Ethics as Practical Science
Roland Polansky
In Polansky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Cambridge, 2014

"[I]n action and practical science, the doing deals with both form and matter. The statesman molds the population and sets up its political arrangement, thus engaging with both the matter of the community and the form developed for it. Analogously, ethics has passions and actions as the matter to which it gives form by shaping the character and development of practical wisdom." (POLANSKY, p. 4) [PSA: compare to FURTH on form and matter.]

"[V]irtue best displays itself in certain difficult settings. Aristotle is not denying, say, that courage appears in terminal illness or elsewhere besides battle, but he supposes that if someone can do well in the difficult special sphere or theater of the virtue, then the person will also do well everywhere else (see esp. 1127a33-b7, and Rhetoric 1367a33-b7)." (POLANSKY, p. 9)

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