Proof of God

[Mudhammam]

As I have completed Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics a few days ago, I can say most assuredly that ethics---and one that is unfortunately in this case quite antiquated in its opinion of women and slaves---need not rely on some notion of divinity to be rational and objective, and furthermore, the results of a secular approach (which is more or less what Aristotle attempts, and in my view, largely accomplishes) are almost guaranteed to be more intuitively pleasing to the senses of a person with a capacity for moral reasoning than religious dogmas are.

I agree with you that Aristotle  largely accomplishes his goal of creating a secular ethic. It is a good starting point for further debate. I don't think that you can isolate the Ethics from its traditional context. The notion of 'The Good' is an important consideration. He identifies the good that all men desire as happiness but his next task (if i remember correctly) is to show how happiness is achieved based on the essence of what it means to be human, i. e. a rational animal. This brings into play many concepts I wager you would not be as inclined to accept.

Sure, as brilliant as Aristotle was and as much as I admire the way his mind worked, he was writing in the latter half of the 4th-century B.C.E. so we should expect that our conceptions of the good life are refined to the extent that our knowledge of ourselves, as individuals and as a species, has expanded a great deal. That being said, Aristotle gets much of it correct in my view, and not merely his definitions---of happiness, friendship, and the like---but his approach of the means between contrary extremes, the most important of which for his ethics is a recognition of the latter; that objective morality, whatever it may be, requires two opposing ends, which are universally recognized by a rather urbane enunciation of actual and potential pleasures and pains. On the one hand, it's at the other end of the spectrum in consideration of something like Nietzsche's moral theory or post-modernism, yet these two latter frameworks basically assume a project along the lines Aristotle that established, that whether it's a comparison between two polities or two mutually exclusive ethical systems, reason demands that we can and must evaluate them on terms that are open to criticism or confirmation.

What perhaps struck me the most was how similar Aristotle's ethics were to a modern-day moral realist like Sam Harris and the ideas he advocates in the The Moral Landscape---which is more or less an update.