Aristotle → Nicomachean Ethics → Book Ⅱ (virtue)

In the opening section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle opens an inquiry into virtue.

He ended the previous book by preparing the way for this inquiry and noting that there are both conscious virtues and more subconscious ones, like tolerance, that seem more a matter of character than of deliberation.

Aristotle asserts that both varieties of virtue are learned skills. You aren’t born virtuous, but become that way through instruction (in the case of conscious, intellectual, deliberate virtues) and training (in the case of more subconscious, “moral” virtues). As you practice virtue, you become more virtuous; virtue is a skill that is acquired by instruction and practice.

This links into politics because wise legislation and good states have the purpose of educating their citizens in good behavior and thereby training them in the virtues.

After reading this, I spent some time brainstorming on how one becomes more virtuous. Here’s my own program; we’ll see how well it harmonizes with Aristotle’s:

1. Learn to identify virtuous behavior & motives. What sort of behavior do you admire? If you were looking at your life as though it were a story, what would you do if you were meant to be the hero?
2. Value virtuous behavior. Care about it and make it rank highly in your judgments. Be willing to sacrifice less-important things for it.
3. Learn to observe yourself dispassionately and honestly, and to expect your inner devil to offer you flattering lies to explain away your vices. Be skeptical of such stories.
4. Cultivate investigative introspection as a way of weeding out the roots of your vices and of defending yourself against self-deception.
5. Encourage courage and persistence in changing your bad habits for good ones.

In the second section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle first reiterates that his project is not to formulate a precise definition of virtue so much as to come up with a practical guide to practicing a virtuous life.

In general, he feels, virtues are characterized by their “just enoughness” — as a mean between two opposing extremes of too-much and too-little. For example, between the extremes of rashness and cowardice is the virtue of courage.

Like some philosophical Goldilocks, Aristotle samples various human virtues and finds them to be somewhere on a continuum between too much and too little. I can’t help but feel that there’s not much meat here. It seems to depend a little too much on linguistic conventions of how we describe various things. Do we really learn anything about virtue from this that we don’t already know just by being competent users of our language?

We can describe courage on a continuum of sensitivity to fear, where at one extreme you’re too susceptible to fear, and at the other end you’re too insensible to it. But with other virtues, like health and beauty and wisdom, the endpoint of the continuum — the extreme — is by definition the perfection of the virtue. Can you be too healthy? too beautiful? too wise?

I think Aristotle is overgeneralizing from his initial instinct to look for just-rightnesses rather than for extreme ideals, which is probably a reaction to the instincts of the idealists he’s opposing, which were probably to try to maximize certain characteristics that partook in “The Good.”

In the third section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle puts some flesh on the bones of the assertion he made in book one that a virtuous person is a person who takes pleasure in acting virtuously.

Virtue doesn’t consist in doing the right thing even though it is unpleasant to do so, but in taking a pleasure in virtue that outweighs any incidental unpleasantness of any particular virtuous act.

So for instance, although a courageous person is pained by fright in a frightful situation, he takes pleasure from his bravery in standing his ground and rising to the occasion, and this pleasure outweighs the pain. For a coward, the pain of fear outweighs the pleasure of bravery.

Aristotle believes that it is important to get proper education and training from a young age in order “both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.” An example of this sort of training is punishment, which associates vice with pain in a Pavlovian way.

Pleasure and pain are primary motivators, and so investigating them is very important to the ethicist: “it is by reason of pleasures and pains that men become bad, by pursuing and avoiding these — either the pleasures and pains they ought not, or when they ought not, or as they ought not, or by going wrong in one of the other similar ways that may be distinguished.”

Aside from pleasurable/painful, two other motivators are noble/base and advantageous/injurious. But pleasure/pain is the important one, since noble & advantageous things are typically also pleasurable, and base & injurious things are typically also painful.

To sum up, “the whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good, he who uses them badly bad.”

In the fourth section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes acting virtuously from merely doing virtuous acts.

He says that it’s not enough to just behave virtuously by imitation or by following a rulebook, you also have to incubate a particular mental state:

1. You must know what you’re doing.
2. You must choose your acts deliberately.
3. You must be acting based on “a firm and unchangeable character” (other translations include: “fixedness and stability”, “a fixed and unchangeable principle”, “the expression of a formed and stable character”, “a fixed and unalterable habit of mind”, and “a settled and immutable moral state”)

Isn’t Aristotle undermining himself here? He’s trying to come up with a way of molding people into virtuous people, and to do this by training them by practice in virtuous action, but at the same time he says that in order to practice virtue you have to base your actions on a “firm and unchangeable character.” Sounds like a hard process to bootstrap.

Maybe what he’s saying is that there is an art of virtuous action, which you can practice on your way to becoming a virtuous person, and that eventually by so doing you will develop the ability to choose virtuous acts deliberately based on your newly-molded fixed and stable character.

