Book II

In order to live a virtuous life we must ask the question; what are virtues?

This book is Aristotles attempt to answer that. He first describes how we get them, a process less like learning and more of acquisition of a skill. Then in response to a possible belief that these virtues have rigid meaning and outcomes, Aristotle creates a spectrum, with what is virtuous drifting somewhere in the middle.

Virtue can be split into two parts: "intellectual and moral". Intellectual is easily taught, comparable to rules. Moral virtues require acquisition through the building of habits. Morals cannot come about naturally, someone cannot go to sleep evil and wake up an angel. Aristotle uses analogies about how rocks cannot simply move up hills, it is against their nature, no matter how often they practise. Therefore it cannot be nature that grows virtues in someone, nature allows us to accept virtues, but we must grow them. Because of this, virtues act more like arts than senses. Someone who paints for the first time is unlikely to be good even if they've been to millions of lectures. For a painter to get good, they need to paint, the more they paint, the better they get. So for a person to get braver, they commit brave actions. The more they act brave, the braver they get.

Aristotle believes this is what separates good/useful from bad in every aspect. Good laws create a habit in the citizens, while bad laws only offer a punishment, with the offender unlikely to change their ways. This separation of good and bad is no different in virtues. They are things to acquire, and so you can either acquire them well or poorly. Being good at virtues is acting in accordance with them when the situation arises. Continually failing to act correctly makes someone unvirtuous. People are not born brave, but only become so if they act bravely and make a habit out of it.

"Character arises out of activities"

The main idea of this section is that rigid, specific, universal descriptions of the acts needed to build virtues are impossible. An important distinction is that virtues and guidelines for actions, but actions are NOT guidelines for virtues. When it comes to virtues, what is "good for us have no fixity (rigidity), any more than matters of health". While running is good for your health, having a broken leg means that this is no longer the case. Completing the same action in different situations will have different outcomes. One can be called good/virtuous or the other can be condemned. Just because it is brave to stand up for someone in one situation, exclusively repeating this action without thought will not grow the virtue in someone. Pennycook uses a boat captain to explain this point. Without wind, it is wisest to point straight at the destination and go. But wind is variable, and so a good boat captain must point the boat slightly opposing the direction of the wind, continually course correcting to be on track to the destination.

Not oversteering is a balance described by Aristotle as avoiding "excess" and "defect". This is what the virtue spectrums are all about. We can think of bravery as in the middle or the mean of cowardness and rashness. This is quite a straightforward idea to grasp. A good runner runs enough to get fit, and not enough to get a stress fracture. Balancing the defect and excess is the core of being virtuous. It is important to remember the perfect mean is different for everyone, in every situation as described previously. Luckily, balancing becomes a habit, making it easier to balance in the future.

Virtue is concerned with pleasure and pain. However it is not by pursuing or avoiding them, these only lead to poor outcomes. This is the cause of this idea that virtuous people are thought of as doing nothing. But instead, feeling pleasure and pain in the right measures, at the right time strengths the virtues. One example is when hurting others. Its not virtuous to gain pleasure form this action. And this is why doggedly pursing pleasure and avoiding pain is unwise. There are times like funerals in which feeling pain is a good thing. And so the virtues are concerned with pleasure and pain.

Choice	Contrary
Noble	Base
Advantageous	Injurious
Pleasant	Painful

Virtues are only virtuous if the person doing them:

• Must have knowledge
• Must choose the acts for their own sake
• Proceed from a firm and unchanging character

Someone who is a grammarian must say something something grammatical in accordance with their grammatical knowledge. Someone is not a grammarian if they only stumble onto a grammatically correct statement. Virtues can be though of similarly. It is not virtuous to stumble onto virtuous acts, its much better to act with the full intention and understanding of what is virtuous. The intentions justify the end.

This concept I found quite confusing. Last book, Aristotle has previous based his reasoning off the the key claim that all actions aim at good. But how can this be consistent with the claim that the intention always justifies the action? For an example of how all actions aim at good, we could use murder. This is objectively bad. However, people that murder have reasons for doing so, the simplest, they enjoy it. From their perspective, the intention and the act of murdering was good. They committed murder with the intention to enjoy it. There are many things I do, solely because I enjoy them. Writing this is one example. So what makes one of these actions better than the other. If the intention justifies the ends, the good in the actions and intentions are synonymous. So, naturally we must look somewhere else to understand how we should intend to act. Perhaps I intend to write this to bring me Eudaimonia while murder is only committed in the pursuit pleasure, separating the two. Or perhaps writing is also similarly hedonistic and I should go get a job. All convincing points. The problem is, there is a virtuous way to act. If there was not, someone with the wrong intentions would be unable to stumble into acting virtuously. So then, if virtuous acts can be defined, why bother with the intentions? Simply, the virtuous acts are defined by the intentions. Writing is more virtuous than murder, because that is what a virtuous person would intend to do. Without the intention to commit virtuous acts, they will be infrequent, unable to build a habit or character, instead existing as flukes never to be repeated.

It is good stumble onto virtuous acts. It is better if the individual can then learn from the experience to inform future intentions. And its much better to act with the full intention and understanding of what is virtuous and then use this experience to inform future intentions. The intentions DO NOT justify the end, but having good intentions will always eventually lead to a good end (Eudaimonia) and a virtuous life.
The next section underlines the importance of copying the intention of those who are virtuous, for them you are able to act in a virtuous manner and become virtuous yourself.

On the topic of the virtues being in contradiction with each other.

The idea came up in class that fully committing to one virtue makes it impossible to fully commit to other virtues. However, it is important to look at Book 1 - Chapter 1. Aristotle states that goods are either master or subordinate. A master horse trainer includes all the goods of bridle making and horse-riding and so on. But if someone were to devote themselves to bravery, they would struggle to completely commit to another virtue like justice in the same way the horse-trainer will struggle to commit to accounting. Aristotle counters this with the concept that we should always be aiming for the master, or more simply that the master good is better than the sum of its parts. A piano player is not expected to completely commit to the left side of the keyboard, that would be absurd. Instead a good piano player would fully commit to the piano, from that goal requires mastering each side of the keyboard in balance/moderation. What this means for virtues is that you should not fully commit to a single virtue or even a few, but instead commit to the master good of being virtuous as a whole. In Brendan's example, he may have stopped fully committing to study. But he has continued a full commitment to his life, and study is simply helping that cause, a subordinate good to his life.

Virtues are objective, each situation has objectively virtuous actions. But the action always depends on the situation, so while the action for a single epoch is constant, continual virtuous actions over a period of time is not constant

Things to do with the soul can be split into three categories:

• Passions
• Faculties
• States of Character

Passion are the general feelings the accompany pleasure and pain. Passions include thigs like anger, fear, confidence and envy.

Faculties are the capability of feeling these passions. An example of a faculty would be the ability to feel anger. Someone who might not have the capacity to feel anger would just be calm all the time, even if the situation calls for anger.

States of character are how we react in reference to the passions. In reference to anger, we might get violent. Since passions and faculties are defined without choice from the individual, virtues must be a state of character

For anything continuous and divisible there is a mean point that is an equal distance from the extremes of excess and defect. This is were virtue lies. However from our perspective, this mean is not always central. By nature we are typically either predisposed for excess and defect in all regards

More notes coming when I transfer them ...