ARISTOTLE

All or Nothing
Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic,
metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and
theatre.
He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. He was more empirically-minded
than Plato or Socrates and is famous for rejecting Plato’s theory of forms.
Aquinas referred to him as “The Philosopher”.

ARISTOTLE’S
ETHICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
A person who:
Knows what to say
Deliver tough news carefully; Confident without being arrogant;
Brave but not reckless; Generous but never arrogant.
 VIRTUE
Virtue is a disposition to behave in the right manner, which is inculcated from a young age.
According to Aristotle, virtue is something learned through constant practice that begins at a
young age.
His Ethics then, is not designed to make people good, but rather to explain what is good, why it is
good and how we might set about building societies and institutions that might inculcate this goodness.
Virtue is emphasizing the individual’s character rather than saying “follow these rules so you can
be a good person”.
“If we can just focus on being good people, the right actions will follow, effortlessly”.
 EUDAIMONIA
”Happiness”
Eudaimonia which carries connotations of success and fulfillment. For Aristotle, happiness is our
highest goal.
The conception people have of happiness frequently does not line up with true happiness because
people are generally deficient in virtue.
 DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN
Aristotle understood virtue as a set of robust character that once developed will lead to
predictably good behavior.
Virtue is just the right amount – the middle spot between the extreme of excess and extreme of
deficiency. The middle spot is known as the golden mean.
o VIRTUE OF courage

According to Aristotle, courage is the midpoint between the extremes of cowardice and
recklessness.
Art of having courage, he argued, is being able to recognize when, rather than stepping in, you
need to find an authority who can handle a situation that’s too big for you to tackle alone.
o VIRTUE OF HONESTY

Honesty is the midpoint between brutal honesty and failing to say things that need to be said. The
virtues of honest means knowing what needs to be put out there and what you should keep quiet about.
o VIRTUE OF GENEROSITY
 It avoids the obvious vice of stinginess but also doesn’t give too much. Giving the right amount
of generosity means giving when you have it, to those who need it.
He said virtue is a skill, a way of living and that’s something that can really only be learned
through experiences.
Aristotle said your character is developed through habituation
The way you know what the right thing to do is in the first place, is by finding someone who
already knows and emulating them. These people who already possesses virtue are called moral
exemplars.
 GOOD
Good to Aristotle can mean two different things, things that are good for their own sake or things that are
good as the means to achieving something else that’s good bearing this in mind the ideal good should be
the thing or group of things which is the end to all other means that is to say the good that all other goods
are done in order to achieve all so by that logic goods that are means to an end are subordinate to goods
that are good.
Happiness is desirable and you can’t use it to achieve any other goods.
If this happiness is this ideal good, to live well is to live for the sake of happiness
According to Aristotle, Living Well is synonymous to excellence in everything you do and excellence in
regard to morality would be to live virtuously.
 HABIT
They are passive but lasting conditions, desires and impulses are passive and momentary, but
they are very strong. Not the end but the beginning of the progress toward virtue. Does make all the
difference to our lives without being the only thing shaping those lives and without being the final form
they take.
TYPES OF HABIT
o Mechanistic

Aristotle’s ethics also highlights the inapplicability of this mechanistic model of habituation.
The need for virtuous actions to be accompanied by appropriate mental states in such mechanistic
habits are supposed to be non-conscious by their very nature. In contrast, Aristotle’s virtuous person must
not only be aware of his actions, but also take the appropriate cognitive and affective stance towards
them.
Thus virtue cannot be developed through mechanistic habits, as such habits cannot accommodate the
necessary fine-tuned judgment of particulars in moral decision-making.
o Emotionalistic

So according to this emotionalistic approach, habituation is essentially a process of nonrational

training particularly concerned with the proper ordering of pleasures and pains.
The primary strength of this interpretation of moral habits lies in its insistence, also found in
Aristotle, on virtuous actions being accompanied by appropriate internal states. In fact, habits are here so
deeply connected with feelings that to act on habit is to essentially be guided by (eventually rational)
moral feelings.
 LEADERSHIP
The role of the leader is to create the environment in which all the members of an organization
have the opportunity to realize their own potential.
The ethical role of the leader is not to enhance his or her own power but to create the conditions
under which followers can achieve their potential.
He also raises a lot of questions about the distribution of rewards in organizations based on
ethical principle of rewarding people proportionate to their contributions.
Virtue and wisdom will definitely elude leaders who fail to engage in ethical analysis of their
actions.