Aristotle →
Nicomachean Ethics →
Book Ⅲ (virtue, and some moral virtues)
One of the recurring issues that comes up today in debates about conscientious tax resistance is whether (and if so, to what extent) paying taxes makes you liable for what the government does with the tax money.
Does a taxpayer bear some responsibility, and deserve some blame, for paying taxes?
I’ve heard answers at either extreme: that taxpaying makes the taxpayer absolutely complicit in all of the government’s deeds, or that because the government forces you to pay taxes against your will you can’t be thought to be responsible for the consequences of paying them.
For example, the blogger FSK wrote:
(See also The Picket Line of for an in-depth look at many of the arguments that have been given concerning the question: does taxpaying make you complicit?)
Much of the debate concerns the extent to which taxpaying is a chosen, deliberate act of free will, or the extent to which it is a forced act done only under duress.
On the one hand, taxpaying is certainly coerced — thus all of the various criminal and civil sanctions brought to bear against people who don’t pay up.
On the other hand, these various sanctions are really just consequences of the choice you make, and all choices of any moral significance have consequences — the trick to being a good person is weighing these consequences well.
In the opening section of the third book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins to take on the task of distinguishing the voluntary and involuntary, the chosen and unchosen, and such categories.
As I go through the sections of this book I’ll be trying to see how taxpaying fits in to the system he devises.
(Note: some translations break this opening section out into three distinct sections.)
Aristotle says that distinguishing between the voluntary & involuntary is essential for a discussion of ethics, because only voluntary acts are rightly subject to praise or blame, honor or punishment.
(Involuntary acts are due pardon or pity at worst.)
Voluntary acts are those that are caused by something internal to a person — that person’s will or desire or choice.
Involuntary acts are caused or impelled from outside.
That’s fine for the black-and-white cases, but there’s a big grey area.
As Aristotle has argued before, we are motivated in our actions by desire for pleasure and fear of pain.
Do those things amount to compulsions that make our actions involuntary?
Aristotle says no.
To admit such an argument would be to make the voluntary/involuntary distinction meaningless.
The desire for pleasure and fear of pain are internal to us and so represent voluntary impulses.
This is true also for more extreme emotions like passion and anger.
What if you do something wrong because you were ignorant about what you were doing or what the consequences would be?
Aristotle says that actions done in ignorance form a third category: the “non-voluntary.”
If the actor later is pained by the action and regrets it, it can then be promoted out of this purgatory into the involuntary category.
But isn’t everyone who acts wrongly acting in ignorance of how and why they ought to act rightly?
Aristotle says that it is true that ignorance is what causes people to be unjust and wicked, but that this sort of ignorance does not change the voluntary/involuntary nature of the action: only ignorance of the particulars of the action, like what it is or what it is affecting.
He gives the example of someone who is demonstrating the use of a weapon, thinking it to be disarmed, who fires it and inadvertently causes damage.
What if you’re forced to do something vicious by fear of adverse consequences for not doing it — a lesser-of-two-evils sort of choice?
Aristotle says that such acts are voluntary in-and-of themselves, “although in the abstract they may be said perhaps to be involuntary, as nobody would choose any such action in itself.”* He notes that you can be praised for putting up with degrading or painful circumstances for honorable ends, so why shouldn’t you be blamed for avoiding pain for dishonorable ends?
(But what if you voluntarily put yourself into a situation in which you know it is likely that you will have to make a lesser-of-two-evils sort of choice, I wonder?)
You may be pardoned for voluntarily doing an act “under pressure which overstrains human nature and which no one could withstand,” but there are some acts that you should prefer death to committing.
In general you need to do a cost/benefit analysis.
So where does taxpaying fit in?
So far it looks to be in this voluntary in-and-of itself but possibly involuntary in-the-abstract category.
Aristotle hasn’t told us much about this category yet, so it’s hard to draw any conclusions about what this means.
“Actions of this kind, therefore, are voluntary — though regarded independently of their surroundings they are surely involuntary: no one, that is, would make choice of an act of great sacrifice for its own sake.”
