We have just seen that Aristotle believes that what is ‘good’ is determined by purposes, relative to individuals, and so when we are talking about what is good for human beings, we need to understand that this will be relative to what human beings are. Human beings are rational animals, so what is good for human beings is to be rational. What it means to ‘live well’ is to use reason to evaluate our purposes and thus to make reason our purpose. We ought to aim to be rational.
Consider an analogy: A saw is something that cuts wood. Its purpose is defined in relation to what it is, which is ‘something that cuts wood’; so the purpose of a saw is to cut wood. And what is ‘good’ is defined in relation to its purpose. Therefore, what is ‘good’ for a saw is defined by its ability to cut wood. Good saws cut wood; bad saws don’t.
A human being is something that is rational. By analogy, as with the saw, its purpose is defined in relation to what it is, which is a ‘thing that is rational’; so the purpose of human being is to be rational. And what is ‘good’ is defined in relation to that purpose. Therefore, what is ‘good’ for a human being is defined by its rationality. Good humans are rational; bad humans aren’t.
What happens when we aim to be rational, using reason to evaluate our purposes? First, we find that we have purposes; second, that we have a range of different purposes; and third, that there is one ‘purpose of purposes’ that is ‘happiness’ or ‘living well’. We all want happiness; we want happiness in itself, not for the sake of anything else; and we want other things insofar as they give us happiness. Everything we do, we do in order to be happy or live well. Imagine Bryan Adams singing his famous song but on behalf of all humanity: ‘Everything I doooooo, I do it for euuuuu(daimonia)…’
So how does one be happy and live well, according to Aristotle? This is the subject of his ‘Ethics’. His advice is very pragmatic and he is not afraid of telling us some hard truths. He acknowledges that it is very difficult to be happy and live well if life is unkind to you. If you are born ugly, for example, you will find it harder to live well and be happy than if you are born good looking. If you are born to a poor family, you will find it harder than if you are born rich. If you are surrounded by bad influences as a young person, or deprived education, you will find it harder to get on in the world. It would be lovely to say that these things do not matter, but that would not be realistic. Aristotle is relentlessly realistic, and I think his philosophy is stronger as a result. The truth is sometimes hard.
Bad fortune makes it harder to live well, but not impossible. All you can do is play the cards you are dealt. But one of the major differences between Socrates (and Plato) and Aristotle is that whilst the former shows a somewhat high-minded priority of moral goodness that is indifferent to worldly matters – such as when Socrates says that a good man cannot be harmed – Aristotle recognises the necessity of getting by and of making the best of your circumstances. And getting by in a hard world requires a pragmatic attitude. You need to behave well, yes, but you also need to get some money, make some friends, achieve some reputation, and, ultimately, try to be lucky. To achieve all this, you will need to equip yourself with some virtues.
The Happy Middle
Look around you, and have a think, and draw up a list of qualities that some people have that you admire or appreciate. What comes to mind? You will have your own list: I will stick to some uncontroversial examples, such as kindness or compassion, willpower, humility, courage or bravery, humour or wit, confidence, generosity, a sense of justice, etc., etc., etc. It doesn’t really matter what the names of these ‘virtues’ are, or which you place higher or lower on your hierarchy of values, the point is only that we can observe some qualities that we admire. We point at these qualities in people and say ‘that is good’. These qualities are called ‘virtues’.
(The word ‘virtue’ has unavoidably ‘moral’ connotations now, but that was not always the case. The dominant moralised version of the concept came about partly from the Romans and the transition from Greek into Latin as the philosophical language of choice: some words just don’t translate in a straightforward way, and the Greek-to-Latin translation of ‘virtue’ is one of them. But the moralised version of ‘virtue’ also came about because the language of virtue was entangled with Christianity for over a thousand years; by the time it got spit out the other end, the concept of ‘virtue’ had taken on some heavy moralistic and religious baggage. The Ancient Greek notion of ‘virtue’ is not necessarily a moral notion, however. The word ‘virtue’ is a Latin translation of the original Greek word arete. This word does not necessarily connote anything moral: it simply means an ‘excellence’. This ‘excellence’ can be academic, athletic, economic, political, theatrical, etc., etc. It doesn’t have to be moral. We’ve seen that Socrates spoke of ‘virtue’ in a moralised way, but he was just one dissenting voice, arguing that none of the other excellences really matter as much as moral excellence. So bear in mind that when Aristotle talks about ‘virtues’, he doesn’t necessarily mean anything moral.)
