NICOMACHEANETHICS(BOOKII) 183
3035both praise and success are signs of virtue or excellence. Consequently, virtue is a mean
in the sense that it aims at the median. This is corroborated by the fact that there are
many ways of going wrong, but only one way which is right—for evil belongs to
the indeterminate, as the Pythagoreans imagined, but good to the determinate. This, by
the way, is also the reason why the one is easy and the other hard: it is easy to miss the
target but hard to hit it. Here, then, is an additional proof that excess and deficiency
characterize vice, while the mean characterizes virtue: for “bad men have many ways,
good men but one.”
We may thus conclude that virtue or excellence is a characteristic involving
choice, and that it consists in observing the mean relative to us, a mean which is defined
by a rational principle, such as a man of practical wisdom would use to determine it.
It is the mean by reference to two vices: the one of excess and the other of deficiency. It
is, moreover, a mean because some vices exceed and others fall short of what is required
in emotion and in action, whereas virtue finds and chooses the median. Hence, in
respect of its essence and the definition of its essential nature virtue is a mean, but in
regard to goodness and excellence it is an extreme.
Not every action nor every emotion admits of a mean. There are some actions and
emotions whose very names connote baseness, e.g., spite, shamelessness, envy; and
among actions, adultery, theft, and murder. These and similar emotions and actions
imply by their very names that they are bad; it is not their excess nor their deficiency
which is called bad. It is, therefore, impossible ever to do right in performing them: to
perform them is always to do wrong. In cases of this sort, let us say adultery, rightness
and wrongness do not depend on committing it with the right woman at the right time
and in the right manner, but the mere fact of committing such action at all is to do wrong.
It would be just as absurd to suppose that there is a mean, an excess, and a deficiency in
1107 a51015According to Aristotle, virtue or excellence “is the mean by reference to two vices: the one of excess and the
other of deficiency.” For example, in this drawing the person on the left has an excess of confidence and hence
is reckless. The person on the right is deficient in confidence and so is cowardly. In terms of fear, the person on
the left has a defect and the person on the right has an excess. In both these cases we should seek to rationally
choose the “Golden Mean” of the person in the middle: courage.