Aristotle and the Doctrine of the Mean’s Everyday Purposes

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In Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean, he describes his view on virtue and it in relation to an individual’s everyday life. Aristotle offers the audience a system of virtue that allows them to improve their daily habits, make them more virtuous, and therefore a better person. Through this standpoint, we can intertwine morality with ones personality. Aristotle’s theories on virtue vary vastly from those of his predecessors. As opposed to the views of someone such as Plato, who believed that goodness came from knowledge, Aristotle argued that goodness, was achieved by building virtuous habits. Aristotle stated “The virtue of man will also be the state of character, which makes a man good, and which makes him do his own work well” (qtd. In Great Traditions of Ethics page 29). This means that being virtuous was a personality trait, which would help to do whatever he had to good. Aristotle believed that a morally virtuous person lives his life by choosing his actions according to a “golden mean”. This golden mean is used as the standard to avoid excess and defect; it is an intermediary o...

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