Alasdair MacIntyre
Chapter 7, A short History of Ethics: History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century
“EVERY CRAFT and every inquiry, and similarly every action
and project, seems to aim at some good; hence the good has been well defined as
that at which everything aims.” The book which Aristotle opens with this
trenchant sentence is traditionally known as the Nicomachean Ethics (it was
either dedicated to or edited by Aristotle’s son Nicomachus), but its subject
matter is declared to be “politics.” And the work which is called the Politics
is presented as the sequel to the Ethics. Both are concerned with the practical
science of human happiness in which we study what happiness is, what activities
it consists in, and how to become happy. The Ethics shows us what form and
style of life are necessary to happiness, the Politics what particular form of
constitution, what set of institutions, are necessary to make this form of life
possible and to safeguard it. But to say only this is misleading. For the word
πολιτικός does not mean precisely what we mean by political; Aristotle’s word
covers both what we mean by political and what we mean by social and does not
discriminate between them. The reason for this is obvious. In the small-scale
Greek city-state, the institutions of the πόλις are both those in which policy
and the means to execute it are determined and those in which the face-to-face
relationships of social life find their home. In the assembly a citizen meets
his friends; with his friends he will be among fellow members of the assembly.
There is a clue here to the understanding of parts of the Ethics which later on
we shall have to follow up. For the moment we must return to the first
sentence.
Good is defined at the outset in terms of the goal, purpose,
or aim to which something or somebody moves. To call something good is to say
that it is under certain conditions sought or aimed at. There are numerous
activities, numerous aims, and hence numerous goods. To see that Aristotle is
completely right in establishing this relationship between being good and being
that at which we aim, let us consider three points about the use of the word
good. First, if I aim at something, try to bring about some state of affairs,
that I so aim is certainly not sufficient to justify my calling whatever I aim
at good; but if I call what I aim at good, I shall be indicating that what I
seek is what is sought in general by people who want what I want. If I call
what I am trying to get good–a good cricket bat or a good holiday, for
example–by using the word good, I invoke the criteria characteristically
accepted as a standard by those who want cricket bats or holidays. That this is
genuinely so is brought out by a second point: to call something good and to
allow that it is not a thing which anyone who wanted that sort of thing would
want would be to speak unintelligibly. In this good differs from red. That
people in general want or do not want red objects is a contingent matter of
fact; that people in general want what is good is a matter of the internal
relationship of the concept of being good and being an object of desire. Or to
make the same point in a third way: if we were trying to learn the language of
a strange tribe, and a linguist asserted of one of their words that it was to
be translated by good, but this word was never applied to what they sought or
pursued, although its use was always accompanied, say, by smiles, we should
know a priori that the linguist was mistaken.
“If, then, there is some one goal among those which we
pursue in our actions, which we desire for its own sake, and if we desire other
things for its sake, and if we do not choose everything for the sake of
something else–in that case we should proceed to choose ad infinitum, so that
all desire would be empty and futile –it is plain that this would be the good
and the best of goods.”17 Aristotle’s definition of the supreme good leaves it
open for the moment whether there is or is not such a good. Some medieval
scholastic commentators, doubtless with an eye to theological implications,
rewrote Aristotle as if he had written that everything is chosen for the sake
of some good, and that therefore there is (one) good for the sake of which
everything is chosen. But this fallacious inference is not in Aristotle.
Aristotle’s procedure is to inquire whether anything does in fact answer to his
description of a possible supreme good, and his method is to examine a number
of opinions which have been held on the topic. Before he does this, however, he
issues two warnings. The first is to remember that every sort of inquiry has
its own standards and possibilities of precision. In ethics we are guided by
general considerations to general conclusions, which nonetheless admit of
exceptions. Courage and wealth are good, for example, but wealth sometimes
causes harm and men have died as a result of being brave. What is required is a
kind of judgment altogether different from that of mathematics. Moreover, young
men will be no good at “politics”: they lack experience and hence they lack
judgment. I mention these dicta of Aristotle only because they are so often
quoted; certainly there is something very middle-aged about the spirit which
Aristotle breathes. But we ought to remember that what we have now is the text
of lectures, and we ought not to treat what are clearly lecturer’s asides as if
they are developed arguments.
Aristotle’s next move is to give a name to his possible
supreme good: the name εὐδαιμονία is badly but inevitably translated by
happiness, badly because it includes both the notion of behaving well and the
notion of faring well. Aristotle’s use of this word reflects the strong Greek
sense that virtue and happiness, in the sense of prosperity, cannot be entirely
divorced. The Kantian injunction which a million puritan parents have made
their own, “Do not seek to be happy, seek to be deserving of happiness,” makes
no sense if εὐδαίμων and εὐδαιμονίa are substituted for happy and happiness.
Once again the change of language is also a change of concepts. In what does εὐδαιμονία
consist? Some say in pleasure, some say in wealth, some say in honor and
reputation; and some have said that there is a supreme good over and above all
particular goods which is the cause of their being good. Aristotle dismisses
pleasure rather brusquely at this point–“The many in choosing a life fit for
cattle exhibit themselves as totally slavish”–but later on he is to deal with
it at great length. Wealth cannot be the good, for it is only a means to an
end; and men prize honor and reputation not as such, but they prize being
honored because they are virtuous. So honor is envisaged as a desirable
by-product of virtue. Does happiness, then, consist in virtue? No, because to
call a man virtuous is to talk not of the state he is in, but of his
disposition. A man is virtuous if he would behave in such and such a way if
such and such a situation were to occur. Hence a man is no less virtuous while
asleep or on other occasions when he is not exercising his virtues. More than
this, however, a man can be virtuous and wretched and such a man is certainly
not εὐδαίμων.
Aristotle at this point challenges not merely the Kantians
and the puritans to come, but also the Platonists. Plato in both the Gorgias
and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that “it is better to
suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of
doing evil.” Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely
emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to
be free from being tortured on the rack. The fact that, strictly speaking, what
Aristotle says and what Plato says are not inconsistent could be misleading.
