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Lecture on
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
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[The following is the text of a lecture
delivered, in part, in Liberal Studies 301, on November 18, 1997, by Ian
Johnston at Malaspina College (now Vancouver
Island University). This document is in the Public Domain, and may be used by
anyone, in whole or in part, without permission and without charge, provided
the source is acknowledged, released November 1997; revised slightly in April
2014
[A Ukrainian translation of an earlier
draft of this lecture is available here]
A.
INTRODUCTION
All lectures on Aristotle customarily
begin by apologizing for the difficulty in the prose, pointing out
that this problem is, in large part, due to the fact that Aristotle did not
prepare the text for publication. The existing text (it is assumed) is the
result of editors dealing with lecture notes, or, as one philosopher has put
it, with notes pulled out of the waste paper basket. Whatever the reason,
reading Aristotle, whose style in his finished pieces was admired in antiquity,
is often difficult because there appears to be much confusion with the sequence
of the argument, the digressions, many puzzling contradictions and grammatical
obscurities, and other rather obvious questions left unexplored or dealt with
very cryptically. So if you’re finding many passages in the Ethics a
hard read, well, you’re not alone.
The main problem, as Jonathan Barnes, a
well-known modern Aristotle scholar points out, is that reacting to Aristotle’s
views is often difficult, since we first have to reconstruct them and establish
what we think he meant. And there is by no means secure agreement about every
detail of such a project. If it’s any consolation, the Ethics is
widely regarded as one of the most accessible of all Aristotle’s philosophical
writings. And, in a sense, if we pay careful attention to what Aristotle is
saying in Book I, the major points in the argument are not too difficult to
follow, and we can derive many useful and coherent ideas from Aristotle’s
reflections. In fact, I want to make the case that a good deal of what
Aristotle is saying in this text answers to our commonsense notions of how we
should deal with ethical questions and an education in moral awareness and
right conduct.
What I propose to do in this lecture is
to outline, as best I can, Aristotle’s central argument in the Ethics and
to explore rather tentatively why he holds up this particular view of human
moral conduct and what some of the consequences of this view might be. I shall
attempt to steer clear, as much as possible, of most of the continuing
philosophical arguments concerning the interpretation of particularly difficult
sections (which I am not really qualified to dissect anyway). And I shall be
largely skipping over some interesting and important matters which arise from
the main argument (e.g., Aristotle’s analysis of voluntary and involuntary
action and the sections of friendship, among others).
My main contention here, as I have
indicated briefly, is that Aristotle’s great value as a moral philosopher and
the main reason for the lasting importance of his reflections on morality is
that he offers us a workable and intelligible framework for sorting out how we
should think about living our lives—a version that in
many ways fits our commonsense notions and is thus more closely in tune with
our common experience than many other alternative visions of how human beings
ought to live.
B. SOME
INITIAL OBSERVATIONS
Aristotle’s central concern in
the Ethics is much the same as Plato’s in the Republic:
What objective grounds do we have for arguing that there is a way of evaluating
moral life so as to counter the skepticism of the sophists, including the view
of Thrasymachus that justice is merely the interest
of the strong in society who create laws and moral systems to provide a
conventional justification for their own self-interest? Plato, you will recall,
offered at least three answers to that problem: first, that people were
naturally divided into different areas of excellence and that there were thus
some naturally gifted to rule on moral questions (provided they received an
appropriate education), second, that there existed absolute moral truths, in
the Forms, which were accessible to a few people, and, thirdly, the Myth
of Er, which provides a fictional vision of the
afterlife. Aristotle, as we shall see, rejects or ignores these Platonic
answers to the challenge of the sophists, in order to create his own response.
But it’s important to recognize that his task is similar: he wants to find sure
grounds on which to base the moral life.
The similarity in purpose between
Aristotle and Plato is worth stressing. Many commentators will emphasize the
differences between the two thinkers (which are certainly significant), but, as
we shall see, in many key respects their concerns and their response to the
ethical problems of the time are very close indeed. Indeed, some have argued
that we can see Aristotle’s Ethics as a continuation of
Plato’s Republic, an attempt to resolve one basic problem left to
us by that famous dialogue: either one must find a transcendent, objective
reality of pure goodness (the Form of the Good) radically separated from the
imperfect sensible world, or one must concede moral enquiry to the sophists and
relativists. Aristotle is no more willing than Plato is to surrender the
argument, but he wants to put ethical evaluations and enquiry into ethical
matters on a different footing, one that does not require the appeal to things
like the theory of forms but that grounds moral arguments in our practical
experience.
C.
ARISTOTLE’S PRELIMINARY MOVES IN BOOK I
Before looking at the details of
Aristotle’s main argument, we must pay careful attention to his opening
assumptions, the introductory remarks he makes in Book I about the nature of
his enquiry. For much of what follows comes clearly enough from these starting
points.
