We tend to measure a life by what it produced: the work completed, the recognition earned, the things left behind. Virtue asks us to use a different measure. What kind of person did we become while doing all of that? Aristotle believed that we become virtuous by training reason and practicing good habits. Al-Ghazali agreed about the habits but questioned the goal. Is virtue the perfection of our humanity, or does it prepare us for something beyond ourselves?
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The Big Questions
- What is the difference between valuing honesty and actually becoming honest?
- Can reason identify virtues that apply across cultures and historical periods?
- Why should we cultivate virtue when it does not reliably bring pleasure, success, or happiness?
- How much control can reason exercise over our passions, fears, and impulses?
- Is virtue an end in itself, or does it require a larger purpose?
- Can a belief improve our lives even when we are uncertain that it is true?
- What virtue would we most want others to remember after we are gone?
The Argument
Aristotle begins with a fairly optimistic claim about reason. Human beings can recognize that rashness and cowardice are both bad ways to live. Between them lies courage: not the absence of fear, but the ability to take a worthwhile risk without being ruled by it. The same structure applies to pleasure. We need not choose between indulgence and self-denial. Temperance occupies the more difficult territory between them. Virtue, in this account, is not obedience to an arbitrary rule. It is the habit of finding the right response.
Knowing the right response, however, does not make us virtuous. I can believe deeply in generosity while remaining remarkably good at finding reasons not to give anything away. A value is something I endorse. A virtue is something I have practiced until it has entered my character. Aristotle therefore gives habit an enormous role. We become courageous by repeatedly acting courageously, just as we become unjust through repeated acts of injustice. Families and political communities help form these habits, sometimes through education and sometimes through the threat of punishment.
Al-Ghazali accepts much of this but changes its direction. Reason is not the destination. It is more like the prime minister of a disorderly kingdom, attempting to keep the passions and anger from seizing control. Or, in another metaphor, reason is the rider perched on an elephant made up of appetites, emotions, biases, and habits. The rider can influence the elephant. It cannot pretend the elephant is not there.
Virtue helps with this task, but for al-Ghazali self-mastery is still not enough. The soul is a mirror meant to reflect divine reality, and unchecked desire coats it with rust. Virtuous habits clean the surface. They prepare us for knowledge of God, although they cannot compel God to draw near. Aristotle makes virtue the visible expression of perfected reason. Al-Ghazali makes it preparation for transcendence. I find the second account more compelling, but it leaves us with an awkward question: What becomes of virtue when we no longer agree about what lies beyond it?
Further Exploration
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II is the place to begin with Aristotle’s claim that virtue does not arise naturally or through intellectual agreement alone; we acquire it by repeatedly doing the sorts of things a virtuous person would do.
Richard Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy clarifies what Aristotle means by character, habit, and practical wisdom, while showing why the golden mean is not a simple instruction to choose the moderate option in every situation.
Al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness supplies the episode’s central challenge to Aristotle: reason and virtue may help us order the self, but neither tells us what that ordered self is ultimately for. This edition can be read online or downloaded.
Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy places Aristotle within the wider virtue tradition and draws out a problem that remains unresolved here: whether virtue is sufficient for flourishing or whether happiness also depends on health, friendship, security, and luck.
Jonathan Haidt, “The Moral Dumbfounding Behind Our Political Choices” gives a modern psychological form to the rider-and-elephant metaphor. Haidt’s rider often invents reasons for judgments the elephant has already made, which makes the ancient confidence in reason look considerably less secure.
Continuing the Conversation
What virtue do you admire most readily in other people but find hardest to practice yourself?
Which of your habits are forming the person you hope to become, and which are quietly forming someone else?
Would virtue still matter to you if it brought no recognition, happiness, or reward beyond the kind of person it made you?
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Full Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability while remaining faithful to the recorded episode.
Take a minute to think about your tombstone, or perhaps about what you would like to see in your obituary. Would you like more attention paid to your achievements, or to your virtues?
In the last two episodes, we explored one paradigm of the happy life: pleasure. In this episode of Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life, we move to a second paradigm: virtue.
