A student of Plato (that Republic guy who shared the adventures of Socrates), Aristotle (382 - 322 BCE) ended up becoming a philosophical powerhouse in his own right. Indeed, Aristotle created logical, rhetorical, and scientific systems that influenced the Western world for centuries to come.

Like many of our favorite philosophers, Aristotle was a polymath, a dude learned in so many areas it could make your head spin. Though educated under the wing of Plato, Aristotle came into his own, even developing theories that would contradict those of his mentor. After Plato’s death, Philip II of Macedon asked our philosopher to tutor his son Alexander (yeah, the Great one).

So, Aristotle had a pretty decent life for a philosopher, getting hired to tutor an up and coming military mind. But the breadth and depth of his work is simply incredible. If he didn’t expound upon a subject, he started up a new subject. He established a giant library, and while little is known about his life, the impact of his work, only a fraction of which exists today, is remarkable.

Aristotle’s work became pivotal to the Medieval philosophers. Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas latched onto his systems. Islamic philosophers, such as  Al-Farabi, called him “the First Teacher,” and widely translated his works. Jewish philosophers, such as Moses Maimonides, took up his work and used it as a jumping off point for their own. Few people ever get such a universal pull.

And while today we talk about Aristotle’s ethics, it was one system that fell out of vogue more quickly than many of the rest. It is only in the latter half of the 20th century that a renewed interest in the Nichomachean Ethics promoted virtue ethics as a viable ethical system.

The Lowdown on Our Modern Ethics

The modern period did much to spin the assumptions of religious practice and normalized beliefs in good and evil on its head. Two masters of the art of ethical theory really shaped our contemporary thoughts about ethics, to the point where many of us assume this is just how we do good.

At the cusp of the 19th century, Immanuel Kant penned The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). In this iconic work, Kant famously describes the categorical imperative, in which the person determines actions which are right and wrong. It is something, in theory, that anyone could use when going about their day. The idea is that you create a maxim, or phrase about an action that you would do, and you see if you can universalize it. In so doing, you can easily (according to Kant, at least) determine a right or wrong action.

In making your maxim, you do the thing for the sake of doing the good thing. This does not allow for nuance or for situational ethical issues. You are either doing an action that is universally good or one that is universally bad. There is no in between. Often, this deontological model is referred to as rule-based.

And while rigid in nature, the morality exists for the sake of the morality. Things are not moral because of how we feel about them. They are not moral because of situations. They are moral outside of us. For Kant, morality is a priori, that is, something that exists before our human experience.

Fast forward almost a century and you have the Victorian social reformer John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873), who writes his own ethical treatise, Utilitarianism (1861). He takes part of this from Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1842), who began the theory, and develops it into a very Victorian, reform-minded concept.

Utilitarianism is often summed up as “the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Just as with Kantian ethics, the person considering an action makes up a formula when considering it. The main thing to think about with utilitarian ethics is, how many people will benefit from the action, versus how many people will end up hurt from the action. For utilitarianism, you want to maximize how many people can benefit from an action, and therein lies its moral good.

Of course, other popular ethical systems exist, like Ayn Rand’s (1905 - 1982) objectivism, that is selfish in nature, and the situational ethics of the French existentialist crowd. Many people rely on cultural relativism or outright subjectivism.

Virtue Ethics: Another Path

But the difference between the ethical systems posited by modern thinkers, and that from Aristotle’s antiquity, is that the ethical system espoused in Nichomachean Ethics, is not so much about what you do as much as the person you become.

In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle talks about what it is like to be a good person. He’s got a good jumping off point with his mentor Plato, who asks, through Socrates, “what is the good life?” Socrates runs around Greece asking people questions to help them discover knowledge they didn’t perhaps know they had. And the question about the good life is timeless.

Aristotle, then, takes this question about the good life, and considers what a good person would look like. In so doing, he talks about what he calls virtues. For Aristotle, virtues are traits that people have, that they can grow with practice, that make them good people. For instance, a virtuous person might be temperate. And by temperate, we mean that this person does not, for instance, drink or eat to excess. This person thinks carefully about their passions, and regulates them, to grow into a better version of themself.

