NICOMACHEANETHICS(BOOKII) 185
man who occupies the middle position gentle. Of the extremes, let the man who exceeds
be called short-tempered and his vice a short temper, and the deficient man apathetic
and his vice apathy.
There are, further, three other means which have a certain similarity with one
another, but differ nonetheless one from the other. They are all concerned with human
relations in speech and action, but they differ in that one of them is concerned with truth
in speech and action and the other two with pleasantness:(a)pleasantness in amusement
and (b)pleasantness in all our daily life. We must include these, too, in our discussion, in
order to see more clearly that the mean is to be praised in all things and that the extremes
are neither praiseworthy nor right, but worthy of blame. Here, too, most of the virtues
and vices have no name, but for the sake of clarity and easier comprehension we must try
to coin names for them, as we did in earlier instances.
To come to the point; in regard to truth, let us call the man in the middle position
truthful and the mean truthfulness. Pretense in the form of exaggeration is boastfulness
and its possessor boastful, while pretense in the form of understatement is self-depreciation
and its possessor a self-depreciator.
Concerning pleasantness in amusement, the man in the middle position is witty
and his disposition wittiness; the excess is called buffoonery and its possessor a buffoon;
and the deficient man a kind of boor and the corresponding characteristic boorishness.
As far as the other kind of pleasantness is concerned, pleasantness in our daily
life, a man who is as pleasant as he should be is friendly and the mean is friendliness. A
man who exceeds is called obsequious if he has no particular purpose in being pleasant,
but if he is acting for his own material advantage, he is a flatterer. And a man who is
deficient and unpleasant in every respect is a quarrelsome and grouchy kind of person.
A mean can also be found in our emotional experiences and in our emotions.
Thus, while a sense of shame is not a virtue, a bashful or modest man is praised. For
even in these matters we speak of one kind of person as intermediate and of another as
exceeding if he is terror-stricken and abashed at everything. On the other hand, a man
who is deficient in shame or has none at all is called shameless, whereas the intermedi-
ate man is bashful or modest.
Righteous indignation is the mean between envy and spite, all of these being
concerned with the pain and pleasure which we feel in regard to the fortunes of our
neighbors. The righteously indignant man feels pain when someone prospers unde-
servedly; an envious man exceeds him in that he is pained when he sees anyone prosper;
and a spiteful man is so deficient in feeling pain that he even rejoices [when someone
suffers undeservedly].
But we shall have an opportunity to deal with these matters again elsewhere. After
that, we shall discuss justice; since it has more than one meaning, we shall distinguish
the two kinds of justice and show in what way each is a mean.
- The Relation between the Mean and Its Extremes:There are, then, three kinds
of disposition: two are vices (one marked by excess and one by deficiency), and
one, virtue, the mean. Now, each of these dispositions is, in a sense, opposed to both
the others: the extremes are opposites to the middle as well as to one another, and the
middle is opposed to the extremes. Just as an equal amount is larger in relation to a
smaller and smaller in relation to a larger amount, so, in the case both of emotions and
of actions, the middle characteristics exceed in relation to the deficiencies and are
deficient in relation to the excesses. For example, a brave man seems reckless in rela-
tion to a coward, but in relation to a reckless man he seems cowardly. Similarly, a
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