Virtue and the mean | Rohan's Rambles

The nature of virtue

“Virtue is a state which decides, consisting in a mean relative to us, which is defined by reference to reason. It is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency.” (II.6, 1106b36-1107a3)

Virtue is a hexis, or a state/disposition. This is a stable inclination to act a certain way and feel a certain way.
- The Greek word fits perfectly well with Aristotle’s claim about excellence being persistent and something which is actively exercised.
- Virtue is not:
  - a capacity. These are things which are always fully articulated: you’re able to see as a baby (from the capacity for sight), but you don’t come out of the womb virtuous!
  - a feeling. We don’t praise people for feelings, and also feelings don’t involve decisions.
Virtue involves decision (prohairesis), a deliberative desire about how to act in order to promote the end (III.2-3, VI.2). (see section on voluntariness below for more)
- Your action needs to be driven by reason to be virtuous, not merely aligned/in accord with it (NE 6.13, 1144b25-27).
- This is what makes virtue a rational, active disposition rather than a mere reflex.
S acts virtuously only if they: (i) act knowingly, (ii) decide on the action for its own sake [rather than instrumentally], and (iii) act from a firm and unchanging state.
- So, it’s possible to do a virtuous action (or, an action “in accord with the virtuous”) without acting virtuously (II.4).
  - This is what makes virtue disanalogous with craft: a craft is judged simply by the quality of its product, but virtue is judged by the state of the agent performing actions.
- The end for which the virtuous person acts is to kalon (the fine/noble); this is what unifies all kinds of virtuous acts.
  - So the three necessary conditions above aren’t sufficient; grasp of the right end is also required.

Acquisition of virtue

Virtue arises “neither by nature nor against nature”, but through habituation, made possible by nature (II.1).
- Not everybody can attain virtue: recall in I.4: “we need to have been brought up in fine habits if we are to be adequate students of fine and just things”
- We’re interested in acquisition of virtue not only so we can do it ourselves, but also because (Aristotle thinks) you’re able to learn about the features of virtue from looking at how people acquire it.
Aristotle thinks habituation is obvious to people, and this is needed to justify why we can hold people accountable for their virtue / vice (see next section on voluntariness).
- “[Only] a totally insensible person would not know that a given type of activity is the source of the corresponding state; [hence] if someone does what he knows will make him unjust, he is willingly unjust.” (III.5, 1114a12-13)
Habituation is not merely mechanical conditioning; it involves reason in a variety of ways.
- Aristotle thinks the non-rational part of the soul “shares reason in a way, insofar as it both listens to reason and obeys it”.
  - He makes an analogy to the father-child relationship – the desiderative part can pay heed to reason like a child does their parent.
- So habituation isn’t simply Pavlovian conditioning. It works because the non-rational part is responsive to rational guidance.
  - Moreover, it’s clear from his descriptions of the process that it requires rational engagement. We sometimes need to aim at the opposite extreme to our current tendency (II.9); etc.
- There’s also the meta-awareness of habituation described above.
Pleasure and pain are important for virtue in several respects (II.3, also 1152b4-8 in Book X, and VII).
- They’re a sign of character: an agent who e.g. abstains from bodily pleasures and delights in this is temperate (i.e. possesses virtue); someone who does abstain with great pain is only self-controlled (enkratic); see section on akrasia below.
- The fully virtuous agent is the standard for what is truly pleasurable and painful.
  - “Virtue is the sort of state that does the best actions concerning pleasures and pains”
- In order to become virtuous, we need to train our emotional responses so that we find pleasure and pain in the right things.
There’s mutual dependence between phronesis and virtue of character, and it’s not clear whether one is prior to the other / how they’re acquired.
- Virtue of character is what makes the goal correct; phronesis provides the deliberative capacity to work out what promotes those ends.
- Burnyeat (1980) suggests that there are three stages to development of virtue:
  - (1) You perform virtuous actions under external guidance
    - You can use the morally-neutral capacity for cleverness (deinotes) to follow the example of others, even without complete virtue of character or practical wisdom. (VI.12)
  - (2) You come to enjoy performing these actions, and develop a disposition towards them
  - (3) You understand why they are good (acquiring phronesis)
- Alternatively, you might be able to get the appropriate headstart needed for virtue from good upbringing & moral education.
  - Recall the book is aimed at only a certain kind of person: well-educated male citizens who have been brought up “to acquire one sort of habit or another, right from [their] youth” (II.1, 1103b22-25).
The legislator plays an important role as an external standard for what is virtuous. (II.1, 1103b3-6)
- They’re one such practically-wise person whose example we ought to pay attention to, and can mimic until we develop phronesis ourself.
- You can also transpose the polis analogy into the soul: the legislator is a bit like the rational part, the citizens listening are like the part which listens to reason.
Aristotle returns to moral education and habituation at the end of NE, in X.9
- He’s clear that he thinks ethics is practical, as well as theoretical: “knowing about virtue is not enough, but we must also try to possess and exercise virtue”.
- He thinks that those who live by passion won’t listen to an argument that tries to dissuade them from doing so, and this is why law and compulsion are needed.
  - “It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed as a result of people’s characters… the soul of the student needs to have been prepared by habits for enjoying and hating finely”.

