Nicomachean Ethics -- Book II
II. Moral Virtue, how produced, in what medium and in what manner
1) If moral virtue is formed by habit. Because of this, we know that it doesn't arise in us by nature, we must train to it. If our nature made us be absolutely one way or another, habit couldn't change our virtue. We become virtuous by performing virtuous acts. States of character arise out of like activities.
2) We must act according to the right rule, and this right rule is that of moderation. By practicing the right way of acting, we become better at it.
3) Virtue is concerned with pleasure and pain -- the virtuous man finds pleasure in virtuous acts, and the vicious man has difficulty with them, dislikes them. It is, in fact, good to be concerned with doing the harder thing, which virtue might sometimes be.
4) Virtue is not just the doing of virtuous acts, but the doing them habitually, and with certainty in moral knowledge, as a matter of practice. This is different than simply the doing of acts as a matter of chance.
5) Virtue is not a passion, because we do not praise or blame people for feeling passions, only for acting on them well or badly. Similarly, it is not a faculty for the passions, because everyone has these, and again can feel it. It must be a state of character.
6) Virtue is that which makes a thing good, and also allows it to achieve its ends well. It is the intermediate, because of everything that there might be a virtue, there are vices on both the excess and deficiency. (Remember that virtues arise from repeated action, they must be relative to action -- so even though Aristotle's "strength" is a virtue, for which there could likely be no problem with excess if seen as a natural quality, if seen as "use of strength," then a person could use it too much or too little.) There is only one way to hit virtue, the mean, whereas there are many ways to miss it. Some qualities imply goodness or badness in their name -- these, of course, don't have an intermediate excellence. So we must be careful in choosing what might have a virtue and two vices -- the quality must admit of all three in order to fit the category of a virtue.
7) The qualities of which there is a mean, excess and deficiency -- these will be treated individually later in the book.
8) The intermediate is often closer to either excess or deficiency, rather than being halfway between.
9) It is not easy to hit the mean. To go too far one direction or another is quite easy, and obvious to reason, but to find the appropriate middle can't be done deductively. The middle must be known as we know things with our senses (does this mean there's a moral sense?). We don't blame the man who deviates just a little from the mean -- this is to be expected, as he tries one way and another to hit the mark -- we only blame those who deviate far from the mean.
Also, we must pay attention to our own bad tendencies, and guard against them by pushing far to the other side, and one bad tendency available to almost all people is self-indulgence, so for most people temperance is a very important virtue to cultivate.
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Questions: I-1. If states of character arise out of activities, from what do activities arise? It seems that even if we are not fixed in a moral position by nature, we can still start from different places, one person more naturally inclined to virtuous acts than another. These questions relate -- how do human beings start performing virtuous acts? Is it merely by trial and error -- of the many things one can do, one tries some virtuous acts, and likes it? Yes, this is a good question -- if eudaimonia is the good life, a habit of being good, how does one find one's way to even the initial acts of being good, and knowing that these are good?
1-2. I'm not so sure that moderation is the right rule, and it would do well to question this. For example, there must be qualities for which it is best to strive for the excess -- virtue itself, for example. There can be no excess of virtue, and vice should be wholly avoided. But Aristotle seems to mean that since these are so hard to find, virtue is, that we will have to occasionally tend towards one vice or another, in order to keep trying to find the virtuous mean. How do we weigh whether this tending has had a good or bad effect?
And also -- if by practicing bravery one becomes brave, or practicing indulgence that one becomes self-indulgent -- how does the self-indulgent person ever become temperate? Is it still by the tending one way or another, that when the self-indulgent person ends up trying something that is more temperate, ze may find that ze likes it? Perhaps it is the same as in the case of the temperate person tending one way or the other, and somehow weighing -- it's just that the work of weighing is harder in the case of the vicious person. But again, how do we weigh? Is this where intellectual virtue comes in?
I-4. I still wonder how people find their way to virtuous acts, but otherwise I am finding this distinction interesting. The question of a person's character is an interesting one -- certainly people can choose to do something completely different than what they've done in the past, and the results of this are not affected by who they were before the act, but by the act itself -- and yet, inductively we can judge a person's character, from the building up of experiences with the person. It again requires not asking for too much precision from the field. Am I okay with not asking too much precision? Is it a good thing to base character on repeated habits? Is judging a character a good thing? I think that judging is a good thing, and must be based on something, like past experience. A quality of judging a person's character, then, is practical, but it also must not harm the person. We can judge a character for the purpose of our own well-being and in order to better get along with the person -- is there danger in judging a character? What does one need to do in order not to fall into danger, in order to not harm by the judging?
1-9. If virtues are known as we know with the senses, this means that there must be something that senses the mean, the good, even if imperfectly. Is there some sort of innate moral sense that leads us to perceive the mean? If there is, then this explains how we start moving towards virtue. What are other explanations for why we move towards it? Society? The influence of our peers? I think, too, that intellectual virtue might have something to do with it. I'll see as I read on. I want to see how he answers this question.