Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Main Claim

Not primarily concerned with acts

• Morality is not a skill, not something once can practice and learn, be bad at, and become better at

Concerned with the goodness of persons

◦ To have a good life, try to be a good person.

> And if you are a good person, acting well is just acting naturally.

> So instead of fretting over every action, work on your character.

◦ To have a good life, cultivate good habits: virtues.

◦ We are able to cultivate virtuous habits - But we are not given them, they require training.

Supporting argument - practice

◦ You become good by practicing being good.

◦ All badness comes either from a deficit or an excess.

> Why something is bad: either lacks something or it is excessive.

Supporting argument 2 - human flourishing

◦ Aristotle’s value theory is one of human flourishing.

◦ One flourishes when one self-actualizes, finds meaning, is content…

> Argues that one comes to flourish through self-improvement

> Avoiding bad habits and cultivating good ones.

> If one has good habits, moral acts are done naturally.

Supporting argument 3 - practice and force

to be a good person is more than just doing good

◦ You can still do just things if you don’t meet the conditions.

> That’s what you do to practice, perhaps under instruction.

> If you do something because you are more afraid of something else, you are not brave even though you act like a brave person would have acted

◦ As long as you have to force yourself you are not yet good.

> The formation of the virtuous habit is signified by its natural ease.

◦ What pleases you and what pains you are indicative of your moral character.

◦ To be good is more than just doing the right thing.

> It is to be the kind of person who does the right thing.

Kant vs Aristotle:

◦ They agree that it matters why one acts as one does.

> For Kant, one must act from duty.

> For Aristotle, one must act from virtuous habit.

Virtue according to aristotle

◦ To act virtuously, you must understand justice, choose justice for the sake of justice, and must do so from an acquired habit.

Neither the virtues nor the vices are passions

Virtues are modes of choice or involve choice, thus states of character - pattern of choice

> That is, dispositions to action or passion.

Supporting argument 4 - a good disposition

Suffers neither deficit nor excess.

> Being just right disposed to anger – patience (excellence of anger).

> Being just right disposed to act – courage (excellence of action).

◦ But there’s no ‘just right’ way to be murderous or envious.

> Tells us already that these are not good things.

Supporting argument 5 - categorically wrong acts

◦ Aristotle considers some acts to be categorically wrong.

> No deficit in never doing these things (ex: envy)

> These are things that happen at the extremes.

◦ To find the virtues, we identify names for the excesses, and names for their means.

Supporting argument 6 - spheres

Each: sphere of action or passion, what it would be to do or feel too little and too much

> The virtue lies in the mean.

> The mean may not be the literal center, as sometimes the proper mean is closer to one end or other.

◦ Sphere: Rhetoric.

> Virtue: truthfulness; excess: bragging; deficit: understatement

◦ Fear/confidence: the mean is courage.

> Excess of confidence is rashness; excess of fear is cowardice.

Supporting argument 7 - excess

Impossible to be too virtuous.

No such thing as being ‘too in the mean’.

> Virtues are perfections: they can be achieved to a determinate maximum and cannot be overdone

Perfection cannot be improved upon

Being brave isn’t running into exactly 50% of burning buildings.

Supporting argument 8 - experimentation

◦ You can only grasp the mean when you reached its perfection.

> For from a position of excess, the mean looks like a deficit.

> And from a position of deficit, the mean looks like an excess.

Finding the mean requires some amount of experimentation - try being a little excessive and a little deficient and see what it does

Supporting argument 9 - human nature

people are neither naturally good or naturally bad

We’re constituted to be able to have bad or good habits, the capacity for good or bad

Legislatures should create conditions that make it easier to lean towards acquiring virtue