Aristotle on Virtue

ARISTOTLE DEPARTED FROM PLATO'S thought in a number of ways, including in Plato's four-fold reductionism of virtue to the classic four: wisdom, courage or fortitude, temperance, and justice.  Although Plato had expanded upon Socrates' even more reductionist formula--virtue is equivalent to wisdom--Plato did not sufficiently capture the variety of virtue nor the essential balance that he believed virtue required.  Plato's virtue doctrine, like much of his doctrine, was too heady, to ideal.  Aristotle was much more empirical, practical in his doctrine of virtue.

In devising his view of virtue, Aristotle therefore withdrew from Plato's vantage point of looking at virtue from the perspective of it being a "power" of the soul.  Rather than look at the soul's powers to distinguish virtues, Aristotle thought that the issue could be better handled by focusing on the end of virtue, namely justice.  In Aristotle's view, ethics was less an ontological study than a practical study; accordingly, the goal of our activity was the focal point of analysis.

Famously, Aristotle developed his eudaemonistic ethic--and ethic based upon man's goal: happiness. This happiness of Aristotle might also be defined as flourishing, success.  It is an objective measure of success, and not mere emotional or subjective satisfaction, such as the modern notion of happiness.

In Aristotle's view, Socrates had over-intellectualized, over-theorized virtue.  Virtue was not principally an intellectual quality; rather, it was a practical quality.  Virtue should be seen as part of the art or craft of living well, and therefore it was a moral habit, not an intellectual habit which principally drove virtue in the realm of ethics.  Knowledge alone does not a virtue make; rather, virtues might be seen as moral habits, character traits with staying power that are acquired by repeated behavior in accord with some norm.  Virtue was sort of an inner well-worn path that led to moral excellence, happiness.

Aristotle analogized virtue to the senses.  Just like sight directs itself to color, and hearing to sound, so likewise does virtue lend itself to being understood by reference to its object.  This required a two-fold analysis:

For Aristotle, then, knowing a virtue depended on two things: (1) knowing its formal character, that is, attaining a middle point between the extremes of excess and defect, which are the two vices opposed to it, and (2) knowing this "mean" concretely, not abstractly, by limited each virtue to a precise area of moral life.

Houser, 14.  Aristotle's virtue ethics, therefore, famously revolved around the notion of a "golden mean" between two vices, the aurea mediocritas.

Aristotle's form of analysis--an amalgam of formal analysis and practical application--yielded a richer tapestry of virtues that the four-fold schema of Plato, and certainly more than the one-fold scheme of Socrates.  For Aristotle, the Platonic wisdom (sophia) expanded itself into wisdom understood theoretically (sophia), and understanding (nous), knowledge (episteme), productive craftsmanship (techne), and prudence (phronesis).  While Aristotle also adopted three of Plato's moral virtues into his scheme--courage (andreia), temperance (sophrosyne), and justice (dikaiosyne), these virtues were "transformed . . . into specific virtues by limiting the scope of each."  Houser, 14.

Aristotle

Courage or fortitude (andreia), which concerned itself with fear (phobia), was therefore the mean between rashness (thrasus) and cowardliness (deilos).  Temperance (sophrosyne) which concerned itself with pleasure (hedone) and pain (lupe), was the mean between profligacy (akolasia) and insensitivity (anaisthetos).

In Aristotle, the virtue of justice was more complex, as it recognized the broad expanse of justice, including justice in the city, which included the notions of distributive justice, legal justice, and retributive justice, and justice in the soul.

Aristotle also identified not other specific virtues in addition to these "Platonic three," interestingly finding them hidden within what Plato had banished into vice.

By combing and parsing through Plato's broad painting of human behavior as vice, including the timocracts, oligarchs, and democrats Plato painted as vicious, Aristotle found virtues unfairly portrayed as vices.  For example, in the timocrat's untoward love of honor, Aristotle found the virtues of proper ambition (a mean between being over-ambitious (philotimos) and lacking ambition (aphilotimos)  (when honors are small) and magnanimity (megalopsychia, a mean between vanity (chaunotes) and smallness of soul (mikropsychia) (when great honors are involved).

