Aristotle: Virtue as the Mean Between Vices

Quote

"Virtue is a mean between two vices, one of excess and the other of deficiency."

— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.6, 1107a

Historical Context

The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's most important ethical work, a compilation of lectures delivered at the Lyceum in Athens around 350 BCE. Book II lays the foundation for the entire treatise by explaining how virtues of character are acquired and what their formal structure is. The doctrine of the mean, presented at chapter 6 (Bekker 1107a), is the centerpiece of this account and the idea most commonly associated with Aristotle's ethics.

Aristotle's argument responds to a live debate in ancient Greek philosophy about the nature of virtue. The Sophists claimed to teach it; Socrates identified it with knowledge; Plato located it in the harmony of the soul's parts. Aristotle's contribution is to define virtue with unusual precision: it is a settled disposition (hexis) concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, determined by reason and by the way a practically wise person would determine it. The doctrine of the mean is not a recipe for mediocrity but a structural account of what every virtue has in common — it occupies the territory between two corresponding failures.

The context matters. Aristotle is not writing a self-help manual or a set of moral rules. He is conducting a philosophical inquiry into the nature of the human good, and the doctrine of the mean is one conclusion in a larger argument about what it means to live well. The mean is inseparable from his account of habituation, practical wisdom, and the role of the passions in moral life. Pull it out of that context and it becomes a slogan; within it, the doctrine provides a powerful framework for understanding ethical excellence.

Meaning

Aristotle's claim is that every virtue of character stands between two vices, one involving excess and the other involving deficiency. Courage, for example, is the mean between cowardice (deficiency of fearlessness — too much fear) and recklessness (excess of fearlessness — too little fear). Temperance is the mean between insensibility (deficiency of pleasure — too little enjoyment) and intemperance (excess of pleasure — too much enjoyment). Generosity is the mean between stinginess and wastefulness. The pattern holds across the virtues: each one is the appropriate middle state, and the two vices are the failures on either side.

The mean is not an arithmetic midpoint. Aristotle is explicit that it is "relative to us" — relative to the particular agent, the particular situation, and the particular object of the passion or action. What counts as the right amount of food for an athlete training for the Olympics is not the right amount for someone just beginning a fitness regimen. What counts as courageous in one situation may be reckless in another. The mean is not a fixed quantity but a judgment about what is appropriate, and making that judgment requires practical wisdom (phronesis), the intellectual virtue that enables a person to perceive the morally salient features of a situation and respond appropriately.

This is why the doctrine cannot be reduced to a rule. A rule tells you what to do in advance, but the mean is determined case by case, in the particular circumstances, by someone who has developed the capacity to see what those circumstances require. Aristotle compares the mean to the way a skilled craftsman works: the carpenter does not follow a formula for every cut but adjusts to the grain of the wood, the tools at hand, and the structure being built. Similarly, the virtuous person adjusts to the demands of the situation, hitting the mean through trained perception rather than mechanical calculation.

Philosophical Interpretation

The doctrine of the mean has often been caricatured as the advice to "do everything in moderation," a banal injunction that drains virtue of its demands. This reading misses what makes the doctrine philosophically interesting. Aristotle is not recommending tepid half-measures; he is describing the structural relationship between virtue and vice. Courage is not a compromise between cowardice and recklessness — it is not less courageous than recklessness but more. The courageous person feels fear at the right time, in the right way, toward the right objects, and for the right reasons, and acts accordingly. The reckless person, by contrast, feels too little fear and acts foolishly. The mean is the peak, not the valley.

The doctrine also illuminates Aristotle's understanding of the passions. Unlike the Stoics, who sought to extinguish or suppress emotion, Aristotle treats the passions as integral to virtue. The virtuous person is not someone who feels nothing but someone who feels appropriately — anger when anger is warranted, fear when fear is called for, pleasure when pleasure is fitting. Virtue does not eliminate feeling; it orders it. The vicious person feels too much or too little, or at the wrong time, or toward the wrong people. This emphasis on the right ordering of the passions connects the doctrine of the mean to Aristotle's broader psychology: the soul functions well when its rational and non-rational parts are in harmony, and the mean is the expression of that harmony in action.

The influence of the doctrine extends far beyond antiquity. Thomas Aquinas incorporated it into Christian theology, treating the cardinal virtues — prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance — as means between corresponding vices and grounding them in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. In the twentieth century, Alasdair MacIntyre revived Aristotelian virtue ethics as an alternative to the Kantian and utilitarian traditions that had dominated modern moral philosophy. MacIntyre argued that the doctrine of the mean makes sense only within a teleological framework — an account of the human good that specifies what human beings are for — and that modern moral philosophy, having lost such a framework, cannot fully recover Aristotle's insights without also recovering his teleology.

A persistent challenge to the doctrine is whether every virtue genuinely fits the mean structure. Some virtues — truthfulness, for instance — seem to have only one corresponding vice (lying). Others — justice — seem too complex to be captured by a single mean. Aristotle himself acknowledges these difficulties and adjusts the doctrine accordingly, distinguishing between virtues that fit the pattern neatly and those that require qualification. The doctrine is not a rigid taxonomy but a heuristic: a way of seeing the structure of virtue that illuminates most cases while requiring nuance in others. Its enduring value lies not in its universal applicability but in the insight it provides into the relationship between excellence and failure, between the well-ordered soul and the disordered one.

Relations

This quote presents the foundational doctrine of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, situated within the traditions of virtue ethics and Greek philosophy. It influenced Thomas Aquinas's theological synthesis and was revived by Alasdair MacIntyre's modern virtue ethics. The quote speaks to the wisdom of virtue, courage, temperance, and practical wisdom, and belongs to the collections on ancient wisdom and understanding yourself.

Sources

1. "Aristotle's Ethics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/
2. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999. II.6, 1107a.
3. "Virtue Ethics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/