Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics › Legacy and Connections

The _Nicomachean Ethics_ has shaped virtually every subsequent Western approach to ethics, even those that reject its conclusions. Medieval Christian thinkers, especially Thomas Aquinas, integrated Aristotle's virtue ethics with Christian theology. The Stoics and Epicureans, Aristotle's near-contemporaries and immediate successors, developed competing accounts of flourishing. Kant and the utilitarians, centuries later, defined themselves partly in opposition to virtue-based approaches. The twentieth century saw a significant revival of virtue ethics, led by philosophers like Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Philippa Foot, who argued that modern moral philosophy had lost something important. The _Nicomachean Ethics_ also connects to other wisdom traditions. Buddhist concepts of skillful action and the cultivation of mental qualities through practice resemble Aristotelian ideas about habituation and practical wisdom. Confucian ethics, with its emphasis on cultivating virtue through ritual and social roles, shares structural features with Aristotle's approach. These parallels suggest that Aristotle may have identified something genuinely important about human flourishing: insights that appear across cultures and centuries. Scholars debate whether such cross-cultural comparisons risk flattening important differences. For contemporary readers, the _Nicomachean Ethics_ offers an alternative to approaches that can feel either too rigid (rule-following) or too calculating (cost-benefit analysis). It takes seriously the messiness of human life, the importance of context, and the central role of character in living well. It reminds us that ethics is not primarily about solving puzzles but about becoming certain kinds of people. Against our culture's tendency toward fragmentation, it suggests that the good life is a unified whole. The same excellences that make us good friends can make us good workers, good citizens, and good thinkers. Will Durant, in _The Story of Philosophy_, summarized the _Nicomachean Ethics_ with a line often misattributed to Aristotle himself: > We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. The insight is genuinely Aristotelian, and genuinely urgent. If our characters are shaped by our daily practices, then the question of how we spend our time becomes the most important ethical question we face. What are we becoming through the choices we make today?