You’re listening to Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life, a podcast about ancient wisdom, modern psychology, and the search for a life that is not only successful but meaningful. I’m Michael Satlow.
Aristotle and a Life of Virtue
Before diving in, let me return to the map I introduced earlier. In this podcast, I am exploring four broad orientations toward the good life: pleasure, virtue, service, and acceptance or detachment. These are not mutually exclusive. Most of us live with some mixture of all four. But each one asks us to organize life around a different center. Pleasure asks, “What feels good?” Virtue asks, “What kind of person am I becoming?” Service asks, “Whom is my life for?” And detachment asks, “How should I live with suffering, loss, and change?”
Today, I want to discuss a life of virtue. Virtue circles us back to Aristotle. We met Aristotle earlier as a thinker of eudaimonia, the good life. Today I want to return to him from a slightly different angle: not happiness as the goal of life, but virtue as the formation of character.
For Aristotle, the good life is one that perfects our unique capacity to reason. Reason brings us inexorably to the conclusion that there are better and worse ways to live. It teaches us that certain values are good. These values are expressions of the golden mean.
Here’s an example. We know that rashness is generally not a good characteristic. In extreme situations, it can lead us to endanger our lives and the lives of those around us. In more mundane situations, it can lead to bad decisions, such as investing a large portion of our savings in a stock that an internet meme promises is about to pop—or, when annoyed, firing off a text message that we quickly come to regret.
Yet we also recognize that extreme shyness and fear are not the best ways to live. They can lead us not to commit to a potential lover, to isolate ourselves, to shun prudent investments, or to turn down opportunities. What lies between rashness and fear? Courage. True courage allows us to take calculated risks that minimize, but cannot completely eliminate, the possibility of loss and suffering.
A second example returns us to our previous discussion of pleasure. Licentiousness is on one end of the spectrum. Living a life of unbridled sensual pleasure, even when it does not harm anyone else, probably does not appeal to most of us. Why? Because a part of us—the rational part, Aristotle would say—recognizes that this would not lead to a fulfilling life.
But we are equally put off by abstinence: the deliberate refusal to enjoy sensual pleasure, perhaps extending even to self-mortification. The golden mean is temperance, to use an old-fashioned word. This is also what Ecclesiastes counseled: enjoying the pleasures that come to us, in moderation.
Aristotle gives many such examples, which hew closely to those found in earlier Greek literature. He claims that because these ideal behaviors are deduced from reason, and reason is shared by humans in all places and times, they are universal rather than culturally specific.
It has largely gone out of fashion in the humanities to talk about universal features or to weave large global theories; we are now much more sensitive to cultural differences. Some of the behaviors and characteristics that we value, Aristotle did not. Many people today, for example, value humility, whereas Aristotle thought that a person should neither overestimate nor underestimate their abilities and worth. The interesting point, though, is that the golden-mean approach can easily be understood to produce humility. It is often a matter of where we set the extremes and which value characterizes the middle.
To this point, I have been speaking somewhat vaguely about values, behaviors, and characteristics. Now we need to take one more step, to virtue. Values are beliefs or principles that guide us. We value honesty, for example, and seek to be honest with others. Virtues, however, are character traits. They are intrinsic to who we are.
The famous story of George Washington cutting down a cherry tree and confessing to his father with the words, “I cannot tell a lie,” is meant to convey that Washington possessed the virtue of honesty. Values and virtues are related, but they are not identical. I can place a high value on compassion without doing a particularly good job of practicing it. When caring for others becomes almost reflexive and unthinking, then I have developed that virtue. A value is something you endorse. A virtue is something you have practiced until it has become part of you.
In Aristotle’s account, any human being can, through the proper exercise of the rational faculty, gain knowledge of the virtues and recognize that flourishing comes to those who cultivate them. Developing the virtues, however, as Aristotle readily admits, is neither universal nor easy.
