Ethics | Page 6

this is the case in regard to every virtue named and recognised
as such, but his treatment is often forced and the endeavour is not very successful. Except
as a convenient principle of arrangement of the various forms of praiseworthy or
blameworthy characters, generally acknowledged as such by Greek opinion, this form of
the doctrine is of no great significance.
Books III-V are occupied with a survey of the moral virtues and vices. These seem to
have been undertaken in order to verify in detail the general account, but this aim is not
kept steadily in view. Nor is there any well-considered principle of classification. What
we find is a sort of portrait-gallery of the various types of moral excellence which the
Greeks of the author's age admired and strove to encourage. The discussion is full of
acute, interesting and sometimes profound observations. Some of the types are those
which are and will be admired at all times, but others are connected with peculiar features
of Greek life which have now passed away. The most important is that of Justice or the
Just Man, to which we may later return. But the discussion is preceded by an attempt to
elucidate some difficult and obscure points in the general account of moral virtue and
action (Book III, cc i-v). This section is concerned with the notion of Responsibility. The
discussion designedly excludes what we may call the metaphysical issues of the problem,
which here present themselves, it moves on the level of thought of the practical man, the
statesman, and the legislator. Coercion and ignorance of relevant circumstances render
acts involuntary and exempt their doer from responsibility, otherwise the act is voluntary
and the agent responsible, choice or preference of what is done, and inner consent to the
deed, are to be presumed. Neither passion nor ignorance of the right rule can extenuate
responsibility. But there is a difference between acts done voluntarily and acts done of set
choice or purpose. The latter imply Deliberation. Deliberation involves thinking, thinking
out means to ends: in deliberate acts the whole nature of the agent consents to and enters
into the act, and in a peculiar sense they are his, they are him in action, and the most
significant evidence of what he is. Aristotle is unable wholly to avoid allusion to the
metaphysical difficulties and what he does here say upon them is obscure and
unsatisfactory. But he insists upon the importance in moral action of the agent's inner
consent, and on the reality of his individual responsibility. For his present purpose the
metaphysical difficulties are irrelevant.
The treatment of Justice in Book V has always been a source of great difficulty to
students of the Ethics. Almost more than any other part of the work it has exercised
influence upon mediaeval and modern thought upon the subject. The distinctions and
divisions have become part of the stock-in-trade of would be philosophic jurists. And yet,
oddly enough, most of these distinctions have been misunderstood and the whole purport
of the discussion misconceived. Aristotle is here dealing with justice in a restricted sense
viz as that special goodness of character which is required of every adult citizen and
which can be produced by early discipline or habituation. It is the temper or habitual
attitude demanded of the citizen for the due exercise of his functions as taking part in the
administration of the civic community--as a member of the judicature and executive. The
Greek citizen was only exceptionally, and at rare intervals if ever, a law-maker while at
any moment he might be called upon to act as a judge (juryman or arbitrator) or as an

administrator. For the work of a legislator far more than the moral virtue of justice or
fairmindedness was necessary, these were requisite to the rarer and higher "intellectual
virtue" of practical wisdom. Then here, too, the discussion moves on a low level, and the
raising of fundamental problems is excluded. Hence "distributive justice" is concerned
not with the large question of the distribution of political power and privileges among the
constituent members or classes of the state but with the smaller questions of the
distribution among those of casual gains and even with the division among private
claimants of a common fund or inheritance, while "corrective justice" is concerned solely
with the management of legal redress. The whole treatment is confused by the unhappy
attempt to give a precise mathematical form to the principles of justice in the various
fields distinguished. Still it remains an interesting first endeavour to give greater
exactness to some of the leading conceptions of jurisprudence.
Book VI appears to have in view two aims: (1) to describe goodness of intellect and
discover its highest form or forms; (2) to show how this is related