The Nicomachean Ethics

"It was of course Socrates who challenged his time, and has challenged us all, with the great question: What sort of people should we be? How should we live? And by implication, what kind of society is the right kind to ensure that individual flourishing can occur? That question which Socrates asked was not hijacked but was at least developed by Plato into a set of views that we might not agree with because they’re a bit too idealistic. Also, the society that he envisaged as a setting for the good life is a bit too much like fascism for most of our tastes now. But Aristotle, who is a more down-to-earth character, has a much more realistic grasp of what is possible for human beings to do. He said the great question is how we should live well, so that we live a good life, and he came up with a very positive response – which is to say that what distinguishes us from the rest of the world is our possession of reason. It’s in the application of reason to circumstance that we do our best. So if we navigate our way through situations where we’re obliged to make certain sorts of choices or respond in certain ways, using our reason, then we will in general be expressing the virtues. For example, you find yourself in a situation where courage is called for. What is courage, in that situation? Well, it is the middle path between rashness on the one hand and cowardice on the other. Or suppose you’re asked to be generous? What’s that? In the circumstances, it is not being mean and not being profligate, but something in between. People have said this sounds like a middle class, middle aged, middle brow approach to the virtuous life, but in a way it isn’t because [Aristotle] was very conscious of the fact that circumstances differ, our capacity to respond to them differs from individual to individual, and therefore the real expression of a moral life is this serious, sincere endeavour to do the best in your circumstances. Indeed, friendship is a very important thing for Aristotle, and perhaps one of the most beautiful things in the Nichomachean Ethics is his discussion of friendship. That discussion may push the concept of friendship just that little bit too far, because he says we must treat a friend as another self, so we identify our friend’s interests with our own. That seems to fly in the face of the thought that we should give our friends some space, recognise their individuality and not make too many demands on them to be like us. So you could have a conversation with Aristotle – and I think all great ethical works are ones that we can have a conversation with. But he’s dead right that if we become friends with our children as they grow up, become friends with our parents as we grow up, become friends with our lovers or spouses, our comrades, our colleagues, then even if they remain those things – if your lover remains your lover, but you become a friend with him or her – that is a human achievement of the very highest order. He’s right about that, and it sets us a worthy goal. He also talked, as you point out, about magnanimity. There is a wonderful expression in the ancient Greek – the “megalopsychos”, which sounds like something certifiable but it just means magna anima [great soul], from which we get our word “magnanimity”. The magnanimous person, the great souled person, is a person of generosity and sympathy. I think this is very beautiful, and underlies almost all humanist ethics – the idea that we premise our engagement with other people on the most generous and sympathetic understanding we can have of human nature and the human condition. That we make allowances for being human. The Greeks have this marvellous idea, so different from the theological moralities where sin is a stain on your soul which you have to work hard to scrub off, and perhaps never quite get rid of. The Greek conception is what they called hamartia , which is the mistaken shot. You shoot your arrow at the target – if you miss, what do you do? You take better aim next time. Indeed. That’s a very good way of putting it. The well lived life is the well lived life. The well living of life is what it is to live life well. The quest of the good is itself good. This idea is I think a tremendously important one, that one can easily demonstrate by saying: The reason why you admire your friends is not because of what they’ve achieved, but because of what you know they would sincerely like to achieve. We know that if we were to measure the value of a human life only by its successes, then there would be very little value in the world. But we ought to value, and I think do value, people in terms of what they authentically are trying to do and to be. And it’s that endeavour which is the serious thing."

"The Nicomachean Ethics sets out in a systematic way to answer the question, “What is the good life? ” Aristotle wrote it not for scholars, not for other professional philosophers, but for everybody. He took the view that if a person applied practical wisdom to the right course of action in a given circumstance, he would achieve the good. And I like the fact that, as Socrates had done before him, he was thinking about a theory of the good life in terms of what is practical and reasonable. In writing some of my own books for a general readership, I’ve tried to do something along these lines. Aristotle’s answer to the question is based on the idea that we call “good” what relates to the distinguishing function of a thing. So a knife is a good knife if it cuts well. Analogously, when we say that a person is good, what we mean is that he lives according to the most distinctive thing about human beings, which is the faculty of reason. If you live a considered life you will have what Aristotle called “ eudaimonia ”. The usual translation of eudaimonia is happiness, but that concept is rather too thin. It really means “flourishing” and “achievement”. The idea that philosophy belongs to every educated person has been diminished as a result of the professionalization of the academy over the last century or so. The result has in many ways been negative; philosophy has developed into an esoteric pursuit marked by technical jargon and over-fine distinctions, rather like scholastic philosophy. If you go back to Hume , Locke or Descartes, you find that they weren’t writing for professionals in university, they were writing for their educated peers. Every educated mind should be reflective and engaged with the great questions."