Since we are calling these qualities ‘good’, they will each have a purpose, according to Aristotle, and the goodness that the quality has will be related to that purpose. Consider the virtue of having some willpower, for example. This is ‘good’ because it serves the purpose of enabling us to control ourselves. If we want to lose weight or stop smoking, we need to exert our willpower to stick to a regime, even when it is hard and we don’t want to. Good willpower allows us to do this; bad willpower doesn’t. Willpower is ‘good’ to the extent that it achieves its purpose. And if we identify this quality as ‘good’ or ‘virtuous’, then it must be because its purpose ultimately serves our purpose of purposes, which is to be happy. Having willpower allows you to exert self-control, which enables you to be someone you are happy to be.
Willpower is just one example. You will find the same for any example you choose. It’s not for Aristotle (or me) to list the virtues, nor identify their purposes, because you can do this for yourself based on your own observations and reflections. What Aristotle points out is that virtues are very important, but you can have too much of a good thing.
Each ‘excellence’, according to Aristotle, will lie at a happy middle point between two extremes. The classic example is courage or bravery. To be brave is an excellent quality to have: it serves the purpose of being able to stand up for yourself when you need to, or find the strength to help others when you want to, etc. Obviously, in the Ancient Greek world it was important to have the courage to fight well in battle. We tend to contrast courage with cowardice. A courageous fighter stands their ground; a cowardly fighter runs away. Cowardice does not serve the purpose required of fighting in battle. Courage does, and so courage is the ‘good’ quality: the ‘virtue’ not the ‘vice’.
There are degrees of courage, obviously. Some of us might be brave enough to stand up to our boss once in a while, but not many would back themselves to stand their ground against a horde of heavily-armed and bloodthirsty warriors. Some of us can’t even return food in a restaurant. So there’s a sliding scale, with each of us finding ourselves at some point on that scale at various times and in various contexts. What Aristotle observes is that it is not ideal to be at the extreme of either end of the scale; we should want to be somewhere in the middle.
To lack courage is clearly a problem. If you need to fight a battle for the purpose of protecting your property, but you run away out of cowardice, you will lose your property. Purpose not served = bad. So you want to have some courage.
But to have too much courage is equally problematic. If you have so much courage that you rush headlong into battle, you put yourself in far greater danger than is needed. You might well die needlessly. You are just as likely to cause more problems for yourself and others by being too courageous as you are by not being courageous enough. Too much courage is identified with their own ‘vice’ words, such as ‘reckless’ or ‘foolhardy’. Aristotle’s method identifies why these are not virtues: they do not serve their purpose. Recklessness can be just as counter-purposive as cowardice.
Consider another example: ‘wit’ or a sense of humour. Everyone likes a laugh, and someone who can find the funny side and make us laugh is often rightly admired. But this can go too far. Someone who tells nothing but jokes, never takes anything seriously, always sees the funny side no matter how dark the situation is, etc., is not a ‘wit’ but a ‘fool’. And possibly an insensitive fool at that. No one wants to be boring, but no one wants to be an insensitive fool either. What you want is the happy middle between these two extremes.
Consider another example: confidence. Confidence is a tremendous quality to have. It makes everything easier and allows you to glide through life. Almost all of us feel like we want more confidence. But look around and see what you think about the instances of ‘confidence’ we can observe in ourselves and others. Yes, we admire (and envy) those who have confidence, but we tend to really dislike those who have too much, or more than we feel they deserve. It’s all too easy to take self-belief too far. When this happens, we call it arrogance. A lack of confidence is a problem, but too much confidence it a problem too. What you want is just enough confidence: the happy middle between two extremes.