(Walter M. Hatch)
“Such acts, then, are voluntary, though in themselves [or apart from these qualifying circumstances] we may allow them to be involuntary; for no one would choose anything of this kind on its own account.”
(F.H. Peters)
“I have called them mixed acts as though they were partly voluntary and partly involuntary — involuntary as being acts such as no one under ordinary circumstances would do, but voluntary as proceeding from the will of the agent under the pressure of circumstances.
But if you look closely into these acts, you will find that they are really voluntary.”
(St. George Stock’s paraphrase)
“Simply considered, however, they are perhaps involuntary; for no one would choose any one of these on its own account.”
(Thomas Taylor)
Most other translations I looked at were pretty close to the wording I used in the main body, from William David Ross’s translation.
Chosen acts are those voluntary acts that are not just from spur-of-the-moment whim or a sudden emotion like anger but that may involve rational deliberation.
Choice is distinct from things like wish or opinion in that it concerns things that are actually under our control, and concerns means (not just ends).
Reading this section, a few questions came to mind that I hope Aristotle will resolve:
If we only choose means, not ends, where do the ends come from?
Or is the ultimate end, eudaimonia, considered a given at this point, and all the other ends just amounting to subordinate means to that end?
If we don’t choose this end, is it built-in to human nature or is it taught or is it discovered rationally/experimentally?
Can you choose not to choose, or from habit or instruction can you remove certain acts from the category of the deliberately chosen?
Can you be ignorant about whether or not a course of action is chosen or voluntary?
What if you choose to commit yourself to a certain goal or future course of action?
Does such a vow change the voluntary nature of future acts, or merely the set of consequences?
Deliberation is usually a component of those voluntary acts that are
chosen. An exception concerns those chosen acts for which no
deliberation is necessary: for example, writing each of the letters involved
in signing your name represents a series of chosen acts, but you don’t have
to deliberate over these acts because you already know what is involved in
forming the letters; it has become automatic.
Aristotle reiterates that we deliberate about means, not ends (which
underlines the fact that Book One was a descriptive account of the ultimate
ends of human action, not a prescriptive one). Deliberation starts with the
intended end in mind, and then decomposes this end into the means that will
accomplish it, then, treating these means as ends, decomposes them in turn
into the means that will accomplish them, until either one of these means
proves to be impossible (in which case the end is abandoned, at least for now)
or one proves to be immediately attainable (in which case it becomes the
chosen act).
This seems sensible enough, and it appeals to the computer scientist in me.
Certain varieties of artificial intelligence algorithms operate in this sort
of methodical fashion. This also makes me a little suspicious, though, since
such tidy algorithmic processes are often better models for how to make
computers behave than they are descriptions of how brains actually behave.
But so long as we see it as a model, it strikes me as a good one.
Those things which are liable to change, not in a periodic or invariable way,
and that depend on man, particularly on ourselves, are the appropriate objects
of deliberation, as shown in this illustration from
St. George Stock’s paraphrase ()
“Some” say that the only things we can really wish for are actually good
things, “others” say that ends are purely subjective and that there is no
Actually Good standard to compare them to. Aristotle, characteristically,
aims for some position in the middle, acknowledging that there is an objective
good, but insisting that we’re perfectly capable of being mistaken or unwise
in our wishes, and that the goals we wish for are subjective ends that may or
may not coincide with the objective good. Usually, he says, when you wish for
something objectively bad, you’re being misled by pleasure.
To me this seems an odd debate. Different people wish for different things,
often incompatible things, certainly opposing things, so they can’t all be
objectively good, so we must be able to wish for things that are merely
subjective goods, right? There must have been some debate that used a more
specialized definition of words like “wish” or “good” that I’m not aware of.
Virtue is found in the exercise of means (wishing for the correct
ends is presumably more a matter of wisdom than virtue). The
exercise of means (or the decision not to) is a matter of deliberation and
choice, and so is in our power, and therefore so is our virtue.
