The Danger of Adapting Virtues to Circumstance

Aristotle’s departure from his teacher Plato brings about in many ways concepts of virtue and the good that people living in a relatively free society (such as the United States) will feel a stronger affinity for. After all, the concept of actualizing one’s potential so they may truly flourish as a human being seems right in line with the prominent pledge to our children that they “can become anything they want”.  Particularly the premise that sensible things are not reflections of ideas (or forms) but are, in fact, the things themselves, which eventually extends itself into the realm of the good and virtue, is comforting to members of a society that places empirical evidence as one of the strongest – if not the strongest – forms of evidence in discourse.

 However, I have a concern…

Aristotle allows for the contextualization of virtue within the restraints of the “Golden Mean” – the optimal point between indulgency and deficiency.  This is allowed because virtue is observed directly by people and can be reasoned. In contrast, Plato argued that virtue does not exist as a middle-ground found through reason and experience but is an idea to strive for.  Initially, Aristotle’s claim may seem more down-to-Earth than Plato’s – particularly if you prefer a literal reading of Plato’s theory of forms.

And yet, I cannot help but wonder as to whether Aristotle’s concept of a Golden Mean is not, perhaps, prone to corruption.

Plato’s argument deals with a set idea – perhaps one that is unable to be articulated but is set nonetheless. Aristotle’s allows for circumstance – meaning it can be adjusted and adapted – and therefore it refers to a mean. However, often we can observe cases in which virtue is abandoned.

Take college students for example. Temperance as it is often thought of is not prominent among a majority of young adults around college age – at least as an undergrad. Within this category, so defined, what would be indulgence to others is the norm and is therefore accepted – sometimes even heralded as ambitious or toted as an example of “truly living”. It does not necessarily have to be consumption of alcohol, which is an obvious suggestion, but a majority of actions taken by college students are done in excess – as if to do any less would be to deny the ability to experience them.  To reiterate, this is accepted by the majority of the people who make up the category of college students as normal, and is typically expected and accepted by other groups as well.

Aristotle, himself, said that human beings around this age are much too young to practice the virtues – and I will not object to him on this point for the sake of continuing – but the example serves to illustrate a concern I have with the over contextualization of virtue and ethics – namely that it could be relative.

I would not be so bold as to claim that Aristotle made virtues subjectively-based (unless one grants it is still subjective when an entire society decides), but he did allow for context to play an equal part to reason in deciding what is virtuous. For the most part, this is clearly an attempt to avoid extremes of virtues which may distort them (e.g. fool-heartiness, self-deprecation, and so on). But one could easily imagine a civilization in which the extremes of the virtues are where the mean sits, and anything below that is a deficiency. For that civilization, Aristotle would argue that they are, in fact, virtuous as long as they are within the Golden Mean determined by their society, which seems all well and good until it is imagined that then this societies virtues are so extreme that they are in direct conflict with our own. For instance, in such a society it may be considered temperate to indulge every whim to extremity, never use honesty unless one has to in order to preserve an agreed upon ruse,  or never show a shred of fear even when it is more reasonable to back down. The concern is, then, if these virtues of this imagined society truly are virtues. Perhaps to this society they are but that would seem to threaten not simply the objectivity of “the good” but more practically defy attempts to impose laws, or ideas of right and wrong. These supposedly objective ideas suddenly become malleable and un-defendable since they are based only on what is agreed by a majority as permissible.

In my opinion, such being the case, we cannot rely on the contextualization of virtues because of these threats of subjective based ethics, which defeats the purpose of ethics itself (i.e. to determine what it means to live a good life). We must work toward an objective understand of the good instead – in order to assure it is the good that is, in fact, attained.