The Archer Analogy
Imagine an archer firing an arrow at a target. They must draw the bow, aim the arrow, and loose. They are aiming for the happy middle of the target. If they aim too high, or pull too strongly, they will overshoot the target; if they aim too low, or pull too lightly, they will not reach the target. They need to aim at the right level and put the right amount of effort in; not too much, not too little. Achieving virtues is just the same; you are aiming for the happy middle between two extremes.
The archer’s shooting needs to adapt to the situation. If the target is further away, they need to aim higher and pull stronger. If the target is closer, they need to aim lower and pull lighter. They need to learn not only how to aim higher or lower, how to pull stronger or lighter, but also how to judge the distance so that they know how high to aim and strong to pull. Achieving virtues is just the same; some purposes require more extremes of virtue, and some virtues are more difficult to achieve than others.
The archer’s shooting needs to adapt to themselves, the archer. If the archer is weak, they need to use a lighter bow, one with less power but is easier to draw; this means they will have to aim higher to compensate and make the distance. If the archer is strong, they can use a heavier bow; this means they can pull less and aim lower but still achieve the same distance with ease. If the archer is skilled, then can aim for a smaller target at greater distance; if the archer is not skilled, they’d best stick to the beginner’s range. If the archer is tense, they need to calm down, otherwise their aim will be shaky. If the archer is too calm, they need to rouse themselves so that they are focussed. Achieving virtues is much the same. You need to understand yourself and aim for virtues proportionate with your abilities.
Practical Wisdom
According to Aristotle’s view, wisdom lies in the ability to identify and choosethe happy middle, for you, relative to yourself and your purposes. One part of this is philosophical: you need to look, think, and understand what the happy middle is, for you, for any given virtue. The other part is practical: you need to choose what you identify as the happy middle. This choice is an action; it is something that it done, not only something that is thought about. The ability to make that choice depends on more than just thinking about it: you need to train yourself to make the right choices. You need to make them habitual.
This suggests there are two things that are necessary for moral understanding, according to Aristotle: education and habituation. You need to learn what the happy middle is and then you need to practise it. You can teach yourself, through suitably informed philosophical reflection, but it’s often easier to just have someone show you the ropes. Putting it into practice is something we all have to do for ourselves.
Your aim is to become the kind of person who habitually makes the right choices and finds the happy middle. To begin with, this process requires deliberate thought, but with practice and habituation it becomes a kind of instinct, a second-nature that you can follow without thinking. When faced with a situation in which you could be cowardly or courageous or reckless, you choose to be courageous; when faced with a situation in which you could be a bore or a wit or a fool, you choose to be a wit; when faced with a situation in which you could be shy or confident or arrogant, you choose to be confident. Over time, with practice, you mould your character into someone who has a habit of making the right choices and finding themselves in their happy middle. In this way you will give yourself the best chance of achieving your purposes and living a good life. This, for Aristotle, is what it is to be an excellent human being.
And so he sums it up: ‘Virtue […] is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.’
The Ideal Human Being
The last clause in that sentence is a perpetually frustrating one: ‘…that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.’ I’d encourage you not to read too much into it; I think it says less than it seems. Firstly, it’s of no relevance at all that this is a gendered ‘man’ – it just means ‘human being’ (though Aristotle was amongst the least admirable of ancient philosophers when it comes to gender equality). Secondly, this human being clearly doesn’t actually exist: it’s an appeal to an ideal, not an actual person. Thirdly, it is not an appeal to follow the instructions of this ideal person, as if there were this ideal philosopher-dictator drawing up a list of rules in the sky that would tell us what to do. Aristotle is not giving us instructions; he is giving us an analysis. A practical analysis, granted, that gives us some practical advice, but it remains an analysis.
