Some Notes on Aristotle’s Moral Theory
Short Biography
Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Stagira in 384 BCE.
He was taught by his father, but he was orphaned at the age of ten, at which point his uncle took
over his education. At the age of 18 he went to the Academy, the school founded by Plato, and
became one of Plato’s favorite students. (Aristotle’s philosophy is often contrasted with Plato’s:
unlike Plato, he was much more interested in investigating the actual natural world than he was
in engaging in a priori reflection about such abstract things as “The Forms” which were Plato’s
main concern.) Later in life, Aristotle became the private tutor of Alexander the Great. Around
335 BCE Aristotle founded his own philosophical school, known as the Lyceum. The
philosophers he trained there were sometimes called the peripatetics; many people speculate that
they were called this because Aristotle would discuss philosophical questions while walking
around the grounds of the Lyceum. Aristotle wrote most of his works in the latter part of his life,
while teaching at the Lyceum. His most important work in ethics is his Nicomachean Ethics.
[Don’t study or memorize any of this biographical stuff.]
Aristotle’s Moral Theory
Unlike Kant and the Utilitarians we have, up until this point, been studying, for Aristotle, the
central/primary ethical question is neither “what ought I to do?” or “how ought I to behave?”,
but, rather, “what type of person ought I to be?”. This fact makes Aristotle’s moral theory as
different, arguably, from both Kantians and Utilitarians as they are from each other.
Aristotle begins his discussion with an inquiry into what human good is. He notes straightaway
that everyone agrees that happiness is the human good, but he says people disagree about what
happiness consists in. Some think that happiness is pleasure, others think it is honor, and yet
others think it is virtue. Aristotle disagrees with all of these views. He rejects out of hand the
view that being happy is a matter of having pleasure. He dismisses the idea that being happy is a
matter of being honored because being happy, we think, is an intrinsic state, whereas being
honored is extrinsic (i.e., whether you are honored depends on what other people think of you,
whereas being happy, we think, doesn’t depend on facts about other people). And he also thinks
that being happy isn’t just a matter of having virtue because, he notes, being virtuous is
consistent with being completely inactive. (Aristotle also considers and rejects Plato’s theory of
happiness.) Finally, Aristotle settles on the view that: “happiness is an activity of soul in
accordance with perfect virtue”. But he immediately qualifies this by saying:
But we must add ‘in a complete life’. For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does
one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.
This leads us to Aristotle’s theory of the good:
Aristotelian Theory of Value: Lives are the kinds of things that can be good or bad and
a life is good (bad) to the degree that it is filled with virtuous (vicious) activity performed
virtuously (viciously).
In Aristotle’s view the human soul (and by ‘soul’ he did not mean the kind of incorporeal thing
that many people mean by ‘soul’; rather, for Aristotle, the soul is just the animating force of a
living being) is divided into three parts:
1. vegetative part
- responsible for growth, digestion, breathing, and all other involuntary
bodily activities
2. appetitive part
- responsible for desires, motivations, passions, emotions, etc.
3. rational part
- responsible for reasoning and all our other intellectual faculties
The first two parts constitute what Aristotle called “the irrational part of the soul” whereas the
last part constituted, obviously, “the rational part of the soul”. The excellences of the vegetative
part of the soul are not particularly human (because we share them with other non-human living
things) and thus are not relevant to Aristotle’s inquiry.
Aristotle is concerned with the excellences of the appetitive and the rational parts of the soul;
these he calls virtues. Excellences of the appetitive part of the soul he calls moral virtues and
excellences of the rational part of the soul he calls intellectual virtues. One crucial difference
between these types of virtue is that, according to Aristotle, whereas intellectual virtue can be
taught, moral virtue cannot. Rather, moral virtue can only be acquired via habit. Moral virtue
cannot be taught, according to Aristotle, because he thinks that there simply aren’t any general
moral principles that one can use to apply in any situation in which one might find oneself to
figure out what to do.
[We won’t focus on the intellectual virtues. Our main focus is on the moral virtues.]
Another crucial point about the moral virtues for Aristotle is that they are not innate; no one is
born with any of the moral virtues. He says:
From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature…. Neither
by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by
nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.
So, for Aristotle, though no one is born with any of the virtues, we are all born with a capacity to
acquire the virtues, and we acquire the virtues by habit.
