The Triptychs of Publius

Self-Sufficiency, Excellent Activity, and the Limits of Fortune

Abstract

Aristotle defines the self-sufficient good as that which makes life choiceworthy and lacking in nothing (Nicomachean Ethics I.7, 1097b14–15). This paper develops an interpretation of deficiency (endeia) relative to feasible improvement: a condition remains deficient insofar as a superior feasible realization of the relevant good remains available. Aristotle’s addition argument supplies the initial model for this interpretation, though the argument must be extended to accommodate tradeoffs and the plurality of human goods.

The paper’s principal claim is that the excellence of rational activity must be distinguished from the extent of its actualization. Circumstances may restrict the opportunities for exercising human capacities without necessarily diminishing the excellence with which the available capacities are exercised. Aristotle’s account of courage illustrates this possibility, while his discussion of Priam in Nicomachean Ethics I.10 supplies its most revealing textual expression. Aristotle describes the virtuous person as one who always performs the finest actions from what is available, yet recognizes that catastrophic misfortune can destroy blessedness and even dislodge happiness.

The resulting distinction is between the excellence of a person’s rational activity and the completeness of the life that circumstances permit. I argue that sustained excellent activity constitutes an irreducible dimension of human flourishing, while the adequate realization of human goods requires favorable external conditions. The contrast between eudaimonia and makaria suggests one way of articulating these dimensions, though Aristotle’s terminology does not consistently maintain such a division. The proposed account is therefore both an interpretation of an Aristotelian distinction and a philosophical reconstruction of its implications.

I. Self-Sufficiency and the Absence of Lack

1. Aristotle’s Definition

Aristotle characterizes the highest human good as complete (teleion) and self-sufficient (autarkes). He defines the latter:

τὸ δʼ αὔταρκες τίθεμεν ὃ μονούμενον αἱρετὸν ποιεῖ τὸν βίον καὶ μηδενὸς ἐνδεᾶ.

“We define the self-sufficient as that which, taken by itself, makes life choiceworthy and lacking in nothing.”

Nicomachean Ethics I.7, 1097b14–15.

The definition establishes two requirements: choiceworthiness and non-deficiency. The highest good must make life worth choosing, and it must leave nothing lacking.[1]

But what does it mean to lack something?

Not every absence constitutes a deficiency. A human being may lack wings without suffering a deprivation, whereas the loss of sight may constitute a genuine deficiency. The difference depends upon the standard against which the condition is evaluated.

Lack is therefore relative to a standard of goodness or completeness.[2]

For the highest good, I propose that the relevant standard is the best genuinely feasible realization of the good.

A condition is deficient insofar as a superior feasible alternative remains. If the condition could be improved, the improvement identifies something that was lacking relative to the better alternative.

Deficiency accordingly admits degrees. A life may possess many genuine goods and nevertheless fall short of a better feasible life. Another may suffer far greater deprivation. Both may be deficient, but not equally or in the same respects.

A condition is deficient relative to the relevant good insofar as a superior feasible realization remains available.

This does not require that all goods be reducible to a single numerical measure. Nor does it require a unique optimum.

Where several feasible realizations are incomparable, each may be undominated: none is demonstrably inferior to another. The relevant condition is therefore not necessarily the attainment of one uniquely best alternative, but the absence of a feasible alternative that is better overall.[3]

2. Aristotle’s Addition Argument

Aristotle immediately provides a test of completeness:

ἔτι δὲ πάντων αἱρετωτάτην μὴ συναριθμουμένην—συναριθμουμένην δὲ δῆλον ὡς αἱρετωτέραν μετὰ τοῦ ἐλαχίστου τῶν ἀγαθῶν· ὑπεροχὴ γὰρ ἀγαθῶν γίνεται τὸ προστιθέμενον.

“And we regard it as the most choiceworthy of all things, not counted together with other goods; for if counted together with even the smallest good, it would evidently be more choiceworthy, since what is added produces an excess of goods.”

NE I.7, 1097b16–19.

