Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Sterling’s Six Commitments
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Sterling’s Six Commitments
1. Substance Dualism
The Nicomachean Ethics approaches dualism differently than Plato but arrives at a compatible position through its analysis of the soul’s rational part as the seat of human identity. In Book I Aristotle argues that the human function (ergon) is the activity of the soul in accordance with reason. Not sensation, not nutrition, not appetite — reason. The rational soul is what makes a human being what it is. In Book X he goes further, arguing that the life of contemplative reason (theoria) is the highest life precisely because nous — pure intellect — is the most divine element in us, and may even be separable from the body. He writes that we should not follow those who advise us to think only human thoughts, but should “as far as possible immortalize” ourselves by living according to the best thing in us, which is nous.
This is not Platonic dualism in its full metaphysical form, but it is functionally equivalent for Sterling’s purposes. The rational faculty is the true self. Everything else — appetite, sensation, the body’s conditions — is subordinate material that the rational faculty is designed to govern. Proposition 4 (a person’s true identity is constituted by the rational faculty alone) and Proposition 5 (everything other than the rational faculty is external to the self, including the body) find their Aristotelian support here.
2. Libertarian Free Will
Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics contains the most rigorous analysis of voluntar0-9y action and genuine agency in classical philosophy. Aristotle distinguishes voluntary from involuntary actions on the basis of whether the origin of the action is internal to the agent. An action is voluntary when its source is within the agent and the agent knows what he is doing. Crucially, Aristotle argues that character itself is voluntary — we are responsible not only for individual actions but for the habits and dispositions we have formed, because we chose the actions that produced them.
The analysis of prohairesis — deliberate choice — in Book III is the direct Aristotelian anticipation of Sterling’s central concept. Prohairesis is the voluntary, reasoned selection of means toward ends. It is the act of the rational faculty operating freely on the basis of deliberation. Aristotle explicitly argues that no external compulsion determines prohairesis when the faculty is functioning correctly. The Stoics took this term directly from Aristotle and made it the cornerstone of their system. Sterling’s Metaphysical Libertarianism — that the user has absolute causal power over their own assent — is Aristotle’s analysis of prohairesis stated in Sterling’s systematic vocabulary.
3. Ethical Intuitionism
Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics establishes that the first principles of ethics are not derived from prior premises. Aristotle distinguishes between knowledge that proceeds from first principles and knowledge that proceeds toward first principles. In ethics we proceed toward first principles by habituation, experience, and the cultivation of practical wisdom (phronesis) until the first principles become self-evident to us. This is not empiricism in the modern sense. The first principles of ethics are not generalizations from observed data. They are grasped directly by the nous of the person whose rational faculty has been properly developed.
Book VI makes the point precisely through the concept of nous as the faculty that grasps first principles directly — not through demonstration but through immediate intellectual apprehension. Practical wisdom (phronesis) operates analogously in the moral domain: the person of practical wisdom perceives the morally relevant features of a situation directly, without inference. Sterling’s Ethical Intuitionism — that moral truths are grasped directly by reason — is this Aristotelian account of nous and phronesis combined. The 58 Propositition function as the first principles that the trained rational faculty grasps directly and applies without requiring external validation.
4. Foundationalism
Aristotle opens the Nicomachean Ethics with one of the most famous foundationalist statements in philosophy: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good.” He immediately sets about organizing all human goods hierarchically, with eudaimonia at the apex as the good that is desired for its own sake and never for the sake of anything else. This hierarchical structure — in which all derivative goods are ordered under a single highest good that is foundational — is Aristotle’s foundationalism applied to ethics.
Book I’s argument that eudaimonia is the final end (telos) that orders all other ends replicates, in practical terms, the logical structure of Sterling’s foundationalism. The 58 Propositions are organized precisely as Aristotle organizes the goods: derivative propositions trace back to foundational ones, and all of them trace back to the single foundational insight that virtue alone is good. Sterling’s Section VIII of the 58 Propositions — the Stoic Path — is an explicit demonstration of how all prior propositions derive from the foundational value claims in Section III. This is Aristotelian architecture applied to Stoic doctrine.
5. Correspondence Theory of Truth
Book VI’s account of the intellectual virtues establishes that the truth-achieving function of reason is its defining excellence. Aristotle defines the virtue of the practical intellect as the state by which it “affirms truly” — that is, produces judgments that correspond to how things actually are. The virtues of the theoretical intellect similarly consist in correspondence between the intellect’s assertions and reality. False judgment is a failure of correspondence, not merely a failure of usefulness or coherence.
The specific application to moral judgment is made through Aristotle’s account of phronesis. The person of practical wisdom perceives the situation correctly — their judgment corresponds to the morally relevant features of reality. The person lacking phronesis perceives incorrectly — their judgment corresponds to appearances or to their appetitive state rather than to the actual moral structure of the situation. Sterling’s Correspondence Theory — that a value-judgment is true only if it matches the objective Stoic status of the object — is this Aristotelian account of correct moral perception applied to the specific question of externals. Calling an external good or evil fails the correspondence test because it does not match the objective moral structure of reality, in exactly Aristotle’s sense of correspondence failure.
6. Moral Realism
The Nicomachean Ethics is the most systematic statement of moral realism in classical philosophy. Aristotle argues throughout that virtue and vice are objective conditions of the soul — not preferences, not cultural conventions, not power relations. The virtues are the states in which the rational faculty and the appetitive faculty are correctly ordered. The vices are states of disorder. These orderings are not relative to what any individual or culture believes. They are grounded in human nature — in the ergon of the human being as a rational animal. What is genuinely good for a human being is determined by what the human rational faculty is for, not by what any particular human desires.
Book X’s account of eudaimonia as the highest good — achievable only through the full exercise of the rational faculty in accordance with its highest virtue — is the Aristotelian equivalent of Sterling’s Moral RealiIsm stated in terms of Propositions 17 and 18. Only virtue is genuinely good. Only vice is genuinely evil. Externals are neither, because they do not constitute the actualization or failure of actualization of the specifically human rational capacity. Aristotle arrives at this through his teleological biology. Sterling arrives at it through the 58 Propositions. The conclusion is the same.
The Difference from Plato and Why It Matters
Where Plato grounds all six commitments in the transcendent Form of the Good — a metaphysical absolute outside the natural world — Aristotle grounds them in human nature itself, in the ergon and telos of the rational animal. This means Aristotle’s support for Sterling’s commitments does not require acceptance of Platonic metaphysics. It requires only acceptance of the claim that human beings have a nature, that the rational faculty constitutes that nature, and that virtue consists in the rational faculty functioning as it is designed to function.
This is why the Nicomachean Ethics provides something The Republic cannot: an immanent, naturalistic grounding for all six commitments that survives the rejection of Platonic Forms. Sterling’s framework does not need the Forms. It needs the rational faculty to be real, its correct function to be identifiable, and virtue to consist in that correct function. Aristotle establishes all three on grounds that remain compelling independent of Platonic metaphysics.
Sterling Unified Stoic System — Classical Foundations.
Dave Kelly
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