The point is that if we begin by asking for an account of goodness which is
compatible with the good man suffering any degree of torture and injustice, the
whole perspective of our ethics will be different from that of an ethics which
begins from asking in what form of life doing well and faring well may be found
together. The first perspective will end up wth an ethics which is irrelevant
to the task of creating such a form of life. Our choice between these two
perspectives is the choice between an ethics which is engaged in telling us how
to endure a society in which the just man is crucified and an ethics which is
concerned with how to create a society in which this no longer happens. But to
talk like this makes Aristotle sound like a revolutionary beside Plato’s
conservatism. And this is a mistake. For, indeed, Plato’s memory of Socrates
insures that even at his worst he has a deep dissatisfaction with all actually
existing societies, while Aristotle is in fact always extremely complacent
about the existing order. And yet Aristotle is at this point in his argument
far more positive than Plato. “No one would call a man suffering miseries and
misfortunes happy, unless he were merely arguing a case.”
Plato’s making goodness independent of any this-worldly happiness
follows, of course, from his concept of the good as well as from his memories
of Socrates. It is this concept of the good which Aristotle now proceeds to
attack. For Plato the word good’s paradigmatic meaning is given by considering
it as the name of the Form of the Good; consequently, good is a single and
unitary notion. Of whatever we use it, we ascribe the same relationship to the
Form of the Good. But in fact we use the word in judgments in all the
categories–of some subjects, such as god or intelligence, of the mode of a
subject, how it is, the excellence it has, its possession of the right amount
of something, its existence in the right time or place for something, and so
on. Moreover, on the Platonic view everything that falls under a single Form
should be the subject of a single science or inquiry; but things that are good
are dealt with by a number of sciences– such as, for example, medicine and
strategy. Thus Aristotle argues that Plato cannot account for the diversity of
uses of good. Moreover, the phrases Plato uses to explain the concept of the
Form of the Good are not in fact explanatory. To speak of the good “itself” or
“as such” does not clearly add anything to good. To call the Form eternal is
misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any
more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness. Moreover,
knowledge of Plato’s Form is of no use to those in fact engaged in the sciences
and crafts in which goods are achieved; they appear to be able to do without
this knowledge perfectly well. But the heart of Aristotle’s criticism of Plato
is in the sentence: “For even if there is some unitary being which is the good,
predicated of different things in virtue of something they share or existing
separated itself by itself, plainly it would not be something to be done or
attained by a man; but it is something which is just that which we are now
looking for.” That is, good in the sense in which it appears in human language,
good in the sense of that which men seek or desire, cannot be the name of a
transcendental object. To call a state of affairs good is not necessarily to
say that it exists or to relate it to any object that exists, whether
transcendental or not; it is to place it as a proper object of desire. And this
brings us back to the identification of the good with happiness in the sense of
εὐδαιμονία.
That happiness is the final end or goal, the good (and that more
than a name is involved here), appears from considering two crucial properties
which anything which is to be the final end must possess, and which happiness
does in fact possess. The first of these is that it must be something which is
always chosen for its own sake and never merely as a means to something else.
There are many things which we can choose for their own sake, but may choose
for the sake of some further end. But happiness is not among these. We may
choose to pursue intelligence, honor, pleasure, wealth, or what we will for the
sake of happiness; we could not choose to pursue happiness in order to secure
intelligence, honor, pleasure, or wealth. What sort of “could not” is this?
Clearly, Aristotle is saying that the concept of happiness is such that we
could not use it of anything but a final end. Equally, happiness is a
self-sufficient good; by self-sufficiency Aristotle intends that happiness is
not a component in some other state of affairs, nor is it just one good among
others. In a choice between goods, if happiness were offered along with one but
not the others, this would always and necessarily tilt the scales of choice.
Thus, to justify some action by saying “Happiness is brought by this” or
“Happiness consists in doing this” is always to give a reason for acting which
terminates argument. No further why? can be raised. To have elucidated these
logical properties of the concept of happiness is not, of course, to have said
anything about what happiness consists in. To this Aristotle turns next.
In what does the final end of a man consist? The final end
of a flute player is to play well, of a shoemaker to make good shoes, and so
on. Each of these kinds of man has a function which he discharges by performing
a specific activity and which he discharges well by doing whatever it may be
well. Have men therefore a specific activity which belongs to them as men, as
members of a species, and not merely as kinds of men? Men share some
capacities, those of nutrition and growth, with plants, and others, those of
consciousness and feeling, with animals. But rationality is exclusively human.
In man’s exercise of his rational powers therefore the specific human activity
consists, and in the right and able exercise of them lies the specific human
excellence.
Aristotle advances this argument as though it were obvious,
and against the background of the general Aristotelian view of the universe it
is obvious. Nature is composed of well-marked and distinct kinds of being; each
of these moves and is moved from its potentiality to that state of activity in
which it achieves its end. At the top of the scale is the Unmoved Mover,
thought unchangingly thinking itself, to which all things are moved. Man, like
every other species, moves toward his end, and his end can be determined simply
by considering what distinguishes him from other species. Given the general
vision, the conclusion appears unassailable; lacking it, the conclusion appears
highly implausible. But very little in Aristotle’s argument is affected by this.
For when he proceeds to his definition of the good, he depends only on the view
that rational behavior is the characteristic exercise of human beings, in the
light of which any characteristically human good has to be defined. The good of
man is defined as the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, or if
there are a number of human excellences or virtues, in accordance with the best
and most perfect of them. “What is more, it is this activity throughout a whole
life. One swallow does not make a summer, nor one fine day. So one good day or
short period does not make a man blessed and happy.”
Happy, that is, is a predicate to be used of a whole life.
It is lives that we are judging when we call someone happy or unhappy and not
particular states or actions. The individual actions and projects which make up
a life are judged as virtuous or not, and the whole as happy or unhappy. We can
see, says Aristotle, the connection between happiness thus understood and all
those things which are popularly thought to constitute happiness: virtue,
though not man’s final end, is an essential part of the form of life that is;
pleasure is taken by a good man in virtuous activity, and hence pleasure
rightly comes in; a modicum of external goods is needed for characteristic
human well-being and well-doing; and so on.
We have two large questions on our agenda as a result of
Aristotle’s definition of the good for man. There is the question to be
answered at the end of the Ethics as to the activity in which the good man will
be chiefly employed. And there is the question of the excellences, of the
virtues, which he has to manifest in all his activities. When Aristotle
proceeds to the discussion of the virtues he subdivides them in accordance with
his division of the soul. Aristotle’s use of the expression soul is quite
different from Plato’s. For Plato soul and body are two entities, contingently
and perhaps unhappily united. For Aristotle the soul is form to the body’s
matter. When Aristotle speaks of the soul we could very often retain his
meaning by speaking of personality. Thus nothing peculiar to the Aristotelian
psychology turns on his distinction between the rational and nonrational parts
of the soul. For this is simply a contrast between reasoning and other human
faculties. The nonrational part of the soul includes the merely physiological
as well as the realm of feelings and impulses. These latter can be called
rational or irrational insofar as they accord with what reason enjoins, and
their characteristic excellence is to so accord. There is no necessary conflict
between reason and desire, such as Plato envisages, although Aristotle is fully
aware of the facts of such conflicts.