The argument is revealing. Suppose we identify something as the highest good. If adding another genuine good makes the resulting whole better, the original condition was not yet complete. The addition reveals a deficiency.

If pleasure together with wisdom is better than pleasure alone, pleasure alone cannot constitute the comprehensive highest good. If wisdom together with friendship is better than wisdom alone, wisdom considered in isolation cannot be complete unless friendship is already accounted for within the good.

The relevant claim is not that happiness requires the greatest imaginable quantity of every good. It is that the complete good cannot be improved by the addition of some further good without thereby showing that the original conception was incomplete.

Aristotle’s argument therefore supplies a model for identifying deficiency through improvement.[4]

3. From Addition to Optimality

The addition argument concerns one form of improvement: supplementing a proposed good with another good. But human life also involves substitution, allocation, and tradeoffs.

A person may improve their life not by adding more of something, but by devoting fewer resources to one pursuit and more to another. Greater pleasure may come at the expense of understanding, friendship, or health.

Consequently, completeness cannot simply mean maximizing each good separately. The relevant question is whether the whole could be better.

A realization of the good is non-deficient relative to feasible alternatives when no superior feasible whole remains available.

This extends Aristotle’s addition argument into a broader account of constrained choice. It is a philosophical reconstruction, not a claim that Aristotle explicitly formulates a theory of optimization.

It also leaves open the question whether happiness is a comprehensive ordering of several intrinsic goods or consists principally in a dominant activity. The longstanding debate between inclusive and dominant interpretations cannot be resolved by the addition argument alone.[5]

4. Two Domains of Evaluation

Consider a general commanding an inferior army. The general may deploy every available resource with unsurpassed wisdom and nevertheless lose the battle. The strategy may be excellent relative to the available forces, even though those forces are inadequate to secure victory.

We must therefore distinguish:

The excellence of activity: How well an agent exercises rational capacities within genuinely available circumstances.

The favorability of circumstances: How extensively those circumstances permit human capacities and goods to be realized.

The two need not coincide. A person may act excellently under profoundly unfortunate circumstances. Conversely, someone may enjoy exceptional advantages while exercising their capacities poorly.

This distinction does not imply that external circumstances are irrelevant to flourishing. Rather, it identifies two different objects of evaluation.

The person who acts excellently under deprivation may lack no excellence in their available activity while nevertheless lacking opportunities, relationships, resources, and other goods necessary for a fuller human life.

The excellence of an activity is not identical to the completeness of the life in which it occurs.[6]

II. Eudaimonia as Excellent Rational Activity

1. The Function Argument

The formal conditions of completeness and self-sufficiency do not yet establish what the human good consists in. Aristotle therefore introduces the function argument, concluding:

ἀνθρώπινον ἀγαθὸν ψυχῆς ἐνέργεια γίνεται κατʼ ἀρετήν.

“The human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue.”

NE I.7, 1098a16–17.

The distinction between possession and exercise is essential. A person may possess virtue while sleeping or remaining inactive. Consequently, virtue as a mere disposition cannot constitute happiness.

Eudaimonia concerns energeia: the actual exercise of excellence. The human good is therefore not simply possessing admirable character traits. It involves the excellent realization of rational capacities in life.[7]

2. Virtue Under Constraints

Virtuous activity always occurs in particular circumstances. Those circumstances involve limitations, competing demands, uncertainty, and the possibility of loss.

Indeed, many virtues are intelligible only in relation to such conditions. Courage is exercised in the face of danger. Temperance concerns the regulation of pleasures and desires. Justice concerns the proper treatment of persons amid competing claims. Practical wisdom concerns deliberation under contingent and uncertain conditions.

Constraints are therefore not merely obstacles to virtuous activity. They frequently provide its subject matter.[8]

This is especially clear in Aristotle’s discussion of courage in NE III.6–9. The courageous person faces danger for the sake of the noble (to kalon), choosing appropriately despite the possibility of suffering or death.

Remove the danger, and one removes the occasion for that particular exercise of courage. Consequently, the excellence of courageous activity cannot be measured by the absence of danger.

The circumstances that make an action difficult may also make its excellence possible.