You are responsible for being reasonably informed about what you need to know
to make the right decisions in the circumstances you encounter, and if you
ignore this responsibility (or if you actively contribute to your own
ignorance, for instance by being drunk or by looking away from some
inconvenient truth), you cannot use your ignorance as an excuse for vicious
actions.
Since virtue is a habit (as is vice), it may be a choice to initially
acquire a vice or to neglect a virtue, but once you have
done this habitually, it becomes less voluntary over time. This is
interesting for a couple of reasons: first, if virtues and vices become less
voluntary as they become more habitual, it would seem that they become less
praiseworthy or blameworthy also; second, it seems to create another
obstacle in the path to becoming a virtuous person if you aren’t
one already — how do you go about changing bad habits if they aren’t even
very voluntary any longer? (Aristotle does not yet address either of these
points, but I hope he does eventually.)
In some recorded lectures about the
Nicomachean Ethics that I was listening to during a recent leisurely
train ride down California,
Joseph Koturksi emphasized that Aristotle defined moral virtue in particular as a habit of choosing the golden mean — that is to say that it differs from other varieties of habit in not constricting choice but in exhibiting itself as choosing.
It seems from this that the lack of moral virtue can take two forms, or a
combination of the two: not choosing, or choosing poorly.
(I suppose a third variety would be a failure to make correct choosing
habitual, but my reading of Aristotle suggests that this habituation
is an automatic process, and so its absence would be more suggestive of, say,
brain damage, than of anything correctable by philosophy.)
Anyway: “habit” in the case of moral virtue isn’t meant as a sort of
unthinking, repetitive, by-rote sort of behavior. Point made.
Next, Aristotle addresses the argument that while everybody aims for the
apparent good, what appears to be good to each of us is not under
our control but is just a given part of our temperament or constitution or
some such. Aristotle says that if this is true, then you aren’t really to be
blamed for deeds you perform under the misapprehension that you’re doing the
right thing. However, he says that to some extent, you are responsible for
your own temperament and constitution, and to that extent you can inherit
responsibility for the misdeeds you perform under its influence.
But in any case, if our virtues are voluntary and we can be praised for them,
our vices are too, and we can be blamed for them.
From here, for most of the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics, we’re going to go
into an in-depth look at particular virtues. The rest of this book will look
at courage and temperance. Book four will concern liberality, magnificence,
pride, industriousness, good temper, friendliness, truthfulness, bonhomie,
and the quasi-virtue of shame. Book five is all about justice. Book six
concerns the intellectual virtues. Book seven concerns continence and also
contains a discussion of pleasure that will be continued in book ten.
Several days ago my sweetie and I were relaxing at home with a
DVD from the library: the movie
Secretary.
It’s a silly story about a mousy young woman (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal,
who also, coincidentally, played the vivacious tax resister in
Stranger than
Fiction) who becomes the secretary of an eccentric lawyer and who
finds her job transforming into an erotic dominance/submission scene in which
she learns to play the submissive and ends up personally flowering and
maturing in the course of doing so.
It’s not a very deep film, but some of her character’s comments about the
pleasures of submission — unthinking obedience to the commands of a trusted
dominant — and the sort of confidence and, oddly, “freedom” that results from
this, lodged in my head and got me thinking about this and that.
Much of this “freedom” is freedom from having to make up your own mind and
make your own decisions and assert your own risky initiative. What am I
going to do? Whatever the dominant wants me to do or tells me to do. If
that’s always the right answer, it makes deciding a snap and much
less of a burden, and permits you (or seems to permit you) to shift most of
the burden of the responsibility for the consequences onto the dominant
“decider.”
In a bedroom scene, that’s all fun and games, but when such things come out
of the bedroom and into society at large, this sort of evasion of
responsibility can be very dangerous. Hannah Arendt spent some time analyzing
Adolf Eichmann as someone who had decided to renounce his will and devote
himself to carrying out his Fuhrer’s will; once he was caught and put on
trial for this, he pathetically tried to excuse his behavior by saying that
having made himself an agent of the Fuhrer’s whims, he was no longer
able to behave according to his remaining ethical instincts.