We therefore exhibit rationality in two kinds of activity:
in thinking, where reasoning is what constitutes the activity itself; and in
such activities other than thinking where we may succeed or fail in obeying the
precepts of reason. The excellences of the former Aristotle calls the
intellectual virtues; of the latter, the moral virtues. Examples of the former
are wisdom, intelligence, and prudence; of the latter, liberality and
temperance. Intellectual virtue is the consequence usually of explicit
instruction; moral, of habit. Virtue is not inborn, but a consequence of
training. The contrast with our natural capacities is plain: first we have the
natural capacity, and then we exercise it; whereas with virtues we acquire the
habit by first performing the acts. We become just men by performing just
actions, courageous by performing courageous actions, and so on. There is no
paradox here: one brave action does not make a brave man. But continuing to
perform brave actions will inculcate the habit in respect of which we call not
merely the action but also the man brave.
Pleasures and pains are a useful guide here. Just as they
can corrupt us by distracting us from habits of virtue, so they can be used to
inculcate the virtues. For Aristotle one sign of a virtuous man is that he gets
pleasure from virtuous activity, and another is that he knows how to choose
among pleasures and pains. It is this matter of virtue as involving choice that
makes it clear that virtue cannot be either an emotion or a capacity. We are
not called good or bad, we are not praised or blamed, by reason of our emotions
or capacities. It is rather what we choose to do with them that entitles us to
be called virtuous or vicious. Virtuous choice is choice in accordance with a
mean.
This notion of the mean is perhaps the single most difficult
concept in the Ethics. It will be most conveniently introduced by an example.
The virtue of courage is said to be the mean between two vices–a vice of
excess, which is rashness, and a vice of deficiency, which is cowardice. A mean
is thus a rule or principle of choice between two extremes. Extremes of what?
Of emotion or of action. In the case of courage, I give way too much to the
impulses which danger arouses when I am a coward, too little to them when I am
foolhardy. Three obvious objections at once arise. The first is that there are
many emotions and actions for which there cannot be a “too much” or a “too
little.” Aristotle specifically allows for this. He says that a man “can be
afraid and be bold and desire and be angry and pity and feel pleasure and pain
in general, too much or too little”; but he says also that malice,
shamelessness, and envy are such that their names imply that they are evil. So
also with actions such as adultery, theft, and murder. But Aristotle states no
principle which will enable us to recognize what falls in one class, what in
the other. We can, however, attempt to interpret Aristotle at this point and
try to state the principle implicit in his examples.
If I merely ascribe anger or pity to a man, I thereby
neither applaud nor condemn him. If I ascribe envy, I do so condemn him. Those
emotions of which there can be a mean–and the actions which correspond to
them–are those which I can characterize without any moral commitment. It is
where I can characterize an emotion or action as a case of anger or whatever it
is, prior to and independently of asking whether there is too much or too
little of it, that I have a subject for the mean. But if this is what Aristotle
means, then he is committed to showing that every virtue and vice are mean and
extreme for some emotion or concern with pleasure and pain characterizeable and
identifiable in nonmoral terms. Just this is what Aristotle sets out to show in
the latter part of Book II of the Ethics. Envy, for example, is one extreme,
and malice another, of a certain attitude to the fortunes of others. The virtue
which is the mean is righteous indignation. But this very example brings out a
new difficulty in the doctrine. The righteously indignant man is one who is
upset by the undeserved good fortune of others (this example is perhaps the
first indication that Aristotle was not a nice or a good man: the words
“supercilious prig” spring to mind very often in reading the Ethics). The
jealous man has an excess of this attitude–he is upset even by the deserved
good fortune of others; and the malicious man is alleged to have a defect here
in that he falls short of being pained–he takes pleasure. But this is absurd.
The malicious man rejoices in the ill-fortune of others. The Greek word for
malice, ἐπιχειρεκακία, means this. Thus what he rejoices in is not the same as
what the jealous and the righteously indignant man are pained by. His attitude
cannot be placed on the same scale as theirs, and only a determination to make
the schematism of mean, excess, and defect work at all costs could have led
Aristotle to make this slip. Perhaps with a little ingenuity Aristotle could be
emended here so as to save his doctrine. But what of the virtue of liberality? The
vices here are prodigality and meanness. Prodigality is excess in giving,
deficiency in getting, and meanness is excess in getting, deficiency in giving.
So these are not after all excess or defect of the same emotion or action. And
Aristotle himself half admits that to the virtue of temperance and the excess
of profligacy there is no corresponding defect. “Men deficient in the enjoyment
of pleasures scarcely occur.” Thus the doctrine finally appears as at best of
varying degrees of usefulness in exposition, but scarcely as picking out
something logically necessary to the character of a virtue.
Moreover, there is a falsely abstract air about the
doctrine. For Aristotle does not, as he might seem to, think that there is one
and only one right choice of emotion or action, independent of circumstances.
