structural:summarization
The need for education, habituation, and good laws

Aristotle reiterates that the Ethics has not reached its aim if it has no effect in practice. The point is not just to learn how to live, but to actually live that way. Theories are not enough.

The practice of virtue requires good education and habituation from an early age. Young people otherwise do not get to experience the highest forms of pleasure and are distracted by the easiest ones. While parents often attempt this sort of education, it is critical that the community enact good laws.

Concerning this need for good laws and education, Aristotle says he seeks to address an eternal problem: unlike in medical science, theoreticians of happiness and teachers of virtue such as sophists never have practical experience themselves, while good parents and lawmakers have never developed a scientific approach to analyzing what the best laws are. Furthermore, few lawmakers, perhaps only the Spartans, made education a focus of law-making, as they should. Education needs to be more like medicine, with both practice and theory, and this requires a new approach to studying politics. Such study should, he says, help even in communities where the laws are not good and the parents need to try to create the right habits in young people without help from lawmakers.

Aristotle closes the Nicomachean Ethics therefore by highlighting his sequel, Politics. (However, Politics as we have it today is significantly different from the promised discussion of politics Aristotle alludes to there.)