The idea of virtue plays an important role in Aristotle’s ethics. Virtue has an important impact on making us the right kind of people who make the right kind of decisions in their lives. But not only are there more than one virtue, but there are more than one kind of virtue; namely, there are moral virtues and intellectual ones. Moral virtues are emotional dispositions that allow us to make the correct response to practical situations and intellectual virtues are what allow us to know the truth.
Here, the concept of Moral Virtue will be expanded upon.
First it is worth stressing that Aristotle separates us into two elements: a rational element and an irrational one. It is the irrational element that contains the emotions as well as the mental states or conditions that accompany pleasure and pain. What that means is that our non-rational element governs not only the emotional feelings and states such as love or hate, and not only the direct feelings of pleasure and pain but also the states that pleasure and pain put us in mentally or the mental states associated with pleasure and pain. For example, when you’re experiencing a high amount of pleasure – whether that be mental or physical or both - that might make you more energetic, enthusiastic or friendly, whereas high amounts of pain might make you more tired and irritable. These states would be counted amongst the irrational elements of our being.
Now, Aristotle does not condemn all of these irrational elements of our being as purely negative. Indeed, the Moral Virtues are bound up with our emotions and Aristotle would argue that we should have the proper emotions in response to the correct situation. Yet, the emotions alone cannot determine what the correct emotional response is to a given situation; if we were solely emotional, a feeling of pure hatred might put us in a state in which we believe that hatred is the right emotion to feel at the time. But Aristotle appeals to a part of us that can judge the emotions from “the outside” – so to speak; a part of us that can stand apart from the emotions that we feel and determine whether those emotions are Morally appropriate for the situation. This is the role of our rational element and this is why Aristotle argues that our emotions should be kept in check by and be beholden to our reason.
At this juncture there are two things to consider. The first is what our proper emotional makeup is – that is, what it is that our reason determines to be good Moral Virtue as well as what emotional characteristics constitute moral Vices. The second is how reason is meant to have control over the emotions.
The first issue has a lot of depth because Aristotle addresses the main Moral Virtues and vices separately and due to the scale of this, these will be explained in a separate discussion. Therefore, this discussion will proceed to focus on the relationship between our reason and our emotions.
In that case, how are we meant to use our reason to rule our emotions? Well, to begin with, assuming that we have some idea of what types of emotional states are better to be in for a given purpose, Aristotle points out that it’s very hard to control the emotions through reasoning. Just as an example, consider how difficult it is to argue someone out of being in a rage or a complete infatuation; once we are in the grips of an emotion, it tends to act as a blinder on our reason. For that reason, Aristotle suggests that the emotions need to be trained and conditioned over a long period of time. In this sense, we must use our reason – when we can – to make certain emotional states and Moral Virtues habitual so that we don’t fall into the problem of being trapped by them at the wrong time.
To provide someone with this kind of moral training, pleasure and pain can become useful tools. By judiciously applying pleasure and pain to the right situation, we can help to train someone’s moral character. So, for example, let’s say that someone gets angry at something small and unimportant – this is an immoral situation in which to feel anger and so, by making someone feel pain in that situation (perhaps by reprimanding them or, in the case of a child, denying them some kind of luxury) we might train them to avoid being angry in that situation. On the other hand, if we notice that someone has remained calm when a small irritation has arisen, we might give them some praise which further encourages them to react in this more moral way in the future. Or someone might even get angry at the right time – angry against tyranny or injustice; this too can be encouraged and develop the habit of being the right kind of angry in the right situation. Of course, this kind of moral training seems to be most suited to a societal situation – it is probably easier to receive moral training if you have the right mentors around you such as friends and family who know when the right and just time is to provide you with pleasure or pain, especially if they are applying this from a young age. Then again, we could imagine that we can train ourselves to some degree – perhaps we can find ways to reward ourselves when we have controlled our temper and deprive ourselves of something when we lose control. This might be much more difficult and complicated and little has been made of it in the material and so little more will be made of it here.