Doctrine of the Mean

Virtue, then, is a mean, insofar as it aims at what is intermediate. (II.6, 1106b28)

Aristotle’s core claim: the mean (meson) is a particular situation-specific response involving both feelings and actions, intermediate between the extremes associated with vices of excess and deficiency.
- Recall that virtue is a stable disposition (hexis) towards exhibiting this response, and reaching a decision (prohairesis) grounded in the right principle (arche)
By “mean”, Aristotle is not referring to a simple arithmetic quantity. “Aiming” at the mean doesn’t imply that you do an internal calculation to hit that target.
- Example with Milo the athlete: the right quantity of food for a trainer to prescribe is not necessarily the arithmetic average of some amount which is too much and some other which is too little but may instead depend on the context.
- Rather, you have a disposition to know the end and act on it, correctly hitting the good that every action aims at (as NE I opens).
  - This is why habituation and phronesis is needed. If you could compute what action is right, then that would be much simpler.
- Hursthouse: it’s like hitting a bullseye at the centre of a circle, in that it requires the appropriate choice of a great many different parameters.
  - And, like a real bullseye, there may be range of optimal points – hence Aristotle’s point that we should approach ethics without demanding too much precision.
- So, the Doctrine of the Mean can explain why virtue is admirable: “it is hard work to be excellent, for in each case it is hard work to find the intermediate” (II.9).
  - Bravery and generosity need you to do “the right things, for the right end, in the right way, at the right time” (1115b16-17 and 1120b3-5).
We can understand the meson for each character trait in two ways, according to Young (2006). And these two can come apart:
- (i) as the virtuous state located between two vicious tendencies of excess and deficiency along that same dimension of character [the location thesis]
- (ii) something which generates a particular situation-specific response in terms of actions and feelings that are intermediate between the extremes which would be generated by its virtue’s corresponding vices [the intermediacy thesis]
There are three reasons why virtue might be related to the mean:
- Endoxon: people blame excesses and deficiencies, and praise the intermediate amount. So it would make sense that virtue aims at the intermediate.
  - Note that the idea of the mean was a very common thing in Ancient Greek philosophy.
  - Hursthouse (2006): a general principle from contemporaries that the meson was the best state across various disciplines and crafts.
- Virtue aims at the best, and in other fields (e.g. craftsmanship and health) the best comes from an intermediate, so maybe it would in right action too.
  - In this optimal state, you can’t improve on things by adding or taking away anything.
- Ethical habituation is about feelings. Since feelings admit of degrees, so virtue must aim at the mean which is the correct amount of each feeling.
When Aristotle talks about the mean “relative to us”, he isn’t endorsing subjectivism, but referring to the specific human ergon and mode of flourishing (Brown, 1997).
- When he says the mean is not “one and the same for all” (1106a30-b8), this is about context rather than subjectivism: cf Milo.
  - So it doesn’t imply that there is relativism about ethike arete, or no right course of action in any given scenario.
- Indeed, Aristotle explicitly says in II.6 that the reason of the prudent person is the normative standard by which all decisions are judged.

Problems with the Doctrine

There’s a dilemma: either the Doctrine of the Mean is trivial, or it’s false.
- Talking about “excess” and “deficiency” seems to be smuggling in evaluative content.
  - If it’s just saying vice is when you, say, have “a bad amount of anger”, then yes, obviously. Virtue gets things right, and that’s just restating what it is.
  - Even granting that it’s not trivial that there can be excesses and deficiencies of all character traits, the theory still is rather thin, and presupposing a prior account of what the right amount of a trait is.
- On the other hand, if the doctrine is making the substantive claim that for each virtue there are exactly two corresponding vices along some specific axis, then it struggles to account for all the virtues.
  - For example, Aristotle says that the person deficient in bodily pleasure “hardly occurs” and “is not human” (III.11).
  - By Aristotle’s own account, justice is “not as the other virtues are” (V.5), and its nature as a proportional mean is somewhat contorted.
  - And Aristotle admits that “not every action or feeling admits of a mean, for the name of some automatically include baseness [e.g. murder, adultery]” (II.6)
It’s not very action-guiding.
- Aristotle argues that one extreme might be worse than the other, and as an unvirtuous agent sometimes it’s best to aim at the opposite vice than the one you have, rather than the mean directly. (e.g. II.9, 1109b1-5)
  - But then the mean itself doesn’t really play much of a part in what you ought to do.
- He goes on to discuss various specific virtues of character in subsequent books, but these later recommendations do not hinge on any insight from the Doctrine of the Mean (Hursthouse 2006)
Conclusion: The Doctrine of the Mean not only fails to tell us anything new about the character of a virtuous individual, it is also unhelpful in showing aspirationally virtuous agents what path to take.

Is Aristotle a virtue ethicist?

Certainly Aristotle thinks that virtue should be a central object of study in ethics – so he is at least agent-focused (per Slote)
But there are two important differences.
Aristotle thinks the life of theoria is the best life; one focused on excellence of character is good but lesser.
- So, “the virtue ethicist’s best life is Aristotle’s second-best” (Taylor)
Arguably, Aristotle defines right action differently.
- Taylor’s view is that they do agree, i.e. that Aristotle is an agent-prior virtue ethicist.
  - Textual support for this can be found in III: “actions are called just and temperate when they are the sort of actions that the just and temperate person would perform; the just and temperate person is not [merely] the person who performs those actions, but in addition the one who acts in the way just and temperate people do”
  - But you can equally read that as simply describing the class of just and temperate actions, not defining them.
- It would be strange for Aristotle to define right action in terms of the virtuous agent’s dispositions, when virtue is just the state of character that allows one to attain eudaimonia.
  - Why should the state of character have priority over the kind of life that we’re saying it enables, if that happy way of life is our ultimate object of interest?
- A counterargument: the apparent circularity in the definition of virtue (defined by reference to those who have phronesis, but thus must have virtue) could be precisely because virtue cannot be defined independently of the virtuous person.
  - But an alternative interpretation (from Morison) is that here Aristotle is again just characterising virtue in broad strokes, not yet defining it (since we don’t yet have the resources for that)