What is courage in one situation would in another be rashness and in a third
cowardice. Virtuous action cannot be specified without reference to the
judgment of a prudent man– that is, of one who knows how to take account of
circumstances. Consequently, knowledge of the mean cannot just be knowledge of
a formula, it must be knowledge of how to apply the rules to choices. And here
the notions of excess and defect will not help us. A man who is suspicious of
his own tendency to indignation will rightly consider how much envy and malice
there is in it; but the connection of envy and malice with indignation is that
in the one case I evince a desire to possess the goods of others, and in the
other I evince a desire for the harm of others. What makes these wrong is that
I desire that what is not mine should be mine, without thought for the deserts
of others or myself, and that I desire harm. The viciousness of these desires
is in no way due to their being excess or defect of the same desire, and
therefore the doctrine of the mean is no guide here. But if this classification
in terms of the mean is no practical help, what is its point? Aristotle relates
it to no theoretical account of, for example, the emotions, and it therefore
appears more and more as an arbitrary construction. But we can see how
Aristotle may have arrived at it. For he may have examined everything commonly
called a virtue, looked for a recurrent pattern, and thought that he had found
one in the mean. The list of virtues in the Ethics is not a list resting on
Aristotle’s own personal choices and evaluations. It reflects what Aristotle
takes to be “the code of a gentleman” in contemporary Greek society. Aristotle
himself endorses this code. Just as in analyzing political constitutions he
treats Greek society as normative, so in explaining the virtues he treats
upper-class Greek life as normative. And what else could we have expected? To
this there are two answers. The first is that it would be purely unhistorical
to look in the Ethics for a moral virtue such as meekness, which enters only
with the Christian gospels, or thrift, which enters only with the puritan
ethics of work, or for an intellectual virtue such as curiosity, which enters
self-consciously with systematic experimental science. (Aristotle himself, in
fact, exhibited this virtue, but perhaps could not have envisaged it as a
virtue.) Yet this is not good enough as an answer, for Aristotle was aware of
alternative codes. There is in Aristotle’s Ethics not merely a contempt for the
morality of artisans or of barbarians, but also a systematic repudiation of the
morality of Socrates. It is not just that the undeserved suffering of the good
man is never attended to. But when Aristotle considers justice he so defines it
that the enactments of a state are unlikely to be unjust provided that they are
properly enacted, without undue haste and in due form. It cannot
therefore–generally speaking–be just to break the law. Moreover, in the
discussion of the virtues, the defect of the virtue of truthfulness is the vice
of the self-deprecator which is named εἰρωνεία, irony. This is a word closely
associated with Socrates’ claim to ignorance, and its use can scarcely have
been accidental. Thus at every point where a reference to Socrates occurs in
Aristotle we find none of Plato’s respect, although a deep respect for Plato
himself is shown. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that what we see
here is Aristotle’s class-bound conservatism silently and partisanly rewriting
the table of the virtues, and so from yet another point of view suspicion is
cast upon the doctrine of the mean.
The detail of Aristotle’s account of particular virtues is
rendered with brilliant analysis and perceptive insight, especially in the case
of courage. It is much more, as I have just suggested, the list of virtues
which raises questions. The virtues discussed are courage, temperance,
liberality, magnificence, greatness of soul, good temper or gentleness, being
agreeable in company, wittiness, and lastly, modesty, which is treated as not a
virtue, but akin to one. Of these, greatness of soul is to do in part with how
to behave to one’s social inferiors, and liberality and magnificence concern
one’s attitudes to one’s wealth. Three of the other virtues have to do with
what are sometimes called manners in polite society. Aristotle’s social bias is
thus unmistakable. This bias would not matter philosophically but for the fact
that it prevents Aristotle from raising the questions, How do I decide what is
in fact included in the list of the virtues? could I invent a virtue? is it
logically open to me to consider a vice what others have considered a virtue?
And to beg these questions is to suggest strongly that there just are so many
virtues–in the same sense that at a given period there just are so many Greek
states.
Aristotle’s account of the particular virtues is preceded by
an account of the concept of voluntary action, necessary, as he says, because
it is only to voluntary actions that praise and blame are assigned. Hence, on
Aristotle’s own premise, only in voluntary actions are virtues and vices
manifested. Aristotle’s method here is to give criteria for holding an action
to be nonvoluntary. (The usual translation for ἀκούσιος is involuntary, but
this is a mistake. Involuntary in English usage is contrasted with “deliberate”
or “done on purpose,” not with “voluntary.”) An action is nonvoluntary when it
is done under compulsion or in ignorance. Compulsion covers all cases when the
agent is really not an agent at all. The wind carries his ship somewhere, for
example. Actions can also be nonvoluntary where other people have the agent in
their power, but actions done under threat of one’s parents or one’s children
being put to death are borderline cases. They satisfy the ordinary criteria of
voluntary actions in that they are deliberately chosen. But no one apart from
such special circumstances would deliberately choose to act as he would under
such threats. In some cases we allow the circumstances to be an excuse, in
others not. As an example of the latter, Aristotle cites our attitude to the
character of Alcmaeon in Euripides’ play, who murders his mother under threats.
Aristotle is careful to point out that the fact that I am
motivated in some particular way never entails that I am compelled. If I could
allow that my being moved by pleasure or for some noble end was enough to show
that I was compelled, then I could not conceive of an action which could not be
shown by this or a similar argument to be compulsory. But the whole point of
the concept of being compelled is to distinguish actions which we have chosen
on the basis of our own criteria, such as the pleasure we shall get or the
nobility of the object, from those things we do in which our own choice was not
part of the effective agency. Thus, to include too much under the heading of
compulsion would be to destroy the point of the concept.
In the case of ignorance Aristotle distinguishes the
nonvoluntary from the merely not-voluntary. For an action to be nonvoluntary
through ignorance, the discovery of what he has done must cause the agent pain
and a wish that he had not so acted. The rationale of this is clear. A man who,
having discovered what he has unwittingly done, says, “But if I had known, that
is just what I would have chosen to do” thereby assumes a kind of
responsibility for the action, and so cannot use his ignorance to disclaim such
responsibility. Aristotle next distinguishes actions done in a state of
ignorance, such as when drunk or raging, from actions done through ignorance,
and points out that moral ignorance–ignorance of what constitutes virtue and
vice–is not exculpatory, but is indeed what constitutes vice. The ignorance
which is exculpatory is that through which a particular action is done, which
would otherwise not have been done, and it is ignorance as to the particular
circumstances of the particular action. The examples of such ignorance are
various. A man may not know what he is doing, as when someone tells of a matter
which he does not know is a secret and so does not know that he is revealing
something hidden. A man may mistake one person for another (his son for an
enemy) or one thing for another (a harmless weapon for a deadly one). A man may
not realize that a medicine is in this type of case deadly, or how hard he is
hitting. All these types of ignorance are exculpatory, for it is a necessary
condition of an action being voluntary that the agent knows what he is doing.
What is most worth remarking on here is Aristotle’s method.