There are many types of virtues out there, related to different areas in our lives. Temperance is a virtue of character, for instance. There are also different versions of justice, that are virtues, different versions of knowledge that are virtuous, and virtues of friendship. In considering these virtues, a person can start growing a good moral character through their own actions and way of being.

This is fundamentally different from the ethical systems we spoke about previously, because it does not rely simply on the character of a single action. It does not slap a theoretical action into a box and determine if it is good or bad. It rather demands that we cultivate a character that will enable us to do good things, because we are good people, and want to be good people.

The Opposite of Virtue: Vice

While virtues are at the heart of Aristotle’s ethical system, they have counterpoints in vices. That person who was temperate? They could also be incontinent, if they are prone to binging on food or splurging in other ways. Every virtue has an opposite vice, and you can get to the vice and become a vicious (yes, that word comes from vice) person just as you could become a virtuous person.

Consider it like taking a walk through a forest and coming across two paths. You can take the one path that will be a little stumbly but will lead you to the best philosophy library ever, or you could take the more pleasant way that will lead you into a ditch with TikTok dance videos as your only source of entertainment. Forever.

Interestingly, Aristotle shrugs and says that you really can cultivate vice and become a terrible human being, just as you cultivate virtue to become a better human being. In this sense, virtue ethics relies on polarities, but because it is a living system, a person can adjust from being vicious in one area to becoming virtuous in the same, with practice. There is hope!

Virtue: How Do We Get There?

But where do you even start? And how do you know if you are a good person? And how do you become a good person? How does this even work?

For Aristotle, one of the most important things to consider when it comes to virtue is that we have free control of our own actions. We are the owners of our own destiny, in the sense that we control what we do and who we are. A sort of free will is essential in this, because it allows the path of virtue to be open to everyone, but also notes that we can end up going the other way.

The ability to have what is called agency, is essential in most ethical theories. If we have no control over our own actions, how can we say that we are acting in a way that is ethical? If we hold no responsibility for the things that we do, how can they even be assigned the values of good or evil? And, for Aristotle, if we have no control over our own actions, how would that make us any different from animals that do not even have morality? We would just be doing what we do, robots that are predestined to do certain actions.

Another question to ask is, how do we know if we are doing something virtuous or vicious? How do we know if we are being a good or bad person? Aristotle answers this question in his own rigorous way. For instance, you can tell if a thing you are about to do is going to be temperate, because you model it off what another temperate person would do.

So, if you are abstaining from drinking a lot, you are acting in a temperate way. If you find yourself feeling good about your abstinence, you are probably a temperate person. If, on the other hand, you’re taking up this practice and feeling some kind of way about it, you are maybe not as temperate as you could be, and could use more practice.

Virtue Ethics: Room to Grow

Aristotle’s virtue ethics gives us room to grow. We know that we can always improve, but what makes virtue ethics compelling, is that we can be proud of progress that we’ve made, we can work to shape ourselves into better people who care about others and the world around us. And there is a sort of optimism here, that with practice, you do not have to be stuck in a mire and always be evil (or feel evil).

In the late part of the 20th century, virtue ethics received a revival, and was picked up by (mostly Christian) philosophers. The late Alisdair MacIntyre (1929 - 2025) was vital in the virtue ethics movement with his important book, After Virtue(1981). In this text, he offers a compelling critique of Kantian ethics, as well as revitalizing what Aristotle pioneered in antiquity.

Virtue ethics offers an alternative to those systems that we’ve adhered to as a society for so long. In addition, Aristotle’s system places our morality in our own hands, emphasizing that we are the ones who make the choices in our lives. And frankly, there is power in that.

We can think about our actions in terms of the person we want to become. And who do you want to become? Do you want to be a more caring, more compassionate person? Do you want to be a person who becomes a role model for others? Do you want to be a person who feels at ease with yourself and can sleep at night?

And in asking ourselves who we want to be, we have the potential for optimism that may not be as mired in guilt as we can often be when we are told what to do (or what not to do). And frankly, I find that intriguing.