Nicomachean Ethics

I also have this sense, hard to put into words, that it is written from a perspective of socioeconomic privilege and implicitly assumes a certain freedom, or has as its focus certain concerns that reflect that. It comes across to me now as narrow-minded and lacking in understanding of the broader human condition and diversity of challenges affecting persons. Put another way, it seems to be written as if advising royalty or the wealthy is the implied goal, ignoring the broader experiences of mankind, which seems to me in turn ironically a moral failure.

Maybe related to this, it seems to presume a certain set of things that I see as actually being fundamental societal and philosophical questions, such as free will and personal agency and all that encompasses. Failure to attain well-being in a broad sense is a failure of the individual to practice free will, under The Ethics, and not of society to foster or intervene in a way so as to facilitate individual improvements in well-being. The sort of paradigm being asserted in The Ethics provides no way out to address the question of "how do I improve the lot of my fellow persons?" or to develop virtues in others. If someone rejects the notion of free will, either in itself or as a meta-phenomenon (that is, as something that can be manipulated itself), The Ethics seems misguided at best and pernicious at worst.

Virtue ethics also seem naive to me often, in that there's often little self-awareness of its limitations. For example, what if two virtues conflict? How do you resolve this? How do you interpret a behavior vis-a-vis its outcome in the presence of fundamental uncertainty?

But, for example, in Book 3 (via the Rackham translation; http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...):

"If then whereas we wish for our end, the means to our end are matters of deliberation and choice, it follows that actions dealing with these means are done by choice, and voluntary. But the activities in which the virtues are exercised deal with means.

Therefore virtue also depends on ourselves. And so also does vice. For where we are free to act we are also free to refrain from acting, and where we are able to say No we are also able to say Yes; if therefore we are responsible for doing a thing when to do it is right, we are also responsible for not doing it when not to do it is wrong, and if we are responsible for rightly not doing a thing, we are also responsible for wrongly doing it.

But if it is in our power to do and to refrain from doing right and wrong, and if, as we saw,1 being good or bad is doing right or wrong, it consequently depends on us whether we are virtuous or vicious."

These types of passages assume or assert (1) free will, (2) the notion of responsibility for behavior as a consequence of this, and (3) a schema that is framed in terms of broad evaluative personal characteristics rather than specific decisions. If you believe that the notion of free will is specious, even partially in significant cases of vice, the entire Ethics starts to become questionable. To be even more specific: what if you believe that society (if not now due to scientific-technical limitations, then some day) has a moral obligation to address criminal wrongdoing by means of neurobehavioral intervention, to treat criminal predisposition as a disease? Is relying on an Aristotlian view of ethics as personal responsibility then unethical because it elevates an erroneous assumption of free will above the societal consequences of reducing suffering from criminal behavior?

This is taken out of context to some extent, as Aristotle also discusses free will, voluntary vs. nonvoluntary actions etc. But I'd argue that those discussions are kind of beside the point, and amount to logical loopholes of sorts in that they amount to something like "I'm not talking about cases where there isn't free will." But what if that is the main issue at some level?

The discussion of virtue ethics in general, to be contrasted with deontological or consequentialist ethical reasoning, for example, is a whole other topic, about which books have been written.