According to Aristotle, we have the virtues neither by nor contrary to (our) nature; we are
fitted by (our) nature to receive them. If we had the virtues ‘by nature’ we would be born
good, and no moral education of our children would be necessary. We know we are not
like that and no philosopher, as far as I know, has ever maintained that we are. If we had
the virtues contrary to nature, then those of us who were at least fairly virtuous - honest,
just, generous, not hell-bent on seizing every passing pleasure come what may - would
find ourselves in constant conflict, as our natural inclinations to lie and deceive, to do
other people down, to grab everything we wanted and in general not to be at all concerned
about anyone except ourselves would always fight against what our moral education had
taught us we should do.
Now this view, or something like it, does have its proponents. Although Aristotle gets his
picture of our being able to bring our emotions and desires into complete harmony with
our reason from Plato, Plato also sometimes expresses the other view. There are passages
in him where he depicts the human psyche as a battleground between our animal passions
or emotions - particularly our passion for physical pleasure - and our reason. Our
emotions, for Plato on this picture, are there to be restrained and conquered by reason and, of course, there is, thereby, always a danger that they will break out again. This
aspect of Plato’s thought influenced early Christianity - it’s very clear in St Augustine with some unfortunate results, and persists to our day. You can see it in Freud, who is in
fact very Platonic, - Peter quoted him (paraphrased him?) as saying ‘objectivity and
unselfishness are not natural to human beings.’ It is also common in contemporary
economic theory. Economists, standardly, take it as an obvious premise that human
beings are, by nature, entirely self-interested, out for No.1.
But this view is straightforwardly, objectively, scientifically false.
Given that Aristotle was Plato’s pupil, and thereby near contemporary, the two of them
inevitably have a great deal in common. But Aristotle differed markedly from Plato in
being passionately interested in science, particularly in (as we would now say) the
biological sciences. And, I believe myself, it was this interest that lead to the much more
plausible view about human nature that he holds.
Human beings are rational animals - that is a premise that he and Plato share. But
Aristotle, given his interest in the biological sciences, was acutely aware of the fact that
we are rational social animals. We are not like cheetahs or polar bears, which are solitary
animals. (Polar bears lead horrid lives, speaking anthropocentrically.) We are like bees
and elephants and wolves. (Wolves, notwithstanding their reputation, are particularly nice
animals, prepared, as we know from the few fascinating cases of ‘wolf-children’, to
nurture the young of other species with tender care - and patience presumably, given how
much longer it takes us to get going.) And when you look at the way in which the other
social animals go on, you see clearly, as a straightforward matter of scientific fact, (given
that ethology certainly counts as a science) that the other social animals are not entirely
self-interested, but, by nature, co-operative, and, in their own way, ‘sharing and caring.’
They are thus by nature. We, as was already granted, are not - but, Aristotle’s thought is,
the nature we are born with, as rational social animals, is all set up, or fitted, to receive
those character traits - the virtues - that are needed for us to live well as human beings,
and thereby, as social animals who live together, co-operating and caring for each other.
Because the nature we are born with is, so to speak, just waiting to receive the virtues,
when they are inculcated in us, and we develop them properly, they fit us like a glove.
They suit us, we flourish when we have them, living in harmony both with each other and
with our emotions, rather than being in the Platonic/Freudian state of conflict or
suppression.
It is instructive to compare Aristotle’s remark about the virtues with the ability to
understand language. We are not born understanding language; we do not emerge from
other mother’s womb saying ‘gosh Mum, it was hot in there.’ But nor is it contrary to our
nature. If anything is natural to human beings, language is. We are fitted by nature to
receive it. And the analogy carries a further message. It is, I gather, sadly true, that if
human children do not have language inculcated fairly early in their lives, it becomes
quite impossible to teach it. Of the wolf-children I mentioned before, it is, I believe, well
established, that those who were brought back into human society before something like
nine could still be taught a language, but those who were eleven or twelve just could not.
And thereby their lives are ruined; they can never be flourishing human beings, who live
well, as human beings.
The message with respect to moral education is obvious. It may be that it is never too late
to acquire the virtues, but the chances are high that, if their inculcation does not begin
early, it will simply be too late for them to be inculcated at all, or for their observance to
make their recipients flourish and enable them to live well as human beings.