First, Aristotle stresses that a study
of ethics, that is, a study of the character of human beings (which is what the
words Ta Ethika mean) rests, as
do all enquiries into how human beings are to behave, on a particular
understanding of what a human being is. In one of his most oft-quoted remarks,
the importance of which one cannot overestimate, Aristotle gives the key point:
“We do not mean a man who lives his life in isolation, but a man who also lives
with parents, children, a wife, and friends and fellow citizens generally,
since man is by nature a social and political being” (1097b). Human beings, in
other words, derive their identity—their sense of self—and thus their moral purposes from their
participation in an existing community, the world of parents, ancestors,
friends, customs, institutions, and laws. In a tradition that goes back at
least as far as Homer, Aristotle has no room for the notion that there is an
individual existence prior to or independent of the community. Thus, whatever
ethical enquiry involves, it must take into account the essential social and
political basis of human life.
Aristotle makes no attempt to argue
this fundamental point; he simply takes it as self-evident (as it would be for any
one of his contemporaries). Thus, the study of what makes a particular person
good is, as Aristotle repeatedly observes, really an introduction to and
inextricably a part of the more important discussion of what makes the
community, the polis, good. His moral theory is,
to use Oakeshott’s phrase, firmly a morality
of community (rather than, say, seeing human life as a self-defining activity
which goes on independent or in defiance of the community). Aristotle’s
emphasis on this point is clearly stronger than Plato’s in the Republic,
for the latter suggests that in his view justice in the individual is
independent of and antecedent to justice in the polis (even though Plato
assumes human beings will, indeed must, live in communities).
To introduce an analogy to which I
shall return from time to time, one might say that Aristotle sees the
individual as inevitably part of a team—a large and complex but clearly identifiable group
of team members of all sorts of capabilities, an environment which shapes the
purposes and value of that individual life in relation to other members of the
team community and to the team as an overall unity. And just as a team player,
in a sense, has no identity or purpose without a team in which he or she can
participate as a fully integrated member, so the human being has no complete
identity or purpose without the polis to which he or she belongs.
Now, it’s clear that if we are
interested in having excellent teams, a good place to start is with the
question: How can the individual become an excellent team player? In other
words, we might start with a study of the particular conduct of individuals,
even though our major goal is to achieve an understanding of the entire team.
And so it is for Aristotle. For him the study of ethics, how individuals can
become excellent or can evaluate excellence, is a necessary preliminary to the
study of politics. Note that the last sentence of the Ethics reads
as follows: “So let us begin our discussion” (1181b). In other words, now that
we have dealt with the necessary preliminary topic of ethics, let us move to
our major interest, politics.
It’s important to notice, if we pursue
this analogy, that wanting to study excellence in team play does not mean that
I have to deal with teams which all play the same game or abide by the same
rules. Aristotle is quite aware of cultural differences. But he believes that,
if we examine carefully how these apparently different games proceed and what
constitutes excellence in the different games, we will be able to come up with
some general principles about team excellence itself. In other words, by
studying different manifestations of games as they are played in the sensible
world, we can discover some important universal principles which govern
excellence in all games.
It is vital to grasp this point.
Aristotle does not deny the obvious point that different communities live by
different rules and have different standards of ethical conduct. But he claims
that if we study what constitutes effective community membership (or, to use my
analogy, excellent team play) we can come to an understanding of moral
excellence in any community, no matter what its basic rules may be (just as if
we study what constitutes excellence in, say, hockey, football, and rugby, we
can come to an understanding of standards of excellence which apply to them
all, regardless of the different rules of each game).
The second important opening
observation Aristotle makes in Book I is that in the study of human character
(ethics) we must focus on the world we know—the world around us, the traditions of our polis
and of others, the received opinions of earlier thinkers, especially those
famous for their wisdom—and on what we all
observe about the actual behaviour of people. We must begin with people as we
find them. The theories of human conduct we inherit we must explore by an
examination of the facts around us, not with a view to revealing the
inadequacies in the theories so that we can dismiss them (although that might
be sometimes necessary) but rather to see what they may have in common or the
extent to which they may help to confirm our own speculations about the best
way to live.
He also stresses that such knowledge
derived from observation of what really goes on will be approximate, an
outline, a general sketch, a framework for thinking about ethical questions and
a proper education in moral matters. Ethics is not, in other words, an exact
science which is going to deliver certainty in all moral questions.
This emphasis on the world around us
and on the inexact nature of the enquiry accounts for two things that clearly
distinguish Aristotle’s ethical writings from those of Plato in the Republic.
Aristotle wants to ground the study of ethics in empirical enquiry (that is, on
the observation of what really happens) and to deny that from the study of
moral questions we are going to achieve certainty. These points go against the
emphasis in the Republic on the deceptiveness of the sensible
world and on the quest for the certainty available once we can get out of the
cave (one possible interpretation of Plato’s moral thrust).
Aristotle is concerned to place the
study of ethics on a more empirical basis because, as he says, Plato’s radical
separation of the Form of the Good (in the ideal reality) from the particular
forms of human conduct in the sensible world makes the moral knowledge
necessary for the good life inaccessible to almost everyone:
Thus, although a great deal of what
Aristotle says about appropriate conduct often sounds quite similar to what
Plato is saying (for both are presenting defenses of the traditional virtues),
the basis of Aristotle’s moral theory is significantly different, with a much
stronger emphasis in tradition and experience, on the practical realities of
daily life and moral situations, than on intellectual wisdom of the sort
described in the Republic.
