>Whatever the Abrahamic influence on the course of Aristotelian thought, there is no reason to believe that Abrahamic influence was absolutely necessary to "universalize ethics" (take the early Stoics, for instance). This is expected and returns to my original point, that much of ethics is knowable in principle through unaided reason alone.

Aristotle directly refutes this in Nichomachean Ethics, this is why I wrote that it is “a very qualified doing”. He asserts that you can’t simply “get good” at committing virtuous acts because they require the correct upbringing firstly (“it makes a very great difference; or rather all the difference”); a good amount of that text reads like a parenting book; you can’t turn the skip later in life. So when you say:

> freedom to choose between alternatives apprehended by the intellect

I don’t think this is exhaustive in describing what’s going on in Nichomachean Ethics to any degree to render all else negligible. Given the way he talks about “soul” (a word which also conveys the worst interpretation of what he’s talking about in De Anima), it becomes clearer to me why conditioning is so important to him.