But how, exactly, do we acquire the virtues, then? For Aristotle, we get the virtues by exercising
them. Huh? What can that mean? Here is Aristotle’s point. To acquire a virtue, you need to act in
those ways you would act if you had the virtue. Then after a while, after habitual performance of
these kinds of acts, over time you will develop the virtue. Here is a revealing passage:
Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the
temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does those that is just and temperate,
but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then,
that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the
temperate man; without doing these, no one would have even a prospect of becoming
good.
So, here, I take it, is the picture. We are all born not virtuous (not vicious either). If we habitually
perform virtuous acts (how you might ask? By imitating those who we know are virtuous, acting
in the ways they would act in the situations we find ourselves in), then over time we will acquire
the virtues ourselves. (How and when does this acquisition take place? Aristotle doesn’t say.) So
before we acquire the virtues, we perform virtuous acts (by imitating those acts of the virtuous
people), but before we acquire the virtues ourselves, our performances of those acts are not
virtuous performances of those acts. So before we acquire the virtues, if we imitate virtuous
people, we perform virtuous acts, but we don’t perform those virtuous acts virtuously. It is only
once we acquire the virtues (the particular virtuous character traits) that we can perform virtuous
acts virtuously.
An action is a virtuous act if and only if it is of a type that a virtuous person would
perform in that situation
An action is a virtuous action performed virtuously if and only if it is
(1) a virtuous act, and
(2) it is performed from the stable virtuous character trait itself.
But what, you might ask, are the moral virtues? Well, Aristotle spends a lot of the Nicomachean
Ethics discussing a lot of the different individual moral virtues. Here is a list of some of the
virtues: Courage, Temperance, Liberality, Patience, Wittiness, Friendliness.
Now we come to a crucial Aristotelian doctrine. For Aristotle, the virtues are character traits that
always are situated in a middle ground between two vices (one of excess, and the other of
deficiency). This is his famous Doctrine of the Mean. He illustrates this doctrine with an
analogy:
[E]xercise either excessive or defective destroys strength, and similarly drink or food
which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is
proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case
of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For the man who flies from and fears
everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the
man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly,
the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent,
while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible;
temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the
mean.”
Here is my best formulation of this famous doctrine:
The Doctrine of the Mean: The virtues are those character traits that lie at the mean
along a continuum of character traits of a certain type, at the opposite ends of which lie
the corresponding vices of excess and deficiency, respectively.
So, for example, here is how Aristotle would see the above-mentioned virtues situated in
between their corresponding vices:
Vice of Deficiency
Cowardice
Insensibility
Illiberality
Lack of Spirit
Boorishness
Cantankerousness
Virtue
Courage
Temperance
Liberality
Patience
Wittiness
Friendliness
Vice of Excess
Rashness
Licentiousness
Prodigality
Irascibility
Buffoonery
Obsequiousness
[You do not need to memorize these virtues. Just understand the Doctrine of the Mean and be
familiar with one or two virtues (the ones closer to the top, preferably) and how they relate to
their corresponding vices.]
Note: The Doctrine of the Mean is not the view that in any situation what you should do is the
“middle of the road” action. Rather, it is a thesis about the relation of the virtues and their
corresponding vices.
So, to return to Aristotle’s theory of the good, to live a good life, according to Aristotle, one must
live a life filled with the performance of actions done from the kinds of character traits listed
above under the “virtue” column.
But what about Aristotle’s Criterion of Morally Permissible Action? Well, he doesn’t really offer
one explicitly. But I think the best account of it is as follows:
Aristotelian Criterion of Morally Permissible Action: An action is permissible in a
certain situation if and only if it is the kind of action a virtuous person would perform in
that situation.
This leads us, finally, to one of Aristotle’s most controversial doctrine: the unity of the virtues:
The Unity of the Virtues Thesis: one cannot fully have one of the virtues unless one
also fully had all of the other virtues as well.
This is an extremely controversial thesis for it seems rather unintuitive. We can, it seems,
imagine people who fully possess one of the virtues but utterly lack others. For instance, it seems
possible that there be someone who is perfectly courageous but who is not temperate at all. For
various complicated/sophisticated reasons, however, Aristotle thinks that the Unity of the Virtues
Thesis is true.