The Good and the Good Human Life

Chapter 2 defends Aristotle’s premise that the final agential good is the well-lived human life. This premise does not receive much critical attention in the literature. Scholars tend to go along with Aristotle’s mode of exposition, granting that the earliest steps of the Nicomachean Ethics are agreed-upon. Against this, the chapter argues that Aristotle is making a controversial, weighty, and compelling claim. In drawing on the NE, the argument continues, one may pause here. One may accept that the highest agential good is a good human life, without buying into the next steps of the NE, which lead toward a ranking of lives. The chapter defends the premise that the human good is a well-lived life, and develops it such as to make room for a plurality of good human lives.