In rejecting the Platonic approach
through an intelligible apprehension of the ideal reality of the Forms,
together with his emphasis on the study of ethics as an inexact and rough
study, the production of what he calls “a general sketch” of moral principles
which will hold “for the most part” (rather than on acquiring moral knowledge
which will provide certainty in moral questions), Aristotle’s aim is thoroughly
practical. Using such empirically derived principles, we will be able to
construct and evaluate our own lives better. It seems that for Aristotle,
ethics is not a matter for theoretical, scientific, exact knowledge of what is
true, but of practical know-how—in many respects
associated with the skill of artistic production (he makes the analogy
repeatedly). The basis for the good life we have to learn in the practical
sensible world around us, and providing a framework to assist us in this
endeavour is inexact. In what must be one his most historically ironic remarks,
Aristotle observes that this procedure is appropriate because “anyone can fill
in the gaps” (1098a).
One final introductory point. Aristotle indicates in Book I that his approach
is intended only for those who already have some sense of virtue: “to be a
competent student of what is right and just, and
of politics generally, one must first have received a proper upbringing in
moral conduct” (1095b). That is to say, an understanding of some of the
principles of moral conduct requires some existing sense of virtue in the
student.
Here again the analogy of the team may
be useful. If we want to offer a series of lectures on the topic “How are we to
understand the principles which determine excellence in a team player,” we
would almost certainly set as a prerequisite some team experience in the
students, some shared training in the social dynamics of team behaviour, of the
sort which comes from experience, so that the students would bring to the
lectures the appropriate state of awareness of the issues and a desire to
learn. Someone with very little or no experience of team play and no desire to
find out about it might have great difficulties understanding the issues.
D. THE OVERALL
STRUCTURE OF ARISTOTLE’S ARGUMENT
The main framework for the first part
of Aristotle’s argument, laid out below for clarification, goes something like
this (the page numbers refer to the Ostwald edition):
The sections below examine some salient
features of this argument.
E. HUMAN
BEHAVIOUR AS TELEOLOGICAL ACTIVITY
Aristotle makes his most crucial
assertion in the very first sentence in the Ethics: “Every art or applied
science and every systematic investigation, and similarly every action and choice, seems to aim at some good; the good therefore, has
been well defined at that at which all things aim” (1094a). This claim asserts,
in effect, that all activity is goal directed: it has purpose in mind, an end
point (a telos). Aristotle offers no
“proof” of this claim that all behaviour is goal oriented or teleological, by
nature purposeful, and that the notion of goodness is thus naturally linked to
some final destination or stage of development.
This claim is a vital point (as
important as Plato’s assumption in the Republic that human
beings are characterized by a natural division in their talents) because it
will enable Aristotle to anchor his discussion in nature, in the truth of
things, rather than in opinion or convention. The teleological striving of
human beings is what is natural to them, so their moral nature is going to be
linked directly and naturally to a process of development towards an end point.
The excellence of the human being is thus going to be associated with growth
towards some final realization of his or her true and best nature.
Without this assumption, Aristotle
might have serious problems grounding his ethical framework in the truth of
things; whereas, if his claim is true, then this starting point can form the
basis of an answer to relativists who claim that there is no single truth about
moral conduct. If there is a natural purpose for human life (as Aristotle
suggests) then it seems clear that the quality of a human life (its excellence
or lack of excellence) can then be measured against the extent to which a human
life has realized this purpose. Thus, the moral life is not just a matter of
opinion but deeply rooted in the truth of life itself. Aristotle does not
attempt to prove this point, and there is no hint of a divine sanction for this
initial claim. It is an opening assumption, of great importance in the
argument.
The claim is often made that Aristotle
starts here because of his great interest in biology, a subject of enquiry in
which the concept of natural striving towards some final excellence, some full
attainment of potential, is an obvious way of understanding the behaviour of
plants and animals. And it is also true that in the Greek tradition of
excellence, from Homer onwards, there is a very strong emphasis placed on
measuring the quality of the individual against one’s sense of what a truly
heroic and fully developed human being (like Odysseus, for example) might and
can be.
F. EUDAIMONIA:
ARISTOTLE’S CONCEPTION OF HAPPINESS
Having established the notion of
goal-directed activity as the concept essential to an understanding of human
goodness and excellence, Aristotle then seeks a definition of what the final
goal of human life might be, the most important activity which we pursue for
its own sake, something over and above all the other goods (like money, fame,
good looks, learning, and so on). This final goal he identifies on the basis of
an appeal to experience as eudaimonia, a
word traditionally translated as happiness (1097). This English
rendering causes some difficulties if we do not remind ourselves that by the
term Aristotle means something much wider than the word happiness might suggest to us. Eudaimonia carries
the notion of objective success, the proper conditions of a person’s life, what
we might more properly call “well being” or “living well.” Thus, eudaimonia includes
a sense of material, psychological, and physical well being over time, for the
fully happy life will include success for oneself, for one’s immediate family,
and for one’s descendants. This notion links the Ethics directly
with the Greek traditions, especially the Iliad, in which the
happiness of life includes a sense of posthumous fame and the success of one’s
children as vital components. We may better get a sense of what Aristotle means
by the term if we take the advice of one interpreter and see eudaimonia as the answer to the question
“What sort of a life would we most wish for our children?”
