The Social Presuppositions of Aristotle’s Ethics

Aristotle is unique among ancient moralists in making no use of philosophical exemplars. Platonists, Stoics, Cynics and Sceptics frequently invoke Socrates as a model of the virtuous life; Epicureans invoke Epicurus; but the Nicomachean Ethics is oddly devoid of exemplary philosophers. Socrates is mentioned only occasionally and critically. When Aristotle seeks to buttress his arguments with appeals to authority, he generally quotes Homer or the tragedians, or traditional commonplaces. And unusually among ancient philosophers, he approaches every topic by first consulting “the opinions” (endoxa) on it, popular as well as learned.

These peculiarities of Aristotle can be summarised by saying that he doesn’t recognise a specifically philosophical ethics as distinct from a philosophical refinement of Greek popular ethics. He presupposes an ethical tradition, which he sees as his task as a philosopher to expound, interpret and systematise. He doesn’t, unlike Plato, Epicurus and the Stoics, aim to create a distinctively philosophical ethics de novo. This is why he insists (N.E. 1095b1-6) that students of ethics must have well brought up. They need to know already that such-and-such an act is just, courageous, etc., before they can appreciate an account of why it is just, courageous, etc.

This dependency of Aristotle’s ethics on a pre-philosophical ethical tradition helps explain why, of all the ethical systems bequeathed by antiquity, his was especially amenable to adaptation by Christians such as Aquinas. All they had to do was replace the pagan traditions appealed to by Aristotle (Homer, “the gods”, etc.) with Christian traditions. The endoxa had changed, but not the formal structures into which they were fitted. By contrast, the revival of Stoic and Epicurean ethics in the Renaissance had necessarily to take a non-Christian or even anti-Christian form, since Stoicism and Epicureanism are both substantive ethics in their own right, with their own pantheon of (non-Christian) exemplary figures.

I conclude, finally, with a glance at the situation of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the modern world. This situation is a somewhat anomalous one. Aristotle and medieval Aristotelians were able draw on shared traditions of ethical thinking, decked out with generally acknowledged exemplars of the virtues and vices. (Thus Aristotle can assume agreement among his readers that death in battle is the highest form of courage, while Aquinas can assume agreement among his readers that martyrdom is the highest form of courage.) Such agreement no longer exists in the Western world – at least, outside a few religious communities. This is why most modern books of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics remain on the level of general, programmatic statement.^[7] The stable background of popular usage on which Aristotle and Aquinas could draw for their analyses of individual virtues and vices has long since crumbled away.

[8] Myrthe Bartels

Universitä t Erfurt, Deutschland