Happy Lives and the Highest Good by Lear Gabriel Richardson

Author:Lear, Gabriel Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

CHAPTER SIX

Moral Virtue and To Kalon

IN NE I.7 Aristotle argued that the human good at which the happy person aims is virtuous activity of reason. And he opaquely hinted that “if there are many virtues, [the human good] is the activity of the soul in accordance with the best and most final virtue” (1098a16–18). By the time we finish NE VI, we understand that activity in accordance with theoretical rational virtue is superior to the excellent practical reasoning that guides the moral virtues Aristotle describes in NE II–V. Theoretical wisdom sets a standard of excellence that virtuous practical reason approximates in aiming to grasp the practical truth. However, approximation is a teleological relationship.

Thus, as readers of the Nicomachean Ethics we begin to suspect what Aristotle will in fact conclude in NE X: The happy person aims at excellent contemplation as his highest good, choosing all other good things, including morally virtuous actions, for its sake. His morally virtuous actions will also be worth choosing for their own sakes, for insofar as they succeed in approximating theoretical truthfulness, they inherit excellent contemplation’s intrinsic value.

But what are we to make of NE II–V, where Aristotle analyzes the nature of moral virtue in general and provides rich descriptions of many particular moral virtues? Even if he has not yet established the superiority of theoretical wisdom, surely there ought to be some hint that morally virtuous action is subordinated to theoretical knowing. In particular, if my interpretation of the nature of practical wisdom is correct, it ought to cohere in some way with Aristotle’s famous theory that moral virtue is a mean or intermediate state (NE II.6–9). Now, the doctrine of the intermediate is important because it seems to specify the intrinsic value of morally virtuous action. At least, Aristotle’s insistence that genuine morally virtuous actions are chosen for their own sakes (NE II.4 1105a32) immediately precedes his definition of such actions as intermediate. (Virtuous states are called intermediate because they are dispositions to perform intermediate actions, 1106b27–28.) It seems reasonable to assume, then, that when the virtuous person chooses his actions for themselves, he chooses them for their intermediacy. So if my solution to the problem of morally virtuous action as a middle-level end is correct, we might expect some indication in the description of these acts as intermediate that they are to that extent also worth choosing for the sake of contemplation.

Rather than approach the doctrine of the intermediate head-on, I want to examine what makes morally virtuous action kalon, that is fine, noble, or beautiful.1 This is not really a different topic. I believe that what makes morally virtuous actions intermediate and thus worth choosing for their own sakes is, in Aristotle’s account, the very same thing that makes them fine. Myargument for this claim will have to come after a more general analysis of what it is for something to be fine, but for now we can at least notice that fittingness or appropriateness is a mark of beauty. (At Topics 135a13–14, Aristotle actually defines the fine as the fitting.

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