One thing that had been addressed however is the way in which pleasure can naturally reinforce virtue from within us because there seems to be a certain type of pleasure that someone feels when they do what they know to be right – a kind of pleasant feeling that we are acting in line with our moral compass. However, this is not guaranteed and Aristotle does point out that someone might not feel good about doing what is right if they lack the appropriate virtue for that. As an example, imagine if someone is trying not to indulge too much and they are sat before a lavish cake. Now, if not indulging in the cake makes the person feel resentful of what they are having to do, they are not taking pleasure in the virtuous act and this might be a sign that the person doesn’t really have the virtue of self-control. On the other hand, if the person was happy to sit there cheerfully whilst all of their friends enjoyed the cake, they could be said to have the virtue of self-control.
This discussion about how Moral Virtues are formed by training seems to present an apparent
paradox: Moral Virtues are formed by training, but the training and action require Moral Virtue. If we return to the example of anger, we might try to train someone who is angry by rewarding them when they are calm, but for them to be calm in the first place, would they not already need to have the virtue that makes them calm? Or, the example of bravery is given: to become brave you would need to do brave things, but how are you to do brave things if you don’t already have bravery?
Aristotle offers two solutions to this apparent paradox. He gives the first solution by pointing out that when we train something like – say – a technical skill, we often practice under the guidance of someone else until our own competence gains enough momentum that we can carry on practising that skill by ourselves. In the same way, someone who is training to be calm or brave might do so under the guidance of someone who is calm or brave or by trying to emulate them. And then, once this calmness or braveness has been “practised” well enough by the student, that virtue can be practised by them independently. The virtue wouldn’t need to be there initially; it could be passed on by someone else who already has that virtue, be nurtured and then developed.
The second solution is that someone need not possess a particular virtue to do the right things and take the right steps that will eventually gain them that virtue. An analogy is useful here. Think of being strong in regards to weightlifting. If someone was to consider that being able to bench press 200 kilograms was the mark of being “strong” they would not need to be able to lift 200 kilograms in order to take the right steps to become strong; they could of course progress through lifting 20 kilograms to 50, to 100 until they have attained the capacity to be strong enough to bench press 200 kilograms. In the same way then, a virtue such a bravery could be progressed towards even if one is not brave. Someone might stand tall with their head high, or face the danger that is ahead of them, learn to hold their nerve and the like, even whilst they are not being truly brave but whilst they approach the state of true bravery.
And so, that’s all for the discussion on Moral Training but before we conclude and before there is a further discussion about what all of the Moral Virtues and Vices are, it is worth introducing the idea of the Middle States: that is, Aristotle’s idea that a given Moral Virtue lies in the middle of two Vices, instead of the Virtue simply being the opposite of a Vice. As an example, we could continue with the Virtue of bravery. If we thought that Vices were the exact opposite of Virtues, we might conclude that the virtue is bravery and its corresponding vice is its opposite: cowardice. However, what Aristotle argues is that the opposite of cowardice is not bravery but rashness, with the virtue of bravery lying between cowardice and rashness. To understand this, it might help to picture a spectrum with cowardice on the one end, rashness on the other and bravery in the middle of the two.
The point that Aristotle is trying to make is that an emotional characteristic can be bad if we have either too much of it or too little. In this example, someone might not have enough courage, which makes them cowardly and unable to do the right thing in the face of fear. Yet, someone might also have too much courage which makes them disregard fear in a stupid way, causing them to blindly and wastefully throw themselves into danger – this is what it means to be rash. Therefore, if one can have too little courage or too much, the right amount must lie somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, and if one has just the right amount of courage that they can do the right thing despite their fear, but still respect their fear enough not to be stupid in the face of it, we might say this this person has the virtue of bravery.
Just to clarify, the term “middle states” can be somewhat misleading because Aristotle doesn’t argue that every virtue is in the exact middle of its two vices. Instead, a virtue will tend to be closer to one vice than the other. Bravery, for example, is apparently closer to being rash than it is to being cowardly. Therefore, just the right amount of an emotional characteristic needs to hit a sweet spot on each virtuous spectrum which be different for each virtue. Aristotle admits that getting this balance right can be very hard, as can correcting and cultivating our Moral Virtues, but he advises knowing our own weakness and knowing what vices we tend towards most so that we know what we need to pull back from in order to ensure that we are being as virtuous as possible.
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