[PW] The good of the many

[Simon Cauchi]

On 16/03/2008, at 3:31 AM, Jeanne Schramm wrote:

> Here is a quote contained within Summa Theologica (St. Thomas Aquinas):
> "The good of the many is more of the godlike than the good of the
> individual."    (Quoting the "Philosopher")
> http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/sum398.htm

The "Philosopher" being Aristotle. Aquinas is citing the Nichomachean 
Ethics, Book I, Chapter 2. See the last sentence but one.

Book 1, Chapter 2

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for 
its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and 
if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at 
that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would 
be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. 
Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? 
Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to 
hit upon what is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to 
determine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is 
the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and 
that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of 
this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should 
be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn 
and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most 
highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, 
economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, 
and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are 
to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the 
others, so that this end must be the good for man. For even if the end 
is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems 
at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or 
to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one 
man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for 
city-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry aims, since 
it is political science, in one sense of that term.