Aristotelian Virtue Ethics

Overview

Recall questions on eudaimonia and the function argument, intellectual and moral virtues, the golden mean and phronesis, role models and vices, the twentieth-century revival, and the arguments of Foot and MacIntyre.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What historical setting produced Aristotle's ethics?

   Model answer

   Fourth-century Athens, a city-state small enough for citizens to know one another, where moral education was a public matter and arete, excellence, was already the central evaluative notion in Greek culture. Aristotle studied under Plato but rejected the idea of a separate Form of the Good, preferring to begin from how people actually live, and his ethics, set out in the Nicomachean Ethics, is continuous with his politics because he thought character is formed by the community.

2. 2

   What is eudaimonia?

   Model answer

   Usually rendered as flourishing or living well rather than happiness, since it is an activity of a whole life rather than a feeling. Aristotle argues it is the final end: we want other things for the sake of it and it for the sake of nothing further, and it is self-sufficient. A person can therefore be pleased and not be flourishing, and flourishing while going through hardship.

3. 3

   Explain the function argument.

   Model answer

   Aristotle argues that we judge a flautist or a carpenter good by how well they perform their characteristic activity, and asks what the characteristic activity of a human being is. Not growth or sensation, which we share with plants and animals, but activity of the soul in accordance with reason. So the good human life is rational activity performed excellently, and virtue is that excellence.

4. 4

   How do intellectual and moral virtues differ?

   Model answer

   Intellectual virtues, such as theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom, are acquired chiefly through teaching and take time and experience. Moral virtues, such as courage, temperance and generosity, are acquired through habituation: we become just by doing just acts, in the way we learn an instrument by playing it. That is why upbringing matters so much on this account.

5. 5

   What is the golden mean?

   Model answer

   Each moral virtue lies between an excess and a deficiency: courage between cowardice and rashness, generosity between meanness and extravagance, proper pride between vanity and self-deprecation. The mean is relative to the person and the situation, not an arithmetical midpoint, and is fixed by what the person of practical wisdom would do. Aristotle adds that some things admit of no mean at all, since there is no right amount of murder or theft.

6. 6

   Why is phronesis the key virtue?

   Model answer

   Because practical wisdom is what perceives the right thing to do in this particular case, and without it the other virtues misfire: courage without judgement becomes recklessness, generosity without judgement becomes waste. It cannot be taught as a set of rules, only developed through experience, which is why Aristotle says the young can be good mathematicians but not wise.

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