We must, however, remember that the production of good character is not
the end of either individual or state action: that is the aim of the
one and the other because good character is the indispensable condition
and chief determinant of happiness, itself the goal of all human doing.
The end of all action, individual or collective, is the greatest
happiness of the greatest number. There is, Aristotle insists, no
difference of kind between the good of one and the good of many or all.
The sole difference is one of amount or scale. This does not mean
simply that the State exists to secure in larger measure the objects of
degree which the isolated individual attempts, but is too feeble, to
secure without it. On the contrary, it rather insists that whatever
goods society alone enables a man to secure have always had to the
individual—whether he realised it or not—the value which, when so
secured, he recognises them to possess. The best and happiest life for
the individual is that which the State renders possible, and this it
does mainly by revealing to him the value of new objects of desire and
educating him to appreciate them. To Aristotle or to Plato the State
is, above all, a large and powerful educative agency which gives the
individual increased opportunities of self-development and greater
capacities for the enjoyment of life.
Looking forward, then, to the life of the State as that which aids
support, and combines the efforts of the individual to obtain
happiness, Aristotle draws no hard and fast distinction between the
spheres of action of Man as individual and Man as citizen. Nor does the
division of his discussion into the _Ethics_ and the _Politics_ rest
upon any such distinction. The distinction implied is rather between
two stages in the life of the civilised man—the stage of preparation
for the full life of the adult citizen, and the stage of the actual
exercise or enjoyment of citizenship. Hence the _Ethics_, where his
attention is directed upon the formation of character, is largely and
centrally a treatise on Moral Education. It discusses especially those
admirable human qualities which fit a man for life in an organised
civic community, which makes him “a good citizen,” and considers how
they can be fostered or created and their opposites prevented.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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