Led by Aristotle
About this course
The second module of the Ethics paper answers the question the first one forced: if the good life is activity in accordance with virtue, what is virtue, and how do we come to have it? Aristotle's reply is the founding statement of virtue ethics.
Character, he argues, is not something we are born with or simply know; it is a disposition built by habit — we become just by doing just acts, as we become builders by building. Virtue of character then has a shape: it lies in a mean between excess and deficiency — courage between cowardice and rashness, generosity between meanness and waste — but a mean relative to the person and the situation, not a fixed midpoint, and one fixed "as the person of practical wisdom would fix it." That practically wise person, the phronimos, turns out to be the real standard of right action, because — and this is Aristotle's deepest claim — there is no rule or formula that settles what to do in every case; ethical knowledge culminates in the trained perception of particulars, not in a principle. Along the way the module secures what makes us responsible (voluntary action and choice) and explains how we can know the good yet fail to do it (weakness of will).
The student leaves with a full theory of moral character and judgement — and with the question that drives the rest of the paper: is rightness a matter of character and perception, as Aristotle holds, or can it be captured in a single action-guiding principle, as Mill and Kant will claim? They read the Nicomachean Ethics, Books II–III, VI, and VII, directly.
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Led by Aristotle
The question
What is virtue, where does it come from, and how does it tell us what to do? Aristotle argues that virtue of character is a disposition built up by habit, structured as a mean between doing or feeling too much and too little — but a mean relative to us, not a sum, and fixed by the judgement of the person of practical wisdom rather than by any rule. He secures what makes our actions and characters our own (so that praise and blame are just), and confronts the old puzzle of how someone can know the better and still do the worse. Underlying it all is a claim the rest of the paper will test: that right action cannot be reduced to a formula, but is seen, in the particular case, by the trained perception of the good person.