This article considers the publication in 1879 of the Moral Philosophy of Aristotle, a book aimed at Oxford University undergraduates studying for the Classics degree course known as Literae Humaniores. This book is of contemporary interest. It takes us to the heart of the question of whether the work of Aristotle is meant for everyone or just for a select few. In principle, whatever we have inherited from Antiquity (whether materially or intellectually) belongs to us all. Therefore, there is an educational requirement to make it accessible to everyone and this should apply to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. But Aristotle is famously obscure and so in practice the study of Aristotle is confined to a small elite. Hatch’s The Moral Philosophy of Aristotle tries to overcome the problem of Aristotle’s obscurity by paraphrasing the Nicomachean Ethics in a popularising fashion and in sharp contrast to the way Aristotle is usually presented. To bring out the distinctive qualities of the Hatch approach this article compares The Moral Philosophy of Aristotle with the translations published in the modern Clarendon Aristotle series, which are intended for a readership made up largely of professionals working in universities. The article contrasts Hatch’s goals of readability and dogmatic clarity with the insistence on semantic fidelity which is the hallmark of the Clarendon series. The article concludes that there is a greater risk of distorting Aristotle’s meaning on the Hatch approach, but that this is compensated for by its pedagogic merits, and suggests that ideally teachers will use both Hatch and Clarendon together.

In this article I challenge the standard view that clarity and coherence in moral philosophy and ethics are always good and obscurity necessarily bad. The appraisal of clarity, I argue, entails a risk of reducing and misrepresenting the complex and multifaceted nature of good, productive and true thinking and communication. Uncertainty and obscurity do not necessarily lead to vagueness, imprecision or meaning-obstruction. There are productive forms of uncertainty and there are unproductive forms. Indeed, to be precise, lucid and truthful sometimes requires respecting and linguistically and conceptually reproducing the incoherence, obscurity and uncertainty of reality.