Whereas Plato saw love of money of the oligarchs as irredeemably vicious, Aristotle found virtues relating to the proper use of money, magnificence (megaloprepeia, a mean between tastelessness or vulgarity (apeirokalia or banausia) and paltriness or chinziness (mikroprepeia) (when large sums were involved, a virtue particularly of the wealthy) and liberality or generosity (eleutheriotes, a mean between prodigality or wastefulness (asotia) and meanness or stinginess (analeutheria) (when small sums were involved).

Likewise, in the democratic soul, Aristotle mined for virtues and found such virtues as shame (in the realm of desires), good temper (a virtue which controls emotions), and such social virtues such as truthfulness (aletheia, a mean between boastfullness, pretense, exaggeration (alazoneia) and self-deprecation, pretense in understatement (eironia), friendliness or gentleness (praotes, a mean between irascibility (orgilotes) and spritlessness (aorgesia), and wittiness or general pleasantness (a mean between obsegiousness (areskos) and flattery (kolax) and quarrelsomeness (dyseris) or surliness (dyskolos).

The great moderator of all these myriad virtues was prudence (sophrosyne).  Prudence for Aristotle was the virtue that concerned itself with good practical decision-making.  It was not so much a matter of the theoretical intellect, but a virtue of the practical intellect.  Prudence, therefore, was the monitor which allowed the entry into the golden mean.  "It is not possible to be good in the principal way," said Aristotle, "without prudence."  (Nic. Eth. 1144b30-32).

The rich tapestry of virtues in Aristotle's schema also led Aristotle to reject the Platonic "all or nothing" notion.  Plato thought that a person either was virtuous or was not.  For Aristotle, someone could be prudent in one area of his life, and yet imprudent in another.  There were therefore the vicious, the fully virtuous, and the gray area of someone with virtue in one area, vice in others, a gray area where most of us lived.

While Aristotle's contribution to virtue theory is massive, it did come at a cost.  As Houser explains it:

The way Aristotle treated the moral vision of Socrates had a cost: he sacrificed Plato's central insight that there are for virtues linked closely to human nature. It seems never to have occurred to him that in doing so he fell victim in the area of moral virtue to the same error he had attributed to Socrates and Plato in the area of intellectual virtue, namely, setting the standards for virtue too high. While he recognized moral acts and habits at work in everyday life, he reserved the term "virtue" for the outstanding excellence of the few.

Houser, 16.  Plato's "residue" of elitism remained.

Contra Consequentialismum: Happiness and Basic Goods

“HUMAN LIFE IS MULTIFACETED, and human appetites diverse, so too the good for man, or happiness, has many aspects." Oderberg, 40-41. Oderberg, like any eudaimonistic moralist worth his salt, focuses on man's happiness, his flourishing, which he defines as the "tendency of a thing towards some action or operation for the securing of some good." Oderberg, 41. It may be that these goods, and their combination, are well-nigh infinite. But morality is principally focused not on the myriad subordinate goods and their even more myriad combinations. "[T]he primary concern of moral theory is the most general distinguishable features of human activity that make up human flourishing . . . and there is no reason to think this list should be infinite." Oderberg, 41. Thankfully, we can count these. Among the most important, what we may classify as fundamental goods necessary for our happiness, are:

• Life in the biological and physiological sense is perhaps the most important since it is the foundational sine qua non of any other good. It is senseless to talk about the good of a corpse, or a dismembered fetus, or a euthanized senior. The fundamental good of life also includes a healthy and integrated existence, including psychological and spiritual health.
  
