Aristotle’s word for goodness and virtue here is arete, which may better be translated
asexcellence:
Virtue, then, is of two kinds, intellectual and moral. Of these, the intellectual is in
the main indebted to teaching for its production and growth, and this calls for time
and experience. Moral goodness, on the other hand, is the child of habit, from
which it got its very name, ethics being derived from ethos, ‘habit’, by a slight
alteration in the quantity of the e. This is an indication that none of the moral
virtues are implanted in us by Nature, since nothing that Nature creates can be
taught by habit to change the direction of its development.
(Ethics, 11, 1)Education, the responsibility of the city, is to play a vital role in the inculcation of good
habits. As we acquire the moral virtues by first exercising them, so Aristotle is
persistent in stressing that virtue is a matter of action:
For in ‘doing well’ the happy man will of necessity do. Just as at the Olympic games,
it is not the best looking or the strongest men present who are crowned with victory,
but competitors – the successful competitors – so in the arena of human life, the
honours and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.
(Ethics, 1, 8)In the Ethics, Aristotle does not attempt to legislate for virtue (excellence, arete); he
lays down no rules to be followed, no ten commandments or prescriptions for the
good life, recognising that in discussing right conduct in action he is dealing with an
inexact science:
Now matters of conduct and consideration of what is to our advantage have no
fixity about them any more than matters affecting our health. And if this be true of
moral philosophy as a whole, it is still more true that the discussion of particular
problems in ethics admits of no exactitude. For they do not fall under any science
or professional tradition, but those who are following some line of conduct are
forced in every combination of circumstances to think out for themselves what is
suited to those circumstances, just as doctors and navigators have to do in their
different métiers.
(Ethics, 2, 2)He then advances the most famous general principle of his Ethics:
Let us begin with the following observation. It is in the nature of moral qualities
that they can be destroyed by deficiency on the one hand and excess on the other.PHILOSOPHY 207