Necessary Conditions for Virtue

Although Aristotle explains how to attain the mean and what it consists in, he also gives other conditions that must be met for some action to be considered virtuous. Moral virtue is concerned with both passivity and activity. The passive aspect deals with the emotion and the activity deals with an action of virtue. Both are connected together to establish moral virtue. The action must be done to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way (1109a.25). These five conditions make it much harder to perform virtuous activity and force the agent to really intend such an act for it to be valid. In some ways this makes sense, because Aristotle believes habituation can develop moral virtue, but that only seems possible if the person is consciously engaged toward this virtue. These five conditions solidify that mentality and contribute to the formation of a disposition or state of mind, rather than something we do every once in a while.

One issue with this is that Aristotle does not make clear who determines the rightness of these different conditions. Must these conditions be objectively right to any person, or must these conditions be right with respect to the individual. One example is generosity where the individual is to give just the right amount of money without being too stingy or too extravagant. Say the individual meets all the conditions except giving it to the right person. They give it to someone posing to be poor rather than an actual poor person. The individual thinks they gave it to the right person and would meet all of the conditions. Such an act would seem to shape the individual toward the mean of generosity. However, objectively they did not give it to the right person which would not be virtuous. Depending on the perspective, the conditions were either met or not. I think many would say that such an act would move the individual toward the mean since they did not know the person was posing as poor even if it may not have been completely virtuous. I have trouble deciding myself, but regardless of the stance, this example shows that the lines of virtuous activity can easily become blurred. What would Aristotle think of this example?

-BaylorBear16