Aristotle Virtue

Aristotle’s thesis is that virtue is cultivated through performing virtuous acts virtuously. Understanding what Aristotle means by virtue is critical to understanding this thesis. Aristotle, virtues ,such as temperance and courage, are dispositions of the mind which are them mean of an emotion or action between excess and deficiency. Means are relative to each individual and derived through one’s own reason. For instance, consumption of 3 glasses of wine might be considered temperate for a middle-aged person but immoderate for an old man.

Aristotle asserts that virtues are acquired by “first exercising them”. Just as one acquires skills such building and lyre-playing by doing those tasks, he says that one “becomes just by doing just actions, temperate by temperate

P2 : Virtues are similar to skills. C : Hence, it follows that if some exercises a virtue, they are already virtuous.

The objection directly undermines Aristotle’s account how virtue is cultivated . If one who does the virtuous deed needs to be virtuous, then is not possible to cultivate virtue by doing virtuous actions.

Aristotle lays out two independent responses to the objection. Aristotle’s first response is that performing a skill doesn’t necessarily mean one posses the skill. This is in direct refutation to P1. Aristotle gives the counter-example of how “one can produce something literate by chance or under instruction from another [person]” and we would deem that such a person is literate [27]. This is because, typically for us to attribute a skill to someone we would expect them to do it on their own accord. For instance, we would say that pianist has musicality only if he is able to interpret music and play the piano well independently. The pianist could randomly hit notes that sound pleasant or play notes well with his coach hand-holding him doesn’t posses musicality because the results didn’t stem from his