Aristotle ends this section with a good jab at theoretical ethicists who are more concerned with elucidating a philosophy of right and wrong than in becoming virtuous through practice.

In the fifth section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that there are three sorts of things “in the soul” (where virtue is found):

passions

things like appetite, anger, fear, and so forth (some other translations call these “emotions” and “feelings”)

faculties

the ability to feel the various passions (some other translations call these “capacities”, “capabilities”, and “powers”)

characteristics

our attitudes and reactions toward the passions (some other translations call these “habits”, “trained faculties”, “states”, and “moral states”)

Virtue, according to Aristotle, is in the third category. I don’t see where he’s going with this, unless it is simply to suggest that things in the third category are more malleable and under our control.

St. George Stock’s interesting paraphrase of the Nicomachean Ethics (Lectures in the Lyceum: or, Aristotle’s Ethics for English Readers, 1897) goes into this in more detail and relates Aristotle’s categorization of virtue here to his thinking about the “Dialectic” which he gives in another work. Maybe if I knew more about that, this section would make more sense to me.

Illustration showing the categories of things in the soul, from St. George Stock’s paraphrase (1897)

In the sixth section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle reminds his audience that virtues occupy a “just-enough” sweet spot between the vices of excess & deficit, and that in the same way that there’s only one place to hit the bullseye and many places to miss it, virtues are small and contained while vices are vast and easy to come by.

You may remember that a while back I expressed some doubts about Aristotle’s Goldilocksian theory of virtue, suggesting that it was too dependent on accidents of language and not very informative. In this section, Aristotle answers the criticism by acknowledging that some things we call vices are wrong in any amount (there is no improper deficit of the vice, or some ideal amount of the vice to have) and some things we call virtues are perfections (you can’t have too much of them).

He says that this is because our words for those vices are actually shorthand words for an excess or deficit of some trait — so for instance, “cowardice” is a vice, but it’s really shorthand for “a deficit of bravery” — and our words for those virtues are shorthand words for the golden mean itself — so for instance, you can’t be too “temperate” because the word itself defines someone who has found the mean between self-indulgence and asceticism.

You shouldn’t expect to find extremes of something which is implicitly a mean, nor a mean of something which is an extreme by definition.

This goes some way toward answering my objection, but I’m still not convinced. I can’t answer my original questions (“Can you be too healthy? too beautiful? too wise?”) using this logic without really stretching the concepts to the breaking point. Is “healthy” implicitly a mean between an invalid and, uh, a muscle-bound showpiece? Is “wise” really a mean between stupid and, uh, overintellectual? Is “beautiful” really a mean between ugly and, uh, saccharine-pretty? It seems more intuitive and less of a stretch just to think of those terms as representing extremes on dimensions in which there is no vice in aiming for the extreme, contra Aristotle’s rule.

In section seven, Aristotle gives some examples of how his “just-enough” rule applies to a variety of specific virtues. In some of these cases, one of the extremes is rare enough that there isn’t a word for it and it’s a little difficult to imagine. Some of his examples seem to be real stretches, but I can’t tell if this is just because of inevitable inexactitudes of translation. In any case, I get what he’s aiming at and wonder why he’s going on at such length about it.

Illustration showing some of Aristotle’s virtues and their associated vices of deficiency and excess, from D.P. Chase’s translation (1861)

Section eight is more refinement of the theory, but mostly stuff that to me seemed pretty obvious and hardly worth mentioning.

In the ninth and final section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that finding virtue’s sweet spot between the vicious extremes of excess and deficiency is more an art than a science.

He gives two helpful rules of thumb:

1. Err toward the extreme that is closest to the mean. For example, the extreme of rashness is closer to the mean of courage than the extreme of cowardice is. So if you’re not quite sure where in a range of possible actions the virtuous mean lies, you’re less likely to go wrong if you tend toward the rash end of that range than if you tend toward the cowardly end.
2. Err toward the extreme that is less pleasant. Your natural tendency will tend to pull you toward the more pleasant extreme, and this will help to correct for that.

So, to sum up book two:

• It takes instruction and practice to become virtuous.
• Virtues are characterized by their “just enoughness” between extremes of too-much and too-little.
• The way to be virtuous is to take pleasure in virtuous action and to be pained by vice.
• Virtue is not just in the action, but also in the mental state that accompanies it; behaving virtuously requires consciously chosen, deliberate action rooted in character.
• Discovering the golden mean isn’t an exact science, but there are some helpful rules of thumb.

Another theme that Aristotle hasn’t much developed yet but that he refers to from time to time is that of politics as the science of arranging society in such a way as to promote the virtues and discourage the vices. I’m curious as to where he’s going to go with that and whether it will leave room for a non-coercive strategy or whether it will necessarily rely on a coercive state to do this indoctrination and conditioning.