• The pursuit of truth or the acquisition of knowledge. The knowledge in question includes the broad gamut of knowledge. Knowledge is not reserved for the academic in his ivory tower, but includes the farmer and his knowledge of the seasons and of his crops, and the whole slew of knowledge in between and beyond, including the most sublime knowledge relating to the supreme Truth, God. One of the more significant truths or knowledge is the true knowledge of the good. "Without knowledge of the good, the good life as a whole could not even begin to be lived." Oderberg, 42.
• Man is as much a social animal as he is a rational animal. He binds himself in all sorts of groups. This general good may be broadly identified as the good of friendship, which would include friendship in the narrow sense as well as friendship "in the broader sense of social living, in particular living in a self-governing community, or perhaps state, whose sole purpose is to promote the peaceful and harmonious coexistence of its members." Oderberg, 43. To be happy, man must be expected to live life in a "perfect society" or "perfect community."*
  
• Related to society, but distinct from it, and essential toward human flourishing is the good of the family. The family is the fundamental cell where other goods, such as life (procreation, sustenance) and knowledge (education) are naturally promoted, especially in the early years of human formation.
  
• Work and play are are the yin and yang as it were of human endeavor. "[W]ork and play are but two aspects of a single component of the happy life and are plausibly distinguished from other goods, with work at its best a form of play and vice versa, although they both serve, of course, in the promotion of other goods such as life, knowledge, and friendship." Oderberg, 43.
• The appreciation of beauty, both in nature and through art, seems to be something unique to man, and an essential feature of his happiness.
• The happiness of man must include religious belief and practice. Even scientific man--who has purposefully stifled this desire through an erroneous philosophy in a sort of perverse spiritual anorexia nervosa--cannot rid himself of the sense of wonder. Even the materialist atheist Carl Sagan's "informed worship" is nothing other than the scientific man's religious desire peeping out from under the blanket of his materialistic philosophy as it were. When denied spiritual food, man's spiritual stomach grumbles. Naturally, religious belief and practice is tied to truth, and so happiness is obtained, not from any religious belief and practice, but from true or authentic religious belief and practice: orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Satanism, or the worship of Huitzilopochtli, to take extreme examples, may be said to be obviously unfulfilling. They do not lead to happiness, but to the misery of thoraxes without hearts, and brains without God.
  

No Happiness in Worshiping a False God

In our next posting, we will discuss Oderberg's view on virtues. But we should close by distinguishing between means and ends. Oderberg observes: "Every human good can be, and often is, used as an instrument [means] for the pursuit of some other good." Oderberg, 44. Some goods are purely instrumental, that is, purely means to another good (as, for example, properly, money should be). But though almost all goods can be instrumental goods, or means to another good, we must not use the basic or fundamental goods in this fashion. "[N]o basic good is solely instrumental in character." Oderberg, 44. This is a sort of categorical imperative.

If any of the basic, fundamental goods are "turned way from, rejected, or compromised in general, life goes badly for the person who does so. And often, though not always, if a good is turned away from, rejected, or compromised in a given instance or circumstance, life again is not lived well." Oderberg, 44-45. There is some play in the joints of human living, so it may be, and in practice one experiences, that one instance of turning away from, rejecting, or compromising a basic good won't make a man's bones come apart, or the whole world or all society fall apart. So a solitary man may visit a prostitute, engage in premarital sex, or look at some pornography and engage in self-abuse in violation of a basic good (which is evil enough), but society and the conjugal union and institution of the family will persist and survive such particular assault. But if society as a whole, or even in significant part, rejects the basic value of family life, and a substantial number of men engage in prostitution, premarital sex, and pornography and self-abuse, in assault of the value of family life, social life will go very badly indeed. A society may be able to tolerate a small number of atheists, but it is doubtful that a society of atheists will long survive. For both individual and society, there is a vast difference between sin and a life of sin, between sinning (which we all do) and living in sin (which not all of us do). The first is a wrongful act, the latter is a habit and prolonged.

When a man, or for that matter, a society, lives a life of sin, he heads, in his self-loathing and in his moral dissolution, toward sure self-destruction. In his walk in the darkness he progressively desensitizes himself to sin, and loses the sense of sin.

Lack of Happiness Reflected in Music

In the words of the imbalanced and unhappy Hank Williams, III's song "Life of Sin," where the misery of seeking wrong goods, and doing so habitually, reflects itself in both screaming lyric and a metallic, punkish, inharmonious musical grind:

Well I'm runnin' down the road about a hundred and five
Don't care if I live, I just wanna die
Searching for a gal who wants to keep me alive
Satan's in the backseat givin' me advice again
Livin' a life of sin.