He does not begin by looking for some characteristic of voluntary action which
all voluntary actions must have in common. He rather looks for a list of
characteristics any one of which would if present in an action, be sufficient
to withdraw the title “voluntary” from it. An action is treated as voluntary
unless done through compulsion or ignorance. Thus Aristotle never gets involved
in the riddles of later philosophers about free will. He delineates the
concepts of the voluntary and the involuntary as we possess them, and brings
out the point about them that they enable us to contrast those cases where we
admit the validity of excuses and those cases where we do not. Because this is
so, Aristotle only raises marginally–in discussing our responsibility for our
own character formation–the question which has haunted modern free-will
discussions, Is it possible that all actions are determined by causes
independent of the agent’s deliberations and choices, so that no actions are
voluntary? For Aristotle, even if all actions were somehow thus determined,
there would still be a distinction between agents acting under compulsion or
through ignorance and agents not so acting. And Aristotle would surely be right
about this. We should not be able to escape his distinction no matter what the
causation of action might be.
What does emerge about voluntary action in a positive sense
is that choice and deliberation have a key role in it. The deliberation which
leads up to action always concerns means and not ends. This is yet another
Aristotelian saying which may mislead us if we read it anachronistically. Some
modern philosophers have contrasted reason and emotion or desire in such a way
that ends were merely the outcome of nonrational passions, while reason could
calculate only as to the means to attain such ends. We shall see later on that
Hume took such a view. But this view is alien to Aristotle’s moral psychology.
Aristotle’s point is a conceptual one. If I in fact deliberate about something,
it must be about alternatives. Deliberation can only be as to things which are
not necessarily and inevitably what they are, and as to things which are within
my power to alter. Otherwise there is no room for deliberation. But if I choose
between two alternatives, then I must envisage something beyond these
alternatives in the light of which I make my choice, that for the sake of which
I shall choose one rather than another, that which provides me with a criterion
in my deliberation. This will in fact be what in that particular case I am
treating as an end. It follows that if I can deliberate about whether or not to
do something, it will always be about means that I am deliberating in the light
of some end. If I then deliberate about what was in the former case the end, I
shall now be treating it as a means, with alternatives, to some further end.
Thus, necessarily, deliberation is of means, not of ends, without there being
any commitment to a moral psychology of a Humean kind.
The form of the deliberation involved Aristotle characterizes
as that of the practical syllogism. The major premise of such a syllogism is a
principle of action to the effect that a certain sort of thing is good for,
befits, satisfies a certain class of person. The minor premise is a statement,
warranted by perception, that here is some of whatever it is; and the
conclusion is the action. An example which, although its content is mysterious,
makes the form of the practical syllogism clear is given by Aristotle: Dry food
is good for man–major premise; Here’s some dry food– minor premise; and the
conclusion is that the agent eats it. That the conclusion is an action makes it
plain that the practical syllogism is a pattern of reasoning by the agent and
not a pattern of reasoning by others about what the agent ought to do. (That is
why a second minor premise–e.g., And here is a man–would be redundant, and
indeed misleading, since it would distract from the point.) Nor indeed is it a
pattern of reasoning by the agent about what he ought to do. It is not to be
confused with perfectly ordinary syllogisms, whose conclusion is a statement of
that order. Its whole point is to probe the sense in which an action may be the
outcome of reasoning.
A probable first reaction to Aristotle’s account will fasten
upon just this point. How can an action follow from premises as a conclusion?
Surely only a statement can do that. To remove this doubt, consider some
possible relations between actions and beliefs. An action can be inconsistent
with beliefs in a way analogous to that in which one belief can be inconsistent
with another. If I assert that all men are mortal, and that Socrates is a man,
but deny that Socrates is mortal, I become unintelligible in my utterance; if I
assert that dry food is good for man, and I am a man, and I assert that this is
dry food, and I do not eat it, my behavior is analogously unintelligible. But
perhaps the example is bad. For it may be that I can provide an explanation
which will remove the apparent inconsistency. How? By making another statement,
such as that I am not hungry, having just finished gorging myself on dry food,
or that I suspect that this dry food is poisoned. But this strengthens, not
weakens the parallel with ordinary deductive reasoning. If I allow that a warm
front’s approach causes rain, and that a warm front is approaching, but deny
that it is going to rain, I can remove the appearance of inconsistency in this
case also by making some further statement, such as that before the warm front
reaches here it will be intercepted. So that actions can be consistent and
inconsistent with beliefs in much the way that other beliefs can be. And this
is because actions embody principles. It is in holding this that Aristotle lays
himself open to the charge of “intellectualism.” To understand this charge, let
us consider it first in a crude form and then in a more sophisticated one.
The crude version of the attack is that made by Bertrand
Russell.18 It is because his actions embody principles, conform or fail to
conform to precepts of reason in a way that those of no other species do, that
Aristotle defines man as a rational animal. Russell’s comment upon this is to
invoke the history of human folly and irrationality: men just are not rational
in fact. But this is to miss Aristotle’s point massively. For Aristotle is in
no sense maintaining that men always act rationally, but that the standards by
which men judge their own actions are those of reason. To call human beings
irrational, as Russell rightly does, is to imply that it makes sense and is
appropriate to judge men as succeeding or failing in the light of rational
standards, and when Aristotle calls men rational beings, he is simply pointing
out the meaningfulness and appropriateness of the application of predicates
which refer to such standards. However, Aristotle is committed to more than
this. For he has to maintain that men characteristically act rationaly, and
what this implies is that the concept of human action is such that unless a
piece of behavior fulfills some elementary criterion of rationality, it does
not count as an action. That is, unless implicit in the behavior there is a
purpose of a recognizably human kind, unless the agent knows under some
description what he is doing, and unless we can detect some principle of action
in his behavior, what we have is not an action at all, but merely a bodily
movement, perhaps a reflex, only to be explained in terms of other bodily
movements, such as those of muscles and nerves. That Aristotle is right about
this appears if we consider another kind of criticism of his intellectualism,
implied in the injunctions of all those moralists who believe that reason is a
misleading guide, that we should rely on instinct or on feeling. This appeal to
feeling as a moral guide is central to the Romantic period; it emerges again in
modern times in the appeal to dark, visceral emotion of D. H. Lawrence’s
Mexican period; and in its most detestable form it is expressed in the Nazi cry
to think with the blood. But these injunctions are intelligible only because
they are backed up by reasons; and these reasons are usually assertions to the
effect that too much reasoning leads to a calculating, insufficiently
spontaneous nature, that it inhibits and frustrates. In other words, it is
argued that our actions, if the product of too much calculation, will exhibit
undesirable traits or will produce undesirable effects. But to argue like this
is to meet Aristotle on his own ground. It is to suggest that there is some
criterion or principle of action which cannot be embodied in deliberate action,
and thus that deliberate action would be to that extent irrational. And to
argue thus is to accept, not to dissent from, a central thesis of Aristotle’s
rationalism.
