Every activity, every enquiry, every practice aims at some good; for by ‘the good’ or ‘a good’ we mean that at which human beings characteristically aim. It is important that Aristotle’s initial arguments in the Ethics pre-suppose that what G.E. Moore was to call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ is not a fallacy at all and that statements about what is good—and what is just or courageous or excellent in other ways—just are a kind of factual statement. Human beings, like the members of all other species, have a specific nature; and that nature is such that they have certain aims and goals, such that
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