The Timpson Lyceum · History of Philosophy (2024)

Aristotle's Ethics – Lecture 28 (History of Philosophy)

Overview

Aristotle's ethics — set out in the Nicomachean Ethics — asks a single practical question: what is the good life for a human being, and how is it achieved? The answer grows directly out of Aristotle's metaphysics and psychology. Because a thing's moral vocation is to fully actualize its own nature, and because a human's defining nature is rationality, the human good must be an activity that expresses reason well. Every art, inquiry, and action aims at some good; these goods are ordered as means to ends, and the whole structure terminates in one final end desired for its own sake and never as a means to anything else. That end is eudaimonia — happiness, better rendered as flourishing.

Ethics is, for Aristotle, the opening movement of a larger project that culminates in the Politics: it is grander for a whole city to achieve the good than for a single person to. Its subject matter admits only of probable premises, so it yields probable conclusions — the mark of an educated person is to demand only as much exactness as the subject allows. Against Plato, Aristotle rejects a single transcendent Form of the Good; the good relevant to ethics is the good of human life, discovered by attending to the actual facts of human nature. From the function argument he derives that happiness is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and from the analysis of virtue he arrives at his most famous doctrine — the mean.

Key Concepts

• Eudaimonia (happiness / flourishing) — The ultimate end at which all human action aims, desired for its own sake and never as a means. Not momentary contentment or satisfied appetite (the psychologist's sense), but a complete, well-lived life. "One swallow does not make a spring": a few good days do not constitute a flourishing life, and one can only be called happy in view of a whole life.
• The hierarchy of ends — Arts and their ends nest: bridle-making serves horsemanship, horsemanship serves generalship, all serve the master art of politics. The end of a superior art is more choiceworthy than that of its subordinates, so the chief human good is the end of the most authoritative art.
• The function (ergon) argument — A thing's good lies in performing its characteristic function well. The function peculiar to humans is not mere life (shared with plants) or perception (shared with animals) but activity of the soul in accordance with reason. Hence the human good is rational activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete.
• Divisions of the soul — Vegetative (nutrition, growth — no share in virtue), appetitive/sensitive (desires and feelings — obeys reason in the virtuous person), and rational (reasons). Only the latter two bear on virtue.
• Two kinds of virtue — Moral virtues (of the appetitive part) come about by habituation — ēthikē from ethos, "habit"; intellectual virtues (of the rational part) come mainly by teaching and require experience and time.
• Virtue as a mean (the doctrine of the mean) — Each moral virtue is an intermediate state between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency, in feelings and actions. Courage lies between cowardice (deficiency of confidence, excess of fear) and rashness (excess of confidence); temperance between self-indulgence and insensibility; liberality between prodigality and meanness.
• The mean "relative to us" — Not the arithmetic midpoint of a quantity, but the right amount for this agent in these circumstances — to feel and act "at the right times, toward the right objects, toward the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way."
• Every virtue is a mean, but not every mean is a virtue — Some actions (adultery, theft, murder) are bad in themselves and admit no mean; there is no "right amount" of them. Seeking a mean of them would be seeking a mean of an excess.
• Habituation and moral education — We become just by doing just acts, brave by doing brave acts. The virtuous person eventually takes pleasure in virtuous action; hence the young should be trained from the start to delight in what they ought and be pained by what they ought not.
• External goods — Flourishing needs equipment: some wealth, friends, health, freedom. Noble action is difficult or impossible without resources, so Aristotle (against a purely internal Stoic or Socratic view) holds these to be genuine goods, though not the good itself.
• Passions, faculties, states of character — We are praised or blamed not for our passions (e.g. feeling anger) or capacities to feel them, but for our states of character — our settled dispositions toward those passions. Virtue is therefore a state of character.
• The three lives — The life of enjoyment (pleasure), the political life (honor — though the best honor-seekers use honor as a gauge of their own virtue), and the life of contemplation, which Aristotle ultimately ranks highest.
• Against Plato's Form of the Good — "Good" is said in as many ways as being (across all the categories), so there is no single Form common to them all; and even were there, the good sought in ethics is the attainable human good, not a separate universal.

Worked Example

Modeling a virtue as the mean between two vices. Consider a feeling or action $F$ — say the confidence/fear involved in facing danger. Aristotle's claim is that virtue with respect to $F$ is an intermediate, but not an arithmetic one.

1. Lay $F$ out on a spectrum from too little to too much. For confidence in danger:

$\text{cowardice} \;\longleftarrow\; \text{(too little)} \qquad \boxed{\text{COURAGE}} \qquad \text{(too much)} \;\longrightarrow\; \text{rashness}$

1. Name the two vices. The deficiency is cowardice (excess of fear, deficiency of confidence); the excess is rashness (deficiency of fear, excess of confidence). The virtue courage is the intermediate state $M$.

2. Contrast with the arithmetic mean. If a quantity ran from $a$ (deficiency) to $b$ (excess), the arithmetic midpoint would be

$M_{\text{arith}} = \frac{a+b}{2},$

the same single number for everyone. Aristotle explicitly rejects this as the model for virtue.

1. His illustration: if $10$ units of food is too much and $2$ too little, the trainer does not prescribe $\frac{10+2}{2}=6$ to every athlete. For the champion wrestler $6$ may still be too little; for the beginner it may be too much. The right amount is the mean relative to us, $M_{\text{rel}}$, which depends on the agent and situation:

$M_{\text{rel}} = f(\text{agent},\ \text{circumstances}) \neq \frac{a+b}{2} \quad \text{in general.}$

1. Make the target precise. Acting well is hitting a single point in a many-dimensional space of conditions — feeling $F$

$\text{at the right } \textit{time},\ \text{toward the right } \textit{object},\ \text{the right } \textit{person},\ \text{the right } \textit{motive},\ \text{the right } \textit{way}.$

There are many ways to miss and only one way to hit, "for men are good in but one way, but bad in many."

1. Note the asymmetry. The mean need not sit halfway between the vices; one extreme is usually more opposed to the virtue than the other. Rashness resembles courage more than cowardice does, so in practice the harder pull to resist is often cowardice — the virtue lies toward the more dangerous extreme, not at the geometric center.

2. Therefore virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, determined by reason — as the person of practical wisdom would determine it. It is a mean between two vices, yet, judged by its excellence, an extreme: at the peak of what is right and best. $\blacksquare$

Summary

• The human good is eudaimonia — flourishing — the one end sought always for its own sake, assessed over a complete life, not by fleeting pleasure.
• The function argument identifies happiness as activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, since rational activity is the work peculiar to humans.
• Moral virtues are acquired by habituation (we become just by doing just acts); intellectual virtues by teaching and experience.
• The doctrine of the mean holds each moral virtue to be an intermediate — relative to us, not an arithmetic midpoint — between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess; some acts are simply bad and admit no mean.
• Flourishing also requires external goods as equipment for virtuous action, and Aristotle's ethics opens directly onto his politics, since the good is fuller when a whole community attains it.