The Habits of Aristotle

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Aristotle’s ethics is his theory of moral habits, largely found in the opening chapters of Book II of Nicomachean Ethics. By elucidating not only the requirements of virtue but also the methods by which we develop virtue, Aristotle’s ethics offers us a realistic hope of realizing his moral ideal. However, as we shall see, Aristotle presents only a brief sketch of the process of habituation, mostly through a partial analogy between virtue and the arts. Consequently, we are in danger of misinterpreting Aristotle’s moral habits as either mechanistic or emotionalistic. However and delightfully, Nancy Sherman offers a far more powerful and subtle conception of moral habits as grounded in the development of an individual’s powers of discernment. As a bit of background, in Book I of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that happiness (or well-being) is “the chief good” of human life, as it alone is “always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else” (1097a24-b7). Although external goods such as good birth, children, and wealth are necessary “equipment” of the good life, the most basic requirement of such a life is “activity of the soul in accordance with complete excellence” (1099a32-b8; 1102a5-6). Then in the opening lines of Book II, Aristotle intimately connects habits to virtue in remarking that “moral excellence [i.e. virtue] comes about as a result of habit” (1103a16-17). The precise nature of this relationship between virtue and habit is principally explicated through a partial analogy between virtue and the arts. In Book II, Chapter 1, Aristotle presents his analogy of virtue to the arts largely in order to argue for virtues as sets of skills gradually developed over time through practice. Then in Chapter 4, Aristotle notes the incompleteness of his earlier analogy, given that virtues require a person to be in a particular internal state, while the arts do not. This partial analogy thus explains both the external and internal elements of habituated virtue.