Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: Happiness Is The Highest Good

Everybody has fundamental reasons of why she acts the way she does. The highest good is what we ultimately want to obtain in life and why we do the things we do. If we have just the highest good, everything else would have little to none impact on us. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he states that the highest good is happiness. I believe that he is right because happiness the underlying reason of why we live life. However, I disagree with Aristotle on what is happiness and how to achieve it. Instead of living a virtuous life, happiness, to me, means living a comfortable life filled with pleasure and love.
I believe that happiness is the highest good because everything we do in life is in the pursuit of it. Like Aristotle states in Nicomachean …show more content…
In order to be happy, I believe one has to experience the world and all that it has to offer by travelling and being immersed in different cultures. In addition to pleasure, one also has to experience love from family, friends, and significant others. If I can experience as much beauty the world has to offer and receive love from my close ones, then nothing else matters and I would be happy. However, I also believe that living a comfortable life would aid happiness. Living a comfortable life includes having basic necessities, not having financial problems, and being content with my job and living conditions. Living a comfortable life would make achieving happiness much easier and definitely would help to elevate my level of happiness, but just having it would not make me happy. Yet if I have only love and pleasure, I would still be happy, even if it means I am not living …show more content…
Obtaining pleasure to me means being able to experience as much as I which can do achieved by doing as much new things as I can. However, I do believe that there is a limit to what kinds of pleasure is acceptable to chase after. I believe that we should look at all aspects of a pleasurable thing before doing it. For example, many people find pleasure in doing hard drugs. Although it is true that they experience life in a new way, there are many more negative effects in doing those drugs. To me, that is a wrong way to obtain pleasure. Thus, I believe that obtaining pleasure in a healthy and, in most cases, legal way is the right way to do so. This is what I mean by living responsibly with no regrets. In addition to pleasure, a life filled with love means being able to receive and give affection to your close ones. Love means being accepted unconditionally for who I am by my family and my friends and being able to provide the same assurance back to them. However, I also believe there is a wrong way of obtaining love. It is detrimental to love the wrong person; whether that is because the person is causing emotional or physical harm to you or because the love is one-sided. Loving someone who does not reciprocate your feelings will not be the way of achieving happiness. Only delusional people perceive this as love. Only through authentic love from