Eudaimonia, we should note, is one of a number of goals desired
for their own sakes, yet it is also, for Aristotle, clearly superior to them.
And this point may cause some confusion. The best way to make sense of the
notion perhaps is to regard happiness as something of a framework for all the
other various goods that we pursue. We achieve eudaimonia with the proper ordering of such items, by imposing a
pattern on our activities which gives all of them the appropriate significance,
by, if you like, adopting a suitable hierarchy for all the different goods we
pursue. Thus, eudaimonia will be
made up of many different goods and will provide the overall significance to
all of them (it will, in other words, provide a significant meaning to our
lives). We do not achieve eudaimonia by actively seeking
it (this is an important point); we attain it by ordering our pursuit of all
the other goods in the right manner. Happiness, which is the highest and final
goal of human striving, is, in other words, something of a by-product of
carrying out our pursuit of all the other goods (wealth, fame, learning, and so
on) in the proper manner.
G. THE
FUNCTION (ERGON) ARGUMENT
This concept of eudaimonia, Aristotle admits (1097b), is not all
that helpful, without some further attempt to define more closely what the
concept means. In other words, the concept is, to this point, rather empty of
significant content. Aristotle meets this need with another traditional Greek
notion, linking the concept of goodness with that of function (ergon).
This argument rests on the assumption
that everything, living or non-living, has a specific function for which it is
designed. The excellence (arete) of the thing
or person will therefore depend upon the extent to which it fulfils the
function for which it is designed. A knife which cuts poorly will have little
excellence, since it carries out its function poorly; a racehorse which runs
fast will have a high arete, since it is
fulfilling its function very well. Since a human being is, above all else, a
social and political being, then the excellence of a human being will be those
things which best enable the human being to fulfill that social and political
function.
Now, since the excellence of anything
is particular to that thing (i.e., is unique to that object or living
creature), Aristotle seeks to find what the unique functions of human beings
might be. And in 1098a he identifies the unique function of human beings as the
rational element in action: “The proper function of man, then, consists in an
activity of the soul in conformity with a rational principle, or, at least, not
without it” (1098a). The excellence of the human being, therefore, is going to
depend upon the extent to which this unique function manifests itself.
H. THE
INITIAL CONCLUSION: THE GOOD LIFE
Putting together, then, his notion of goal-directed,
teleological striving as the basis for all life, the notion of happiness (eudaimonia), and of the excellence of human life (arete) linked to a distinctively human function (ergon), Aristotle can offer as his fundamental moral
principle the following definition:
There are some important problems with
the argument up to this point, notably with the function argument. Social roles
(artisans, musicians, soldier, housewives, and so on) have functions, but
how to we speak of a human function? If we had recourse to divine revelation we
might understand something about a uniquely human function, but Aristotle makes
no such appeal. Just because a certain activity is particularly human, that
does not mean we have an obligation to engage in it. Human beings, for example,
are the only creatures who can use words to tell lies to each other. That does
not mean we are obliged to carry out that activity in order to be fully human.
The doubts about the function argument
have led some interpreters to suggest that the main emphasis in the Ethics is
not strictly on what we might consider ethics and more on success: “the
immediate aim of the Ethics is to make us ‘good men’—not morally good men, but expert or successful
human beings” (Barnes 29). On this reading, the Ethics ”is
not directly telling us how to be morally good men, or even how to be humanly
happy: it is telling us how to live successful lives, how to fulfill ourselves
as men” (Barnes 34).
We recognize that there is a
significant difference between being successful and being morally good. But if
we recall the team analogy, the way Aristotle brings the two more or less
together begins to make sense. After all, to the extent that we identify people
as team players, to that extent we tend to acknowledge that their excellence as
human beings rests on the success that they demonstrate in the team
environment, a group of activities which involves guiding behaviour by the
standards of excellence established by the group. Since Aristotle, as we have
seen, claims that human beings are, first and foremost, social and political
beings, it is probably not so surprising that he gauges their excellence in
social terms. What enables someone to contribute well to the group and to be
recognized by the group as an excellent contributor (that is, to be a success)
is a measure of the human being’s worth or excellence.
Whatever these difficulties, this
definition of the good life shows just how much Aristotle, like Plato,
identifies moral excellence with the possession of a certain kind of character,
with a sense of a full and rich life constituted by the best virtues in the
individual. The central moral concern of human life, therefore, is going to
rest on the appropriate relationship between the individual’s character,
desires, thought process, and choices, as these manifest themselves in action,
rather than on, say, the consequences of certain actions or the fidelity with
which the person follows certain carefully established rules.