I quoted Arne Johan Vetlesen’s summary of Arendt’s
argument: “superfluousness represents a temptation: it holds the
promise of an existence devoid of (enacted) human agency, hence free
of the burdens of responsibility and guilt, as well as hurt and loss.”
Vetlesen says that indulging this temptation not only dangerously enables you
to commit evil, but is a sort of evil itself:
Morally speaking, permitting oneself to be dehumanized, to be robbed of
one’s autonomy (Kant), is in itself no lesser sin than participating in the
dehumanization of others; it entails permitting oneself to become an
instrument in the realization of ends posited by others.
The military chain of command is another dangerous variety of
D&S
game in which essentially unquestioning obedience is expected. I suspect that
a craving for submission and for freedom from the burden of decision-making
and its consequences is a strong motivation for many people who join the
military. This burden can feel especially heavy to young people just
emerging from home and from institutional education into the freedom of
adulthood and all of the responsibility it entails.
In a Christian context, this is explicit: the Christian accepts Christ as his
or her Lord and Master, and says Thy Will Be Done, I will deny myself and take
up my cross daily, and so forth. Kant, for his part, thought that an act was
really virtuous only if it was unpleasant, painful, or difficult — whip me! beat me! make me virtuous!
How do you identify and correct for a decadent parody of virtue that really
amounts to a responsibility-denying
D&S
scene? That is, how do you know whether you’re being virtuous or whether
you’re submitting to a freedom-restricting straitjacket in the name of virtue?
How do you avoid getting in a situation where you do the wrong thing, but
“can’t help it” because you’ve obligated yourself to submit to Christ’s
teachings, or to think of the greatest good for the greatest number, or to
maintain Army discipline, or to obey the categorical imperative, or whatever
your dom happens to be?
And how would you defend against the argument that Aristotle’s model of virtue
is essentially a
D&S
scene in which a mental model of virtue is the
dom?
One possible line of defense would be to note that, in Aristotle’s scheme
(unlike Kant’s, for instance), virtuous acts are not necessarily painful or
difficult or against your inclinations — indeed, often quite the opposite:
virtue is a variety of excellence and an important path toward
eudaimonia — flourishing, thriving, happiness.
So at least this isn’t an
S&M thing,
where you martyr yourself and then take pleasure in your suffering. Also, as
Joseph Koturski pointed out, moral virtue
is the habit of choosing well, so it doesn’t unburden you of the
need to choose at all. To the extent that a
D&S
scene is partially about freedom-from-choice, an internal, non-dogmatic
dom doesn’t do the trick
(whereas a Categorical Imperative or a scriptural Jesus might do).
A few months after writing this entry, I picked up A Testament to Freedom, a collection of the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
In one of his early works on Christian Ethics, he wrote:
For Christians there are no ethical principles by means of which they could
perhaps civilize themselves. Nor can yesterday ever be decisive for my moral
action today. Rather must a direct relationship to God’s will be ever sought
afresh. I do not do something again today because it seemed to me to be good
yesterday, but because the will of God points out this way to me today. This
is the great moral renewal through Jesus, the renunciation of principles, of
rulings, in the words of the Bible, of the law, and this follows as a
consequence of the Christian idea of God; for if there was a generally valid
moral law, then there would be a way from the human to God — I would have my
principles, so I would believe myself assured sub specie
aeternitatis. So, to some extent, I would have control over my
relationship to God, so there would be a moral action without immediate
relationship to God. And, most important of all, in that case I would once
again become a slave to my principles. I would sacrifice our most precious
gift, freedom.
As he’s stated before, courage is a virtue that occupies the golden mean on
a continuum of levels of confidence in the face of fearful situations, between
the opposing extremes of cowardice on the one hand and rashness on the other.
Fear, says Aristotle, is the expectation of evil, and evil is properly
to be feared. Some fears are noble, for instance the fear of disgrace, and
to be “fearless” in a situation where disgrace is to be feared is a vice
(“shamelessness”), not a virtue.