You might well want to raise the question ‘But who is to decide which are the virtues?
How can we be sure, in our pluralist society, which character traits are the virtues and
which are the vices?’ Well, this is one of the great advantages, in my view, for teaching
the virtues in schools (as the ‘Virtues Project’ so successfully does – see
www.virtuesproject.com) rather than moral rules/principles or ‘These actions are right
these are wrong’ or even values or rights. The notable fact about the virtues is that they
are not subject to the same sort of cultural relativity that you find with respect to moral
rules, or particular judgements about right and wrong actions (such as ‘abortion is
right/wrong.’) or values. And Aristotle provides a striking example of this fact. There he
is, writing almost 2,500 years ago - and what, one might say, could be more culturally
alien than a society separated from ours by 2,500 years , and a slave-owning, sexist one at
that? - and yet, though he discusses a fair number of virtues, there is not one we would
not recognise now, given a reasonable reapplication of it to our form of life. He discusses,
for instance, courage, justice, generosity, moral wisdom, friendship, and ‘temperance’.
(This sounds odd to a modern ear, but it basically means giving the physical pleasures of
food drink and sex their due weight. There is nothing wrong with desiring physical
pleasure - we are animals after all; we fall into the vices of imprudence, greed, selfindulgence and licentiousness only when we desire it too much and think that having it is
more important than it is)
He also discusses a virtue that did not have a name in ancient Greek and, oddly enough,
still has not acquired one, though it is instantly recognisable as a very important virtue.
The word for it in ancient Greek we translate, accurately enough, as ‘patience’, but, as
Aristotle says of his Greek word, this errs towards the side of not getting angry enough
when you should, whereas the virtue he is trying to name involves being rightly oriented
to the emotion of anger, so that you do get angry sometimes, but are angered only by the
right things, such as injustice or cruelty to others (not by wrong things, such as not getting
your own way) and to the right extent, and act accordingly. As soon as we notice how
much literally murderous ‘road rage’, how much violence and how much brutality to
children springs from the corresponding vice, we see how essential this virtue is.
He also discusses one that sounds initially strange but which I think we can recognise
once we see what it would be doing in the (tiny) city of Aristotle’s Athens. It is
megalopsuchia, literally ‘greatness of soul’; it supposedly crowns the other virtues and
consists of having all the other virtues AND recognising that you have them and that
thereby you are better than a lot of other people and worthy of great things. This doesn’t
sound very attractive, though it is obviously better than one of its corresponding vices,
namely vanity, where you think you have all the other virtues (and thereby better than
many others and are worthy of great things) but you don’t; you are over-estimating
yourself. Still, we might be tempted to see a cultural disagreement in Aristotle’s labelling
of the other corresponding vice as a vice. If you have micropsuchia, smallness of soul,
you have all the other virtues and are worthy of great things, but you don’t think you are –
you underestimate yourself. And we might say – ‘well, that’s rather nice isn’t it? Not a
vice or a defect at all. Better than being that puffed up megalopsuchia bloke.’
But the small-souled won’t play their proper role in Aristotle’s Athens. By hypothesis
they are good, they have all the other virtues, they are just the sort of people who ought to
be taking a leading role and thereby influencing their whole society – as, in Athens, it was
possible for just one man to do. And they won’t; they hang back saying ‘oh I’m not
worthy’ and let the vain (who don’t have the virtues but are sure they are the people who
should be the leaders) take over. Now that the good let the bad take over, not speaking out
or acting against them, is dangerous in any society; as Burke (?) rightly remarked, a great
deal of evil comes about simply because good men do nothing.
Viewed in this light, we can see that at least the smaller scale version of megalopsuchia
which Aristotle also discusses really is a virtue – something we need in order to live well
together. (In the smaller scale version you have the virtues to some degree, and recognise
that you do, and thereby are better than the people who don’t have them at all.) Now we
call it something like ‘ego-strength’ or assertiveness (in contexts where we emphasise
that assertiveness is quite different from aggressiveness). I have discovered, talking about
this virtue to various girls’ Year 12 and 13 groups, that it is one that girls particularly
need to recognise and develop as part of their training for citizenship. Things don’t go too
well when good women hang back and do nothing either, and they still tend to do so even
in this post-feminist age.
