Aristotle

2 Pages 388 Words

How does Aristotle’s list of virtues and vices differ from our modern conceptions of vice and virtue?

Aristotle’s claim that virtue can be learned only through constant practice implies that there are no set rules we can learn and then obey. Instead, virtue consists of learning through experience what is the mean path, relative to ourselves, between the vices we may be liable to stumble into.



For Aristotle, virtue is an all-or-nothing affair. We cannot pick and choose our virtues: we cannot decide that we will be courageous and temperate but choose not to be magnificent. Nor can we call people properly virtuous if they fail to exhibit all of the virtues.
Though Aristotle lists a number of virtues, he sees them all as coming from the same source. A virtuous person is someone who is naturally disposed to exhibit all the virtues, and a naturally virtuous disposition exhibits all the virtues equally.
Our word ethics descends from the Greek word ethos, which means more properly “character.” Aristotle’s concern in the Ethics, then, is what constitutes a good character. All the virtues spring from a unified character, so no good person can exhibit some virtues without exhibiting them all.

One of the most famous aspects of the Ethics is Aristotle’s doctrine that virtue exists as a mean state between the vicious extremes of excess and deficiency. For example, the virtuous mean of courage stands between the vices of rashness and cowardice, which represent excess and deficiency respectively.

So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, by that which a prudent man would use to determine it.
This quotation from Book II, Chapter 6, gives us a clear expression of Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean: virtue is a mean disposition between the vicious extremes of excess and deficiency. In calling virtue a “purposive” disposition, Aristotle means that...