Aristotle's Virtue

Virtue, by Aristotle’s definition, means to have a good character such as honesty and responsibility, which lead to good behaviors. A person having high moral standards and good behavior has virtue. Virtue can also be a quality that is good and desirable in a person or thing (object). Aristotle also describes virtue as an object or a person performing the way nature intended. Which includes having a purpose and achieving that purpose, and once achieved then by default you can be virtuous. In order to be virtuous you must live up to your potential and Aristotle has said not all people do. There are bad choices and habits that may lead a person astray from being virtuous. This is where the excess and deficit come into play. These two choices

Those options being the deficit, the excess and then the mean. The deficit is, for most of the time easy to find. Examples are lying all the time, being irresponsible, being cold from lack of showing love or embrace, and even spending too little on a gift for someone. Now, the overindulgence aspect to all of those examples would be being rude, being too serious, smothering in love or embrace, and overspending. Each of these examples of excess and deficits' has a mean or a set virtue, in which Aristotle believes we can all reason with the situation or problem to find. The Golden Mean, from the previous examples, would be honesty, responsibility, compassion, and sufficient funds. Aristotle does mention that we as humans have an inclination to be on either side of the Golden Mean and thus must be aware of our susceptibility to such risks. The best advice offered, which is helpful to throw out the excess and the deficit and use Aristotle's idea of reasoning that the choice being made is "the right action, at the right time, for the right reason" (Rosenstand, 2016, p. 458) will lead one to discover the Golden Mean. Thus leading the person on the path of being virtuous, because only through reasoning can we acquire good habits to live by. One can only find the Golden Mean through trial and error and that being the case, this reasoning must be used throughout our lifetime when one comes across a situation that has the possibility of

Aristotle states that being happy and living a good life is our end goal (our purpose as humans). Through the choices, we make to find the mean we then avoid the bad choices which are the "too little" or "too much". The good choices we make lead us to live well. Therefore one can conclude that developing good habits and good moral virtues lead us to obtain what we need and all that is good for us, whereas the bad habits may lead us to what we want but don't necessarily need. Aristotle states that too much pleasure is not the same as happiness and that pleasure can go away but having the right mean leads us to a balanced life and thus living a good life and being virtuous. As stated previously these good habits and good moral character all accumulate over a human lifetime and if we accomplish finding our mean and stay away from the bad habits and vices we increase our chances of living a good