Virtue Ethics
Practical wisdom and the settled state
4 min
Becoming good
Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics opens with a claim that sounds like common sense and turns out not to be. Virtue of character does not come from nature, Aristotle says, because nothing natural can be trained to behave otherwise: you could throw a stone upwards ten thousand times and it would still fall. Nor does virtue come against nature. We are born able to receive it, and habit finishes the job. We become builders by building, and just by doing just acts.1
If that were the whole account, virtue would be a well-drilled routine, and anything that could be drilled could have it. Aristotle shuts that door in II.4. A just act can be done by someone who is not just, by luck or because they were told to. For the act to come from virtue, the person has to know what they are doing, choose it, choose it for its own sake, and act from a firm and unchanging character.2 All three conditions concern the inside of the act. None of them can be seen from outside.
The definition in II.6 says what that inside is. Virtue is a settled state that issues in choice, lying in a mean relative to us, fixed by reason in the way a person of practical wisdom would fix it.3 The last clause carries the weight. The mean is not a number halfway between two vices. Courage in a soldier and courage in a nurse look different, and no rule captures both. What does exist is a kind of person who can see what courage asks for in this case, and the definition of virtue points at that person.
Practical wisdom
Book VI names the capacity. Phronesis, practical wisdom, is a reasoned and truthful state concerned with action about what is good and bad for human beings.4 It is not cleverness, which finds the means to whatever end you already have. Nor is it scientific knowledge, which deals with what cannot be otherwise. It is the ability to deliberate well about how to live, case by case, in matters that could go either way. It also cannot be had on its own. You cannot be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, Aristotle says, and you cannot be practically wise without virtue of character.5 The two grow together, through the same practice.
This is why virtue ethics keeps asking a question the other schools treat as secondary: what is this doing to the person? A utilitarian can judge an act by its results without asking who did it. A virtue ethicist cannot, because the results of a choice include the chooser. Every decision is one more round of the training Book II describes.
The motions, and the weak point
The motions on Sophecs press on this point from two sides. One side is the system. A model trained on human feedback has done the acts, millions of times, and the question in "Trained to be good" is whether that amounts to the settled state of II.4 or only its visible part. The other side is the user. In "Borrowed judgement" and "The opaque benefit" the system makes the call and the person accepts it. Aristotle's worry there is not that the call will be wrong. Deliberating is how practical wisdom forms, and a person who stops deliberating stops forming it.
Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" is a large part of why this reading is live today. In 1958 she argued that the language of moral obligation, the moral "ought", was a survival from a law conception of ethics whose lawgiver most philosophers no longer believed in. She proposed setting that vocabulary aside and starting again from the psychology of action, intention and human flourishing.6 The modern revival of virtue ethics is usually dated from that paper.
The weakness is the one the other schools press hardest. "Do what the practically wise person would do" helps most when you already are that person. When a self-driving car must choose between its passenger and two pedestrians, a utilitarian at least gives an answer that can be written down and checked. The virtue ethicist says no rule written in advance can carry that weight. That may be true, and it is still nothing an engineer can implement. Defending this school well means owning that cost.
Sources
- 1Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.1, 1103a14–b25
- 2Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.4, 1105a28–33
- 3Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.6, 1106b36–1107a2
- 4Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.5, 1140a24–b30
- 5Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.13, 1144b30–32
- 6G. E. M. Anscombe, Modern Moral Philosophy, Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958), pp. 1–19
Motions this prepares you for
- Borrowed judgementHanding daily choices to an AI assistant costs something that matters, even when its choices are better than the ones it replaces.
- Crash arithmeticA self-driving car should be programmed to minimise total deaths in an unavoidable crash, even when that means sacrificing its own passenger.
- Trained to be goodTraining a model on human feedback can make it good in the same sense that moral upbringing makes a person good.
- The opaque benefitAn AI system that reliably reduces suffering should be deployed even where the people it decides about cannot be told why.