I. THE
DOCTRINE OF MEAN
Up to this point, the argument,
although coherent enough, is somewhat thin. For what does acting in accordance
with rationality mean? If we agree that the excellence of human beings consists
in their carrying out well their unique function and if we further agree that
that function is indeed as Aristotle describes it, are we any closer to understanding
how we ought to behave? To address this concern in Book II Aristotle introduces
his most famous moral principle, the doctrine of the mean (amended by later
commentators to read the doctrine of the golden mean), the idea that “moral
qualities . . . are destroyed by defect and by excess” (35) so that good
behaviour consists in avoiding such extremes.
Now, the doctrine of the mean has been
often interpreted to insist that moral behaviour consists in always acting
moderately or without feeling. But this is a Stoic or Christian misrepresentation
of what Aristotle is actually saying here. For immediately after introducing
the doctrine of the mean, Aristotle insists that the mean he is referring to is
not a mathematical mean (or average between defect and excess), a principle
that would, in effect, amount to a clear rule of behaviour; what his principle
involves, he states, is a mean “relative to us.”
This rider qualifies the doctrine of
the mean in a curious way, by insisting the virtuous action involves a response
appropriate to the particular situation in which one finds oneself—the important thing is to act appropriately,
without overreacting (excess) or under-reacting (defect) to a particular set of
circumstances. In some cases, it will be clear, the appropriate response might
indeed require a very powerful display of feeling and very powerful action
(e.g., if one is attacked physically and one’s life is in danger); at other
times, the appropriate response will be something a good deal milder.
Acting virtuously, therefore,
requires an awareness that in any situation
one has to choose how to respond and that there are two major dangers: over-
and under-reacting. The best behaviour, the most morally excellent conduct,
will be the response appropriate to that set of circumstances.
Having established this doctrine of the
mean in Book II, Aristotle then, in Book III and IV goes on to apply the
concept to defend the traditional virtues, illustrating, often with some
confusion, how each of the traditional virtues fits into his analytical framework.
How useful is this doctrine of the mean
as practical advice to act well? How much of a help is it to me if I am
concerned to be a moral person or to evaluate the conduct of others? Well, at
first glance, it does not seem all that helpful, as Aristotle appears to admit:
“this statement, true though it is, lacks clarity” (1138b). The doctrine may be
helpful in stressing the importance of the emotional components of action, and
it may provide a useful advice to be careful not to be too enthusiastic or too
diffident, but unless it can provide us with some sense of how we estimate what
is “appropriate to the situation” we are still somewhat in the dark as to what
we have to do to be moral agents. As Barnes points out, in its initial
formulation, the doctrine of the mean appears to be saying that if one wants to
be an excellent person, then one should act as an excellent person should act.
Left in this form, the doctrine would seem to have little practical utility.
J. PRACTICAL
WISDOM (PHRONESIS)
Nor is this difficulty made all that
much easier with Aristotle’s introduction into the argument about the mean the
standard of a person who displays practical wisdom: “a mean defined by a
rational principle, such as a man of practical wisdom would use to determine
it” (1106b). This seems to be saying that our benchmark for understanding the
mean should be a role model, a man of practical wisdom, someone recognized for
his moral quality. As we shall see, this is an important principle (that our
moral understanding must use role models), but at this stage it still leaves
open what a person has to do to display practical wisdom. We might note, in
passing, what Aristotle does not do here: he does not offer any sense that
there is a theoretical route to understanding the doctrine of the mean.
Whatever we are to make of this central tenet of his moral teaching, it is
something practical, something acquired in the world of experience and daily
living. It is not something we can pick up by private study.
Aristotle clearly recognizes the need
to clarify this business and in the opening of Book VI he promises to address
the issue: “We must also have a definition of what right reason is and what
standard determines it” (1138b). Unfortunately in the rest of this book he does
not directly deliver on this promise, although indirectly he illuminates what
practical wisdom involves and therefore what qualities are necessary for moral
behaviour.
Book VI of the Ethics is,
in many ways, the most frustrating of all parts of the argument. Aristotle
offers many elusive leads in a number of different directions, but he never returns
to the central question with which he starts and which needs clarification. So,
not unexpectedly, there is a very energetic argument still going on about just
exactly what Aristotle means by practical wisdom, which one writer, in
reviewing the arguments, has called a concept valuable for its suggestiveness
rather than for its coherent final account. The task of reconstructing
Aristotle’s argument is still going on. Given this difficulty the best I can do
here is to offer a sense of what Aristotle seems to mean by the term in
relation to his moral system (recognizing that this is no doubt a simplified
view with which many would disagree).
First, one should note that practical
wisdom for Aristotle does not consist in a simple set of moral rules or maxims,
a list of truths which we can learn and then apply to experience (like, for
example, the Ten Commandments). It consists rather in an ability to do the
right thing in a wide variety of different circumstances. And this ability, in
turn, rests upon a complex set of mental qualities. In other words, moral
action depends upon certain intellectual virtues, without which one will be
unable to carry out the activities essential to the highest moral behaviour.
