I’m reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and in Book II he introduces the idea that virtues are means between two extremes. For example, a person who is scared of everything is cowardly, a vice. A person who ignores danger and constantly runs toward it is rash, a vice. A person who faces danger when it is appropriate and who avoids danger when it is appropriate is courageous. Thus courage is a virtue that is the mean between the vices of cowardice and rashness.
I’m not sure this concept of the mean applies to all virtues (e.g., love), but I think he is mostly correct about it.
From this concept of virtues being means between vices, Aristotle deduces that it is far easier to be bad than good. Think of virtue as the center of a bullseye, and you are trying to shoot an arrow into the middle of the bullseye. It is easy to miss the center of the bullseye, but hard to hit it. Vices are all of the areas surrounding the bullseye, whereas virtues are the center.
He says, “For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.”
Jesus says something analogous in the Sermon on the Mount. “Enter through the narrow gate, because the gate is wide and the way is spacious that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and there are few who find it!”
Once you understand what the virtues are, and you look at yourself and all of the people you know, and you assess how well you are hitting the target, you should agree that it is easy to be bad and hard to be good. It’s just an empirical fact.
Well, you might ask, what are the virtues that a person should be aiming for? The apostle Paul gives us a good list in Galatians 5. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
How many people do you know who are always loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled? How many people do you know who have practiced all these virtues for just one week?
Aristotle’s answer to this problem is that parents and the state need to train children to exhibit these virtues from a young age, and that maybe when they arrive at adulthood, they will practice these virtues.
Christians would agree that parents and the state should train children to be virtuous, but that even this approach will fail to produce the desired results because of a crucial missing ingredient. That missing ingredient is God’s influence. Only God can produce truly virtuous people. This is not an answer that many people want to hear, but it’s the truth. All other attempts at producing virtuous people have failed in the past, are failing today, and will fail in the future.