Fear is a term most properly applied to the response to man-made evils; “we
perhaps ought not to fear” such accidents of fate as poverty and disease, as
they aren’t in this category. That said, we sometimes do consider someone to
be displaying courage who acts bravely under, for instance, the threat of
impoverishment.
Courage is exemplified by the soldier in battle, facing death, when it is
the soldier’s own efforts against the foe that matter. The sort of courage
displayed by someone facing an impersonal foe — for instance, someone in
a storm-tossed boat — is of a different sort.
Myself, I have a hard time distinguishing the bravery of a sailor facing a
storm bravely from that of a soldier facing a battle bravely. Aristotle
breaks the storm case down into two classes of people: sailors, who face the
storm bravely because they know what they’re doing and they’re doing all they
can; and ordinary people, who are just sort of helpless before the storm, and
just give themselves up to fate or to the skill of those who know better.
The latter aren’t really showing courage because “courage is exerted in
circumstances which admit of doing something to help one’s self” while
sailors aren’t really showing courage because “these are light-hearted and
hopeful by reason of their experience” (D.P. Chase’s translation).
Maybe he’s making the sailors out not to really be fearful because they know
the situation isn’t as bad as it appears to the landlubbers. In that case,
they aren’t really exhibiting courage because they aren’t really in danger
of death; while the soldiers are. That would make more sense than what he
seems at first to be saying, which is that the sailor isn’t acting courageous
because he knows what he’s doing — wouldn’t that mean that the soldier also
is only courageous in inverse proportion to his skill, understanding, and
experience? I guess that makes sense to some extent: the first time a
tightrope walker goes out on the rope, she is exhibiting courage; the
hundredth time, she is mostly just exhibiting skill.
In the seventh section of the third book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle reminds us that a brave person isn’t fearless, but when facing fearful things “will [though afraid] face them as he ought and as the rule directs, for honour’s sake; for this is the end of virtue.”
In the realm of confidence in the face of fear, there are many ways in which
you can go wrong. You can fear the wrong thing, fear at the wrong time,
fear in the wrong way, and so forth. Similarly, you can draw confidence
from the wrong thing, in the wrong time, in the wrong way, and so forth.
Okay then; standard Aristotle stuff here.
But in the Ross translation, in the
middle of this boilerplate, Aristotle
lets loose with this whammy: “[T]he end of every activity is conformity to
the corresponding state of character.” That seems important but I couldn’t
make sense of it. He tries to clarify this in the following way:
This is true, therefore, of the brave man as well as of others. But courage
is noble. Therefore the end also is noble; for each thing is defined by its
end. Therefore it is for a noble end that the brave man endures and acts as
courage directs.
This just made me more puzzled. So I went to look for some other translations:
“[T]he end of every energy is the end according to habit, [i.e. the
beautiful in conduct;] and to the brave man fortitude is beautiful. The
end, also, is a thing of this kind; for every thing is defined by the
end. For the sake of the beautiful in conduct, therefore, the brave man
endures and performs all that pertains to fortitude.” — Thomas Taylor
(translation, )
“[T]he end of every energy is that which agrees with the habit; and courage
is the noble thing in the case of the courageous man; this therefore is
the end. For the sake therefore of what is noble, the courageous man
sustains and performs those things which belong to courage.” — anonymous
translation (“Printed by W. Baxter for J. and C. Vincent. ”)
“[T]he end of every separate act of the exercise of a disposition is
that which accords with the disposition. In the brave man courage is a
noble thing, so then must the end of courage be, for each thing has the
character of its end. So nobleness is the motive from which the Brave
man withstands things fearful, and performs the acts which accord with
Courage.” — D.P. Chase (translation, )
“[T]he end in view in each particular act will be the end which is
conformable to the habit of which that act is a manifestation. To the
brave man his bravery is a noble thing. Such then will be the end which
his bravery as a whole has in view; for in every case the attributes of a
habit are determined by its end. And consequently it will be for the sake
of that which is noble that the brave man faces danger, and achieves his
acts of bravery.” — Robert Williams (translation, )
“[T]he ‘end’ of every activity, (in order to be either virtuous or
vicious,) must be one which corresponds with the fixed attitude of mind in
