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Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who lived in Athens in the 4th century BC.

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For Aristotle, ethics is based on a basic purpose that everybody wants to achieve.

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Think about this for a while.

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What do you want to achieve?

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Maybe you think that different people want different goals.

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They try to achieve different things.

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Some people want to be rich.

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Other people want to be famous.

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Other people want a good job.

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other people want to create a family, and it's okay. Aristotle would agree, but then he would

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ask these people, why do you want that? Why do you want the money? What do you want the money for?

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Or what do you want the fame for? Or what do you want your family for? If someone wants to be rich,

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he wants the money to obtain something with it. It is not an end in itself. It is a means,

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an instrument to obtain something more. What do you want with the money? With the money and with

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the fame and with a good job and with the family and with all the kinds of things that we want,

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Aristotle thought that we are all looking for something, which is happiness. When we achieve

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happiness, that's it. That's what we want. We don't want happiness to obtain anything else.

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happiness is not an instrument. It is an end in itself. So Aristotle thought that though different

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people might want different things, in the long run what we all want is the same, is to be happy.

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So the ethics of Aristotle is an ethics of happiness. He is thinking about how we can

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really achieve happiness. That's why the ethics of Aristotle is considered an ends-based ethics

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because he thinks we have a purpose in our life, an end, an objective, which is the pursuit of

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happiness. Aristotle's ethics, it is also called eudaimonic ethics. These difficult words come from

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Greek. In Greek, eudaimonia means happiness, so an eudaimonic ethics is an ethics that considers

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happiness the basic goal of our life. And how can we achieve happiness? What does Aristotle have to

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tell us? He gives us some advice if we want to be happy, because Aristotle thought that real

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happiness consists in becoming the kind of person you want to be. So he thought that it is important

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to consider slowly what kind of person you want to become in the future and to practice virtue

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in order to become this kind of person. He said, if you want to be happy, think about the person

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you want to become, and then get used to practicing good habits, virtues, in order to become this kind

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of person. And what is virtue for Aristotle? Aristotle thought that virtue lies in the middle

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ground between excesses and defects. So, extremes are bad, the middle point is correct, is virtue.

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Aristotle's recipe for happiness is practice virtue, choose the middle point, think carefully

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with prudence the kind of person you want to be, and get used to practicing the kind of good habits

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that will get you closer to this important goal.