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Aristotle assumes that all our actions aim at some end or good, that our ends form a hierarchy, and that there is one ultimate end. The highest good is that at which all actions aim; it must be an end-in-itself, self-sufficient, and attainable. God is the last end of man and, indeed, of all other things. If we can believe the ancient reports, the Greek sage Solon remarked that we ought to count nobody happy until he has died.
More explicitly, an action counts as virtuous, according to Aristotle, when one holds oneself in a stable equilibrium of the soul, in order to choose the action knowingly and for its own sake.
This stable equilibrium of the soul is what constitutes character. Perception and reality does not remain after a person dies, so even happiness does not remain. After death the material body is dissolved in matter and the consciousness disappears in oblivion.
The moral virtues are thought to include traits such as courage, justice, honesty, compassion, temperance, and kindness. Intellectual virtues are thought to include traits such as open-mindedness, intellectual rigour, intellectual humility, and inquisitiveness. They enable us to pursue the ideals we have adopted.
Honesty, courage, compassion, generosity, fidelity, integrity, fairness, self-control, and prudence are all examples of virtues. Paul who placed love as the greatest of them all. It is only by behaving in the right way that we train ourselves to be virtuous. Aristotle defines moral virtue as a disposition to behave in the right manner and as a mean between extremes of deficiency and excess, which are vices.
Virtue is a matter of having the appropriate attitude toward pain and pleasure. Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
What is the difference, according to Aristotle, between performing virtuous actions and being a virtuous person? For instance, the virtue of courage consists of the disposition to feel neither too much nor too little fear, but rather some amount in between. Aristotle proposes three criteria to distinguish virtuous people from people who behave in the right way by accident: first, virtuous people know they are behaving in the right way; second, they choose to behave in the right way for the sake of being virtuous; and third, their behavior manifests itself as part of a ….
Typical virtues include courage, temperance, justice, prudence, fortitude, liberality, and truthfulness. Vices, by contrast, are negative character traits that we develop in response to the same emotions and urges.
Typical vices include cowardice, insensibility, injustice, and vanity. Being virtuous is being a well-functioning human being. Everyone has an interest in that. If Aristotle is right, then everyone would have an interest in doing the right thing since that would tend to make us virtuous. Moreover, doing the right thing because one has a virtuous character is often more praiseworthy than acting out of a sense of duty see Michael Stocker example, as described in EMP on p.
Some other theories e. Difficulties for VAT:. Suppose a person fights for an evil cause, and does so very courageously take your pick of causes: anti-American terrorism, racism, etc. Is this an absurd result? Perhaps not. First, notice that if someone is fighting for an evil cause, it is likely that they are vicious in some respects. For example, suppose that a person commits atrocities because he was ordered to do so by his superiors. The tendency to follow orders, like other kinds of action, allows of a defect, mean, and excess.
So, perhaps the courageous villain is a bad person on account of his slavishness and other vices, but really is courageous. His courage makes him worse in that it makes him a more effective villain, but it is still a virtue. If a suicide bomber believes that he will go straight to heaven after blowing himself up, then he does not believe that he is in any real danger.
Thus, we can deny that he is courageous because he is not facing what he believes to be danger. See EMP p. There is no logical requirement that acting virtuously with regard to one character trait means that one is not acting viciously with regard to another; virtue may involve trade-offs.
However, when virtue theory is considered as a theory of right action VAT , the possibility of conflicting virtues is a definitely a problem. But if there is no answer to the question of whether the action is virtuous because of conflict then there is no answer to the question of whether it is right. One possible solution is to rank the virtues. But on what basis could they be ranked? Both of these disadvantages stem from the fact that VAT is incomplete; it leaves many ethical questions unanswered.
To make it complete, it would have to be supplemented. But any such supplementation would introduce elements from a different moral theory. Hence, it seems that we will need to look at some other moral theories…. Souls According to Aristotle All living things have souls, where a soul is simply whatever it is that makes the difference between life and death.
Therefore, the highest good for man must include the excellent functioning of the rational faculties This will involve the rational faculties being in control of the appetitive part of the soul. Pleasure and happiness According to Aristotle, pleasure is not the aim of every human action, because not every pleasure is good.
An argument: 1. The virtues therefore are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature; nature gives us the capacity to receive them, and this capacity is brought to maturity by habit. Leave it to Aristotle, the great Definer, to pithily encapsulate a concept as huge as Virtue. He makes it simple:. To be virtuous, be in the habit of choosing the mean. Nicomachean Ethics 2. Virtue seems elusive, if it can be considered a reality, at all.
The Mean Not departing from the conventional use of the term, Aristotle says that the mean is the relative midway point between two extremes of action or emotion. Righteous indignation is the mean between envy and malicious gladness.
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