3. Courage and the Goodness of Action

Aristotle acknowledges that courageous activity may be painful. The courageous person may have much to lose, and the prospect of death may be especially grievous to someone whose life contains many genuine goods (NE III.9, 1117b7–22). Yet the courageous person acts nobly despite that loss.[9]

Three judgments are therefore compatible. First, the circumstances are unfortunate and would reasonably be avoided. Second, the person responds to those circumstances with excellent rational activity. Third, the activity is genuinely good even though the circumstances are bad.

There is no contradiction. The goodness of the activity is not identical to the goodness of the circumstances. Indeed, the action may be excellent precisely because the agent responds appropriately to a difficult or tragic situation.

4. Excellence as a Constitutive Good

Why should the excellence of rational activity matter to happiness independently of the extent of its exercise?

The answer begins with Aristotle’s function argument. If the characteristic human good consists in excellent rational activity, then the exercise of rational excellence is not merely an instrument for producing desirable outcomes. It is itself a constituent of human flourishing.

Its goodness therefore cannot be reduced to the external goods it secures. A courageous action may fail to save a city while remaining courageous. A just action may fail to prevent injustice while remaining just. A wise decision may fail to secure success because circumstances intervene.

In each case, the excellent activity remains a genuine realization of the human good.

The excellence of rational activity possesses constitutive value independently of the favorability of its external circumstances or outcomes.

It does not follow that excellent activity is sufficient for every dimension of a flourishing life. That stronger conclusion would require showing that the full human good consists exclusively in the excellence of available activity, without any independent requirement concerning its scope or external conditions. Aristotle’s own account of external goods makes such a conclusion difficult to sustain.[10]

The present argument therefore establishes a more precise thesis: excellent rational activity constitutes an irreducible dimension of flourishing, and external misfortune does not necessarily diminish that dimension merely by frustrating its outcomes.

Whether that dimension is sufficient for eudaimonia in Aristotle’s fullest sense remains a further question.

III. Excellence and the Extent of Actualization

1. Two Dimensions of Actualization

We must distinguish two dimensions:

Excellence of actualization: How well a person exercises rational capacities relative to genuinely available possibilities.

Extent of actualization: How fully circumstances permit those capacities to be exercised.

A person may achieve unsurpassed excellence in the first dimension while suffering severe deprivation in the second.

Consider someone unjustly imprisoned. Within prison, they may act with exemplary courage, wisdom, justice, temperance, and mercy. Their conduct may admit no superior alternative under the circumstances.

Yet imprisonment deprives them of opportunities to teach, participate in political life, cultivate friendships, undertake intellectual projects, and exercise many other human capacities.

Their excellence of agency need not be diminished by this deprivation. But the extent to which their capacities can be actualized is diminished.

Fortune may diminish the scope of human flourishing without diminishing the excellence with which a person exercises the agency that remains.[11]

2. Constraints and Deprivations

Not every constraint has the same relationship to virtuous activity. Some constraints provide occasions for virtue. Danger permits courage; temptation permits temperance; competing claims permit justice.

Other constraints restrict or eliminate opportunities for activity. Severe illness, imprisonment, unconsciousness, or cognitive incapacity may prevent the exercise of particular capacities.

A single circumstance may do both. Imprisonment may create opportunities for courage and endurance while preventing friendship, contemplation, political participation, or productive activity.

Consequently, we should not infer either that adversity necessarily diminishes virtuous activity or that adversity necessarily enriches it. The relevant question is what activity remains possible and how excellently it is exercised.

3. Responsible Possibility

The appeal to available possibilities requires qualification. A person cannot excuse vicious conduct merely by claiming that better conduct was beyond their present abilities. Their abilities may themselves reflect avoidable failures of preparation, habituation, or deliberation.

Accordingly, the relevant possibilities cannot be restricted to whatever an agent happens to find psychologically easy at the moment of action. They must include opportunities for responsible self-formation available across time.

The standard is therefore not simply whether an agent did their best given their present character. It is whether their conduct and development were excellent relative to the possibilities for rational agency genuinely available throughout the relevant period.

