Abstract

Darrin Walsh argues that, despite Rand's affection for Aristotle, her ethics is more in the modern, rather than the Aristotelian, tradition. Aristotle's Nicomachean Hthics was never intended as a prescriptive normative treatise; rather, it offered an ontology of human excellence. Viewing that work through modern assumptions, Rand and others have misinterpreted its significance. A comparison of Aristotelian and Randian notions of happiness shows that the former is more philosophically profound than the latter