Virtue
For Aristotle, moral virtues are an active disposition, an expectant readiness to take the middle road between two extremes in any given situation. The virtues allow one to maintain an equilibrium between the poles of deficiency and excess, both of which are vices. They are related to different types of pleasure and pain. For instance, when faced with physical pleasures, temperance allows one to avoid indulging too much (the excess) and never enjoying any of the finer things in life (the deficiency). In the face of fear and danger, the virtue of courage enables one to avoid cowardice (acting from an excess of fear) as well as rashness (acting from a deficiency of fear).
More broadly speaking, excellences and virtues perfect or complete what they are a virtue of. They develop certain kinds of natural abilities and allow something to perform its intended function well. Physical virtues train and tone the body’s natural capabilities. Intellectual virtues perfect the mind, bringing out the full range of its abilities. Moral virtues perfect one’s ‘appetites’ or feelings such that one can act well regardless of the situation and the affections it might elicit. The virtues aid in living a good life by developing and perfecting the different aspects of a person. The overall goal of the virtues is that they allow one to live the good life, which for Aristotle means a ‘happy’ or ‘flourishing’ life.
Just as with most things, one learns the virtues by practice, by consistently doing virtuous deeds: ‘Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it: people become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarly we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones’.[1] By continuing to act in virtuous ways, by avoiding giving in to too much pleasure or pain, or too little pleasure and pain, one develops these habits and dispositions to act the same way in the future. You are what you do. What you normally do and how you act day in and day out tells you what kind of person you are. Virtues are thus a matter of one’s overall character and the whole course of one’s actions in life.
- [1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000), pp. 1103a33-1103b3.