This makes the evaluation of excellence a life-level judgment rather than a series of isolated assessments.[12]

4. Excellence Across a Complete Life

A single excellent action cannot establish a happy life. Aristotle himself insists that happiness requires activity across a complete life, famously observing that one swallow does not make a summer (NE I.7, 1098a18–20).

Accordingly, the present account does not identify eudaimonia with any isolated instance of optimal choice. It concerns sustained excellence of rational activity across a life.

Nevertheless, sustained excellence and extensive flourishing remain distinguishable.

A person who spends many years under unjust confinement may exhibit practical wisdom, courage, temperance, and intellectual excellence throughout those years, even though their circumstances prevent the realization of many other goods.

The excellence of that activity is genuine. Yet the life remains deprived of opportunities that would have enabled fuller flourishing.

This is not merely a difference in degree. It is a difference between two dimensions of evaluation: the quality of what is actualized and the extent of what can be actualized.

The distinction does not require us to deny that a minimum breadth of activity may be necessary for complete happiness. It requires only that the quality of actualization and the opportunities for actualization not be conflated.[13]

Aristotle’s preference for contemplation in NE X.7–8 introduces a further qualification. If the highest happiness consists principally in theoretical activity, its conditions of realization may differ from those of practical virtue. Nevertheless, contemplation too may be evaluated both in terms of its excellence and the opportunities circumstances provide for its exercise.[14]

IV. Priam: Happiness, Wretchedness, and Blessedness

1. The Problem of Priam

Aristotle invokes the catastrophic misfortunes of Priam as a challenge to the sufficiency of virtue for happiness. If a person loses his family, his kingdom, and finally his life, can he still be called happy?

Immediately before considering Priam, Aristotle describes the genuinely virtuous person:

τὸν γὰρ ὡς ἀληθῶς ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἔμφρονα πάσας οἰόμεθα τὰς τύχας εὐσχημόνως φέρειν καὶ ἐκ τῶν ὑπαρχόντων ἀεὶ τὰ κάλλιστα πράττειν.

“For we think that the truly good and practically wise person bears every fortune with dignity and always does the finest things from what is available.”

NE I.10, 1101a1–3.

The decisive expression is ἐκ τῶν ὑπαρχόντων ἀεὶ τὰ κάλλιστα πράττειν: always to do the finest things from what is available.

Aristotle illustrates the point with a general who makes the best use of the army available to him and a shoemaker who makes the best shoes from the leather supplied.

Excellent activity is not necessarily activity performed under ideal conditions. It is activity performed excellently under the conditions that actually obtain.[15]

The general may exercise unsurpassed practical wisdom despite commanding an inferior army. The shoemaker may exercise unsurpassed craftsmanship despite receiving inferior leather.

Neither example implies that the inferior resources are as desirable as superior ones. Rather, the examples distinguish the excellence of an activity from the quality of the circumstances in which it is performed.[16]

2. The Three Predicates

Aristotle continues:

ἄθλιος μὲν οὐδέποτε γένοιτ’ ἂν ὁ εὐδαίμων, οὐ μὴν μακάριός γε, ἂν Πριαμικαῖς τύχαις περιπέσῃ.

“The happy person would never become wretched; yet he would not be blessed, should he fall into misfortunes like Priam’s.”

NE I.10, 1101a6–8.

The Greek distinguishes three terms. The eudaimōn (ὁ εὐδαίμων) is the subject. Aristotle then predicates two contrasting things of that person:

ἄθλιος μὲν οὐδέποτε — never wretched.

οὐ μὴν μακάριός γε — yet not blessed.

The second claim is qualified by ἂν Πριαμικαῖς τύχαις περιπέσῃ — should he fall into Priam-like misfortunes.

The happy person will never become wretched; yet Priam-like misfortune may prevent him from being blessed.

The verb περιπέσῃ refers to what befalls the agent. It is distinct from the preceding πράττειν, which concerns what the agent does.

