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Instructions for assignment discussion 1

Must be 600 words.

Thames, B. (2018). How should one live? An introduction to ethics and moral reasoning. Bridgepoint Education.

• Chapter 5: Virtue Ethics: Being a Good Person

  • Pleasure and Pain: Aristotle Versus Utilitarianism

  • The Situationist Critique

  • 1: Introduction

  • 2: What Is Virtue Ethics?

  • 3: Virtues and Moral Reasoning

  • 4: The Nicomachean Ethics

  • 5: Objections to Virtue Ethics

  • Conclusion and Summary

 Virtue and Teleology

This discussion will require you to have carefully read Chapter 5 of the textbook, as well as the assigned portions of Aristotle’s (1931) Nicomachean Ethics.

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Aristotle’s account of ethics is “teleological”, which means that our understanding of virtue and living well is based on a sense of the “telos” (function, purpose, or end) of something (see Aristotle’s text and the textbook for the full account).

1. Engage with the text:

Using at least one quote from the required text(s), explain the relation between virtue and living well on Aristotle’s account, and briefly describe some of the key characteristics of the virtues.

2. Reflect on yourself:

Identify an area of your life in which virtues are needed to do well. Explain what the “telos” of that role or activity is, what virtues are needed and why they are needed, and what would be lost if someone tried to be successful in that activity who didn’t exercise the virtues. This might be a role you have, a vocation or career, a hobby, or something common to all of us.

3. Reflect on virtue:

In what ways do the virtues you identify display the characteristics Aristotle describes? For instance, you could explain whether they occupy an intermediate between too much and too little of some quality, how they would affect one’s emotions as well as one's actions, etc.

Virtue Ethics – Aristotle

1. Book 2, Chapter 6

I mean moral virtue; for it is this that is concerned with passions and actions, and in these there is excess, defect, and the intermediate. For instance, both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue. Similarly with regard to actions also there is excess, defect, and the intermediate. Now virtue is concerned with passions and actions, in which excess is a form of failure, and so is defect, while the intermediate is praised and is a form of success; and being praised and being successful are both characteristics of virtue. Therefore, virtue is a kind of mean, since, as we have seen, it aims at what is intermediate. Aristotle. (1931)

1. Book 2, Chapter 1

It is from the same causes and by the same means that every virtue is both produced and destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced. And the corresponding statement is true of builders and of all the rest; men will be good or bad builders as a result of building well or badly. For if this were not so, there would have been no need of a teacher, but all men would have been born good or bad at their craft. This, then, is the case with the virtues also; by doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly. The same is true of appetites and feelings of anger; some men become temperate and good-tempered, others self-indulgent and irascible, by behaving in one way or the other in the appropriate circumstances. Thus, in one word, states of character arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because the states of character correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference. Aristotle. (1931)

1. Book 10, Chapter 6

Now that we have spoken of the virtues, the forms of friendship, and the varieties of pleasure, what remains is to discuss in outline the nature of happiness, since this is what we state the end of human nature to be. Our discussion will be the more concise if we first sum up what we have said already. We said, then, that it is not a disposition; for if it where it might belong to someone who was asleep throughout his life, living the life of a plant, or, again, to someone who was suffering the greatest misfortunes. If these implications are unacceptable, and we must rather class happiness as an activity, as we have said before, and if some activities are necessary, and desirable for the sake of something else, while others are so in themselves, evidently happiness must be placed among those desirable in themselves, not among those desirable for the sake of something else; for happiness does not lack anything but is self-sufficient. Now those activities are desirable in themselves from which nothing is sought beyond the activity. And of this nature virtuous actions are thought to be; for to do noble and good deeds is a thing desirable for its own sake. Aristotle. (1931)

References

Aristotle. (1931). Nicomachean ethics (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press (Original work published ca. 350 B.C.E.)