What is the Good?

What can the Good be?

It is different in different actions and arts.

It is different in the healing art and in the art military, and similarly in the rest.

What then is the Chief Good in each?

Is it not “that for the sake of which the other things are done?” and this in the healing art is health, and in the art military victory, and in that of house-building a house, and in any other thing something else; in short, in every action and moral choice the End, because in all cases men do everything else with a view to this.

So that if there is some one End of all things which are and may be done, this must be the Good proposed by doing, or if more than one, then these.

Thus our discussion after some traversing about has come to the same point which we reached before. And this we must try yet more to clear up.

There are many ends. Of these, we choose some with a view to others.

So, all are not final. Yet the Chief Good is something final.

We must search this Chief Good which is absolutely final.

“Absolutely final” means something that we pursue for itself, without viewing any other.

Happiness is mostly thought to be absolutely final.

We choose happiness always for its own sake and never with a view to anything further. Whereas honour, pleasure, intellect, we choose for the sake of happiness.

The same result[15] follows also from the notion of self-sufficiency, a quality thought to belong to the final good.

Now by sufficient for Self, we mean not for a single individual living a solitary life, but for his parents also and children and wife, and, in general, friends and countrymen; for man is by nature adapted to a social existence.

But of these, of course, some limit must be fixed: for if one extends it to parents and descendants and friends’ friends, there is no end to it.

This point, however, must be left for future investigation: for the present we define that to be self-sufficient “which taken alone makes life choice-worthy, and to be in want of nothing;” now of such kind we think Happiness to be: and further, to be most choice-worthy of all things; not being reckoned with any other thing,[16] for if it were so reckoned, it is plain we must then allow it, with the addition of ever so small a good, to be more choice-worthy than it was before:[17] because what is put to it becomes an addition of so much more good, and of goods the greater is ever the more choice-worthy.

So then Happiness is manifestly something final and self-sufficient, being the end of all things which are and may be done.