Does Aristotle in any case believe that every human action
is preceded by an act of deliberation? Clearly if he does believe this, what he
believes is false. But he does not. It is only acts which are chosen (in a
specially defined sense of chosen which involves deliberation) which are
preceded by deliberation, and Aristotle says explicitly that “not all voluntary
actions are chosen.” What does follow from Aristotle’s account is that we can
assess every action in the light of what would have been done by an agent who
had in fact deliberated before he acted. But this imagined agent cannot, of
course, just be any agent. He has to be ὁ ϕρόνιμος, the prudent man. Once again
translation raises difficulties. Φρόνησιϛ is well translated in medieval Latin
by prudentia, but badly in English by prudence. For later generations of
puritans have connected prudence with thrift, and especially with thrift in
monetary matters (it is the “virtue” embodied in life insurance), and so in
modern English prudent has something of the flavor of “cautious and calculating
in one’s own interest.” But ϕρόνησις has no particular connection either with
caution or with self-interest. It is the virtue of practical intelligence, of
knowing how to apply general principles in particular situations. It is not the
ability to formulate principles intellectually, or to deduce what ought to be
done. It is the ability to act so that principle will take a concrete form.
Prudence is not only itself a virtue, it is the keystone of all virtue. For
without it one cannot be virtuous. A man may have excellent principles, but not
act on them. Or he may perform just or courageous actions, but not be just or
courageous, having acted through fear of punishment, say. In each case he lacks
prudence. Prudence is the virtue which is manifested in acting so that one’s
adherence to other virtues is exemplified in one’s actions.
Prudence is not to be confused with a simple faculty for
seeing what means will bring about a given end. Aristotle denominates that
particular faculty cleverness and holds that it is morally neutral, since it is
of equal use to the man who pursues praiseworthy and to the man who pursues
blameworthy ends. Prudence includes cleverness; it is the cleverness of the man
who possesses virtue in the sense that his actions always flow from a practical
syllogism whose major premise is of the form “Since the end and the best thing
to do is. . . . ” It is a conjunction of a grasp of the true τέλος of men with
cleverness. For Aristotle the role of intelligence is to make articulate
principles on which a man whose natural dispositions are good will have already
been acting unconsciously, so that we are less likely to make mistakes; the
role of prudence is to know how a given principle (which will always be of a
certain degree of generality) applies in a given situation. There is, therefore,
after all a point in the argument at which Aristotle clashes with
irrationalists such as D. H. Lawrence and with Tolstoy. For Aristotle holds
that an explicit and articulate grasp of principle will help to insure the
right sort of conduct, while Lawrence’s praise of spontaneity and Tolstoy’s
adulation of peasant ways of life rest on the contention that being explicit
and articulate about principles is morally crippling. This clash has more than
one root. To a certain extent Aristotle and Lawrence or Tolstoy disagree as to
what the right sort of conduct is; and to a certain extent they disagree about
what the actual consequences of being articulate are. But once again we must
note that although one can be a Lawrentian or a Tolstoyan without inconsistency,
what one cannot consistently do is to offer an explicit and articulate rational
defense of their doctrines. And the fact that both Lawrence and Tolstoy
exhibited all the intellectualism which they used their intellectual resources
to condemn strongly suggests that an Aristotelian position of some sort is
unavoidable. Moreover, it is only when one is explicit and articulate about
principle that one is able to mark clearly the cases where one has failed to do
what one should have done. And because this is such a strong point in favor of
Aristotle’s position, we may well be puzzled that for Aristotle failure
constitutes a problem. But it does.
Aristotle begins from Socrates’ position, discussed in an
earlier chapter, that nobody ever fails to do what he thinks to be best. If a
man does anything, then his doing it is sufficient to show that he thought it
the best thing to do. Consequently moral failure is logically impossible. This,
says Aristotle, flies in the face of the facts. But, for Aristotle, that men
should fail to do what they believe they ought to do still constitutes a
problem. His explanations are several. A man may, for example, know what he
ought to do, in the sense of being committed to a principle of action, but
ignore his principle because he is not exercising his knowledge, as may happen
when a man is drunk or mad or asleep. So a man carried away may do what in one
sense he knows he ought not to do. Or a man may fail to recognize an occasion
as one appropriate to the application of one of his principles. What we need to
underline here is, however, not the adequacy of Aristotle’s explanations. We
can set out a wide range of different kinds of case in which there is a gap
between what an agent professes and what he does. What is interesting, however,
is that Aristotle, and in this he is very close to Socrates, feels that there
is something special to be explained in the facts of moral weakness or failure,
that such weakness or failure constitutes a problem. This suggests strongly
that Aristotle’s initial assumption is that men are rational beings in a much
stronger sense than we have hitherto ascribed to him. For the suggestion is
that if men always did what they thought best, there would be nothing to
explain. Yet any account of men as agents which only introduces the facts of
weakness and failure by a kind of afterthought is bound to be defective. For
human desires are not straightforward drives to unambiguous goals in the way
that biological instincts and drives are. Desires have to be given goals, and
men have to be trained to reach them, and the point of having principles is in
part to detect and diagnose failure in the attempt to reach them. Thus
fallibility is central to human nature and not peripheral to it. Hence the
portrait of a being who was not liable to error could not be the portrait of a
human being. The portrait of the Jesus of the Gospels needs the temptations in
the wilderness and the temptation in Gethsemane in order that we can be shown,
at least in the intention of the authors, not merely a perfect man, but a
perfect man.
Aristotle’s halfhearted admission of fallibility is
connected not merely with a philosophical blindness to the importance of this
human characteristic but also with a moral attitude to prosperity of a kind
that can only be called priggish. This emerges clearly in the course of his
account of the virtues. Aristotle’s list of virtues falls clearly into two
parts, a division obviously not perceived by Aristotle himself. There are, on
the one hand, traits such as courage, restraint, and agreeableness which it is
hard to conceive of as not being valued in any human community. Even these, of
course, fall on a scale. At one end of this scale there are norms and traits
which could not be disavowed totally in any human society, because no group in
which they were absent could fall under the concept of a society. This is a
matter of logic. When Victorian anthropologists sailed round the world they
reported the recurrence of certain norms in all societies as an empirical
generalization, just as a comparative anatomist might report similarites in
bone structure. But consider the case of truth telling. It is a logically
necessary condition for any group of beings to be recognized as a human society
that they should possess a language. It is a necessary condition for a language
to exist that there should be shared rules, and shared rules of such a kind
that an intention to say that what is, is can always be presumed. For if when a
man said, “It is raining” we could not have such a presumption, then what he
said would not communicate anything to us at all. But this presumption,
necessary for language to be meaningful, is only possible where truth telling
is the socially accepted and recognized norm. Indeed, lying itself is only
possible where and on the assumption that men expect the truth to be told.
