Friday, May 3, 2019

Choose some virtue not discussed by Aristotle and present an Aristotellan analysis. The virtue cannot be accountability or forgiveness.

According to Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, ideal ethics were understood by finding the mean of two extreme positions. For example, "courage," a virtue, was the mean between rashness and cowardice, both of which are bad. Likewise, temperance was the mean of self-denial and self-indulgence.
We could imagine many modern virtues that might be arrived at through this process. In fact, many modern people talk about achieving balance in their lives, especially a balance between work and family life, or work and leisure time, which an increasing body of scientific work shows is essential to health. So we might say that a healthy "work-life balance" might be the mean of laziness and what people in the twentieth century called being a "workaholic." Good parenting, certainly a virtue, could be a mean between being too indulgent and being too strict. Aristotle also framed virtues as habits, meaningless without being put into action in human life, a principle which could be applied to any modern virtue, however we define them.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html

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