Plato's Statesman is a strange dialogue, possibly the strangest he wrote. In it an anonymous Eleatic Stranger not merely argues that a statesman is defined by his knowledge alone, and that it does not matter whether this “statesman” ever puts that knowledge into practice, even simply as an advisor to a ruler. The Eleatic goes so far as to suggest that human beings ought to be understood not in terms of our distinctive ability to reason or speak, but as featherless bipeds or two-legged pigs. He even asks his auditors to suppose that there was a time long in the past when the cosmos reversed the direction of its movements so that the cycle of the generation of animals was also reversed. Human beings sprouted from the earth full grown with gray beards and gradually became younger and younger until their seeds wasted away and the direction of the movement of the cosmos again changed.

Readers might be tempted to conclude that the dialogue is one big, if rather weird, joke. Such a conclusion would be rash, however, because Plato says more in the Statesman about the actual possibilities and limitations of political practice than in either of his other two dialogues explicitly devoted to politics: the Republic and the Laws.

The point of this chapter is to present an account of the good human being's motivation, including the way in which the good human being is motivated to care for her friends, that is conducive to Aristotle's ethic of virtue and is consistent with Aristotle's claim, discussed in Chapter 5, that ethical virtue involves and is not merely in accordance with reason. According to Aristotle, the virtuous person is distinguished by the fact that he acts for the sake of the fine. Any account of Aristotle's ethics as an ethic of virtue will therefore have to explain what this means, because the locution is obscure. Modern commentators often connect it with Aristotle's view that the good person does the right thing, for example, the generous action or the brave deed, for its own sake, but the locution “for its own sake” has proved just as puzzling, since, according to Aristotle, something can be chosen both for its own sake and for the sake of something else.

I first show how Aristotle's view is plausible by comparing it with Plato's views. Next, I discuss and raise difficulties for Kantian and Utilitarian interpretations of Aristotle's view. This is important if Aristotle's views are to belong to the genre of virtue ethics that is distinct from Kant or Utilitarianism. I conclude that choosing x for its own sake and for the sake of y makes sense taken at face value, provided that y does not undermine one's choosing x in the first place.

In the previous chapter, I argued that Aristotle's doctrine of the mean is a substantive thesis, and that the substance is to be found in places that have been overlooked. In this chapter, I show how the third aspect of Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, his triadic account of virtue and vices, contributes to his account of the nameless virtues, and I argue that J. L. Ackrill is therefore wrong to claim that “[i]nsofar as Aristotle's accounts of particular virtues embody a particular moral outlook (and that is, perhaps, not far), this is due rather to his acquiescence in the vocabulary and outlook of his time than to his theoretical commitment to ‘the doctrine of the mean’”, a widely held modern view. I argue that the nameless virtues are no less important than their named companions, and that if Aristotle is right about the existence of the nameless virtues, his doctrine of the mean will have resulted in some important discoveries. I also argue that the very existence of nameless virtues in Aristotle's discussion casts doubt on the idea that Aristotle is simply reporting contemporary views. This marks the beginning of an argument, continued in Chapter 4, that Aristotle's account of the ethical virtues depends on his doctrine of the mean and is more innovative than has previously been thought.

In Section 1, I explain which virtues are nameless and what their namelessness consists in. In the next two sections, I explain how the nameless virtues are controversial even within the Aristotelian corpus itself, and yet why there is no reason to exclude them from Aristotle's list of virtues.

This volume is a companion to Greek “political thought,” rather than “political philosophy” or “political theory” - why? One reason will be apparent from the table of contents: the chapters have a broader scope than the terms “philosophy” and “theory” would suggest, and their authors have been trained and teach in a variety of fields, including philosophy, classical literature and history, and political theory. But there is a more substantial reason behind the choice of title. There are three propositions that unite these chapters and that define a central tendency in recent interpretive work on Greek political thought:

1. Our consideration of fundamental questions about politics in the world of ancient Greece must be pursued in texts that cross the standard modern genre distinctions among philosophy, history, and literature. Taking these modern academic distinctions too seriously as a guide to inquiry is an anachronistic mistake and can result in serious distortions of the Greek texts. Treating Plato as a post-Kantian systematic and doctrinal philosopher is one important example of such a distortion; treating Thucydides as a proto-“scientific” historian is another.