"A little later. Aristotle was Plato’s most famous student. It’s not nearly as readable as the Symposium : it’s dense and obscure in places and you really do have to struggle with it, but it is a sophisticated and subtle analysis of the various virtues: courage, temperance, and wisdom among many others. It’s incredibly subtle and precise, especially when you compare it with the way a lot of moral words are used today. I was struck by Aristotle’s description of courage in particular. The word as it’s used today by journalists and politicians has almost no meaning at all. People will say that some writer who wrote a very revelatory book about his son’s drug addiction showed incredible courage, or that someone who stands in the middle of Trafalgar Square and masturbates as part of some artistic performance shows real courage. And suicide bombers are “cowards”, which is precisely the one thing they are not. We use the words “cowardly” and “courageous” very loosely: really just to express the fact that we approve or disapprove of something. Whereas Aristotle shows you that you can really think very precisely about courage and what it means. He says courage is overcoming fear of something. Not just fear of anything: there are some things which you should feel fear about, like disgrace – so someone who overcomes their fear of disgrace is not being courageous, they’re just being shameless. Aristotle also talks about the virtues as being means between extremes. So wit is a mean between the vice of deficiency, which is boorishness, and the vice of excess, which is buffoonery. Most modern moral philosophers would think that there’s nothing really to be said about wit: it’s just a matter of subjective opinion or preference, not something you can analyse or discuss rationally. But Aristotle shows that you can say quite a lot about it that is really plausible and persuasive."

"Just about everyone I know who works on character would say yes. This is apparent most of all in my field of philosophy. For many years, ethics was dominated by two influential traditions: Kantian ethics with its emphasis on rules, and utilitarianism with its emphasis on good consequences. Around the 1970s there was increasing discontent among philosophers with these two approaches. Rather than develop a completely novel approach, though, there was a call for a return to the emphasis on character and virtue that one finds in the writings of Plato and especially Aristotle. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, James Wallace, and Alastair MacIntyre were some of these influential voices. This movement culminated in what I consider to be the leading expression of an Aristotelian approach to ethics, namely Rosalind Hursthouse’s book On Virtue Ethics , published in 1999. Today virtue ethics is taken very seriously by most philosophers and has established itself as a legitimate third option to Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. But Aristotle’s influence extends far more broadly today than just philosophical ethics. Writings about character in other fields, such as religion and literature, often wrestle with his ideas. The same is true with books on character for more popular audiences, such as Thomas Lickona’s Character Matters , David Brooks’s The Road to Character , and Tom Morris’s If Aristotle Ran General Motors . Having said this, writers will differ as to which parts of Aristotle’s Ethics they think are relevant today and which parts are not. Speaking just for myself, let me mention a few which I think are still important. One is that being virtuous is central to our human flourishing – what he called eudaimonia . Another is that being virtuous is not just a matter of behaving well but also of acting for the right reasons and motives, as we already discussed earlier. A third is that habituation and practice are crucial to becoming a better person. You can’t flip a switch and make yourself virtuous overnight. There is also the idea that in addition to moral virtues, there are intellectual virtues, such as wisdom and understanding, and we should pay attention to both of them. Sorry, I am just mentioning things that come to mind, rather than presenting them in any kind of logical progression. “Virtue ethics has established itself as a legitimate third option to Kantian ethics and utilitarianism” I can think of two more ideas at the moment. One is that weakness of will is a major obstacle to becoming a virtuous person, and we need to understand how it works and what can be done to overcome it. We have all been there, I trust — I know I shouldn’t do something, but I give in to temptation and do it anyway. And the last idea I want to mention is that, according to Aristotle , it is hard to become virtuous, and hard to become vicious too. The character of most people is somewhere in the middle. This has been a central theme of my own work, and I think that contemporary psychology has actually vindicated Aristotle here. At the same time, there are some of Aristotle’s ideas about character that find little support anymore. For instance, he held that in order to have one virtue like honesty, you have to have all of them. This famous “doctrine of the unity of the virtues” is hard to accept. I have no problem talking about whether someone is ‘virtuous’ overall, where this is a function of whether they have or do not have the individual virtues like courage, temperance, and fortitude. It would be a pretty high standard to meet, I suspect, since having just one of the vices or some other serious character blemish would keep you from being virtuous. I don’t see how you could be virtuous overall, and have the vice of dishonesty, for instance. To complicate things just a bit, individual virtues come in degrees. Someone can be honest, say, but not as honest as Abraham Lincoln . So presumably ‘virtuousness’ would come in degrees too. And so there would be a threshold below which one’s character would not count as virtuous at all, but above which there is a whole spectrum of degrees of being virtuous. An important question in my own research has been whether most people are – as a matter of fact – virtuous or not. I look to carefully conducted experiments in psychology for answers, experiments that specifically involve morally relevant situations. I then draw my conclusions based on what hundreds of such studies collectively indicate. As I summarise in The Character Gap , the emerging picture is one of mixed character, not virtuousness. Or so I say. There are just too many situations where participants have acted in ways that don’t fit with the behaviour of a virtuous person."