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Aristotles Virtue Ethics

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Aristotle, who succeeded Plato in the historical dialectic of ideas in Western philosophy, thought that the supreme human good was eudaimonia, often inaptly translated as happiness. But daimon in Greek means spirit (and is the word from which the English word demon is derived, although the Greek word has no pejorative connotation). And eu- in Greek is a prefix meaning well (still functioning that way in English in such words as euphoria, eulogy,

and the like). So all human action aims, Aristotle thought, at a well spirit, at a good condition of the soul. But what is this condition, more precisely? And how can it be realized?

We can get a clue, Aristotle suggests, by examining more limited human functions. What is a good musician, a good doctor, a good carpenter? Simply to realize well the nature of those professional functions. A good doctor and a bad doctor are both doctors, but the former doctors well and the latter doctors poorly. Similarly, a good human and a bad human are both human beings, but the former realizes human nature well and the latter does so poorly. And what is human nature? Aristotle gave us the classic definition: Anthropos (humankind) is the rational animal. Hence, to be a good human is to live the animal life—having passions and desires and experiencing their pleasurable satisfaction or painful frustration, activities that we share with all other animals—governed by reason, a capacity that is uniquely human.

One fundamental attribute of reason is the ability to weigh and measure, to find the mean or ratio (the root Latin word of the English word rational) between extremes. Our animal desires and passions run to extremes. Animals often sate their hunger until they are gorged and express their rage to the point of violence. And as animals, we are variously inclined to gluttony and abstemiousness, debauchery and celibacy, fury and diffidence, rashness and terror, and many similar extremes of desire and passion. However, the good rational animal will find the ratio, the mean, between the extremes of excess (too much) and defect (too little). From this analysis, Aristotle derives the cardinal virtues commonly recognized among his contemporaries: Temperance is the mean between eating and drinking too little (abstemiousness and teetotalism) and too much (gluttony and inebriation); courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness; generosity is the mean between stinginess and prodigality; and so on. Thus, a functionally good human being is a morally good human being, from an Aristotelian point of view, as well as a happy human being.

Just as Christianity has its Golden Rule, so Aristotle's classic ethic has its Golden Mean: the rationally determined intermediate state between excess and defect. Virtue ethics—as the ethical tradition inherited from the ancient Greeks and given classical philosophical expression by Aristotle is now called—was vigorously revived in the twentieth century, most notably by Alistair Mclntyre, and was popularized by William (Bill) Bennett, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy and served as secretary of education and then drug czar in the George H. W. Bush Administration. Virtue ethics has also been adopted as one approach to environmental ethics, as detailed by the entry of that title in this encyclopedia.

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