the agent. To the mind of the brave man the display of his bravery is a
source of pride and honour. The ‘end’ of his every activity, therefore,
is a feeling of honour, since the character of every action is
determined by its ‘end.’ It follows that the motive for which the brave
man incurs perils, and performs the acts of bravery, is a sense of honour
or a feeling of noble pride.” — Walter M. Hatch (translation, )
“[T]he end of every energy is that which is according to the habit; and
courage is that which is honourable in the case of the brave man; such
therefore is his end; for everything is defined by its end. For the
sake, therefore, of what is honourable, the brave man bears and performs
those things which belong to courage.” — R.W. Browne (translation, )
“A courageous act, like every other virtuous act, realises its own end
when it shows forth the end for the sake of which its parent habit
exists. The habit of courage is a glory to human nature: it exists for
the sake of being a glory to human nature — to be this that it is is
its end. To show forth then the peculiar glory of courage is the end for
the sake of which the courageous man faces danger and does deeds of
courage.” — J.A. Stewart (summary, )
“[N]ot only the formed habit, but also each individual act of Courage,
will be guided by this one motive, the attainment of the ideally noble.” — Edward Moore (summary, )
“[T]he end or motive of every manifestation of a habit or exercise of a
trained faculty is the end or motive of the habit or trained faculty
itself. Now, to the courageous man courage is essentially a fair or
noble thing. Therefore the end or motive of courage is also noble; for
everything takes its character from its end. It is from a noble motive,
therefore, that the courageous man endures and acts courageously in
each particular case. [The courageous man desires the courageous act
for the same reason for which he desires the virtue itself, viz. simply
because it is noble.]” — F.H. Peters (translation & note, )
“[T]he end of every activity that a man displays is determined by the
corresponding moral state. To the courageous man courage is noble;
therefore the end or object of courage is also noble, for the character
of everything is determined by its end. It is for the sake of what is
noble then that the courageous man faces and does all that courage
demands.” — J.E.C. Welldon (translation, )
[Aristotle.] …the end proposed by any act must be
identical with the end or aim of the state of mind from which that act
proceeds. But the brave man regards his courage as morally right. Of this
nature therefore must be the end: for everything derives its character from
its end. Therefore any brave act, to be truly such, must be done for the sake
of right.
Nicomachus. That sounds like a syllogism, father;
only it seems rather involved.
Aristotle. It is a syllogism and more. For the
minor premiss is supported by a reason, which implies a preceding syllogism.
I will condense the statement, so that you may the more easily detect its
form.
The end of the state is the end of the act.
Right conduct is the end of the state (for what characterizes anything is its end).
∴ Right conduct is the end of the act.
The pro-syllogism, which supports the minor premiss, would, if drawn out in
full, run thus —
What characterizes anything is its end.
Right conduct characterizes the state of courage.
∴ Right conduct is the end of the state [of courage].
These various translations, summaries, and paraphrases help spotlight
Aristotle’s argument from various angles, and I think make it a little more
clear, although I think there is still one point of disagreement and
ambiguity, which I’ll mention in a moment.
Putting on my technical-writer hat, here is how I would try to phrase my
understanding of what seems to be the most common interpretation of what
Aristotle was getting at, as shown by these translators:
Everything that we do characteristically, that is, as a manifestation of
some tendency or character trait in ourselves (that is, not just something we
do haphazardly or incidentally), we do for a purpose that is identical to the
purpose of that tendency or character trait itself. So, for instance, any
particular courageous act has the same aim (at least with respect to its
courageousness) as the general trait of courageousness does. The aim of any
particular demonstration of courage is not to be found in the specific and
incidental goals of the act itself, but in the overarching goals of the
tendency of courageousness. The reason why someone develops the
characteristic of courage is that he or she sees courageousness as honorable
and beautiful and noble, as “a glory to human nature” as J.A. Stewart put it.
Therefore every particular demonstration of courage by someone who cultivates
this trait in him or herself is really aimed not to the particular superficial
goals of the act itself, but to this overarching goal of attaining the
honorable and beautiful and noble state that is courageousness.
