Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics

The idea of a virtuous being, one who lives justly and righteously, is one discussed in great length throughout Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Throughout Books I-III Aristotle offers the two requirements he believes are necessary to become a virtuous person and living accordingly. The first is one must be educated and brought up in a way that instills virtue. Essentially, virtue is acquired by habituation and is primarily taught through conditioning. The second is that one must be willing to live virtuously. This fits with the idea of self determination, that we decide our path in spite of outside influence. While looking at these arguments proposed by Aristotle it appears that both are at odds with each other. How can the inclination to

His reasoning for this is that although everybody has the ability to be virtuous, we need to practice being virtuous in order to not only learn what it means to be virtuous, but to develop this habit of being virtuous. Aristotle further emphasizes this point saying, “It makes not small difference…to be habituated…but an enormous difference, or rather all the difference” showing just how important the right education is to produce virtuous people (1095b5). Thinking of this on a psychological level, this part of Aristotle’s argument, that virtue is brought about by habituation, supports the nurture side of the nature vs nurture theory. Instead of a having a natural inclination to acting virtuously, one’s environment— in this case one’s education and upbringing— is what ultimately decides how she acts. This supports Aristotle’s idea that one needs to be conditioned to act virtuously from childhood, since then children are most susceptible to nurturing and the effects of their environment. Once adulthood is reached, one has already been set in their ways which is why compared to educating a child, educating an adult proves to be

Although, he wasn’t very explicit in his definition, he implies that the right education means “to be brought up...to take delight and feel pain in those things in which one ought...” (1104b12). This would imply that Aristotle considers the right habituation to be putting students in situations where they can discern what is pleasurable and what is not repeatedly in order to develop the habits of seeking what is and avoiding what is not. It is after a person is educated and habituated this way, on what to take pleasure in and what not to, that he or she can develop a virtuous character — one where he or she takes pleasure in acting virtuously as opposed to acting so on compulsion or habit.

A flaw in Aristotle’s view that habituation and education are needed to produce a virtuous person is that it overstates the importance of education and upbringing while underestimating the power of free will. Because of the concept of free will, one can be educated in the noblest way possible but still decide not to live accordingly, thus breaking down Aristotle’s claim that living virtuously is dependent on habituation. This is where Aristotle’s argument, that we have a choice to live virtuously and that virtuous living is ultimately “up to us”