What Aristotle is appealing to is an idea of the way that human beings think and act when we are operating at our most excellent, when we are being most fully ourselves at our best. As we’ve seen, human beings are rational animals; it is our rationality that defines us as human beings; so we operate at our best when we are being rational. And so this ‘rational principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it’ means little more than what an ideal human being would think when they are thinking well. In short, it is the philosophy of the ideal human being, whatever we understand that to be.
Aristotle’s philosophy, which begins with his down-to-earth metaphysics and theory of causation, which shows us what a human being is and in turn what we all want (happiness) and how to get it (be excellent and find the happy middle), is his best attempt at offering that philosophy of the ideal human being. In a sense that is what all philosophers are trying to do. As far as Aristotle’s followers are concerned, he offers the best of any attempt that has been made: he offers us a comprehensive worldview, a depth of theory that conforms to what we can observe in the world elegantly combined with an economy of theory that requires nothing beyond what we can observe. There are no other-worldly skyhooks like Plato’s Forms, nor anything that goes against our day-to-day beliefs like Socrates’ paradoxical claim that it is better to suffer evil than to do it. Aristotle tells it as it is. According to Aristotelians, any properly-functioning human being will agree with these ‘rational principles’ because they are the most rational of principles, the ones that conform most to our observations of the world and human behaviour. They think they have the right answer, the answer that an ideal human being would agree to when they are thinking at their best.
And so if I am permitted to offer a tentative rehabilitation of Aristotle’s famous line:
Virtue is a state of character concerned with choosing the happy middle, relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, which is what an ideal human being would decide when they are thinking at their best.
A Virtuous Recap
A ‘virtue’ is defined in relation to its purpose – if it achieves its purpose, it’s good; if it doesn’t, it’s bad – so if you want to live virtuously you need to be clear about your purposes.
Your purposes will be relative to you. We are all different people, with different purposes. It follows that we will have differing judgements about virtue.
Virtues lie between the two extremes of excess and deficiency. You want neither too much nor too little. Like an archer, we achieve our purposes by aiming for the happy middle.
The ‘happy middle’ is relative to you and your nature. Consider the simple example of athleticism: If you are naturally strong or athletic, you don’t have to work as hard to achieve athletic success. That might mean you can work less than someone else to achieve the same goal, or it might mean you need to aim higher; it will depend on your purposes.
Once again, we have another version the same recurring Socratic idea: align yourself with your nature. Socrates seemed to consider this the natural conclusion to any philosophising about how to live well as a human being, but left it open (or unsaid) what this ‘nature’ really was. Plato, the student of Socrates, went a little further and identified that human nature is composed of various parts, and the rational part should be put in charge, but there is no clear guidance on how to go about doing this. Aristotle, the student of Plato, goes further still, not only offering a metaphysical system that makes it much easier to determine what that human ‘nature’ is, but also uses this to give some practical advice about how to go about aligning yourself with it.
As human beings, our nature is a rational nature: so we should align ourselves with our rational nature. Our rational nature determines our purposes, and of our purposes ‘happiness’ seems to be the one final purpose of purposes: it is ‘that for the sake of which’ all other things are done. Virtues are good to the extent that they achieve our purposes. Our purposes are best achieved when we find and choose the happy middle between two extremes; and this happy middle is relative to our individual talents, abilities, and circumstances. We live best when we are able to habitually make the right choice and hit the happy middle, but it takes some practice to achieve this. Set yourself to task, then, on practising finding and choosing the happy middle. This is what it looks like to live well as a human being. Achieving virtues will make you happy.
What Aristotle’s ethics gives us, more so than Socrates or Plato or any who came before, is a clear guidebook on how to be better. It comes from a rigorous and profound philosophical background, but ends with some straightforward practical advice:
Understand your purposes, choose the virtues that serves those purposes, aim for just the right amount of that virtue, then practise it until it’s habitual. If you do this, then you will live well. Simple.
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