Aristotle on Pleasure and Goodness
Julia Annas
In Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics
University of California Press, 1980

"What is supremely important is to be right about pleasure, because it is only the appropriate pleasure that will lead in the right direction. Since only pleasure in good actions will lead to performance of good actions, the good man must be right about what kind of pleasure to encourage." (ANNAS, p. 286)

"Pleasures in general differ in kind according to the activities they complete. Activities like those of thinking and sensing differ in kind, and so therefore do the pleasures that complete them, each activity being encouraged and forwarded by its own proper pleasure and hindered by the pleasure taken in other activities. Further, pleasures differ in goodness according to the way their activities do (1175b24-29)." (ANNAS, p. 287)

"Aristotle does say that pleasure is the natural end of all animate beings (1172b35-1173a5), and he thinks it absurd to deny that pleasure is a good, because, he holds, everyone does, in fact, aim at pleasure (1153b25-31). But he cannot be a hedonist, because he cannot hold that pleasure is one single independently specifiable end which everyone pursues regardless of how they set about it. For Aristotle, one cannot pursue pleasure regardless of the moral worth of the actions that are one's means to getting it. Rather it is the other way around: it is one's conception of the good life which determines what counts for one as being pleasant." (ANNAS, p. 288)

"The pleasantness of some virtuous actions cannot be appreciated in a way that makes no reference to the viewpoint of the agent, or to his conception of the good life and what it demands of him, or to what is seen by him as valuable." (ANNAS, p. 290)

"We must take seriously the idea that my notion of pleasure and what I find pleasant is internal to my conception of the good." (ANNAS, p. 293)

"The pleasures of temperance have no appeal to someone whose only or main interest is the gratification of immediate desires; but the appropriate response to this is, So what? It is the *good* man's pleasures that count, and they count *because* he is good, because he is *right* about what to do.... [W]e cannot say what is pleasant without reference to what is good, since pleasure and good are internally connected; so why shold we take seriously someone's claims about pleasures when we reject his claims about the good?" (ANNAS, p. 297)

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