Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Virtue and Happiness (the system of aristotle)

« along the correct part of the road by mastering our initial swerves towards the kerb and towards the oncomingtraffic.

Once we have learnt, by whatever means, the right amount of some kind of action – whether it is the rightlength of an after-dinner speech, or the right proportion of one's income to give to charity – then, Aristotle says,we have ‘the right prescription' (orthos logos) in our mind.

Virtue is the state which enables us to act in accordancewith the right prescription.Virtue concerns not only actions, but also passions.

We can have too many fears, and we can have too few fears;we can be excessively concerned with sex or insufficiently interested in it.

The virtuous person is fearless whenappropriate, and fearful when appropriate, and is neither lustful nor frigid.

Virtue is concerned with the mean ofpassion as well as the mean of action.The virtues, besides being concerned with means of action and passion, are themselves means, in the sense thatthey occupy a middle ground between two contrary vices.

Thus generosity is a mean between prodigality andmiserliness; courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness.

But virtues do not admit of the mean in the waythat actions do: there cannot be too much of a virtue.

If we say seriously that someone is over-generous, we meanthat he has crossed the boundary between the virtue of generosity and the vice of prodigality.

The mayor who saidthat he did his best to walk the narrow path between partiality and impartiality had misunderstood Aristotle'sdoctrine.While all moral virtues are means, and concerned with means, not all actions and passions, Aristotle says, are thekinds of things that can have means.

He gives as examples of excluded actions murder and adultery: we couldnever justly compain that somebody had committed too few murders, and there is no such thing as committingadultery with the right person at the right time in the right way.

Among excluded passions he lists envy and spite:any amount of these sentiments is too much.Aristotle's account of virtue as a mean often strikes people as a set of truisms, devoid of moral import.

On thecontrary, his doctrine sets him in conflict with several highly influential moral systems.

Many people nowadays, forinstance, accept a utilitarian viewpoint from which there is no class of actions which are ruled out in advance; themorality of each action is to be judged by its consequences.

These people would oppose Aristotle's exclusions fromthe application of the mean; for them there can, in the appropriate circumstances, be the right amount of adulteryor murder.

On the other hand, some ascetic religious systems have ruled out whole classes of actions to whichAristotle applied the mean: for them any enjoyment of sex, or any eating of meat, is wrong, and there could be noright amount of such actions.

We might say that from Aristotle's point of view, the utilitarians are guilty of excess inthe application of the doctrine of the mean: they apply it to too many kinds of action.

The ascetics, on thecontrary, are guilty of defect in its application; they apply it to too few kinds of action.In being neither innate nor wholly taught, but acquired by a kind of training, and in being concerned with a mean ofaction, moral virtues resemble skills like the ability to play the harp or the practice of medicine.

Socrates and Platoconstantly emphasized these similarities.

They did so over much in Aristotle's view, and he is at pains to emphasizethe differences between skills and virtues.

If someone plays the harp beautifully, or effects a successful cure, itmakes no difference to the evaluation of their skill what was the motive from which theyacted.

But if someone is to be accounted virtuous, it is not enough to perform actions which are objectivelyirreproachable; they must be performed for the right motive (which, for Aristotle, means that they must spring fromthe choice of an appropriate way of life).

For this reason, virtue has a much closer connection than skill has withpleasure in action: a virtuous person, Aristotle believed, must enjoy doing what is right, and a grudging performanceof duty is not truly virtuous.

Again, a skill can be exercised in wrong actions as well as in right actions.

A tennisplayer may serve a double fault on purpose, perhaps to avoid too humiliating a defeat for her opponent, and thedouble fault may be no less a use of her skill than an ace would have been.

But no one could exercise the virtue ofhonesty by, once in a while, bringing off a shrewd swindle.Aristotle treats many individual virtues in detail, defining their area of operation, and showing how they conform tothe theory of the mean.

In Book III he deals at length with courage and temperance, the virtues of the parts of thesoul which Plato called temper and appetite.

He deals also with the vices which flank these virtues: cowardice andrashness on the one hand, and self-indulgence and insensitivity to bodily pleasures on the other.

Book IV offers abriefer treatment of a long series of virtues: generosity, munificence, greatness of soul, proper ambition, goodtemper, sociability, candour, readiness of wit.The types of character which Aristotle has in mind are described shrewdly and vividly; but his descriptions reflectthe social customs and institutions of his age, and not all his preferred virtues would appear nowadays on anyone'slist of the ten most valuable or attractive traits of character.

Both merriment and revulsion have been caused, forinstance, by the picture of the great-souled man, who is very conscious of his own worth, who always demands hisdeserts but is too proud to accept gifts, who is reluctant to admire but swift to despise, and who always speakswith a deep voice and walks with a slow step.

Aristotle's contribution to moral philosophy here is not through theindividual traits of character he commends, but rather in providing a conceptual structure into which virtues of themost different ages and societies can be fitted with remarkable ease.Aristotle's shorthand account of moral virtue is that it is a state of character expressed in choice, lying in theappropriate mean, determined by the prescription that a wise person would lay down.

To complete his account, heneeds to say what wisdom is, and how a wise person lays down prescriptions.

This he does in Book VI, where hetreats of the intellectual virtues.. »