Read together, the passages juxtapose the excellence of action and the misfortunes that may befall the actor.[17]

3. The Philosophical Distinction

The juxtaposition suggests a distinction between the excellence of what a person does and the fortune of the life in which that activity occurs.

The genuinely virtuous person performs the finest actions from what is available. Yet catastrophic misfortune can prevent blessedness.

This supports a distinction between:

Excellent rational activity: The sustained, virtuous exercise of rational capacities within available circumstances.

Complete human flourishing: The realization of such excellence together with sufficiently favorable conditions for the adequate exercise of human capacities and enjoyment of human goods.

The first is a constituent of the second. But the second may require goods and opportunities that excellent agency alone cannot guarantee.

This is the paper’s primary philosophical distinction.

One possible terminological reconstruction assigns the first dimension to eudaimonia and the second to makaria.

On that reconstruction, eudaimonia designates sustained excellent rational activity, while makaria designates that excellence together with adequately favorable external circumstances.

But the philosophical distinction does not depend upon this terminological assignment. Even if Aristotle uses eudaimōn and makarios interchangeably elsewhere, the distinction between excellence of agency and the completeness of a fortunate life remains available.

The terminology is therefore an interpretive proposal, not the foundation of the argument.[18]

4. Was Priam Virtuous?

Aristotle does not establish that the mythological Priam was perfectly virtuous. The passage concerns a happy person encountering Priam-like misfortunes, not necessarily Priam himself as an exemplar of complete practical wisdom.

We should therefore distinguish the mythological case from the philosophical hypothetical: a genuinely virtuous person who suffers comparable catastrophe despite acting excellently.

Suppose Priam had exercised complete wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance throughout his life, yet Troy nevertheless fell through circumstances beyond his control.

Would this misfortune diminish the excellence of his activity?

Aristotle’s preceding principle suggests a negative answer. The genuinely good and practically wise person always performs the finest actions from what is available.

The hypothetical virtuous Priam may therefore lack the opportunities and external goods required for complete flourishing without thereby suffering a corresponding defect in the excellence of his agency.

The tragedy of his circumstances remains genuine. So does the excellence of his response.

5. The Limits of the Interpretation

Aristotle does not simply identify eudaimonia with excellent activity regardless of external circumstances.

Immediately after the Priam sentence, he acknowledges that great and repeated misfortunes can dislodge happiness and that recovery may require a long period of significant achievement (NE I.10, 1101a8–13).[19]

He then asks:

τί οὖν κωλύει λέγειν εὐδαίμονα τὸν κατʼ ἀρετὴν τελείαν ἐνεργοῦντα καὶ τοῖς ἐκτὸς ἀγαθοῖς ἱκανῶς κεχορηγημένον μὴ τὸν τυχόντα χρόνον ἀλλὰ τέλειον βίον;

“What, then, prevents us from calling happy the person who acts in accordance with complete virtue and is adequately supplied with external goods, not for some incidental period but throughout a complete life?”

NE I.10, 1101a14–16.

This passage makes the external-goods requirement explicit. Aristotle’s stated criterion for happiness includes adequate external goods, not merely excellent rational activity.

Moreover, he subsequently calls those who satisfy these conditions makarioi (1101a19–21), further complicating any strict lexical distinction between eudaimonia and makaria.

The Greek does not support treating the two words as consistently separate technical terms.[20]

But the passage also clarifies the relevant standard. Aristotle requires that the happy person be ἱκανῶς κεχορηγημένον—adequately supplied—not maximally supplied.

The requirement is one of sufficiency rather than unlimited abundance. This suggests that external goods matter insofar as they furnish the conditions for sufficiently complete human activity.

The distinction between excellence and extent can therefore be incorporated into Aristotle’s own account without denying the external-goods requirement.

Complete happiness may require both sustained excellence of activity and adequate opportunities for its exercise. A person may nevertheless retain excellence of activity when the second condition is not satisfied.

The distinction between excellence and fortune does not require the claim that complete Aristotelian happiness survives every catastrophe.

It requires only that the excellence of rational activity be distinguished from the external conditions necessary for the completeness of a human life.

