Universality in Aristotle’s Ethics

This paper challenges the view that for Aristotle all judgments in ethics can hold true only “for the most part.” This paper makes three significant contributions to scholarship on Aristotle’s ethics: (i) it rejects as unpersuasive the textual evidence cited in favor of this view; (ii) it explains how the archery metaphor as Aristotle employs it reflects his commitment to the existence of universally true descriptive and prescriptive judgments; and (iii) by way of conclusion, the paper also offers historical reasons as to why Anglophone scholars in the past couple centuries have incorrectly ascribed to Aristotle the view that there are no truly universal judgments in ethics.