The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: politics is about what is good.
We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—an unrivalled introduction to politics: “Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.”
Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that there are many goods and many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth. Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.
Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: if there is some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good—if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless—it is clear that this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.