This highlights what makes Aristotle’s ethics so different from many
other ethical systems. In most ethical systems, your motive for doing the
right thing is that it results in the right consequences: you are courageous
because your courage will help you make some good thing happen, or because
if you give in to fear and don’t do what you should, some bad thing might
happen. Alternatively, maybe you do the right thing out of a sense of
neighborly reciprocity: you are courageous now because you would like to
expect your fellow-man to act courageous in your situation. Or maybe you
are courageous because there is some set of rules, external to you and
independent from your own interests but demanding of respect, that commands
courage from you. In Aristotle, you are courageous because courage is a
variety of excellence you are striving to attain — “nobleness is the motive,”
“the feeling of honour,” “the attainment of the ideally noble.”
So if you are exhibiting courage in, say, fighting a battle in order to win
a war, in order that your army should conquer theirs or not be conquered by
theirs or what have you, your motive for fighting
courageously is not that this will make it more likely that
you will win the battle or win the war — your motive for fighting
courageously is to thereby be courageous.
We exist not to serve others or to serve God or to serve a cause — not for the sake of something else in other words — but we exist in order to exist well, to thrive, to flourish.
Suddenly I’m reminded that Ayn Rand was a big Aristotle-head.
“[A] plant or animal is its own raison d’être; it performs the functions of its nature for the sake of maintaining that nature in perfection” (Stewart, commenting on this section of Aristotle).
A brave person, at least in the dimension of courage, thrives, flourishes, and
is whomever he or she is in the best sort of way that this can be done — that
is, he or she achieves eudaimonia.
A coward, on the other hand, “is a despairing sort of person” while the rash
person, at the other extreme, is more interested in appearing to be
brave than in actually being brave, and so does not actually thrive, flourish,
et cetera, but only pantomimes it.
All that said, there is another possible interpretation of this difficult
passage that has a much more conventional feel to it.
Stock points the arrow in the other
direction in his paraphrase: he says that an act can only be courageous
if it is aimed at something that is morally right, since
courageousness is morally right and an act can only be morally right if its
end is also. His syllogisms don’t really support his conclusion on this point,
and the other translations seem to flatly disagree with him at worst, or at
best to be ambiguous on the point (saying that one does courageous acts
only for the sake of what is honorable leaves ambiguous whether that
is a descriptive or restrictive clause). Many of these translations
(Ross, Taylor, Williams, Browne, Welldon)
can be read in either way, the others (Chase,
Hatch, Stewart, Moore, Peters) disagree with
Stock.
But when I skipped ahead to book four, I found reason to wonder whether Stock
was right after all — the translation of Aristotle’s description of the virtue
of liberality is much more like Stock’s
description of courage in this regard than it is like the other versions I ran
with here. But this will have to wait until we get to book four.
(In my searches, I have found that this passage has puzzled some others.
See this discussion and this follow-up at Dissoi Blogoi.)
Not really courageous is the behavior of soldiers in the organized military who are motivated by penalties for disobedience, by hope of honors, or by fear of shame at being caught acting cowardly.
As Aristotle has explained, courageous deeds are not motivated by such things as this, but by a love of courageousness itself.
Also not really exhibiting courage are those who are less fearful in some situation because they are more experienced or skillful and so are better able to judge the nature of the dangers and what the proper response is.
This is like the “sailors on a storm-tossed sea” example he gave a couple of sections back.
People who act bravely while in the throes of a passion, or boiling anger, or a sudden fight-or-flight crisis are also not exhibiting courage, but only “something akin to courage.”
People who are sanguine, that is they have been lucky or fortunate in past actions and so they are confident now, may not really be exhibiting courage although they may appear to be.
Drunk people are sometimes confident like this.
It’s easy to show courage when things are going your way; a really brave person is brave when the chips are down, or when danger comes on unexpectedly.
People who are ignorant of the danger and therefore overconfident without reason are, for similar reasons to those who are sanguine, also not really exhibiting courage.