To be in habitual sin, and not to care, and then not to even know that one is mired in it. The loss of the sense of sin. This is modern man's tragedy, for without the sense of sin he cannot be saved.**

We will not be happy until all the Hank Williams III's in the world learn to sing Gregorian Chant.
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*As we have noted in the past, the term "perfect society" (societas perfecta or communitas perfecta) does not mean some kind of "utopia," but rather is a term of art meaning a group that is self-sufficient or independent in its realm and has all necessary resources and conditions required to achieve its purposes. For a discussion on the notion of a "perfect society," see our prior post St. Thomas Aquinas: Definition of Law, Authority. In discussing this point, Oderberg rightly criticizes Hegel's absolute inversion of the purpose of the state. Hegel states: "Man owes his entire existence to the state, and has his being within it alone. Whatever worth and spiritual reality he possesses are his solely by virtue of the state." (allen Wert, den der Mensch hat, alle geistige Wirklichkeit, er allein durch den Staat hat). "On the contrary," Oderberg points out, "man does not exist for the state--the state is not his extrinsic ultimate end. Rather the state exists for man, in order to enable him to flourish, and so is good for man." Oderberg, 43.
**Pius XII famously stated that "the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin." Pope Pius XII, Radio Message to the U.S. National Catechetical Congress in Boston (October 26,1946): Discorsi e Radiomessaggi VIII (1946) 288. Pope John Paul II gave an extended reflection on this in his Reconciliatio et paenitentia, No. 18 [As a result of a typographical error, the Vatican text wrongfully attributes the statement to Pius XI, although the footnote reference shows the error]. Pope John Paul II observed how a recapture of the sense of sin by modern man is essential for curing modern man's ills.

Contra Consequentialismum: The Good

AΓΑΘΟΥ ΤΙΝΟΣ ΕΦΙΕΣΘΑΙ ΔΟΚΕΙ, all things tend toward good, Aristotle famously stated in the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics (1094a). With the notion of the the "good" every ethical theory must begin. An understanding of the notion of the good as it pertains to man may be obtained through observation and common sense.

Starting with inanimate objects--a rock--the notion that things are going well or badly for the rock make little sense to us. It seems that inanimate objects have no appetite, no yearning for something, and so we cannot measure whether such appetite has been satisfied or not so as to determine whether it is going well or not for that rock.

This perception changes if we progress toward living things, starting with vegetative life. Let us take an simple organisms such as bacteria or larger organisms such as plants, a citrus tree, for example. We can observe that it makes sense to talk about things going well or badly for them. Bacteria, like our citrus tree, can thrive, flourish under certain conditions, and other conditions can be seriously impeding and bring about disease and death or cessation of their function. We encounter with these that there are certain principles or laws that govern their needs and assure their health so that they can reproduce and propagate more of their species. In most instances, we can easily detect whether a tree is flourishing or whether it is not.

Which is the healthy leaf?

Moving up the ladder of life, we come to animals, complex beings which enjoy locomotion, which feel pain and pleasure, which form social groupings, which seem to take a more active role vis-à-vis their environment. These animals, and their well-being, are also governed by laws or principles similar to the plant kingdom, but significantly more complex. The following of these laws of their nature assures that they flourish. Again, it is generally easy to distinguish an animal that is flourishing versus one that is diseased, unhealthy, or disabled.

Man appears to be distinguishable from other animals by reason of his rational nature. Despite the fact that man shares a significant world with the brute animals, it seems indisputable that he has some faculty--we call it reason--that sets him apart from all other living creatures. Among the animals, he is alone, he is unique. It is for this reason that Aristotle defined man as a rational animal, and animal whose uniqueness is his rational nature.

It would seem that just like all creatures have laws that must be followed if they are to flourish, to be well, that man would have such laws, and that such laws would govern both the nature that he shares with the vegetative and animal life below him as well as the nature that is uniquely his. The following of these laws assures that creature's wellness. Additionally, we note that any activity of man--playing the piano, weaving a rug, churning butter--can be done well or badly and aims toward some good.