2. But the purpose of studying these Greek texts and practices is not archival or antiquarian, nor is it a romantic longing to escape from modernity to a lost idyllic world; instead, the ultimate goal inspiring these studies is to bring voices embodied in these ancient texts into our contemporary discussions of political thought and action.

3. At the same time, this attempt to bring ancient Greek voices into modern discussions will itself be anachronistic unless we are very careful to place the Greek texts in the context of debate and action in which they were written.

The concept of rights is a prominent feature of modern political thought. The principle that all human beings possess inalienable or imprescriptible rights was endorsed in the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Previously, natural rights were central to influential political treatises by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94), John Locke (1632- 1704), and others. There is a growing consensus that the origins of rights theory can be found in the later Middle Ages, with Marsilius of Padua (c. 1280-c. 1343), William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349?), or Jean de Gerson (1363-1429), or still earlier with twelfth and thirteenth century canon lawyers such as Rufinus, Ricardus, Huguccio, and Alanus.

Some scholars view the rights tradition as reaching all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, or even to the ancient Hebrew Bible, while others regard it as a strictly modern phenomenon, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre: “[T]here is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century.” This suggests that the issue involves, in part, the meaning of words.

The Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics present themselves to us as a single course of lectures, the former anticipating the latter, the latter expanding on and referring back to the former. But it is still too often the case that the two texts are taught and studied as if they were utterly separate treatises, concerned with two different subject matters. Aristotle tells us in the first book of the Ethics (1.2, 1094a-b) that his subject matter in that book as well as in the Politics can be classified as an especially comprehensive kind of political science (politikē), and yet, in spite of this clear statement of Aristotle's pedagogical intention, for many years it was a commonplace to assign the two works to separate academic departments. The NE was there to be taught and argued over by members of philosophy departments, while the Politics required the attention of political theorists. For a variety of reasons, this is now, fortunately, not always the case; while it is not quite yet the norm, one frequently finds interpretations of one text drawing on the other. But pedagogy has lagged behind scholarship on this point, and my aim here is to help correct that gap by proposing a way of reading the NE and the Politics that ties the two together in terms that are accessible to students, and readers in general, who approach the works from different backgrounds and levels of theoretical sophistication.

Two Influential Metaphors

In his work On Laws (De legibus), Cicero seeks to imitate Plato and portray a discussion of the best laws, just as he imitated Plato when he offered a dialogue concerning the ideal state in On the Commonwealth (De re publica) (Leg. 1.15 and 2.14). His discussants agree that laws should be based on a “science of right,” and they seek to ground his account not in the Twelve Tables of Roman history - the traditional foundation of Roman laws - but on “deepest philosophy” (Leg. 1.17).

Here Cicero identifies right reason as a foundation for civic laws. Cicero seems to say (at least at first) that this right reason occurs not independent of human minds but only in the perfected reason of some humans; he goes so far as to identify the “mind and reason of the wise” as “the rule of right and wrong” (Leg. 1.19). Even if right reason does not occur in nature independent of human minds, however, there remains on this view a natural determinant of right and wrong, and human beings who perfect their reason have access to it.

As explained in Chapters 5 and 8, Aristotle does not think that it is possible to have any one ethical virtue fully without having all the others. Practical wisdom requires all the ethical virtues, and they require practical wisdom. While the thesis works especially well for the nameless virtues, it has often been objected that this requirement is too strong, because on Aristotle's own view, it seems possible to lack the wealth necessary for exercising magnificence or to lack the social milieu for exercising magnanimity, so that one can have some virtues without even being able to develop others. According to this argument, one can have the small-scale ethical virtues of generosity and the virtue concerning honour on a small scale without having the large-scale virtues of magnificence and magnanimity, although one cannot have the latter without having the former.

This problem has exercised philosophers at least since Aquinas, who is the first to finesse the issue with the suggestion that someone who is poor but has practical wisdom is “so disposed that he may become munificent [magnificent] when he has matter for the virtue”. But this goes against Aristotle's view that we need to practise the actions relevant to each particular virtue in order to attain the virtuous disposition itself. It also concedes that one can have practical wisdom without having all the ethical virtues.

