Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV
1) Liberality -- This is the virtue between prodigality and meanness. The virtue lies closer to the former than the latter, because men are more likely to incline to the latter, and to give too much of what one has is sometimes considered generous -- it is mostly bad in that the prodigal man will then need to accept or beg money from bad sources, in order to keep up his prodigal ways. The virtue is generally more concerned with the giving and spending of wealth than the taking and keeping, although the latter are important to be done in the right ways. The liberal man sets no store by money for itself, and so is easy to deal with in money matters, since he is not overly concerned with either being able to spend great amounts nor keeping what he has.
2) Magnificence -- This is a virtue that can only be found (and the vices disparaged) in men of great wealth. It is being able to spend money well. The deficient side, the niggardly man, will ruin the good of the expense for the saving of a trifling sum of money. He who spends too much is thought vulgar. Again, it is because both care too much for money -- the former cares more about saving a bit of money than creating good effect, and the latter cares about showing off his wealth, and not about the right effect.
3) Pride is the virtue of someone who does great things, and agrees that he is worthy of them. The man who is worthy of little, and knows it, is temperate, but not proud. The proud man is in extreme in respect to the greatness of his claims, and intermediate in respect to the rightness of his claims. The vices are vanity and undue humility.
4) Ambition -- ambition is to pride as liberality is to magnificence. The virtue in the intermediate is unnamed, but since one can be overly ambitious and unambitious, both wrong, than there must be a virtue, a way of being rightly ambitious.
5) Good temper -- the virtue concerned with anger. The good-tempered man gets angry in the right way at the right things. He tends towards lenience, though, so is closer to the deficiency than the excess.
6) Friendliness -- in general social intercourse, there are those who are try to please everyone as a way of currying favor, and those who oppose everything and don't care about others. In between these is the virtue, who treats people rightly, in respect to their relationship with the virtuous man.
7) Truthfulness -- this is not honesty but truthfulness with regard to a man's claims about who he is, his virtues and honors. The vices are boastfulness and mock-modesty. The truthful man avoids falsehood, and is aware of the necessity of truth in social intercourse, and so while seeming modest, understating the truth, he will not deny it. The boaster, being more common and harmful, is the vice more opposed to the truthful mean.
8) Ready wit -- between the vices of buffoonery and humorlessness. Since life includes rest and leisure, and all people seem to enjoy their leisure, it is a virtue to have a ready wit. The buffoon prefers the joke to other matters, or jokes at inappropriate times, and the boor is no good for the leisure aspect of life. The man with ready with is tactfull and pleasant.
9) Shame -- it is not fully a virtue, because the virtuous man would have nothing to feel shamed about. It is a quasi-virtue. It seems to be more of a passion, a passing reaction, than a state of character. The virtuous man will likely have that passion if he does something bad, but that doesn't make shame a virtue, does it? Virtue is more concerned with voluntary action than passions, the involuntary.
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1-2) Both of the virtues concerned with money seem alien to me, and yet the more I think about them the more they make sense, especially within the context of other virtues, like generosity. If one has money, which, being the commerce of most human beings, everyone does -- it makes sense not to be overly concerned with it. It's what I've noticed about my worries about trying not to spend money -- if I can do so in an easy manner, and without disrupting the people around me, it is probably a virtue, but the moment I start putting too much store by the money I'm saving, the moment I can't do it lightly any more but allow myself to get tense about it, and even to start taking from the wrong sources, just so I can put more money towards my student loans -- then it becomes the vice of meanness, stinginess. The second, magnificence, can only exist as a virtue if I accept the necessity in social life of spending large sums of money. Is it a necessity? For festivals and great works, perhaps it is. And in the case that I was creating a social service, a community house for example, I would want to follow the virtue of magnificence -- not being overly concerned with saving, so that I could create the best possible community house without worrying about trifles. If I accept the human desire for art, for pleasure, than I should be aware of this and not sacrifice it for the sake of a saving a little money.
9) I don't understand shame as a quasi-virtue, but I may come to a better understanding of it through the course of the book. Perhaps shame is the moral sense?! It is the innate reaction that leads someone to be virtuous, to change one's ways... hmm.