We need not multiply examples, since the general principle is clear: everything that a person does, everything, aims at something deemed good or worthwhile, whether that good be intrinsic to the activity (performing it well) or extrinsic (for some other objective deemed good); and in nearly all cases, the good aimed at is a combination of both the intrinsic and the extrinsic.

Oderberg, 37-38.

We all do not play the piano or churn butter, but we all live life. In the art of life, in which all men partake, what is a life lived well? That question is answered by another: what is the good, intrinsic or extrinsic, toward which man's life, the rational animal's life, in particular the life of his reason, aims? For whether the good is achieved means whether we are living well.

Now the good "is a single property capable of definition as that which satisfies a thing's natural appetites, or that which fulfills a things nature." Oderberg, 37. What, then, is man's good, the ultimate good toward which his life aims? This good may be defined as "the living of the human life in all its fullness, that is, taking into account all the tendencies, capabilities, and characteristics (such as rationality and freedom) of the human being." Oderberg, 38. The answer to this question must consider all things, "because when we reason about living well we must take in the whole of what a person is and does, not simply this or that aspect." Oderberg, 39.

It is an unfortunate reality that we can make mistakes about the good. In ordering the ensemble of goods to fashion the good, actual or seeming, we can make mistakes in our selection of one of the goods, mistaking an apparent good for an actual good, or we can make mistakes in balancing them, in hierarchizing then, in putting one good above the other, when it should be below another. Moreover, men, even if they know the good without mistake, are capable of working against it. "[I]t is possible--and common--for people to choose evil over good, and to do so knowingly." Oderberg, 39. However, "it is not possible for [men] to choose evil because it is evil." Oderberg, 39. In other words, they chose an evil because it is seen as having "a good aspect, real or apparent, as well as [in addition to] and evil one." Oderberg, 39. "[T]he ubiquitous and complex problem of weakness of will, a distinctively human phenomenon, exemplifies the activity of doing something bad for the sake of usually a short-term and transient satisfaction." Oderberg, 40.

Given all these factors, knowing the good in man's life, and whether he is living well, is consequently much harder to detect than whether the plant of a citrus tree is healthy or diseased. But this complex question is morality's bailiwick. "Morality . . . is concerned primarily with the study and elucidation of what is good and bad for human beings, and hence with what are good and bad actions, choices, and motives." Oderberg, 40.

Is there a monolithic--a single, one and complete--answer to the question amidst the "immense diversity of human endeavors, pursuits, choices, and so on"? Oderberg, 40. Does man have but one supreme end, or is he like Thomas Nagle's combination corkscrew and bottle-opener, a creature with more than one end, more than one use?

Is man a multi-faceted combo corkscrew bottle-opener?

Is man multi-purposed and therefore multi-ended and therefore multi-gooded? Ah, but the question is a false one because the entirety of man's variety and experience can be accommodated if the question is correctly framed.

The good is monolithic, both for all things to which goodness can be attributable at all, and for humans in particular, only in the sense that there is a single property, namely operating well or in according with a thing's nature. For human beings, this is simply living well as human beings. The property, however, consists in a complex of other properties that together mark out the distinctively human life. More precisely, it is happiness that is the good of man. ("Flourishing" is also an appropriate word.) . . . . It is happiness for which we all strive, which we all want from life (at least on rational reflection), and which consists in the well-lived life in which our appetites, capacities, and potentialities as human beings are satisfied in an harmonious, well-ordered way.

Oderberg, 40.

Happiness is thus the monolithic good of man. "Perhaps no more truistic thesis can be found in moral theory." Oderberg, 40.

But isn't this to trade one question for another? "What is man's good?" for "What is man's happiness?" It appears so.

So we must now ask, and try to answer, the question: What is it that makes man happy?

