Character: Virtue Ethics — Ethics 4 (C1)

ETHICS · LESSON 4

Character: Virtue Ethics

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Where do you stand?

Task Write a number from 1 to 5 for each statement.

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

1. A truly good person behaves well in almost any situation.

2. You can become a better person through practice, the way you become a better pianist.

3. It is possible to be too honest.

4. When you don't know what to do, ask what someone you admire would do.

The third lens

Consequences

Duty

Character

Relationships

What will happen?

What rule applies?

What would a good person do?

Who am I to them?

A friend asks: is my plan good?

READING

Aristotle: what is a good life?

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) opens the Nicomachean Ethics with an observation: everything we do aims at some good, and most goods are wanted for the sake of something else. The good wanted purely for its own sake, he argues, is eudaimonia. The word is usually translated as "happiness", but flourishing is closer: not a pleasant mood but a whole life lived well, which others can assess, and about which you can be mistaken.

What does flourishing consist of? Aristotle asks what is distinctive of human beings, and answers: reason. So the human good is "activity of soul in accordance with virtue", sustained over a complete life, for "one swallow does not make a summer, nor does

one day." A virtue of character (Greek arete, "excellence") is a settled state, not a passing feeling or a single good deed. Flourishing also needs some luck: friends, health, enough to live on.

How are virtues acquired? Not by nature, and not by learning rules, but by habituation: "we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts", as people become builders by building. At first we act well with effort. In time, the virtuous person does the right thing willingly and feels the right way about it.

This shifts the moral question. The Character lens asks less "What should I do?" than "What kind of person should I become?"

READING

The mean and practical wisdom

Aristotle defines virtue as "a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us". Each virtue lies between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency. Courage is the mean concerning fear and confidence: the coward fears too much, the rash person too little.

The doctrine of the mean is not advice to be moderate in everything. The mean is "relative to us", not an arithmetic midpoint. If ten pounds of food is too much and two too little, a trainer will not prescribe six for everyone: six may be too little for Milo, a famous wrestler, and too much for a beginner. Nor is the mean only about actions. It is about feeling fear, anger or pity

"at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people", for the right reason and in the right way. And some acts have no mean at all: there is no right amount of theft or murder.

Finding the mean in a particular case needs phronesis, or practical wisdom. It cannot be reduced to rules, because ethics lacks the precision of mathematics: an educated person, Aristotle says, seeks precision only "so far as the nature of the subject admits". Practical wisdom grows from experience, which is why the young can be gifted mathematicians but are rarely practically wise. Hitting the mean is hard: "to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult".

Find the mean

Task Write the row number and a word or phrase for each ? cell. Then choose one row and decide: is the virtue really halfway, or is one extreme closer to it? If you finish early, fill row 7 with a virtue valued where you live.

Deficiency

Virtue

Excess

1

Cowardice

Courage (Aristotle: facing danger)

2

Generosity (Aristotle; the Qur'an, 25:67, on spending)

Wastefulness

3

Never angry, even at an injustice

(Aristotle: anger)

A hot, quick temper

4

Truthfulness about yourself (Aristotle)

Boastfulness

5

Harsh denial of the body, such as extreme fasting

The Middle Way (the Buddha's first sermon: pleasure)

6

The junzi, or exemplary person (Confucius, Analects 6.18: inner substance and outward refinement)

7

(a virtue valued where you live)

READING

The return of character

Twentieth-century moral philosophy in English was dominated by the first two lenses. In 1958 the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe published "Modern Moral Philosophy". She argued that the special moral "ought" was a survival of an older picture of ethics as obedience to a divine law, and made little sense without it. Philosophers should first work out an adequate moral psychology: what motives, intentions and virtues are.

The essay is widely credited with starting the revival of virtue ethics.

Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981) and Rosalind Hursthouse (On Virtue Ethics, 1999) developed it, and scholars now compare Aristotle with the Confucian and Buddhist traditions of cultivating character. Hursthouse's answer to "What should I do?" is: what a virtuous person would characteristically do in the circumstances. Linda Zagzebski (2017) adds that we learn what goodness is from moral exemplars, the people we admire on reflection, and grow by imitating them.

Moral exemplars

Task On your own, choose one exemplar: a real public figure from your own culture (living or historical) or a fictional character. Write their name, the one virtue they show best, and one thing they did that shows it. Avoid current politicians; choose someone whose goodness most people around you would agree on.

Task (Groups) Present your exemplar in one minute, like a portrait in a gallery. After each one, listeners ask one question: is this a virtue, or a talent, a role or good luck? Finally, agree which virtue your group's gallery shows most.

EXAMPLE

Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings. Virtue: loyalty. He follows Frodo into Mordor and, when Frodo can no longer walk, carries him up Mount Doom. Could he overdo it? Perhaps: loyalty without judgement becomes blind devotion.