Various solutions have been canvassed, restricting or re-describing the scope of Aristotle's thesis about the unity of the ethical virtues.

A central and controversial thesis of Aristotle's ethics is that it is impossible to have one ethical virtue fully without having all the rest. Given that Aristotle thinks that there are many different virtues, as we have already seen in previous chapters, the problem is not how there can be many different virtues given the fact that they are united in some way, but why, if the ethical virtues are distinct from one another, it is impossible to have one fully without having all the rest.

Aristotle has already provided one possible answer. As we saw in Chapter 1, the doctrine of the mean is first and foremost a doctrine of equilibrium, not moderation. If we imagine the different ethical virtues as the central points of different spokes on a wheel that is balanced on a central pivot, then just as the wheel will not balance if it is out of kilter in any direction, so one cannot have any one virtue fully – be properly balanced – unless one has all the rest. Only if one's dispositions are in equilibrium will one have the correct emotions and act accordingly on the right occasions. Aristotle's direct argument for his thesis is consistent with this picture, but ultimately relies on a deeper insight about the connection between ethical virtue and thought, captured by a new distinction introduced by Aristotle himself, which will be revisited in later chapters.

Aristotle introduces his thesis and his new distinction in the context of Socrates' view (EN VI [EE V] 13 1144b32–1145a2).

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle lists the following dispositions as ethical virtues: bravery, temperance, generosity, magnificence, magnanimity, a virtue concerned with honour on a small scale, mildness, truthfulness, wit, and friendliness. As we have seen, the first five are named, the second five are nameless. These are followed by justice and equity. The list is interesting both for what is included and for what is omitted. For example, Aristotle thinks that wit and friendliness are virtues. Kant does not. Aristotle treats pusillanimity as a vice, but it is treated as an important virtue by one modern Utilitarian. Hope, not on Aristotle's list, is often considered to be an important virtue, and Aristotle is frequently chided for omitting charity and benevolence. Asceticism, meekness, and self-sacrifice, Aristotelian vices, are often touted as virtues. On a more popular note, self-discipline tops William Bennett's infl uential list, and faith is important too. These are not virtues according to Aristotle. Followers of Ayn Rand praise greed, making and keeping money, and self-assertion. Others yet again praise sympathy or compassion, and tolerance. Yet others talk of environmental virtues.

Given the possible candidates for virtues, it is important to consider the basis for Aristotle's list if we are to see how he would rule out or rule in the modern suggestions about what the ethical virtues are. In Chapter 2, I argued that the existence of Aristotle's nameless virtues contradicts the influential idea that the basis for Aristotle's list is simply the views of his time, and therefore that the list is generated in a very conservative fashion.

Plato did Homer no favors. When Plato banished Homer from his republic, he posited a split between epic and philosophic knowledge that would remain a part of a Western philosophical tradition. For Plato, the problem with the Homeric epics was that they were imitations of phenomenal appearance because they depicted the shadowy world of human action and emotion. Though tempered in recent years by examinations of both the philosophic contributions of literature and the literary basis of philosophy, what has often emerged is a distinction, made both implicitly and explicitly, between political thought - which is depicted as a systematic, reasoned, reflective, and critical account of the political world - and the epics - which are often characterized as uncritical appropriations of myths, legends, stories, and superstitions. As evidence, commentators point to a seemingly irrational cosmology alive with divine forces, inconsistencies in the stories that comprise the epic, and the oral nature of epic verse in which the aim was to tell a particular story and not to analyze the foundations of thought.

In this chapter, I approach Homer as a political thinker. By this I mean both that the epics are engaged in critical reflection and that this reflection is political in nature. The chapter will proceed in several parts. First, I will examine two major obstacles to approaching the epics as works of political thought: the ideas that oral poetry lacks a critical dimension and that Homeric society is pre-political. I end these sections by making an argument about what is critical and what is political in the epics. In the subsequent sections, I engage in a series of forays into Homeric political thought, taking up contending notions of power, rights, the people, gender, and ethics.

