74 ARISTOTLE’S NICOMACHEAN ETHICS

goods. Yet it is possible to understand the passage to be advocating

them: ‘‘Furthermore, eudaimonia is the most preferable of all goods,
assuming that it is not counted along with anything else. Yet if it were
so counted, then clearly it would be more preferable with the addition
of the littlest good thing.’’ In that case, the passage would in effect be
saying that anything that we regard as happiness, but which could be
improved upon by the addition of some good, would not yet be
happiness – because happiness is the most preferable good. So we
would need to keep adding goods to some candidate for happiness,
until we arrived at a composite good that could not be improved upon,
and then that would be the highest good. (Note that, on this latter
interpretation, Aristotle would not be putting forward a third, distinct
criterion. His point about Preferability would simply be a rephrasing
of what he had said in connection with Self-Sufficiency.)

THE FUNCTION ARGUMENT

After Aristotle gives criteria by which to pick out the highest good, he
delimits his field of search in the famous Function Argument
(1097b22–1098a20). Before the Function Argument Aristotle has
done little more than provide criteria for identifying the highest
human good; after the Function Argument he gets to work examin-
ing the particular virtues and their characteristic activities. Therefore,
the purpose of the Function Argument, as I said, is to argue that the
highest human good is to be found among those things that we can
do only because we have the virtues. The Function Argument iden-
tifies virtuous actions as the field of search to which we should apply
the criteria he has given.
Here is how the argument begins:
But to say that the best thing is happiness (one would think) is to say
something that, plainly, everyone accepts. What one wants is that some-
thing be said more clearly about what happiness is. This might just be
possible, if we could identify the work to be done [ergon] by a human
being. Why? Because in the case of a flautist, a sculptor, or any maker – and,
generally, in the case of any occupation for which there is some definite
work to be done – the ‘‘good’’ and the ‘‘well done’’ seem to reside in the
work; and so it would seem also in the case of a human being, if indeed there
is some definite work to be done by him. (1097b22–28)