Part one can be found here. This post reflects on Plutarch’s emphasis on moral excellence and Aristotle’s sense of virtue when it comes to ethical foundations.

Plutarch believes that not any example of excellence will sufficiently induce his readers to moral virtue. A painting or work of art may be excellent and perfectly executed but the painter or artist may be wretched person. Plutarch explains,

For it does not necessarily follow, that if a piece of work pleases for its gracefulness, therefore he that wrought it deserves our admiration. Whence it is that neither do such things really profit or advantage the beholders, upon the sight of them, nor any impulse or inclination, which may prompt any desire or endeavor of doing the like. (121 – 122)

It seems to be Plutarch’s position that an artist or painter may or may not be a moral person, but the best use of art is to inspire great and good actions. What Plutarch really wants his readers to be inspired to perform is great deeds. He tells us that the best things his readers can contemplate for moral improvement are “acts of virtue.” He explains, “such objects we find in the acts of virtue, which also produce in the minds of mere readers about them an emulation and eagerness that may lead them on to imitation” (121). For Plutarch, then, moral excellence is connected to virtuous action.

Finally, Plutarch summarizes his argument by stating the importance of recognizing virtuous actions as a way to moral improvement:

But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men’s minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to practice and exercise. We are content to receive the former from others, the latter we wish others to experience from us. Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen, than it inspires an impulse to practice, and influences the mind and character not by a mere imitation which we look at, but by the statement of the fact creates a moral purpose which we form. (122)

Again, we see the pragmatic emphasis in Plutarch. Moral improvement comes from observing expressions, actions, or events of moral excellence which influences the mind and character to move one towards a more excellent life. A virtuous character is formed by practicing good and honorable deeds. At many points, Plutarch states that virtue is a matter of practice and exercise. Moral excellence comes from a mind or character that is inspired to perform and practice good actions.

Plutarch is reflecting the classical Aristotelian idea of virtue and character development as habit. For Aristotle, humans have an inherent natural capacity to become virtuous. One becomes virtuous through practice and habit as he explains:

Virtue comes about as a result of habit … From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times. … Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. (Nicomachean Ethics, 952)

Along with Aristotle, Plutarch believes moral good is a practical stimulus and reasons that humans can be inspired to practice moral excellence by habit and example. Plutarch, however, never defines what virtue is. He seems to assume that his readers already know what he means by virtue. However, it is helpful to give a definition of what Plutarch might have in mind. Ethicist Louis Pojman defines the classical virtues as “excellences of character, trained behavioral dispositions that result in habitual acts” (166). There were essentially four cardinal virtues in ancient ethics – temperance (self-control), justice, courage, and wisdom (Thornton, 138). Plutarch states his desire to promote moral excellence but it will be helpful to explore how one might determine proper moral conduct and to better understand what he is saying.

Aristotle provides a compelling account of what virtue is and provides a helpful guide to understanding Plutarch and the larger questions of ethics and morality. Aristotle is also important because his ideas provided much of the intellectual context in which Plutarch wrote. For Aristotle, ethical virtue is a balance or proportion between excess and deficiency, intemperance and temperance, virtue and vice. Moral philosophers have called his position the “golden mean.” Aristotle states his position using examples from the physical world,

Drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly, the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean. (954)

The morally virtuous life, then, consists of living in moderation according to the mean between virtue and vice, excess and deficiency. Plutarch seems to be in agreement with Aristotle. The men he most admires are leaders that have exhibited temperate and noble character. Plutarch tells us that this is precisely why he wrote the lives of Pericles and Fabius Maximus,

And so we have thought fit to spend our time and pains in writing of the lives of famous persons; and have composed this tenth book upon that subject, containing the life of Pericles and that of Fabius Maximus, who carried on the war against Hannibal, men alike, as in their other virtues and good parts, so especially in their mild and upright temper and demeanour, and in that capacity to bear the cross-grained humours of their fellow-citizens and colleagues in office, which made them both most useful and serviceable to the interests of their countries. (122)

Plutarch believes the virtues these men exhibited had important ramifications for the state. It was their virtues that made them “serviceable to the interests of their countries.” Plutarch then is not only interested in ethics at the individual level but also at the social and political level.

Works Cited:

Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. ed. by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, Inc., 2001.

Plutarch. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Pojman, Louis. Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong. 2^nd ed. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995.

Thornton, Bruce. Humanities Handbook. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 2001.