>Nobody would call a man ideally happy if he has not got a particle of courage nor of temperance nor of decency nor of good sense, but is afraid of the flies that flutter by him, cannot refrain from any of the most outrageous actions in order to gratify a desire to eat or to drink, and ruins his dearest friends for the sake of a penny…
If Aristotle means that the general lack of these qualities leads to unhappiness than he just needed to have some more profligate friends. I've known cowards, adicts and individuals with terrible practical instincts who were all happy people. If he specifically means the total lack of one of these traits well then no s---. Of course those individuals have a harder time being happy. They're lacking a significant tool the rest of us pack around in tool box for dealing with day to day life. And there's a decent chance they're suffering a debilitating neuroses. In the first case it's naive. In the second it's inane. Obviously Aristotle wasn't an idiot but I find the same flaw among nearly all ancient Greek philosophers. He was retroactively fitting a moral reasoning to his own secular but restrained moral instincts. There's a way of living that felt right to him and he reasoned himself into thinking it was "best". I may be more sympathetic to the Stoics and the Epicureans but I get the same vibe when I read their works.