The Opening Scene

The first scene of Plato's Republic foreshadows the political questions that the remainder of the dialogue addresses in enormous detail. Socrates has the opening line (which he delivers to an unnamed character): “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon.” The Piraeus was the seaport of Athens, a few miles southwest and lower in elevation than the city proper. Most important, it was the setting of the resistance movement that fought against the Tyranny of the Thirty, the brutal group of Spartan sympathizers who in 404 B.C.E., at the end of the Peloponnesian War, had overthrown the Athenian democracy, which had been proudly in place for a century. The democracy was soon restored (in 403), but the trauma suffered by the Athenians was profound. Plato was twenty-five years old at the time, and at least two of his close relatives (Charmides and Critias) were among the Thirty and their henchmen. (The dialogue, which was probably written around 380, is set in approximately 410.)

THE GENERAL THEME AND THE MAIN ARGUMENT OF THE BOOK

The main theme of the book is virtue of character, or, in Aristotelian terms, ethical virtue. My main argument is that Aristotle's puzzling claims about ethical virtue, especially the elusive doctrine of the mean, together form a distinctive ethic of virtue that is well worth pursuing. Hence the title “The Virtue of Aristotle's Ethics”.

In treating Aristotle first and foremost as a virtue ethicist, I approach Aristotle from a different angle from other commentators. For example, I pay close attention to those parts of Aristotle's theory that are often denigrated or neglected, such as Aristotle's doctrine of the mean and the nameless virtues, showing how closely they are related to other important parts of his theory. Again, while others take Aristotle's “function argument” and his views on happiness as their point of departure, I discuss these matters instead as they emerge in the context of Aristotle's controversial views about virtue.

The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, I examine various controversial claims that Aristotle makes about ethical virtue, especially his view that ethical virtues are in a mean, a doctrine that permeates his ethical theory. I argue that the nameless virtues, long-neglected but comprising half of Aristotle's ethical virtues, are important, both from a philosophical and from a practical point of view. I also argue that the virtues are not essentially remedial, for example, they do not remedy defects in human nature. I argue that both the doctrine of the mean and the non-remedial view of the virtues are required to show that Aristotle's list of ethical virtues is of substantive theoretical interest, especially when compared with some modern candidates for virtue.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics starts and ends with political concerns. At the beginning of his work, Aristotle says that the inquiry he is about to begin is a “sort of politics”; and at the end of the work, he suggests that the reader should complete the study of the humanities by studying different political systems. According to Aristotle, the political or social setting is crucial for the virtue and happiness of the citizens. In this chapter, then, I turn to the Politics, but my discussion, both of the polis and of Aristotelian happiness, is everywhere informed by the discussion of Aristotle's ethic of virtue that preceded it.

In previous chapters, I have argued that Aristotle's ethic of virtue is not susceptible to Millian or Kantian interpretations. In this chapter, I argue that Aristotle's view is also antithetical to the social contract tradition of ethics, most notably exemplified by Hobbes. To that end, I explain why the polis is needed and why it is natural, according to Aristotle, and how the genesis and justification for the polis stems from Aristotle's objective view of the good for human beings. I also argue that Aristotle's account of the polis presupposes the non-remedial view of the virtues, as presented in Chapter 3 and explored in subsequent chapters.

I then consider the type of happiness that the polis aims at, according to Aristotle, and the point of the apparent ranking of two types of happiness in the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics.

The characters who inhabit ancient tragedy continue to burn themselves into our consciousness. Oedipus, Antigone, Clytemnestra, and Electra all offer us visions of heroes and villains, personalities and psychologies caught in the labyrinthine consequences of their own characters and of fate. Yet, ancient tragedy goes well beyond the portrayal of the actions and choices of these commanding figures. Through the presentation of an Antigone or an Oedipus or an Orestes, it explores as well the challenges entailed in the founding of political communities. Today, whether we turn to the newly democratizing states or the issues surrounding the creation of a political union in Europe, our understanding of political beginnings and communal life often resides in the process of constitution making, the creation of institutions, and legal safeguards intended to provide for the security and protection of individual freedom. The ancient Athenians, writing long before the legalistic language of constitutions came to define political foundings, grappled with a range of issues that force us to reflect on the beginnings of political communities and to take those concerns well beyond the abstract legalistic focus that dominates the contemporary process. The tragedians recognize the myths, the gender-laden choices, the exclusions at the base of assertions of political order.