So even megalopsuchia turns out to be a virtue that it not alien to us, just like all the other
Aristotelian ones. Of course, we have added more - compassion, or charity, which came
into Western culture with Christianity, and had been long well established in Eastern
culture, is notably lacking in Aristotle’s list - but these are omissions, not cultural
disagreements. He does not advocate callousness as a virtue.
The Virtues Project has, drawing on a comprehensive range of past and existing cultures,
produced a long list of virtues. In fact, they have crafted a list of precisely 52, so you can
teach one a week in a year. And the really remarkable fact about this list is that it has been
successfully translated into just about every language currently spoken in the world, and
the words in the other languages are words for virtues. Every language, every culture,
recognises these character traits as the ways we ought to be. So much for cultural
relativism.
(Of course, occasionally a language doesn’t have a word for one of the 52 – just as the we
and the ancient Greeks haven’t a word for the virtue to do with feeling anger rightly – but
there is still no difficulty in getting its speakers to catch on to what the virtue in question
is, just as you all caught on to ‘patience’.)
In my view, the great advantage of teaching virtues rather than values is that the virtues’
vocabulary is so rich, and thereby pedagogically, so useful. Each virtue noun helps
children (and indeed us) to think, in a concrete detailed way, about how they should act
and feel and be, and to articulate it. Of course, virtues are values – they are things it is
worth pursuing and preserving and having, and the government list does include a few –
but when you think explicitly in terms of virtues rather than values, you can immediately
come up with a much longer list than the rather poverty-stricken one on offer. What
about, for instance – politeness, considerateness, courage, forgiveness, friendliness,
generosity, kindness, loyalty, obedience, and self- discipline? Don’t we want our children
to have those?
None of the virtue words is unfamiliar; quite young children can use the vocabulary
without difficulty and encouraging them to do so teaches them to look for, identify and
respond to, what is morally salient in their own actions and reactions and those of others.
As they get older, one can start exploring some of the slightly less obvious applications of
the terms. Boys tend to think of ‘courageous’ or ‘brave’ as applying to a rather limited
macho set of examples and it is part of their moral education to show them other cases of
courage. Older still, and they can try exploring dilemmas that really do call for nuanced
judgement.
Here is an illustrative example. I have, let us suppose an MA student who, having just
scraped through their MA, comes to see me about enrolling to do a PhD in philosophy. I
know him and his work well; I know he is passionately devoted to philosophy, longs to be
‘a philosopher’, has been setting his heart on it for years. I also know that he is
philosophically weak, that his MA thesis required a great deal of input from me, was the
best he could do, and was still pretty poor. If I tell him he is not up to doing a PhD, as I
know he is not, he will be heartbroken. Do I tell him, and if so why? Well (this of course
is just my judgement), I say ‘Yes, I have to, because it would be dishonest and
irresponsible of me not to.’ I would say further, that academics do their students no
kindness in not telling them this kind of truth – this is not a conflict between the
requirements of honesty and responsibility on the one hand and kindness on the other.
But that is not to say I have to tell him the truth in other circumstances. If he were not my
student but someone else’s, I would not have the same sort of responsibility to him; it is
his supervisor’s responsibility rather than mine to reveal this unpalatable truth to him. If
he asks for my opinion, I won’t lie, because that would be dishonest, and I have a
responsibility to the fellow members of the Dept. and indeed the profession to maintain
standards, but I may well just fob him off and tell him he should talk to them. (What if he
insists? And if he does not ask me for my opinion, but tells me only that he is enrolling
to do a PhD at some other institution, do I say anything against it? Well here, I think, I
may be allowed to just smile and say ‘Good luck’.
There are richer, albeit related, discussions to have about when, if ever, doctors can lie to
their patients, and when they can, without lying, refrain from revealing the truth, and
related ones about truthfulness between close friends. Such discussions, leading to a
heightened awareness of the complexity of the moral world, and an increased sensitivity
to the sorts of considerations that one might have to take into account seem to me to be
infinitely more educational, morally speaking, than encouraging teenagers to air their
views (well, as Peter noted, media-formed or their parents’ views rather than theirs) about
the war in Iraq, or what they would do to end global poverty or what they think about GM
crops. If the little list the government has provided can be used as a starting-point for
developing this kind of detailed discussion of the virtues – and, with a little ingenuity, I
think it can- it would be a great thing.