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Three ethical treatises

Three treatises of Aristotle's ethics survive today:

• Nicomachean Ethics, the most popular
• Eudemian Ethics
• Magna Moralia

Each is believed to be a collection of Aristotle's lecture notes (although authorship of the Magna Moralia is disputed), possibly containing several different lecture courses, which can be sparse and difficult to read.

The scholarly consensus is that Eudemian Ethics represents Aristotle's early ethical theory, and the Nicomachean Ethics appears to build upon it. Some critics consider the Eudemian Ethics to be "less mature," while others, such as Kenny (1978), contend that the Eudemian Ethics is the more mature, and therefore later, work. Books IV-VI of Eudemian Ethics also appear as Books V-VII of Nicomachean Ethics.

Scholars believe that the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics were either edited by or dedicated to Aristotle's son and pupil Nicomachus and his disciple Eudemus, respectively, although the works themselves do not explain the source of their names. Although Aristotle's father was also called Nicomachus, Aristotle's son was the next leader of Aristotle's school, the Lyceum, and historians therefore consider him to be more likely to have influenced the collection of Aristotle's lecture notes.

A fourth treatise, Aristotle's Politics, is often regarded as the sequel to the Ethics; Aristotle's Ethics states that the good of the individual is subordinate to the good of the city-state, or polis. Aristotle's On the Soul may be considered a prequel to his Ethics, especially in its discussion of the rational soul.

Nicomachean Ethics

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle focuses on the importance of continually behaving virtuously and developing virtue rather than committing specific good actions. This can be opposed to Kantian ethics, in which the primary focus is on individual action. Nicomachean Ethics emphasizes the importance of context to ethical behaviour — what might be right in one situation might be wrong in another. Aristotle believed that happiness is the end of life and that as long as a person is striving for goodness, good deeds will result from that struggle, making the person virtuous and therefore happy.