Objectives:

1. Discuss the meaning and basic principles of vietue ethics;

2. Distinguish virtuous acts from non-virtous acts; and
3. Apply Aristotle’s ethics in understabding the Filipino
character.
 INTRODUCTION

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Virtue ethics is the ethical ethat is concerned with understanding the good
as a matter of developing the virtous character of a person.
Virtue ethics focuses on the formation of one’s character brought about by
determining and doing virtuous acts.
• Virtue ethics was a kind of normative ethical
theories which treat the concept of moral virtue
as central to ethics.
Aristotle's discourse of ethics departs from the
Platonic understanding of reality and
conception of the good.
• For Plato, The real is outside the realm of any
human sensory experience but can somehow
be grasped by one's intellect.

• On the other hand, for Aristotle, the real is

found within our everyday encounter with
objects in the world.
Virtue as Excellence
Maria Ariana Pauline Ballena
 VIRTUE
● Excellent way of doing things.
○ Excellent - outstanding or extremely good (Oxford Dictionary)
● According to Aristotle, it is something that one strives for in time: One
does not become an excellent person overnight.
○ Being an excellent individual works on doing well in one’s day-to-
day existence.
 EXCELLENCE
● Aristotle says that excellence is an activity of the human soul and
therefore, one needs to understand the very structure of a person’s
soul.
○ Human soul is divided into two parts:
■ Irrational element
■ Rational element
 IRRATIONAL ELEMENT
VEGETATIVE ASPECT APPETITIVE ASPECT

● Follows the natural processes
involved in the physical activity and
growth of a person.
● Example: nutrition
● According to Aristotle, plants have
vegetative souls.
● Governs the senses and allows us to feel
pleasure or pain, and to have appetites
and desires (desiring faculty according
to Aristotle).
● Ability to perceive
● According to Aristotle, both animals and
humans have appetitive souls.
 RATIONAL ELEMENT
MORAL ASPECT
● Concerns the act of doing: they
have to be learned and practiced.
● According to Aristotle, it is behaving
in the right manner.
● Examples: courage and temperence
INTELLECTUAL ASPECT
● Concerns the act of knowing: good
thinking and learning.
● According to Aristotle, it is learned
through instruction.
● Examples: wisdom and
understanding
MORAL VIRTUES
AND MESOTES
 “Developing a practical wisdom
involves learning from experiences.”
-Aristotle
 When practical wisdom
guides the conduct of making
morally right choices and
actions, what does it identify
as the proper and right
thing to do?
MESOTES

 is what practical wisdom identifies as the right action.

 the middle measure of an action, feeling, or passion.
 nothing is lacking or too much from an act that is morally good.
A morally virtuous person:
• is concerned with achieving her appropriate action in a manner
that is either excessive nor deficient.
• targets the mesotes.

The rightness or wrongness of feelings, passions, and abilities

lies in the degree of their application in a given situation not in the
person itself.
 “Moral Virtue is a state of character
concerned with choice, lying in a mean,
that is, the mean relative to us, this
being determined by a rational principle,
and by that principle by which the man
of practical wisdom would determine it.”
-Aristotle
MORAL VIRTUE
• The condition arrived at by a person who has a character
identified out of her habitual exercise of particular actions.
• The action done that normally manifests feelings and passions
is chosen because it is the middle.
 “There is no
good
(mesotes) in
something
that is already
considered a
bad act.”
Virtues and their Vices
Excess (vice) Mean (virtue) Deficiency (vice)
Recklessness Courage Cowardice

Impulsiveness Self-Control Indecisiveness

 Being superfluous with regard to
manifesting a virtue is no longer an ethical
act because one has gone beyond the
middle. Therefore, one can always be
excessive in her action but an act that is
virtuous cannot go beyond the middle.