Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean and Moral Virtue

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, composed from lecture material used at the Lyceum in Athens probably in the 330s or 320s BCE and likely compiled by his son Nicomachus, opens its central discussion of character in Book II by distinguishing moral virtue (ethike arete) from intellectual virtue (dianoetike arete). Intellectual virtue, Aristotle holds, arises and grows mainly through teaching, and therefore requires time and experience, while moral virtue is the product of habit (ethos), from which its very name derives by a slight variation. His famous formula is blunt: "we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts" (Nicomachean Ethics 1103a34-b2). Virtue, on this account, is not a feeling (pathos) nor a mere capacity (dynamis) but a stable disposition, a hexis, concerned with choice (prohairesis) — and it is this settled character, built up through repeated right action long before it is theorized, that becomes the proper subject of ethical inquiry.