St. Thomas Aquinas: Definition of Law, The Common Good

THE LAW IS A PUBLIC THING, NOT A PRIVATE TOY. This is essentially St. Thomas Aquinas's teaching in the second article to question 90 in the "Treatise on Law." St. Thomas quotes the early encylopedist, St. Isidore of Seville, for the proposition that laws are not enacted for private benefit, but for the public good. Etymologies, v.21 (nullo privato commodo, sed pro communi civium utilitate conscripta).

St. Thomas observes that although reason is what directs the law, there must be something upon which reason is focused, the ultimate end or purpose (what is called the "final cause"). With respect to law, that focus must be the common good. The common good is based upon happiness; this happiness is "the principle in respect of all the rest." ST IaIIae, Q.90, art. 2, resp. From a natural perspective, this happiness is Aristotle's eudaemonia, what St. Thomas calls felicitas, felicity. From a supernatural perspective, this happiness is what is referred to as beatitude or eternal joy, what St. Thomas calls beatitudo.

The happiness that the law is concerned with is not any individual's happiness, but the happiness of the entire body politic, that is, the universal happiness, or happiness of the community (felicitatem communem). The law, therefore, must not have any particular individual's happiness as its end, but, rather, the happiness of the entire body politic. Quoting Aristotle, St. Thomas states that the only just law is that law which is adapted to produce and preserve happiness for the the body politic. See Aristotle, Ethics, v. 1. The law, can address individual things, and it may result in one particular individual's or one group's happiness. In itself, that is not defective so long as the law was ordained to the good of the community. It is only when the law is not it is ordered to the common good, but toward the good of a group or an individual, that it is "devoid of the nature of law" (non habeat rationem legis). ST IaIIae, Q. 90, art. 2, resp.; see also id. resps.1, 2. Thomas thus strikes a balance between individualism and collectivism.

Nathanael Culverwell describes what occurs when the law is ordered toward the common good

Law-givers should send out laws with Olive-branches in their mouths, they should be fruitful and peaceable; they should drop sweetness and fatness upon a land. Let not then Brambles make laws for Trees, lest they scratch them and tear them, and write their laws in blood. But Law-givers are to send out laws, as the Sun shoots forth his beams, with healing under their wings: and thus that elegant Moralist Plutarch speaks, God (says he) is angry with them that counterfeit his thunder and lightning, οὐσκηπτρον, οὐκεραυνὸν, οὐτρίαιναν; his Scepter, and his Thunderbolt, and his Trident, he will not let them meddle with these. He does not love they should imitate him in his absolute dominion and sovereignty; but loves to see them darting out those warm, and amiable, and cherishing ἀκτινοβολίαι, those beamings out of Justice, and goodness, and clemency. And as for Laws, they should be like so many green and pleasant pastures, into which these ποιμένεςλαων [shepherds of nations] are to lead their flocks, where they may feed sweetly and securely by those refreshing streams of justice, that run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty torrent. And this consideration would sweep down many cobweb-laws, that argue only the venom and subtilty of them that spin them; this would sweep down many an Achitophel's web and many an Haman's web, many an Herod's web; every spider's web that spreads laws only for the catching and entangling of weaker ones; such Law-givers are fit to be Domitian's play-fellows, that made it his Royal sport and pastime to catch flies, and insult over them when he had done. Whereas a Law should be a staff for a Commonwealth to lean on, and not a Reed to pierce it through. Laws should be cords of love, not nets and snares. Hence it is that those laws are most radical and fundamental, that principally tend to the conservation of the vitals and essentials of a Kingdom; and those come nearest the Law of God himself, and are participations of that eternal Law, which is the spring and original of all inferior and derivative laws. του ἀρίστου ἕνεκα πάντα τὰ νόμιμα [all laws exist for the sake of the good], as Plato speaks; and there is no such public benefit, as that which comes by laws; for all have an equal interest in them, and privilege by them. And therefore as Aristotle speaks most excellently, Νόμος ἐστὶ νους ἄνευὀρέξεως. A Law is a pure intellect, not only without a sensitive appetite, but without a will. ’Tis pure judgment without affections, a Law is impartial and makes no factions; and a Law cannot be bribed though a Judge may.

(from An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, ed. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001) (spelling modernized).)