The paper’s stronger proposal—to reserve eudaimonia for the first dimension and makaria for the second—remains available as a revisionary reconstruction. But the primary philosophical thesis stands independently of it.

V. Responsibility, Fortune, and Moral Evaluation

The distinction between excellence and extent also clarifies the relationship between happiness and moral responsibility.

A person cannot properly be blamed for a misfortune merely because it has happened to them. Blame requires an appropriate connection between the alleged defect and the person’s agency, character, or responsible conduct.

Yet blamelessness alone does not establish flourishing. The stronger claim is that a person may respond to adversity through genuinely excellent activity.

Courage under danger, justice under pressure, and wisdom under uncertainty are not merely absences of wrongdoing. They are positive achievements of rational agency.

At the same time, the excellence of those achievements does not erase the losses that occasioned them.

A person may act courageously in a disastrous war while the war remains disastrous. A person may act wisely under imprisonment while imprisonment remains a genuine deprivation.

Thus, the excellence of rational agency and the completeness of a fortunate life are distinct objects of evaluation.[21]

The distinction resembles the Stoic separation between what depends upon our agency and what does not. Yet it preserves the Aristotelian recognition that external goods are genuinely important to flourishing.[22]

Fortune may deprive a person of opportunities for excellent activity, even when it does not diminish the excellence of the activity they continue to perform.

The human good must therefore be evaluated with attention to both the excellence of agency and the circumstances that enable its realization.

VI. Conclusion

Aristotle’s account of the highest good connects completeness, self-sufficiency, and excellent rational activity.

The self-sufficient good is that which makes life choiceworthy and lacking in nothing. Lack, however, is intelligible only relative to a relevant standard of goodness or completeness.

Aristotle’s addition argument provides a test of deficiency: if a genuine good could be added to a proposed final good, making the whole better, the original conception was incomplete.

This principle can be generalized to feasible improvements of the whole, though it need not imply a uniquely best alternative or a single quantitative ordering of all human goods.

The resulting account of optimality must distinguish the excellence of activity from the favorability of circumstances.

Virtuous activity is necessarily situated within constraints. Some virtues are exercised precisely in response to adversity.

Consequently, misfortune does not, by itself, diminish the excellence of virtuous activity. Yet misfortune may restrict the opportunities for exercising human capacities, thereby diminishing the extent of their actualization.

Aristotle’s discussion of Priam provides a revealing illustration. The genuinely good and practically wise person always performs the finest actions from what is available. Yet catastrophic misfortune may prevent blessedness and, Aristotle acknowledges, may even dislodge happiness.

These claims are not contradictory once we distinguish the excellence of rational activity from the completeness of a human life.

The first concerns the quality of agency within available circumstances. The second also concerns the opportunities and external goods necessary for the sufficiently full realization of human capacities.

The proposed distinction between eudaimonia and makaria offers one way of naming these dimensions, although Aristotle’s terminology does not consistently preserve it.

The underlying philosophical distinction is more fundamental.

The excellence of a human being must not be confused with the fortune of that human being’s life.

Fortune may determine much of what a person is permitted to do. Virtue concerns the excellence with which they exercise the possibilities that remain.

A person may therefore live excellently, and even die excellently, without having lived a fortunate life.

