Nicomachean Ethics
It&#x27;s been awhile since I&#x27;ve read this. Rereading about it now, it seems like a conceptual mess.<p>I also have this sense, hard to put into words, that it is written from a perspective of socioeconomic privilege and implicitly assumes a certain freedom, or has as its focus certain concerns that reflect that. It comes across to me now as narrow-minded and lacking in understanding of the broader human condition and diversity of challenges affecting persons. Put another way, it seems to be written as if advising royalty or the wealthy is the implied goal, ignoring the broader experiences of mankind, which seems to me in turn ironically a moral failure.<p>Maybe related to this, it seems to presume a certain set of things that I see as actually being fundamental societal and philosophical questions, such as free will and personal agency and all that encompasses. Failure to attain well-being in a broad sense is a failure of the individual to practice free will, under The Ethics, and not of society to foster or intervene in a way so as to facilitate individual improvements in well-being. The sort of paradigm being asserted in The Ethics provides no way out to address the question of &quot;how do I improve the lot of my fellow persons?&quot; or to develop virtues in others. If someone rejects the notion of free will, either in itself or as a meta-phenomenon (that is, as something that can be manipulated itself), The Ethics seems misguided at best and pernicious at worst.<p>Virtue ethics also seem naive to me often, in that there&#x27;s often little self-awareness of its limitations. For example, what if two virtues conflict? How do you resolve this? How do you interpret a behavior vis-a-vis its outcome in the presence of fundamental uncertainty?