Two ethics were written by Aristotle:
Ethics to Eudemo that highlights some Platonic influences and Ethical to Nicomachus which is the definitive version of Aristotelian ethics since it belongs to the third period.
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Aristotle's ethics is, first of all, an ethics of happiness... but it is also an ethics of virtue since this is the means par excellence to achieve happiness.
Happiness consists in the perfect exercise of man's own activity. Such activity is none other than the activity of the soul that for it to be perfect must be accompanied by all virtues.
Towards the end of the Ethical to Nicomachus, Aristótles will affirm that the activity most characteristic of man and the one that brings the greatest happiness to him is theoretical contemplation: that is, wisdom. This is how ethical empiricism leads him to an eclectic position: happiness consists in balancing virtue, contemplation and outward goods.
Aristótles moves away from the Socratic intellectualism that links virtue with knowledge. For him, virtue will be the disposition of the soul, that is, the capacity and fitness of the soul to behave in a certain way:
“ It is not enough that the action has a certain character for the conduct to be fair or good; it is also necessary for man to act in a certain manner first of all, that he knoweth; secondly, that he proceeds by reason of a conscious decision and prefers such action for himself; finally, he acts from a firm position and unshakable” Aristotle, Ethical to Nicomachus
Virtue is then acquired through exercise and habit , that is, for a man to become righteous, he must practice justice. Aristotle believes that no one is done just by “nature” (although a natural predisposition is important), nor is teaching sufficient.
For Aristotle, virtue coniste in the middle, which does not mean mediocrity but a balance between the vices of the extremes. “Courage” is a fair means between “reckless” and “fear.”
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It can be intuited in this conception a certain rest of Pythagorean symmetry also adopted by Plato and also of the concept of “measure”, dominant in Aristotle's contemporary Greek medicine. Like the mediums, for Aristotle, the midpoint is not an abstraction in general but is applied according to the circumstances of each case. The wise man will know how to choose the right means.
One of the main approaches to ethics is virtues. Virtues are traits of character that guide actions aimed at good results. By simply passing the character traits of the entrepreneur in terms of virtues, we can make the connections between the traits of entrepreneurial success and the corresponding virtues.