VIRTUOUS ACTION MAKE A GOOD CHARACTER

VIRTUOUS ACTION MAKE A GOOD CHARACTER

Introduction
Aristotle divided the virtue or excellence into two kinds, intellectual excellence and moral excellence, which is the excellence of this semi-rational faculty of desire. The book II is beginning with the consideration of virtue. Virtue has, too, an essential connexion with pleasure and pain, it is not by indifference to these, but by taking pleasure in the right things and to the right degree, that men become virtuous. Aristotle points out that acts which are such as a just man would do are not just acts unless they are done as the just man would do them. That it is possible to do acts which are on the outside precisely those that a just man would do, but to do them without the knowledge that they are just, or without the desire to do them because they are just, or without having the firm character that a just man has. He deals the question what kind of thing virtue is a passion, a faculty, or a state of character.

Moral virtue like the arts

Virtues are of two kinds, intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching, while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit. None of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.
All the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity; but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them ; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
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. 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.
The present inquiry does not aim at theoretical knowledge but practical knowledge. We are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good. By abstaining from pleasures we become temperate, and it is when we have become so that we are most able to abstain from them; and similarly too in the case of courage; for by being habituated to despise things that are terrible and to stand our ground against them we become brave, and it is when we have become so that we shall be most able to stand our ground against them.

Pleasure by doing virtues actions

We must take as a sign of states of character the pleasure or pain that ensues on acts; for the man who abstains from bodily pleasures and delights in this very fact is temperate. For moral excellence is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of the pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of the pain that we abstain from noble ones.
If the virtues are concerned with actions and passions, and every passion and every action is accompanied by pleasure and pain, for this reason also virtue will be concerned with pleasures and pains. This is indicated also by the fact that punishment is inflicted by these means; for it is a kind of cure, and it is the nature of cures to be effected by contraries.
The following facts also may show us that virtue and vice are concerned with these same things. There being three objects of choice and three of avoidance, the noble, the advantageous, the pleasant, and their contraries, the base, the injurious, the painful, about all of these the good man tends to go right and the bad man to go wrong, and especially about pleasure.
It has grown up with us all from our infancy; this is why it is difficult to rub off this passion, engrained as it is in our life. And we measure even our actions, some of us more and others less, by the rule of pleasure and pain. For this reason, then, our whole inquiry must be about these; for to feel delight and pain rightly or wrongly has no small effect on our actions.
It is harder to fight with pleasure than with anger, but both art and virtue are always concerned with what is harder; for even the good is better when it is harder. Therefore for this reason also the whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good, he who uses them badly bad.
The virtue, is concerned with pleasures and pains , and that by the acts from which it arises it is both increased and, if they are done differently, destroyed, and that the acts from which it arose are those in which it actualizes itself.

The arts and the virtues
What we mean by saying that we must become just by doing just acts, and temperate by doing temperate acts; for if men do just and temperate acts, they are already just and temperate.
The case of the arts and that of the virtues are not similar, for the products of the arts have their goodness in themselves, so that it is enough that they should have a certain character, but if the acts that are in accordance with the virtues have themselves a certain character it does not follow that they are done justly or temperately. The agent also must be in a certain condition when he does them; in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character.
Actions, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. By doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

Conclusion
Just as men become builders by building, they become just by doing just acts, and temperate by doing temperate acts: ‘states of character arise out of like activities’. It is very easy to explain that virtue is a state of character. It remains to say what sort of state of character it is. It is an intermediate state. The act must be done at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way. ‘Virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relatively to us, this being determined by a rational principle, i.e. by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it’ .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle,trans. David Ross. London: Oxford
University Press, 1925.