Notes

1. Completeness and self-sufficiency. Aristotle, NE I.7, 1097a25–b21. Aristotle distinguishes the finality of happiness from its self-sufficiency. For the classic debate concerning the comprehensive and dominant interpretations of the final good, see J. L. Ackrill, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia”; W. F. R. Hardie, “The Final Good in Aristotle’s Ethics”; and Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good.
2. Deficiency and privation. Compare Aristotle, Metaphysics Δ.22, 1022b22–1023a7, on privation (sterēsis). The comparison concerns the dependence of deficiency upon a relevant standard; it does not identify endeia and sterēsis as interchangeable technical terms.
3. Partial ordering and optimality. The distinction between an undominated feasible realization and a uniquely best realization is introduced as part of the present reconstruction. Aristotle’s addition argument does not itself establish a complete ranking of all possible combinations of goods.
4. The addition argument. NE I.7, 1097b16–20. Compare Ackrill, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia,” and Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness. The generalization from additive improvement to feasible improvement of the whole is the present paper’s proposal.
5. Inclusive and dominant interpretations. Hardie, “The Final Good in Aristotle’s Ethics”; Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good. Aristotle’s preference for contemplation in NE X.7–8 complicates any interpretation that treats happiness as the unrestricted aggregation of independently valuable goods.
6. Excellence relative to circumstances. Compare NE I.10, 1101a1–6. Aristotle’s general and shoemaker examples support the distinction between excellence in the use of available resources and the quality of those resources.
7. Activity and possession. NE I.7, 1097b22–1098a20; I.8, 1098b30–1099a7. Aristotle’s distinction between possessing virtue and exercising it is essential to the present argument.
8. Virtue and particular circumstances. NE II.6, 1106b16–1107a8. The doctrine of the mean concerns the fitting response to particular circumstances, not an abstract numerical midpoint.
9. Courage and the noble. NE III.6–9, especially 1115a24–1117b22. The courageous action may remain noble despite pain, danger, and the possibility of genuine loss.
10. Activity and external goods. NE I.8, 1099a31–b8. Aristotle explicitly recognizes that some noble activities require external resources. For focused discussion, see T. D. Roche, “Happiness and the External Goods,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (2012), 34–63.
11. Impediments to activity. NE I.10, 1100b22–30. Aristotle observes that severe misfortune can cause pain and impede many activities. This supports distinguishing excellence in activity from opportunities for its exercise.
12. Habituation and responsibility. NE II.1–4, 1103a14–1105b18; III.5, 1113b3–1114b25. Available possibilities must include responsible self-formation over time, rather than being restricted to an agent’s present dispositions.
13. The complete-life requirement. NE I.7, 1098a18–20; I.10, 1101a14–21. Sustained excellence must be distinguished from isolated excellent actions. Whether a minimum breadth of activity is required for happiness remains an independent question.
14. Contemplation. NE X.7–8, 1177a12–1178b32; Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good. The priority of contemplation raises the question whether excellent practical activity alone can constitute the highest happiness.
15. The context of Priam. NE I.10, 1100b22–1101a13. Aristotle recognizes both the damage caused by severe misfortune and the manifestation of noble character in its endurance.
16. The general and shoemaker. NE I.10, 1101a1–6. The expression ἐκ τῶν ὑπαρχόντων ἀεὶ τὰ κάλλιστα πράττειν provides direct textual support for evaluating excellent activity relative to available circumstances.
17. The Priam sentence. NE I.10, 1101a6–8. The contrast between athlios and makarios does not logically establish that the happy person necessarily retains happiness after catastrophic misfortune.
18. Eudaimōn and makarios. See Kelsey Boor, “Yet Another Heuristic: Assessing Eudaimon versus Makarios in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” Elenchos 45, no. 2 (2024): 255–275; and Iakovos Vasiliou, Varieties of Happiness (2025), chapter 5. The present account treats the distinction as a philosophical proposal rather than a uniform lexical rule.
19. Severe misfortune and happiness. NE I.10, 1101a8–13. Aristotle acknowledges that great and repeated misfortunes can dislodge happiness. The present argument therefore does not claim that complete Aristotelian happiness is invulnerable to fortune.
20. Adequate external goods. NE I.10, 1101a14–21. Aristotle requires that the happy person be τοῖς ἐκτὸς ἀγαθοῖς ἱκανῶς κεχορηγημένον, adequately furnished with external goods. The requirement concerns adequacy, not unlimited abundance. Compare Roche, “Happiness and the External Goods.”
21. Moral luck. Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck”; Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck”; Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness. These works illuminate the vulnerability of human achievement and well-being to circumstances beyond an agent’s control.
22. Aristotle and Stoicism. Compare Epictetus, Enchiridion 1 and 5, with Aristotle, NE I.8–10. The present account preserves the importance of external goods rather than assimilating Aristotle’s theory to a strict Stoic doctrine of the sufficiency of virtue.

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