We are not naturally virtuous from birth. Virtue is a character trait that must be developed steadily and deliberately. Parents, of course, have a responsibility to help children develop the virtues. But so does the state. Laws function to habituate us to virtue. Aristotle firmly believes that human beings respond more readily to the threat of punishment than to the promise of reward. And because so few of us will become habituated to perfect virtue, we will always need a state with laws and the threat of force. Aristotle’s somewhat pessimistic understanding of human nature largely tracks with modern psychological research: we respond more strongly to threats of punishment than to promises of reward.
Later religious thinkers inherited Aristotle’s account of virtue, but they also found something missing. If virtue is simply the perfection of human reason, where is God? For thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, and al-Ghazali, reason mattered enormously, but it could not be the final goal. Virtue had to be placed within a larger spiritual drama: the ordering of the soul toward God. Each thinker had a distinctive take on this issue.
In future episodes, I hope—if you’re interested—to say more about the answers given by Aquinas and Maimonides. Here, though, let me turn to al-Ghazali, who, of the three, is the most skeptical of Aristotle’s answer.
Al-Ghazali was a Persian theologian who lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and he was one of the greatest Muslim theologians of the Middle Ages. In his tract The Alchemy of Happiness, which is an extract from his magnum opus, Revival of the Religious Sciences, he lays out his theory of happiness.
Like Aristotle, al-Ghazali emphasizes the importance of our rational faculty. He grounds his understanding of the human being in the metaphor of the state. Imagine that the body is a kingdom. At its head is the soul, its king. The king has two branches to enforce his will: the revenue collectors and the police. Both are necessary to get the body to do the will of the soul, but both are also prone to acting on their own. The revenue collectors, whom he identifies with the passions, sometimes steal for their own account. The police officers—representing the faculty of anger and the spirit—can be unnecessarily severe or brutal. Al-Ghazali is effectively describing a divided self at war with itself.
This is where reason comes in. Reason is the prime minister in this metaphor, reconciling, cajoling, and threatening the passions and the faculty of anger so that they obey the soul. Reason thus plays a crucial part in helping the individual realize his or her purpose.
The difference from Aristotle, though, is clear and sharp. Reason and its perfection are not the purpose; reason’s role is instrumental. On the one hand, it helps us control ourselves, playing something like the role of the superego in Freud’s formulation. On the other hand, it has the positive role of helping us realize that nothing is higher than God. The goal for al-Ghazali is closeness to God—perhaps even mystical union with God—which we approach through knowledge of God. Ultimately, knowledge of God can come only from God, but reason is necessary to prepare the way.
Reason alone is not enough to prepare us for knowledge of God. We also need virtue. Al-Ghazali sees virtue as the correct ordering of the soul: a set of virtuous habits that helps the soul order its passions.
His metaphor for thinking about this is a medieval mirror—that is, a piece of shiny metal. The soul is a mirror that will ideally shine with the light of divine reality. Sin and the exercise of the passions tarnish the mirror. A soul, as he puts it, “thickly coated with the rust of sensual indulgence,” can never achieve the ultimate pleasure of knowledge of God. Virtuous behavior prevents rust and cleanses the mirror so that it can receive the divine light.
Closeness to God is hard. Al-Ghazali recognizes this and, in fact, states that it can, for the most part, be achieved only in the afterlife. Yet he adds an interesting coda for those who doubt the existence of an afterlife: “Even if he is doubtful about a future existence, reason suggests that he should act as if there were one, considering the tremendous issues at stake,” he writes.
His position raises a number of complex issues about the relationship between belief, motivation, and action. Some beliefs, he argues, benefit you because they motivate you to act in ways that you know are good for you, even when you are not entirely convinced that those beliefs are true.
This might be seen as an early formulation of Pascal’s wager. If you believe in God, you go to heaven. If you do not, you will be damned. Given the enormous consequences of getting this one wrong, what is the harm in believing in God—especially, al-Ghazali would add, if there is a real motivational benefit to the belief, regardless of whether you think it is actually true?
Al-Ghazali never questions Aristotle’s basic assumption that we are different from other animals. We share with other animals a set of innate drives—our passions—that ensure we seek the food we need and mates with whom to reproduce. We want to accumulate resources to protect ourselves and our offspring, and we are roused to anger when we feel threatened.