Where there is no such expectation, the possibility of deception disappears
too. Thus the recognition of a norm of truth telling and of a virtue of honesty
seems written into the concept of a society. Other virtues, although not
logically necessary to social life, are obviously causally necessary to the
maintenance of such life, given that certain very widespread and elementary
facts about human life and its environment are what they are. Thus the
existence of material scarcity, of physical dangers, and of competitive
aspirations bring both courage and justice or fairness on the scene. These are
virtues which, given such facts, appear to belong to the form of human life as
such. Other virtues again appear unavoidable for recognition by any society in
which fairly widespread human desires are present. There can be exceptions, but
as a matter of fact they will be rare. So agreeableness is a general human
virtue, although we may come across an occasional people, such as the
bad-tempered Dobuans, who may not rate it as such. But toward the other end of
the scale there are virtues which are more or less optional, so to speak, which
belong to particular contingent social forms, or which are matters of purely
individual choice. The non-Aristotelian, but Christian virtues of loving one’s
enemies and of humility, with the practice of turning the other cheek, appear
to belong in the latter category; the English and much more Aristotelian public
school virtue of being “a gentleman” in the former. These differences Aristotle
does not recognize, and so we find side by side in Aristotle’s list virtues
which anyone would find it hard not to recognize as virtues and alleged virtues
which are difficult to comprehend outside Aristotle’s own social context and
Aristotle’s own preferences within that context.
The two Aristotelian virtues which demand attention in this
respect are those of “the great-souled man” (μεγαλόμνχος) and of justice. The
great-souled man “claims much and deserves much.” It is for Aristotle a vice to
claim less than you deserve, just as much as it is to claim more. It is
particularly in relation to honor that the great-souled man claims and deserves
much. And since the great-souled man has to deserve most, he must have all the
other virtues too. This paragon is extremely proud. He despises honors offered
by common people. He is gracious to inferiors. He repays benefits so as not to
be put under obligations, and “when he repays a service, it is with interest,
for in this way the original benefactor will become the beneficiary and debtor
in turn.” He speaks his mind without fear or favor, because he has a poor
opinion of others and would not care to conceal his opinion. He runs into few
dangers, because there are few things which he values and would wish to
preserve from harm.
It is because Aristotle conceives of him as not failing that
Aristotle endows the great-souled man with no sense of his own fallibility. The
great-souled man’s characteristic attitudes require a society of superiors and
inferiors in which he can exhibit his peculiar brand of condescension. He is
essentially a member of a society of unequals. In such a society he is
self-sufficient and independent. He indulges in conspicuous consumption, for
“he likes to own beautiful and useless things, since they are better marks of
his independence.” Incidentally, he walks slowly, has a deep voice and a
deliberate mode of utterance. He thinks nothing great. He only gives offense
intentionally. He is very nearly an English gentleman.
This appalling picture of the crown of the virtuous life has
an almost equally distressing counterpart in one aspect of Aristotle’s account
of justice. Much of what Aristotle says about justice is illuminating and far
from objectionable. He distinguishes between distributive justice–fairness–and
the corrective justice which is involved in redress for a harm done. He defines
distributive justice in terms of the mean: “To do injustice is to have more
than one ought, and to suffer it is to have less than one ought,” and justice
is the mean between doing injustice and suffering it. But when Aristotle comes
up against the use of δίκαιος as meaning either “fair” or “right,” or “in
accordance with the laws,” he asserts without argument that although everything
unlawful is unfair, everything unfair is unlawful. It is less clear in the
Ethics than it is in the Politics that Aristotle is prepared to believe that
the positive laws of existing states can be more than marginally a variance
with what is fair and right. “The laws aim either at the common interest of
all, or at the interest of those in power determined in accordance with virtue
or in some such way; so that in one sense we call just anything that effects or
maintains the happiness or the components of the happiness of the political
community.” Aristotle goes on to describe the law as enjoining virtue and
forbidding vice, except where it has been carelessly enacted. And this must
remind us of Aristotle’s complacency with the existing social arrangement. It
is perhaps no accident that he also believes that some men are slaves by
nature.
By contrast, Aristotle appears to advantage in his inclusion
of friendship as among the necessities of the man who achieves or is to achieve
the good. He distinguishes the varieties of friendship –those between equals
and unequals; those based on shared pleasure, mutual usefulness, or common
virtue–and produces a typical catalogue, whose details perhaps matter less than
the fact that the discussion is there at all. But the self-sufficiency of Aristotle’s
ideal man deeply injures and deforms his account of friendship. For his
catalogue of types of friend presupposes that we can always ask the questions,
On what is this friendship based? for the sake of what does it exist? There is
therefore no room left for the type of human relationship of which it would
miss the point totally to ask on what it was based, for the sake of what it
existed. Such relationships can be very different: the homosexual love of
Achilles for Patroclus, or of Alcibiades for Socrates; the romantic devotion of
Petrarch to Laura; the marital fidelity of Sir Thomas More and his wife. But
none of these could be included in the Aristotelian catalogue. For the love of
the person, as against the goodness, pleasantness, or usefulness of the person,
Aristotle can have no place. And we can understand why when we remember the
great-souled man. He admires all that is good, so he will admire it in others.
But he needs nothing, he is self-contained in his virtue. Hence friendship for
him will always be a kind of moral mutual admiration society, and this is just
the friendship which Aristotle describes. And this again illuminates
Aristotle’s social conservatism. How could there be an ideal society for a man
for whom the ideal is as ego centered as it is for Aristotle?