So in Book VI Aristotle explores the
various intellectual virtues—their respective concerns
and methods, in order to distinguish the various intellectual abilities
necessary to each form of enquiry. Only when these are fully deployed, will one
have the practical wisdom necessary for the highest forms of human excellence.
The following list (taken in large part
of McIntyre) indicates the range of intellectual skills and their importance in
moral behaviour:
In other words, Aristotle’s vision of
practical wisdom is a very social form of thinking about myself. As MacIntyre observes,
there is no practical reasoning in isolation from the group, no morality outside the polis (just as there can be no excellent
team conduct if one is not a member of a team). Outside the polis there
is no commonly agreed upon ranking of goods, and thus an individual faced with
a number of options in a particular situation has no sense of moral priorities.
Moral behaviour and the reasoning essential to it emerge from one’s membership
in the community, not independently of it.
K. PRACTICAL
WISDOM CONTINUED: THE PRACTICAL SYLLOGISM
Given all these necessary intellectual
qualities, how should a person think in order to arrive at a morally good
decision? To clarify this concept, Aristotle introduces the notion of the
practical syllogism (although he never uses this term). Its simplest structure
goes something like this. Suppose a person is in the position of having to make
a choice and wishes to make the morally correct choice. Then, according to
Aristotle’s idea of practical wisdom, the process of choosing goes something
like this:
The Major Premise, the universal, comes
from education, habit, observation, and example, from an educated sense of
what eudaimonia means in my
community and its relationship to the variously ranked goods of life. The Minor
Premise comes from my intelligent perception of the particular situation which
now faces me and the various responses I might make to it. And the conclusion
comes from correct reasoning.
Error arises if the major premise is
false (in a bad or poorly educated person, one who has a false notion of the
good life) or if the minor premise is based upon an inaccurate assessment of
the immediate situation and the possible responses to it, or if the person is
ignorant of some essential facts. To be able to avoid such errors means that
one possesses practical wisdom. It is possible to come to the correct
conclusion erroneously (by chance or luck), but the true phronimos will go through the process correctly
and make the morally right choice.
What this process involves is the
ability to bring to bear on particular situations a knowledge of general
principles which relate to the ends of a purposeful good life and an intelligent
sense of the particular situation facing the person, together with the intellectual
skill to combine these characteristics, so that practical wisdom tells us what
the right action in this case is. This process will involve recognizing
relevant circumstances and reasoning correctly from an awareness of the various
goods and their relationship to the highest good to make the best decision
about the particular options.
The process begins with an informed
awareness of a particular situation: “The man of highest practical wisdom is
the man who brings to bear upon a situation the greatest number of genuinely
pertinent concerns and genuinely relevant considerations commensurate with the
importance of the deliberative context” (Wiggins 234). This perception then calls
into play the relevant major premise that “spells out the general import of the
concern that makes this feature the salient feature of the situation” (Wiggins
234). The validity of the major premise brought to bear depends not on its
unconditional acceptability, nor on its all inclusiveness, but on its adequacy
to the particular situation.
L. THE
IMPORTANCE OF FEELING
The qualities outlined above are
necessary if one is to act morally, but they are not, by themselves, sufficient.
To be fully moral, a person must by disposition (feeling) desire to act on what
practical wisdom reveals. Aristotle, in other words, sees the absence of inner
tension in making a decision and acting upon it as one of the essential
components of a fully developed moral character. Hence, reason and desire are
inseparable in making the best moral choices: “since choice is a deliberate
desire, it follows that, if the choice is to be good, the reasoning must be
true and the desire correct. . . . [I]n intellectual activity concerned with
action, the good state is truth in harmony with correct desire” (148; 1138a).
Thought and feeling determine human action. The emphasis of the entire process
falls more on a sensitive feel for what is right than on a formal process of
reasoning which we then impose on our feelings (Sullivan).
Aristotle’s notion of virtue thus flies
in the face of some commonly held notions today, which see virtue as the
ability to overcome temptation. Some of us would see the highest virtue
manifesting itself in those who have to wrestle mightily with temptation, with
their inner desires, and who resist those desires to follow what their reason
tells them to do. In an extreme form, this doctrine might argue that one is
sure of acting morally only when one has to fight mightily
against one’s desires. Not so for Aristotle. For him the hierarchy of virtue is
clearly based upon the harmony between what one’s practical intelligence says
and the desires about what I want to do, as follows:
Consider this list for a moment. In the
most highly developed moral excellence, the person’s feelings mesh effortlessly
with his or her actions, so there is no tension between what the person wants
to do and what is the right thing to do. This may (indeed, should) sound rather
odd to us, who have inherited a tradition where moral excellence is often seen
as involving a struggle of some kind.
Here’s a simple example. Two
desperately hungry men are walking along the road. They come across some
unattended food laid out on a picnic table in preparation for a group meal.
