Aristotle on Courage, based on Charles Young’s article in ACTA

 

§       Aristotle typically gives a virtue’s scope:

o      Temperance is concerned with pleasure

o      Liberality is concerned with wealth

o      Courage, however, is concerned with two items: fear and “cheer” (sometimes translated as “confidence”, but that is not as good as “cheer” thinks Young)

§       He never really attempts to explain what cheer is in NE or EE or the Magna Moralia

§       Cheer makes things complicated:

o      Virtues are means between extremes, says Aristotle.

·      E.g.  temperance is a mean between profligacy and insensibility

·      Magnificence is a mean between stinginess and vulgarity

§       How can there be a mean when there are two different things that imply two continua: cheer and fear?

o      Of those who exceed, he who excels in fearlessness has no name…but someone would be mad or insensitive to pain if he fears nothing… He who exceeds in cheer is rash… He who exceeds in fear is a coward, for he fears the wrong things, in the wrong way, and so on. And he is also deficient in cheer, though his excess in the face of pains is more apparent. EN 1115b24ff

o      Most rash people are rash cowards. For though they are full of cheer in these circumstances (in which they can imitate courageous people), they do not stand firm against frightening things. EN 1115b32ff.

§       So somehow rash people must be cowards.

§       But it may be possible that fear and cheer are not really two separate continua. More on this below.

§       Courage and self-control

o      Usually, an Aristotelian virtue involves a person's desires and emotions supporting what the person’s practical wisdom suggests.
    Remember that desire and emotions are, at any given moment, givens, things that cannot be changed on the spot: they can be changed over time. Practical wisdom is what determines what a person should do now. Desires and emotions provide the goal, where practical wisdom provides the how.

o      A person must be “self-controlled” to do a virtuous action:
A person who is self-controlled may force themselves to do what the virtuous person would do, but that does not mean they are virtuous or that the action is virtuous: that person is “self-controlled” or “strong willed” or has “moral strength” but not virtue.

o      But if it’s the case that one must control one’s fear in order to be courageous, and there is not more to it than that, that seems contrary to Aristotle’s clear statements about virtue. How can courage be virtue?

§       Is it that courage is action in spite of fear: so the courageous person MUST feel fear and what is fear but a desire to avoid what one fears?

§       Things that are fearful to most people, and all that are fearful to human nature, we say are fearful absolutely. But the courageous person is fearless in relation to them, and he endures such fearful things, which are fearful to him in one way but not in another; they are fearful to him qua person, but qua courageous person they are not fearful to him, except slightly, or not at all. But these things really are fearful, because they are fearful to most persons. (EE 1228b25ff)

§       He who is fearless in the face of fine death is properly called courageous EN 1115a32ff

§       Although the courageous man will fear even the sorts of things that are not beyond human endurance, he will endure them as he should and as reason dictates, for the sake of the fine, since this is the end of virtue. EN 1115b11ff

·      Note the “beyond human endurance”: that’s where we might look for Aristotle’s opinion about the extreme situations modern ethics seems to gravitate towards such as the concentration camp, etc.

§       He is courageous, then, who endures and fears the right things, for the right reasons, in the right way, and at the right time, and shows cheer in similar fashion. EN 1115b17

o      The texts apparently conflict, but it looks as if the courageous person may feel fear in situations where courage is appropriate.

§       Obviously courageous agents do not experience the excessive fear that paralyses.

o      Let’s think again about self-control:

§       moral strength is exhibited when someone desires to X, but her practical reason says no to X. She cannot both fulfill her desire AND say no to X. They are incompatible.

§       What if we say that Aristotle could think a courageous person feels fear of death or dismemberment or whatever, BUT does not desire to flee?  The person desires to avoid death, dismemberment, or whatever, BUT does not have a desire to do anything incompatible with courage.

§       That seems to work. Aristotle can admit that courageous folks feel fear and want to avoid the object of fear (death, etc.), but he could say that what they don’t desire is to do anything contrary to courage, such as turn tail and run.

§       What about cheer?

o      In his ethical works, he says practically nothing, but in the Rhetoric, we find:

§       Since it is clear what fear is, and what fearful things are, and what the states of mind are in which people feel fear, it is clear from this what cheer is, and what sorts of things are cheerful, and how the cheerful people are disposed. For cheer is the contrary of fear, and what’s cheerful of what’s fearful. 1381b13ff

§       Fear is pain occasioned by an apparent imminent evil.

§       Cheer is the contrary of that. So what is contrary to that?

1.     Pleasure occasioned by an apparent imminent evil.

2.     Pleasure occasioned by an apparent imminent good.

3.     Pain occasioned by an apparent imminent good.

·      The last one is not relevant, if it exists.

§       Perhaps cheer is the pleasure one gets in battle: at the occasion of danger. The exhilaration and excitement and thrill.

