Vice and vice versa

One of the best ideas to come out of the Junior Ganymede blog is that of the "virtue set" -- an improvement on Aristotle's famous "golden mean" model of virtue. Aristotle, you will recall, maintained (in the Nicomachean Ethics) that any given virtue lay on a continuum between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. Insufficient courage, for example, is the vice of cowardice, while excessive courage is the vice of rashness. True courage -- the virtue of courage -- lay between the two, and consisted in being precisely brave enough without being too brave. Using a conceptual tool that was not available to Aristotle himself, we might plot each Aristotelian "virtue set" (of a virtue and two vices) as a curve.

The horizontal axis indicates how courageous one is, and the vertical axis how virtuous, with the horizontal origin line marking the division between virtue and vice. The curve is asymmetrical because Aristotle recognized that the point of maximum virtue is closer to one end of the scale than to the other -- that, in this case, courage is more akin to rashness than to cowardice, and that cowardice is more properly its opposite.

For Aristotle, then, virtues are not to be maximized but optimized. You want to be just brave enough but not too brave, just honest enough but not too honest, just and benevolent but not excessively so.

But is this really the correct way to think about virtue? If someone suffered from the vice of cowardice, you might well encourage him to have more courage -- but if his besetting vice were rashness or foolhardiness, would you say he should try to have less courage? The rash man's fault is not that he is too courageous, but that his courage is distorted by the lack of another virtue -- in this case, another of the cardinal virtues of the Greeks: prudence.

G's breakthrough was to add this second virtue to the model. An Aristotelian virtue set consists of two vices, with a virtue conceptualized as the optimal balance between them. In contrast, a Ganymedean virtue set (for lack of a better term; the unadorned letter G isn't very good for naming things after), consists of two complementary virtues and two vices. Each vice distorts one of the two virtues via a lack of the other. In the example we have been using, the two virtues are courage and prudence. When courage is distorted by a lack of prudence, it becomes the vice of rashness. When prudence is distorted by a lack of courage, it becomes cowardice.

This relationship can be expressed in a Ganymede diagram, thus:

One big advantage this has over the Aristotelian model is that it reflects the qualitative nature of the difference between virtue and vice. The point is not to zero in on a precisely optimal degree of courage and of prudence, but to strive for perfect courage and perfect prudence -- for the two virtues are not themselves in opposition, but are complementary.

And, pace Aristotle, neither are the two vices in opposition -- and here we come to what inspired this post in the first place. Under the Aristotelian model, a single person or action could no more be simultaneously cowardly and rash than a single integer could be both positive and negative. But we know better now, don't we?

In the venerable Stagirite's defense, he never experienced, and could never have imagined, the world of 2020. "Our house might have germs in it! Let's burn it to the ground!" -- where do you put that sentiment on your continuum, Aristotle?