How is Austen a moralist?

Peter Smith introduced in an essay for Oxford Review (1966) the idea of Jane Austen as a moralist (different from a moralizer), an idea that now has strong support. Smith shows that Austen focuses on universal moral questions and examines them from an Aristotelian perspective that sees moral qualities in degrees and kinds rather than in a Calvinistic binary/dichotomy of black or white, is or is not, has or has not.
Applying this Aristotelian framework supporting Austenian prose aesthetic to Pride and Prejudice, each character represents a kind and degree of pride and/or prejudice. Austen examines the shades of pride and the degrees of prejudice. Characters are contrasted against each other to reveal the effects of the degrees of these moral qualities on love, family and marriage. Austen thus employs the same Aristotelian aesthetic framework that Sir Sidney Philip expounds upon and that Edmund Spenser espouses. In the end, the principal characters, after significant development, represent right-minded moral qualities that have beneficial effects on love, family and marriage.

ELIZABETH: She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think without feeling she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. "How despicably I have acted!" she cried; "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery!" (36)

DARCY: "As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. [...] My object then," replied Darcy, "was to show you, by every civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to." (58)