§       Too much and one would be rash and reckless. Too little, and one would not meet one’s fear with the requisite strength to overcome it, and so one would not be virtuous.

§       But at Rhetoric 1381b16ff, we find: Cheer is the hope for the means of preservation accompanied by its striking one that they are near , while fearful things are non-existent or far away.

§       That looks like it could mean that cheer is pleasure occasioned by an apparent imminent deliverance from evil, and deliverance from evil is a good, which makes cheer look like #2 above!

§       And in that case, both fear and cheer can have the same object and scope: for instance they can both be reactions to an imminent threat to life.

·      Fear is pain at that threat

·      Cheer is pleasure at the prospect of deliverance from it.

·      And cheer is required to overcome fear: too much fear and you’ve got too little cheer; too much cheer, and you are reckless and have too little fear.

·      Thus it seems there is one continua after all, if we follow this interpretation.   
    and since means seem to require continua, that is a further point in favor of this interpretation

§       Courage and the fine

o      For Aristotle, an action is a virtuous one only if it is done because it is fine.

o      Aristotle indicates that courage has to do paradigmatically (and perhaps even exclusively) with fear of death, and more specifically death in battle, which is the finest sort of death:

§       The courageous human is concerned with death in the finest circumstances; and such deaths are those that occur in battle, since such deaths occur in the greatest and finest dangers. EN 1115a29ff)

§       To be willing to die in order to avoid poverty or erotic passion or something painful is characteristic not of a courageous human but rather of a coward. It is weakness to avoid troubles, and such a person endures death not because it is fine to do so but to avoid evil. EN 1116a12

o      There are things that look like courage that are not courage:

§       The professional soldier, who knows when she can safely get through and so stays to fight, but also knows when it’s likely she’ll be killed, and so flees.

§       The person who stays to fight out of fear of the law or dishonor.

o      The truly courageous will stay to fight because it’s fine, it’s noble, it’s the right thing to do. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

 

JUSTICE

Largely based on Charles M. Young’s article in ACTA

 

§       John Rawls, a famous modern theorist of justice, says that “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”

§       Aristotle, and Plato, and Socrates, however, think that justice is a virtue of an individual.

§       Aristotle uses “justice” for two things:

o      All of virtue is often called “justice.”

o      A more narrow conception: one’s conception of self as citizen in a community of free equals.

§       We face an immediate problem: Aristotle identifies justice broadly conceived as lawfulness, obedience to the law.

o      The problem is that laws are made by humans and so are error-prone. Aristotle knows that too!

§       They can be ill-conceived from the get-go in that they simply do not promote societal happiness.

·      Aristotle himself said that oligarchs, for instance, conceive of wealth as the greatest good and so create laws aimed at amassing their own wealth.

§       They can be well-conceived in that they aim at real happiness, but ill-conceived or badly implemented in that while that is their aim, they actually hinder happiness.

§       How can obedience to such laws be justice?

§       Aristotle should be aware of such problems, but does not address them!

o      But the idea of broad justice as lawfulness fits with his conception that virtue promotes happiness and political structures and laws exist to promote happiness.
    Is he saying that justice is one's willingness to obey the strictures set up by one's society? That seems OK, but there needs to be some strong undergirding to deal with the case when one's societal strictures are themselves badly conceived.

§       Particular justice, the narrow sense of justice

o      The scope is external goods such as wealth, honor, and he adds safety (which is a bit different and so harder to understand)

o      Injustice can be done to the community or other individuals (but not to the self)

o      It is confoundedly hard to see how justice is a mean and so how it fits into Aristotle’s schema for all the virtues as means. Lots of scholars spill lots of ink on this.

o      There are two kinds of particular justice: distributive and corrective.

§       Distributive justice concerns fair distribution of goods: equal persons get equal shares.  People of equal worth get equal shares, people of unequal worth get unequal shares (see Politics III for more on this: not the time now)

·      This is proportional: people get more or less depending on their worth.

§       Corrective justice means that whatever wrong is done is compensated by a good that is equal to the wrong done.

·      This is not punishment, although Aristotle does say that the perpretrator may be subject to more loss than the damage inflicted.

·      This is arithmetic: the loss = the gain.

o      Justice disposes one to want one’s fair share.

§       Wanting more than one’s share is a vice: greed

§       Wanting less than one’s share is not a vice, however, because one cannot be unjust to oneself (why? See EN V.6-11: I have not worked it up to a point where I can explain it quickly and accurately: I am sorry for that)

o      There are times when it is difficult to keep the vices separate:

§       Greed is the vice associated with justice

§       Illiberality is another vice that essentially involves desire for excessive gain.

§       It’s hard to say why the two are different.

§       One solution: illiberal people want more while greedy people want not just more but specifically more than their fair share.

·      A just person does not want gain if it comes by taking another’s belongings, whereas an unjust person has no such restraint.

 

FRIENDSHIP

Based primarily on Michael Pakaluk’s article in ACTA