Aristotle's Virtue Ethics: Achieving Happiness Through Reason and Moderation

Aristotle's Virtue Ethics

Achieving Happiness Through Reason and Moderation

It is not enough to know good practice. Virtue is to know, to look for, deliberate on ways to achieve it, choose between them, and have the will to act decisively. It consists of a mean between two extremes.

As I said before, happiness is to do what is proper to human intellectual activity. But we are not only intellect; we have sensitive appetites, so there are two kinds of virtues:

• Dianoetic: arising from the habit of reasoning, such as prudence, science, etc.
• Moral: arising from the habit of guiding passions; meet but do not allow us to move them.

Rational control of passions leads us to stay in the middle ground. There are irrational governing forces in the soul, such as courage, moderation, and other virtues regulating relationships: expediency, truth, and justice.

In conclusion, while dianoetic virtues are in practice knowledge, moral virtues consist of moderate desires, submitting our conduct to practice. For Aristotle, all virtues must be cultivated.

Techne (Art) and Prudence

In techne (art), reason allows us to do things. It would be a mistake to think that art is the production itself; it is knowing how to do things. Knowledge is universal, applicable to all things, to produce something. Experience is knowledge, but much less than technique or art. Technique knows more things than experience. Technique and art are superior to experience but less than science because the former deals with the contingent, while science deals with the necessary. Moreover, techne is teachable and communicable.

Chance and art are similar, dealing with the same object. Art is different in nature because the principle of art is not who produces it. Art is different from prudence.

Prudence (Phronesis)

Prudence, also called wisdom or phronesis, is a rational, real, and practical mode of being about what is good or bad for man. Prudence is a virtue of the rational soul. It is knowledge of actions themselves, while they are being performed. The term of this knowledge is not something external to the action that produces it but is, ultimately, the action itself.

Prudence is not only knowing what to do in certain circumstances but also universal knowledge because it refers to the totality of life. Before acting, we must consider alternatives that precede action. A wise person is wise because they know life; mere knowing would not be called wisdom, but it refers to the knowledge of good and evil.

In conclusion, one who possesses the virtue of prudence has “a real practical reason habit about what is bad and good for man.”