Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude

Ethical Ideas of Aristotle

Ethical Ideas of Aristotle
Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Greece. His father was a court physician of the Macedonian king. He lost his parents at an early age. He studied under Plato for twenty years in the Academy. He then went to Macedonia at the request of King Philip to tutor his son, Alexander the Great, who was then thirteen years old. He supervised Alexander’s studies for five years. Later, Aristotle founded his own school of philosophy at a place called Lyceum.
 
Aristotle differed from his teacher Plato on many matters. Plato’s philosophy was based on idealism, while Aristotle was a down-to-earth, practical thinker. He famously said, ‘Dear is Plato, but dearer still is truth.’
 
He believed that ‘form’ (as described by Plato) is not merely the shape but the shaping force, an inner necessity and impulse which moulds mere materials to a specific figure and purpose. It is the realisation of a potential capacity of matter. We must imagine a prime mover unmoved, a being incorporeal, indivisible, spaceless, sexless, passionless, changeless, perfect and eternal, i.e. God. He then stated, ‘God moves the world as the beloved object moves the lover.’
 
Concept of Soul
 
According to Aristotle, soul is the essence or the sum of the powers of the body. However, soul is not eternal because it cannot exist without body. According to him, body and soul are like form and wax, separable only in thought, but in reality one organic whole. The soul is not put into the body from outside, but the body and the soul come into existence together. A personal and particular soul can exist only in its own body. However, soul is not material, nor does it die.
 
The Philosophy of Aristotle
 
If philosophy is the quest of unity, Aristotle deserves the high name that twenty centuries have given him— ‘The Philosopher’. He was not only a great philosopher, but also a great scientist. He believed in the unity of all forms of knowledge like science and philosophy. He is most famous for writing, Nicomachean Ethics, his celebrated work. His main contribution is in the following two fields—
 
• Happiness
• Virtue or Ethics
 
According to Aristotle, happiness and virtue go together.
 
Summum Bonum
 
Aristotle stated that all things are done with an end in mind. For example—
 
• Ship-building is done to make ships
• Economics is looked into to generate wealth
• Medicine is practised to maintain health
 
Similarly, all human activities are also directed towards an end.
 
All such ends are then directed towards one final end which he called summom bonum, which by itself is not a means of any end.
 
The summom bonum of human being is happiness, as we seek everything to attain happiness. The aim of life is not goodness for its own sake, but happiness ‘for we choose happiness for itself and never with a view to anything further; whereas we choose honour, pleasure, power, intellect…because we believe that through them we shall become happy’.
 
Every creature’s summum bonum depends on its special faculties. For example, animals are ruled by sensation and hence, they try to achieve sensual pleasures. However, pleasure is not good for man because reason is the special faculty of man. Hence, summum bonum of man is to be found living a life of reason.
 
He thus advocated that human happiness is found by the pleasure of the mind; and we may trust it only when it comes from the pursuit or the capture of truth.
 
Concept of Virtue
 
According to Aristotle, virtue is of two types:
• Intellectual
• Ethical
 
He states that the value of intellect is of higher value since it is achieved by leading a life of reason and philosophical contemplation. A man with intellect will follow the ethical path not because it is stated by a philosopher or written in a scripture, but because he understands the benefits of leading an ethical life.
 
The ethical virtues consist of subordinating the human passion and appetites to reason.
 
He believed that the intellectual and ethical values together constitute happiness. It means that your reasoning must be in tune with your ethical values to enjoy lasting happiness in your life.
Aristotle believed that ethical virtues consist in the control of emotions with reason. He also believed that knowledge alone is not enough to make a person virtuous since control of passion is difficult. Passions can be controlled only by self-discipline. Only with practice, virtuous conduct can become a habit and then it becomes so normal for the person that he starts following the virtuous path effortlessly. He, therefore, has stated, ‘Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.’
 
Virtue: The Golden Mean
 
Aristotle’s best-known work on ethics is The Nicomachean Ethics. Here, he asserts that the extreme of anything is a vice and that virtue is found only in the golden mean between the two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. The Nicomachean Ethics or ‘Table of Virtues and Vices’ is provided in the following table. Here, the excess and deficiency of anything represents vices and the mean represents the virtues.
Ethical Ideas of Aristotle
However, there are certain virtues that don’t fit into the golden mean. In these cases, more is better.
These virtues include:
 
• Wisdom
• Truthfulness
• Impartiality
• Magnanimity (a person with valour, generosity, loyalty and dignity)
 
Aristotle’s Concept of Justice
 
According to Aristotle, justice is of two types:
 
1. Distributive: Distributive justice implies that the state should divide or distribute goods and wealth among citizens according to individual merit.
 
2. Corrective: It means inflicting punishment when someone does wrong. It aims to restore what an individual had lost due to the injustice of the society or an individual has gained by illegal means. This justice prevents from encroachments of one right over the other.
 
Politics and State
 
According to Aristotle, politics is the ethics of state. A state must educate people in virtues and provide opportunity to them to exercise the virtues. A state is like an organism with a life and reality of its own just as individuals.
 
He rejects the individualistic view which denies state and also rejects Plato, who denies the individual. He argued that, theoretically, the ideal form of government would be the centralisation of all political power in the one best man, because for such a man, law would be an instrument rather than a limit. When there is no limit to power, one can order society in one direction.
 
However, in practice, monarchy is usually the worst form of government, for great strength and great virtue are not always allies. When, there is no fear of losing power and no accountability, the monarch tends to enjoy a life of pleasure rather than serving people and the state.
 
Hence, he proposed that the best practicable polity is aristocracy, the rule of the informed and capable few.
 
Criticism of Aristotle
 
The advocacy of Aristotle in favour of aristocracy was widely criticised, since in such a state all the benefits and privileges are reserved for a chosen few.
 
Aristotle is also criticised because he accepted the inequality of different kinds—including the one between man and woman. He viewed woman as an inferior species, when he said, ‘Woman is to man as the slave to the master, the manual to the mental worker, the barbarian to the Greek. Woman is an unfinished man, left standing on a lower step in the scale of development.’ This view is unacceptable in the modern world.
 
His concept of ethics is also criticised by many philosophers because it advocates the middle path rather than excellence. These concepts are often quite vague and conventional (middle-class) because he considered the excess of everything as vice.
 
Ethical Ideas of Aristotle
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