Should they steal some of it? The first man, an Aristotelian, in spite of
his cravings, responds easily and without hesitation. Taking food is wrong. So
he moves on. The second man, a Kantian Christian, is sorely tempted. He
struggles to overcome his desires, prays, and finally steels himself to his
moral duty and moves on without taking any food. Which person has displayed the
higher moral excellence? Many of us, I suspect, would choose the second
man, because he had to overcome great difficulties (after all, Kant insisted
that the only time we could be sure we were acting morally was when we did something
we did not want to do). Any many of us link moral quality with overcoming
psychological adversity, especially strong temptation. For Aristotle, however,
the first person is clearly the morally superior man, since his decision came
without any inner tension.
Aristotle thus places a great emphasis
on the importance of educating the feelings. This can come about only through
education in virtuous habits, so that one is naturally inclined to do the right
thing, even before one fully understands everything about ethics. That is the
reason he initially insists that the study of ethics is fit only for those who
by their education and upbringing already have some sense of virtuous and
non-virtuous conduct. It is also one important reason why Aristotle devotes so much
time in a discussion of friendship, on the moral importance of appropriate
personal relationships.
M. MORAL
MOTIVATION
At the risk
of introducing something of a digression, let me pose the following questions:
in Aristotle’s system, what would encourage someone to act in a morally appropriate
manner? Why, that is, would anyone facing a difficult choice choose to be a
good person, especially when facing considerable pressure not to act in that
manner? Aristotle does not go into this directly in very much detail, but
exploring an answer to the question may help to illuminate certain issues.
Clearly one
group of people, the very best moral agents, would act in an appropriate way
because it would simply not occur to them to act otherwise. Their experience,
education, and feelings would seamlessly encourage them to do the right thing,
to demonstrate their own moral excellence, because that is how they see
themselves, that is their nature (they are, if I may once again invoke my
favourite analogy, the Wayne Gretskys and Michael Jordans and Richie McCaws of the
moral world).
A second
group would strive to act in the morally appropriate ways, even though in a
particular situation that might not be their natural inclination, because they
wish to be seen as excellent. They wish, in other words to meet the standard of
moral conduct set by the first group (perhaps even to be seen as one of that
group). But acting in that manner would not come as easily to them as it would
to members of the first group, for they would have to make a conscious decision
to do the right thing instead of doing so without reflection (and perhaps some
struggle).
But the
largest group might well be those people less concerned about achieving moral
excellence than they are about avoiding shame, the social disapproval which
comes from an action (or inaction) that the community recognizes as
dishonourable, something that is, if you like, “letting the team down.” People
in this last group might face very strong temptations to neglect their moral
duty (e.g., terrifying fear in the front lines of battle, greed in the face of
lucrative but dishonest business practices, a craving for depraved pleasures,
and so on) and yet refuse to act on these temptations, not because they wish to
do the right thing and be looked upon as excellent but because they do not want
to be publicly reviled as a coward or a criminal or a dishonourable person.
The extent to
which the desire to avoid shame is a supremely powerful motivating factor in a
culture promoting excellence (of the sort Aristotle is proposing) is
particularly clear in the Iliad,
where it emerges as a constant preoccupation of the warrior leaders, even those
conscious of their own high social standing (Hector, for example, chooses to face almost certain
death rather than risk being laughed at for his refusal to fight Achilles).
We are, of
course, aware of the power of group shame as a motivating force in certain
situations (in the teenage peer group, police forces, army units, sports teams,
and so on), where it is often strong enough to override the law, the rules of
the game, or personal safety. But we are also aware (I think) of the weaknesses
of a moral system which relies upon shame. For the power of shame (as the flip
side of a shared sense of excellence) relies upon the existence of a community
group with a strong and shared sense of what constitutes moral excellence. But
that is material for a different discussion.
N. SOME FINAL
COMMENTS
I began by saying that one of the great
strengths of Aristotle’s Ethics is that, for all the
complications in the prose, it does answer to many of our commonsense notions
of how we ought to educate our children in moral questions. His stress on the
community as the basis for our sense of the good life, on practical observation
and experience (especially of role models), on the importance of habits which
encourage us to mesh desire and good decisions, and on the importance of
practical experience over theoretical insights all make sound sense to many of
us, so much so that in many cases we put our children through an Aristotelian
moral education whether we have read the Ethics or not.
If we remember, too, Aristotle’s
initial idea that his purpose is to provide a rough framework within which we
can discuss and think about moral questions and our own moral conduct, then we can appreciate how, using his concepts, we can
better carry out such discussions.
Here again, the analogy with a team and
with team behaviour may help. If we ask ourselves, “What processes of thought
help an excellent team player choose what to do in a particular situation?” we
shall probably come up with something close to what Aristotle is talking about.
Taking as a starting point the notion that such a person will begin with some
idea of what the ultimate end of being an excellent team player is and of
various subordinate goods in that activity, we can infer that in particular
situation, good team play will require an accurate assessment of the particular
situation, a mature evaluation of various good options, the ability to select
the one most appropriate to the situation, and then a choice which results in
action, which, to be successful, must manifest a certain cleverness, an
efficient skill at achieving the good selected.