Predict: the Good Samaritan study

Task Privately, write your predictions.

In December 1970 the psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson studied 40 students at Princeton Theological Seminary. Each had filled in questionnaires about how and why they were religious. Each then prepared a short talk and was sent to another building to record it. Half were to speak about jobs for seminary graduates; half about the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a priest and a Levite pass a beaten man on the road and a Samaritan stops to help. Some were told they had a few minutes to spare, some that they were expected now, some that they were already late. On the way, in an alley, a man sat slumped in a doorway, head down, coughing and groaning. He was part of the study.

(a) What percentage of each group stopped to help: plenty of time, expected now, already late?

(b) Did the topic of the talk make a difference?

(c) Did how religious the students were predict who stopped?

THE RESULTS

What the study found

Of the 40 students, 16 (40%) offered some help. Hurry made the difference: 63% of those with time to spare helped, 45% of those expected now, and 10% of those already late. The talk's topic had no significant effect (53% of the Good Samaritan speakers helped, against 29% of the others, a gap that could be chance in so small a sample), and none of the religion measures predicted who stopped. On several occasions, the

authors report, a student going to speak on the parable "literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way".

Darley and Batson did not read this as callousness. Many hurried students seem not to have seen the scene as a moment for moral choice at all. Others noticed and seemed anxious: someone was counting on them to arrive, so they faced a conflict.

THE RESULTS · CONTINUED

What the study found

A 1978 follow-up found that hurried participants were more likely to stop when their errand mattered less to the experimenter.

Gilbert Harman (1999) and John Doris (2002) used this and similar studies to argue that the stable traits virtue ethics relies on are rare; Harman suggested there may be no such thing as character. This is the situationist challenge.

Two cautions. This was a single

study of 40 people, an average of about 13 per hurry group, and the paper admits an error in allocating them to groups. Later work, including four studies from Warsaw in 2025, links feeling rushed to less kind behaviour. And virtue ethicists reply that Aristotle never thought full virtue common, and that practical wisdom includes noticing what a situation asks of you.

Character under pressure

Task Choose three or four questions. Spend most of your time on the one your group disagrees about.

1. If most people would walk past the man in the doorway, can we still blame those who do?

2. Is being reliably good in every situation a realistic goal, or a myth?

3. Should we spend less effort building character, and more designing situations that make good behaviour easy?

4. Could someone be truly generous yet often fail to notice others' needs when busy?

5. Where you live, is being busy admired? Does that make people less kind?

6. Are the virtues the same everywhere, or does each culture find its own mean?

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Think of a time when hurry, tiredness or another pressure stopped you doing something you would normally do. What might have helped?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Which virtue do you find easiest to overdo, and which one would you most like to practise more?

Back to where you stood

Task Look again at your numbers for statements 1 and 4 on the slide "Where do you stand?". Would you change either of them now?

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

1. A truly good person behaves well in almost any situation.

4. When you don't know what to do, ask what someone you admire would do.

Before Lesson 5

This week, notice one moment when the situation, not your character, decided what you did.

Consequences

Duty

It might be hurry, tiredness, a crowd, or someone watching. Note what happened and what, if anything, would have changed your response.

Character

Next lesson: Ethics Beyond the West. Moral traditions from other parts of the world, and the fourth lens: Relationships.

Relationships

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key

FIND THE MEAN suggested; the virtue ethicist's point is that the mean is found by judgement, so close equivalents are fine

1 Excess: rashness (Aristotle's word: the rash person). Aristotle adds that rashness is nearer to courage than cowardice is (Nicomachean Ethics II.8).

2 Deficiency: meanness or stinginess (Aristotle pairs "prodigality and meanness"). The Qur'an, 25:67, describes those who, when they spend, are neither extravagant nor miserly but keep to a just balance between the two.

3 Virtue: good temper (Aristotle's term; he admits the Greek barely has a name for it). The good-tempered person is angry at the right things, with the right people, to the right degree.

4 Deficiency: mock modesty (false modesty: understating your own qualities).

5 Excess: the pursuit of sensual pleasure. In his first sermon, the Buddha rejects two extremes, devotion to sensual pleasure and devotion to self-mortification, which he had practised himself before his awakening, in favour of the Middle Way.

6 Deficiency: rusticity, all raw substance and no refinement. Excess: the manner of a clerk or scribe, all polish and form, no substance. Legge's translation: when solid qualities and accomplishments "are equally blended, we then have the man of virtue".

7 Open.

PREDICT: THE GOOD SAMARITAN STUDY see the slide "What the study found". (a) 63% with time to spare, 45% expected now, 10% already late. (b) No significant effect of topic. (c) No: religiosity did not predict whether a student helped, though it was related to how those who stopped helped.