These exceptions emphasize that to be courageous in Aristotle’s sense,
you need to be motivated primarily by your love for courageousness as an honorable thing (not by fear of punishment or dishonor, or by a sudden rush of adrenaline, or hope for fame, for instance),
and you must actually be facing a situation in which you have good reason to be afraid (and are afraid), and in which your own chosen actions make a difference to the outcome.
A brave person accepts pain, and the risk of greater pain & death, because the brave person values courage more than he or she fears those things.
He or she would rather live a flourishing and thriving life of eudaimonia, of which courage is a constituent, than a longer or more painless life.
This is kind of like a boxer or long-distance runner who doesn’t love the pain of being hit or of hitting-the-wall at mile 18, but who loves victory enough to keep fighting through the pain anyway.
Courage is a particularly challenging virtue in this way because, Aristotle says, the more virtuous you are (for instance, the more courageous), the more eudaimon your life is, and therefore the more valuable your life will be to you.
Thus the more courageous you are, the more you are putting at risk by being so.
For this reason, he says, soldiers who are exhibiting one of the varieties of counterfeit courage he mentioned in the previous section may be better soldiers to have in your army because they have less to lose: “they sell their life for trifling gains.”
In the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth sections that finish the third book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the virtue of temperance.
In the same way that courage is a mean between extremes of response to fear; temperance is a mean between extremes of response to pleasure.
On one extreme is the self-indulgent person; on the other is someone who is insensible, or possibly anhedonic.
This latter extreme is a much more rare vice than its opposite, and so we lack a precise word for it — Aristotle calls people who practice this vice “almost imaginary characters” — and so the vice exists mostly in the abstract.
This just reminds me of what I found so unsatisfying about Aristotle’s Goldilocksian theory of virtue.
Fortunately, although Aristotle was clearly very attached to this pet theory, most of what I find interesting about his ideas of ethics doesn’t rely on it.
Courage and temperance are linked also in being “virtues of the irrational parts” — that is, they respond to and regulate our responses to fear and appetite, which are very basic animal impulses.
Temperance only concerns a particular subset of bodily pleasures (so not, for instance, the pleasure of gossiping or of learning).
Aristotle calls this subset the pleasures that concern touch, which he defines to include things like eating, drinking, and sex, but to exclude other sensual things like listening to music or delighting in pleasant smells.
Illustration showing the varieties of pleasure, from St. George Stock’s paraphrase ().
Only the pleasures of touch are the concern of temperance.
Some appetites for this variety of pleasure are universal (for instance hunger or lust), while others are peculiar to the individual, and some people exhibit their appetite for the universal pleasures in peculiar ways (being especially fond of a particular food, or fetishistic about sex).
There are three ways to go wrong in an excess of appetite for bodily-touch pleasure:
You can delight in the wrong thing.
You can delight in something too much.
You can delight in the wrong manner.
Aristotle says that self-indulgent people do all three.
Appetite is a form of pain, and the self-indulgent are pained more than they ought to be over not getting their favorite varieties of bodily-touch pleasure.
Temperate people are not so overpained.
Fear is more disruptive to the senses and to the reason than pleasure is, and so it is easier to forgive cowardice than intemperance.
Self-indulgence is more of a voluntary vice than cowardice is, and so is more worthy of reproach.
Self-indulgent acts are voluntary (they result from internal cravings & desires), but the state of being a self-indulgent person is less so (nobody wants to be intemperate).
By contrast, cowardly acts are often painful/shameful and are performed as if they were involuntary (compelled by fear).
In Greek, the word Aristotle uses for “self-indulgent” or “intemperate” is the same one used for “unchastened” as in a spoiled child.
Aristotle thinks this is apt, as temperance is about disciplining the needy child inside of us, so that none of our appetites exceed in strength the control of our reason.
That, then, is my summary of what Aristotle has to say about temperance.
For me, these sections were a bit of a yawn.
With all of the gluttony and unrelenting shallow commercial sexual titillation in America today, you’d think that there would be something in these sections that would jump out as insightful and valuable and applicable to our place and time.
But in all, I just thought these sections were dry and not particularly useful.
