoning and action. This dissertation addresses these difficulties by developing an account of uniquely human perception that is influenced and informed by the intellectual element of the soul. I argue that the project of ethical development, for Aristotle, is the project of integrating one's perceptual faculty with the intellectual capacity, such that one's perception transcends the natural relativity to the perceiver and gains access to the true good as it emerges in one's particular situation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

An interpretation of how Aristotle explains the value of worldly goods within the terms of his ethical theory in the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle claims that to live in a worthwhile and subjectively satisfying way--that is, to achieve eudaimonia--one needs such things as honor, wealth, friends, and political power. He groups these things together as the external goods, since they are all external in a spatial sense from the perspective of any given person. It is clear that people almost always attach value to such things, but it is less clear why Aristotle should. My aim is to explain why Aristotle regards these things as important, and--in a more formal sense--how far his definition of eudaimonia explains their value. On Aristotle's formal theory, the external goods ought to gain value through some relation to excellent rational activity, but fleshing out the details of this relation raises problems. Chapter 2 assesses Aristotle's formal argument for the value of such goods at NE I.1099a31-b8, chapter 1 develops an account of Aristotle's method in order to support this assessment, and chapter 3 considers the kinds of explanations for the value of the external goods available to Aristotle in terms of his account of action. Chapter 4 draws on the results of the earlier chapters to assess Aristotle's position on moral luck--that is, how Aristotle regards his various categories of value as depending upon factors outside of the agent's control. My aim throughout is to consider how successfully Aristotle draws on his formal theory in order to explain the value of the external goods as well as external things in the broadest sense.

From an accounting standpoint, the concept of social responsibility has gained a lot of momentum with both academicians and practitioners. Many of the top public accounting firms' offer social responsibility reporting services. Also, many CPA firms, most of which tend to be private partnerships and sole proprietorships, are engaged in social responsibility initiatives. CPA Social Responsibility at the level of a business owner is a concept that is largely unexplored in the academic literature. The overwhelming majority of academic papers have looked at social responsibility from the standpoint of a corporation, that is, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The lack of adequate development of social responsibility at the level of a business owner has led to a gap in the research in terms of methodology and of the causal relationships that social responsibility may have on variety of outcomes. This study conducts a thorough literature review on the concept of social responsibility, and then in conjunction with a qualitative analysis consisting of interviews with CPAs (who own their business - that is, sole proprietors and partners), this paper defines social responsibility. Using the definitions generated by the literature review and the expert panel, this paper uses the grounding of Nicomachean Ethics to derive the definitions and elucidate the underlying dimensions of CPA Social Responsibility. Further, the study uses power analysis, factor analysis, scree plots, multidimensional scaling, perceptual maps, and a sequential process to develop and validate an instrument to measure the concept of CPA Social Responsibility at the level of a business owner.

Most people share a strong intuition that there is much to be learned from great literature and other forms of narrative art. This intuition is, however, philosophically contentious. Plato was the first to argue against the possibility of learning anything from narrative art, but he founded a tradition that persists to the present day. I will engage in this debate in order to examine the role narratives might be able to play in acquiring virtue on Aristotle's ethical account, as it is presented in Nicomachean Ethics. I will claim that narratives have so long seemed a problematic source of learning because philosophers have traditionally approached the issue in the wrong way. They have typically tried to show how we might acquire propositional knowledge through our engagement with art, but this approach has failed because of insoluble problems involved in satisfying the justification criterion. Fictions may be rescued from their problematic status by realising that what we truly get from them is, instead, a type of knowledge-how. I will argue that Aristotelian virtue is itself a kind of knowledge-how and so the type of learning that takes place in engaging with narratives has a role to play in its acquisition and exercise. Virtue depends on types of reasoning that are themselves kinds of knowledge-how and which are employed and improved in engaging with narrative art. These types of reasoning will be described as conceptual, emotional and imaginative understanding. I will show how each is important in relation to virtue and how each is a kind of knowledge-how that may be improved through exposure to narrative art.

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This essay is a critical interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as it attempts to reconcile the tension between moral virtue and intellectual virtue, the two virtues which Aristotle deems characteristic of man. This paper looks to include both moral and intellectual virtue in Aristotle’s conception of the happy life, through the summarization and analyzation of David Keyt, J.L Ackrill, John Cooper and Daniel Devereux’s modern interpretations of the ethics.

In a famous argument at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the function and good of the human being is the "actuality of the soul in accordance with virtue". Presenting a view critical of the widespread intellectualist reading of Aristotle's Ethics, in this thesis I argue that the characteristic function of the human being is constitutive of a distinctly human life as a dynamic formal cause teleologically operative in human awareness. I argue for the validity of my own view in a preliminary way in the introduction by way of Aristotle's critique of the Platonic forms. In the second chapter, I argue that the processes of the non-rational part of the soul are acquired and actively operate once acquired independently of singular dictates of active reason within the individual. By this I mean that the virtues do not obey reason in the sense that they receive individual commands from discursive reason to desire or feel in certain ways. Rather, although the moral virtues are formed gradually by repeated acts of choice, as affective states, they are activated by being affected from without by external stimuli. These external stimuli produce impulses in the soul which are conducive to virtuous action, including a cognitive element: primarily, non-rational and non-discursive evaluative judgments of phantasia, which supply a human agent immediately with the ends of his action and the beginning-points of deliberation. These judgments are the awareness of sensible particulars as pleasant. In the third chapter, I turn to the De Anima in order to illuminate the cognitive conditions of human praxis. Following on the arguments contained in the second chapter, I argue that there are two primary cognitive moments which are necessary conditions of action. While the ends of desire are immediate objects of awareness and move humans as unmoved movers, motivational desires, which move as efficient causes, are initiated by a distinct cognitive power: proclamations to pursue or avoid.