Let’s take a trivial example. Suppose a
good hockey player is stick handling the puck in on the opponents’ goal with some
team mates. How does he decide what to do as he moves towards the net? If he is
an excellent team player his decision will result from his conception of his
own excellence, a judicious assessment of the situation (what is the state of
the game, how competent are the opponents between me and the goal, what have my
team mates and I practised, how have we dealt with similar situations successfully
in the past, and so on). The decision he reaches, whether, for example, to
pass, to shoot, or to continue, will result from all of these factors. If he is
a good player, he will make the right decision in that situation and will
succeed (or come very close to success). And if he is a player of the highest
excellence his desire will coincide with his rational decision, so that he will
not execute his decision with any regret, anger, frustration, cowardice, or
malice.
Obviously such a process depends
entirely upon the existence of the individual within the framework of the team.
And what the player does in that situation may well vary from one point in the
game to another or from one game to another, as the situations change (for
example, if the player’s team is way ahead in the game, he may choose to miss
the goal, since running up the score on a beaten opponent is considered
unworthy; if he has different team mates and different opponents, then the
decision may well be different; for instance, if one of his team mates is a
much better goal scorer than he is, then he might pass the puck; with a
different team mate, he might properly choose to take the shot himself). The
principles that govern the decision making in these different situations are
not written in any book; they are acquired by training, education, reflection,
observation (especially of role models, stars celebrated for their excellence),
in short, by excellent habits picked up by intelligent and talented players.
It’s important to stress that Aristotle
is not suggesting that the full thought process outlined above goes on before every
decision. The excellent person, the one with practical wisdom, has a fully
integrated personality which can make right decisions by habit, on the spot.
But if asked to explain the reasoning that led to a decision, he or she could appeal
to the process outlined above. And if we want to explain any errors in the
individual’s behaviour, we can appeal to the process above to discuss that went
wrong. After all, even today when we denigrate a team player, we usually do so
in terms of the poor choices he or she has made in particular situations, and
we frequently appeal to concepts like “love of the game,” or “respect for his
team mates,” and so on.
We might also note that in Aristotle’s
moral thinking, as in the social dynamics of the team, some players are clearly
better than others. There is no ethic of moral equality here. Part of the
challenge of acting morally is recognizing one’s own excellence in relation to
other people’s and adjusting one’s behaviour accordingly, for one’s position in
the moral hierarchy determines the nature of one’s obligations and
responsibilities (just as on any sports team). Similarly in the long discussion
of friendship, Aristotle emphasizes that friendship, an essential part of the
successfully realized moral life, comes in many different forms and that the
man of practical wisdom will have a precise understanding of those differences
and take them into account in his decision making.
O. CONCLUSION
By way of bringing these remark to a
conclusion (omitting a great deal of what Aristotle writes about other matters,
such as pleasure, friendship, and contemplation), I would like to finish by
offering a few suggestions about why this particular view of moral behaviour
has been so influential and remains of major interest today, and not just for
historical reasons.
First, for all the difficulty one
experiences in reading Aristotle, a good deal of what he has to say makes good
practical common sense to the educated citizen. Aristotle, by and large, says
we must concentrate on human conduct as we find it in the world around us and
deal with it as best we can, setting aside utopian schemes for moral
improvement and universal rules of conduct. His arguments that questions about
good and bad conduct are not relative but that, on the other hand, they cannot
be defined with scientific precision, that moral behaviour requires early
training in good habits, that central to moral behaviour is a good character in
which the individual’s desires are educated to want to do the right thing, and
that this is in keeping with human nature, all these match fairly closely the
standards we continue to use in the education of our children because they make
the most sense to us.
The notion that human life is
purposeful and that the end point we should seek is a realization of our full
potential as human beings in a community, that we should work towards having a
fully educated character in which intelligent thinking, educated desires, and
good executive skills enable us to work towards a successful active social
existence which will include material well being, many friends, and the absence
of moral tensions in our decision making, such a goal of living seems to many
very attractive, far more so, in some people’s eyes, that the more austere
model with Plato appears to hold out for us in the Republic.
The importance which Aristotle places
on human life as only acquiring moral meaning in the context of a community
with a shared sense of the structure of goods and on the idea that we can
discover only in such a community identity the appropriate starting points for
rational moral behaviour and the final fulfillment of the good life has again
always appealed to the common sense notion that human beings are, in some
essential ways, dependent on each other in the wider social context and that,
without such a rich and identifiable social context, our moral lives are
significantly diminished. As Roger Sullivan states:
Hence, Aristotle’s view of moral life
has always appealed to those who speak in the name of the community and its
traditional values, and in recent years, as many people have become
disillusioned with the individualistic ethos we have developed since the Renaissance,
the notion that the good life is primarily a matter of emancipating the
individual from traditional communal restraints, interest in Aristotle as a
spokesperson for a community-based moral life has grown.
As a postscript, I shall observe that
this text has played an important role in the formation of the Liberal Studies
program, at least to the extent of reminding us that if we wish to make our
post-secondary education system more humane, more effective, and, in a word,
better, we need to concentrate on creating a learning community, a
social environment in which students working together as friends (in the full
Aristotelian sense of the term) can through experience, observation, and habit,
acquire good moral training precisely in the way Aristotle describes and for
very similar reasons.