Ethics | Page 5

known and similarly
accepted rules (It may be remarked that the Greek word usually translated "reason,"
means in almost all cases in the Ethics such a rule, and not the faculty which apprehends,
formulates, considers them).
The "moral virtues and vices" make up what we call character, and the important
questions arise: (1) What is character? and (2) How is it formed? (for character in this
sense is not a natural endowment; it is formed or produced). Aristotle deals with these
questions in the reverse order. His answers are peculiar and distinctive--not that they are
absolutely novel (for they are anticipated in Plato), but that by him they are for the first
time distinctly and clearly formulated.

(1.) Character, good or bad, is produced by what Aristotle calls "habituation," that is, it is
the result of the repeated doing of acts which have a similar or common quality. Such
repetition acting upon natural aptitudes or propensities gradually fixes them in one or
other of two opposite directions, giving them a bias towards good or evil. Hence the
several acts which determine goodness or badness of character must be done in a certain
way, and thus the formation of good character requires discipline and direction from
without. Not that the agent himself contributes nothing to the formation of his character,
but that at first he needs guidance. The point is not so much that the process cannot be
safely left to Nature, but that it cannot be entrusted to merely intellectual instruction. The
process is one of assimilation, largely by imitation and under direction and control. The
result is a growing understanding of what is done, a choice of it for its own sake, a fixity
and steadiness of purpose. Right acts and feelings become, through habit, easier and more
pleasant, and the doing of them a "second nature." The agent acquires the power of doing
them freely, willingly, more and more "of himself."
But what are "right" acts? In the first place, they are those that conform to a rule--to the
right rule, and ultimately to reason. The Greeks never waver from the conviction that in
the end moral conduct is essentially reasonable conduct. But there is a more significant
way of describing their "rightness," and here for the first time Aristotle introduces his
famous "Doctrine of the Mean." Reasoning from the analogy of "right" physical acts, he
pronounces that rightness always means adaptation or adjustment to the special
requirements of a situation. To this adjustment he gives a quantitative interpretation. To
do (or to feel) what is right in a given situation is to do or to feel just the amount
required--neither more nor less: to do wrong is to do or to feel too much or too little--to
fall short of or over-shoot, "a mean" determined by the situation. The repetition of acts
which lie in the mean is the cause of the formation of each and every "goodness of
character," and for this "rules" can be given.
(2) What then is a "moral virtue," the result of such a process duly directed? It is no mere
mood of feeling, no mere liability to emotion, no mere natural aptitude or endowment, it
is a permanent state of the agent's self, or, as we might in modern phrase put it, of his will,
it consists in a steady self-imposed obedience to a rule of action in certain situations
which frequently recur in human life. The rule prescribes the control and regulation
within limits of the agent's natural impulses to act and feel thus and thus. The situations
fall into groups which constitute the "fields" of the several "moral virtues", for each there
is a rule, conformity to which secures rightness in the individual acts. Thus the moral
ideal appears as a code of rules, accepted by the agent, but as yet to him without rational
justification and without system or unity. But the rules prescribe no mechanical
uniformity: each within its limits permits variety, and the exactly right amount adopted to
the requirements of the individual situation (and every actual situation is individual) must
be determined by the intuition of the moment. There is no attempt to reduce the rich
possibilities of right action to a single monotonous type. On the contrary, there are
acknowledged to be many forms of moral virtue, and there is a long list of them, with
their correlative vices enumerated.
The Doctrine of the Mean here takes a form in which it has impressed subsequent
thinkers, but which has less importance than is usually ascribed to it. In the "Table of the

Virtues and Vices," each of the virtues is flanked by two opposite vices, which are
respectively the excess and defect of that which in due measure constitutes the virtue.
Aristotle tries to show that