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PHEIDIPPIDES: Consider, again, the animal kingdom - cockerels, for example - where offspringyigAi their fathers. And what difference is there between them and us, except that they don't move resolutions in assemblies?
STREPSIADES: Well if you're so keen on the life of a cockerel, why don't you go the whole way and eat manure and sleep on a perch?'
1. Human Good and the Knowledge Thereof
According to Aristotelian naturalism, human goodness is both similar to the goodness of other living things, and importantly different.2 Like other living things, human beings have a good specific to their life form.3 And individual human goodness - including goodness in action and choice - is determined by the good of "the human." In this respect, there is a shared conceptual structure between the evaluation of human action and the evaluation of excellence and defect in other living things, including plants and animals. In each case, the goodness of parts and activities in an individual living thing is understood in relation to its good as defined by its life form - in relation to a particular plant-good or animal-good, in the one case, and in relation to human good in the other. Thus the moral virtues - states of character that lead one to act well qua human being - are analogous to deep roots in an oak or swiftness in a deer. Moral virtue is a special type of natural goodness, and vice a natural defect.
However, human good is crucially different from other kinds of plantgood and animal-good, because human good requires that an individual possess an understanding of the very life form she bears. A virtuous person does not act from blind instinct, but according to an understanding of the good. And since what determines goodness in human action and choice is human form, the virtuous person must have some understanding of her own form. Simply put: the virtuous person has a grasp of human good, and her virtuous action springs from this grasp. Here we encounter a difference between the human case and other life forms, for while there is such a thing as oak-good, it is no part of the life of an oak to form a conception of its own life form, and...