Aristotle's Mesotes as Dynamic Deliberation — Epoche B2
Courage and the Mean: What Aristotle's Formula Presupposes What does the doctrine of the mean actually claim? In the sixth chapter of the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle defines moral virtue as a settled state concerned with choice [1] , lying in a mean relative to us, the mean being determined by reason and as the person of practical wisdom would determine it. The definition has three parts that are easy to run together. It says virtue is a state of character rather than an act. It says the state is a mean between two ways of going wrong. And it says the mean is fixed by something else — by reason, and by the judgement of a person who has it. Aristotle is careful that the mean is not an average [2] . He gives the example of a trainer working out rations. If ten minae of food is too much and two is too little, it does not follow that the trainer should prescribe six, since six may be too much for a beginner and too little for Milo the wrestler. The mean relative to us is not a point on a scale of quantities; it is what suits this agent in these circumstances. The standard complaint against the doctrine follows immediately. If the mean is not a quantity and can only be located by someone who already has practical wisdom, then it tells no one what to do. Courage lies between cowardice and rashness; but the question in front of a soldier is whether to hold the line, and no formula about extremes answers it. This essay argues that the complaint misses, and that a worse problem lies behind it. The doctrine is not a decision procedure and was not offered as one. But it also does not do the job Aristotle assigns it in the argument that introduces it, and his own treatment of courage is where this shows. Why does courage narrow to the battlefield? On the schema, courage is the virtuous state concerning fear and confidence. Fear and confidence are feelings that admit of more and less, so a mean between cowardice and rashness is exactly what the doctrine predicts. Nothing so far restricts the field. In the sixth chapter of the third book Aristotle restricts it sharply. The courageous person is not the one who stands firm against every fearful thing. Disgrace is feared rightly and fearing it is not courage but decency; poverty and disease are not the courageous person's concern in the strict sense. Courage proper is exercised in the face of a fine death, and above all in war, because there the danger is greatest and the finest. Ask what supports the restriction. It is not the doctrine of the mean, which speaks of fear and confidence without qualification and gives no reason why fear of ruin should not have its own virtuous mean. It is not the psychology of the feelings, since the fear of dying of plague is not a different feeling from the fear of dying in a battle line. Aristotle's own answer is given plainly in the same discussion: the courageous person endures and fears what he should, for the sake of the fine, because the fine is the end of virtue. That is an appeal to a substantive judgement about which deaths are noble ones. It is not an appeal to any feature of means and extremes. And it is doing all the work: change the judgement about what is fine, and the same schema yields a different virtue with different boundaries. Does the schema individuate the virtues at all? This matters because of the role the doctrine is supposed to play. Aristotle does not present the mean as an incidental observation. He uses it to organise a list: courage over fear and confidence, temperance over certain pleasures, mildness over anger, and so on. Each virtue is identified by a field of feeling and located as the mean within it. If the mean cannot fix the boundary of a field — and the case of courage suggests it cannot — then the list is not being generated by the doctrine, and something else is generating it. Aristotle himself supplies the clearest evidence for this. He notes that some things admit of no mean at all: spite, shamelessness and envy among feelings, adultery, theft and murder among actions. There is no question of committing adultery with the right person at the right time in the right way; one is simply wrong. The names of these already contain the badness. But if some acts are wrong independently of any excess or deficiency, then the doctrine is not what makes acts wrong, and it cannot be the source of the moral content it is being used to organise. The Arabic tradition that inherited the doctrine makes the missing source explicit. Miskawayh [3] , writing in the early eleventh century, takes over the mean into the Tahdhīb al-akhlāq and builds his ethics on it. But he derives the virtues first, from a psychology he takes from Plato: the soul has a rational, an irascible and an appetitive faculty, and each has its own excellence — wisdom from the rational, courage from the irascible, temperance from the appetitive, with justice as their right ordering. Only then does the mean arrive, to locate each excellence between its two failures. Miskawayh's structure is transparent about what Aristotle's conceals. The faculties do the individuating; the mean does the placing. Al-Fārābī had already treated the mean in a similar spirit [4] , comparing the ruler who sets the measure for a city's habits to a physician who prescribes for a particular body. The comparison is Aristotle's own trainer, and it carries the same implication: the physician needs to know what health is before any talk of dosage becomes intelligible. Is this a criticism, or something Aristotle grants? The strongest reply is J. O. Urmson's. In 'Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean' (1973) he argued that the doctrine has been read far too ambitiously. It is a thesis about feelings, not about actions; it says that the virtues are concerned with fields in which one can feel too much or too little, and that virtue is the state of feeling rightly. It was never a decision procedure and never claimed to specify which feelings matter. O