The exercise of virtue is, of course, for Aristotle not an
end in itself. Virtues are dispositions which issue in the types of action
which manifest human excellence. But the injunctions “Be virtuous,” “Be
courageous,” “Be great-souled,” “Be liberal” do not tell us what to do in the
sense of what to aim at; they rather tell us how we should behave in the
pursuit of our aim, whatever it is. But what should that aim be? What, after
all this, does εὐδαιμονία consist in? What is the τέλος of human life? A claim
which Aristotle takes with immense seriousness, but nonetheless finally
dismisses, is that of pleasure. On this subject he has to argue against two
kinds of opponent. Speusippus, who was Plato’s immediate successor as head of
the Academy, had argued that pleasure was in no sense a good. Eudoxus the
astronomer, who was also a pupil of Plato, held by contrast that pleasure was
the supreme good. Aristotle wished to deny the position of Speusippus without
laying himself open to Eudoxus’ arguments. His arguments for the goodness of
pleasure, or at least for the goodness of some pleasures, are partly a
refutation of Speusippus’ position. To argue, for example, that pleasures are
bad because some are harmful to health is like arguing that health is an evil
because sometimes the pursuit of health conflicts with the pursuit of wealth.
More positively, Aristotle points to the fact that everyone pursues pleasure as
evidence that it is a good, and he advances another argument to the effect that
pleasure is taken in what he calls unimpeded activity. By unimpeded activity he
means activity which achieves its end, which is well done. Everybody, he
argues, takes pleasure in unimpeded activity; everybody wishes his activities
to be unimpeded; everybody therefore must see pleasure as a good. But in fact
pleasure appears to be common to all forms of activity, and to be the only
factor common to all; Aristotle finds himself for a moment close to the
position of Eudoxus, and some scholars have held that in Book VII of the Ethics
this is the position which he in fact takes. But, in Book X at any rate, he
produces arguments against this Eudoxian position, although even here he is
clearly puzzled by the relation of pleasure to the τέλος of human life. The
reason why he is puzzled is evident. Pleasure clearly satisfies some of the
criteria which anything which is to play the role of such a τέλος must satisfy,
but equally clearly it fails to satisfy others. We take pleasure in what we do
well (unimpeded activity again), and thus taking pleasure in an activity is a
criterion of doing it as we wish to do it, of achieving the τέλος of that
action. A τέλος must be a reason for acting, and that we would get pleasure is
always a reason for acting, even if not always a finally conclusive one.
Pleasure, too, is not only sought by almost everybody, and therefore appears to
be a universal τέλος but it cannot be a means to anything else. We do not seek
pleasure for the sake of anything further to be got out of it. At the same
time, pleasure has characteristics that make it appear not to be a τέλος. It
does not complete or terminate an activity; that is, the pleasure we get from
doing something is not a sign that we have reached our goal and should
therefore stop. Rather, getting pleasure is a reason for continuing the
activity. Moreover, there is no particular action or set of actions which can
be specified as ways of getting pleasure. Pleasure comes from many different
kinds of activity, and so to say that pleasure was the τέλος would not of
itself ever give us a reason for choosing one of those kinds of activity rather
than another. But to do this is the function of a τέλος. And finally the
pleasure that we take in an activity cannot be identified separately from the
activity itself; to enjoy or take pleasure in doing something is not to do
something and to have an accompanying experience of something else which is the
pleasure. To enjoy playing a game is not to play the game, and in addition, to experience
some sensations, say, which are the pleasure. To enjoy playing a game is simply
to play well and not to be distracted, to be, as we say, thoroughly involved in
the game. Thus we cannot identify pleasure as a τέλος external to the activity,
to which the activity is a means. Pleasure, says Aristotle, in a memorable but
unhelpful phrase supervenes on the τέλος “like the bloom on the cheek of
youth.”
Different activities, different pleasures; which activities
then? The activities of the good man. But which will these be? “If happiness
consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should
be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue
of what is best in us.” What is best in us is reason and the characteristic
activity of reason is θεωρία, that speculative reasoning which deals with
unchanging truths. Such speculation can be a continuous and pleasant–it is,
Aristotle says brusquely, “the pleasantest”–form of activity. It is a
self-sufficient occupation. It has no practical outcome, so it cannot be a
means to anything else. It is an activity of leisure and peacetime, and leisure
is the time when we do things for their own sake, since business affairs are
for the sake of leisure and war is for the sake of peace. Above all, since it
is concerned with what is unchanging and timeless, it is concerned with the
divine. Aristotle follows Plato and much else in Greek thought in equating
changelessness and divinity.
Thus, surprisingly, the end of human life is metaphysical
contemplation of truth. The treatise which began with an attack on Plato’s
conception of the Form of the Good ends not so far away from the same attitude
of contempt for the merely human. External goods are necessary only to a
limited extent, and the wealth required is only moderate. Thus the whole of
human life reaches its highest point in the activity of a speculative philosopher
with a reasonable income. The banality of the conclusion could not be more
apparent. Why then is it reached? One clue is in Aristotle’s concept of
self-sufficiency. A man’s activities in his relations with other men are for
Aristotle in the end subservient to this. Man may be a social-cum-political
animal, but his social and political activity is not what is central. Yet who
can live with this degree of leisure and wealth and this degree of
disengagement from affairs outside himself? Clearly only a few people. This
however could not appear as an objection to Aristotle: “For it is the nature of
the many to be moved by fear, but not a sense of honor, to abstain from what is
bad not on account of its baseness but for fear of the penalties; for, living
on their emotions, they pursue the appropriate pleasures and the means to these
pleasures, and avoid the opposite pains, but they lack even a concept of the
noble end of true pleasure, never having tasted it.” So, Aristotle concludes,
they could not be attracted or changed by ethical theorizing. The tone is that
of Plato’s Laws.
Aristotle’s audience, then, is explicitly a small leisured
minority. We are no longer faced with a τέλος for human life as such, but with
a τέλος for one kind of life which presupposes a certain kind of hierarchical
social order and which presupposes also a view of the universe in which the
realm of timeless truth is metaphysically superior to the human world of change
and sense experience and ordinary rationality. All Aristotle’s conceptual
brilliance in the course of the argument declines at the end to an apology for
this extraordinarily parochial form of human existence. At once the objection
will be made: this is to judge Aristotle against the background of our values,
not of his. It is to be guilty of anachronism. But this is not true. Socrates
had already presented an alternative set of values in both his teaching and his
life; Greek tragedy presents other, different possibilities; Aristotle did not
choose what he chose for lack of knowledge of alternative views of human life.
How, then, are we to understand this union in the Ethics of philosophical
acumen and social obscurantism? To answer this we must look at his work in a
wider perspective.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. (2002). Short History of Ethics, A:
History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. (Taylor
& Francis 2002)