Yet we, as human beings, also know that we cannot—and should not—simply live according to what our passions desire. The philosophers and theologians would say that we know this innately. Like other animals, we have some kind of sense that we must subordinate those passions in order to live in community. Unlike other animals, however, we somehow know that the unbridled exercise of our passions is bad for us as individuals. Reason is the faculty that allows us to know this, and it is the key to controlling those passions so that we can set ourselves on a better course, one that will lead to self-fulfillment.
When Plato discusses the relationship between the passions and reason, he uses the metaphor of the rider of wild horses. I prefer a slightly different metaphor, offered by Buddhists and some Jewish sources, which compares controlling the passions to riding an elephant.
In more modern terms, the elephant represents the entire complex of cognitive biases and emotional systems—many innate to human beings, but some socialized—that underlies the great bulk of what we do and how we live in the world. This complex is strong and, if we are not careful, can easily crush us. To move toward the good life, we must learn to nudge and tame it. Reason is surely one of our primary tools.
But al-Ghazali also shows us where Aristotle falls short. Aristotle’s idea that the purpose of life is to perfect our reason left al-Ghazali cold, just as it leaves me cold—and, I would assume, many of you. Are we, presaging Descartes, simply rational minds? In an age when AI is pushing toward—and perhaps soon beyond—the capabilities of human reason, that is creepy.
Reason, al-Ghazali declares, is uniquely human and incredibly important, but we must use it as a means to an end, not as the end itself. Reason might be part of the soul, but for al-Ghazali, so too is the heart, the qalb. It is the heart’s quest for transcendence and divine union that is primary. Transcendence, not the perfection of reason, is our real goal.
For Aristotle, virtue is a manifestation of reason. Being perfectly virtuous is the outward manifestation of someone who has perfected reason. Al-Ghazali sees virtue as a set of cultivated habits that purifies the heart and allows a deeper connection with the divine. As with reason, a life of virtue is necessary but insufficient.
So, when all is said and done, will striving to live a virtuous life make you happy? It may. It creates a framework for responding to your elephant in a way that can feel elevating. We can take greater control over our passions than any other living creature. We tend to admire people who are virtuous more than those who are not—although perhaps that is shifting in our influencer-obsessed culture.
Virtue helps us live in communities, and it helps communities develop compelling narratives for their existence. I would rather join a community that promotes a value I share than one that elevates materialism. Aside from these potential psychological and social benefits, the argument for virtue becomes far stronger when it is understood as a path to God, or at least to the transcendent. Many of us yearn to be part of something bigger. Can that be the pole around which we orient our lives?
If your obituary listed only your achievements, something important might still be missing. Virtue names that missing thing: not what you accomplished, but who you became in the course of accomplishing it.
For Aristotle, al-Ghazali, and scores of other Western thinkers in this tradition, virtue is objective. We naturally recognize when someone is virtuous. That shared recognition flows from our shared reason. For Aristotle, that recognition is pretty much everything: the state of eudaimonia is always a state of becoming until the very end; only then can it be judged successful or unsuccessful.
For al-Ghazali, virtue is objective and its achievement is visible to outsiders, but even the most virtuous person might not be in a position to get close to God. For that, a virtuous person must also engage in spiritual practices. Ultimately, however, it is God who decides whom to draw near. We must live with uncertainty, but also with optimism.
Living a virtuous life, then, is far more complicated than simply being a good person. It requires a fundamental orientation around cultivating habits that tame the worst parts of human desire. It means becoming someone else—a better person, according to both Aristotle and al-Ghazali.
What was self-evident to Aristotle and al-Ghazali may not be self-evident to us. Most of us probably believe that it is good to be virtuous. We hope our children become honest, courageous, generous, patient, and kind. But why? Why should virtue matter if it does not always bring pleasure, success, status, or even happiness?
So here is the question to sit with this week: What virtue would you most like to be remembered for? And what would it take to practice that virtue until it became not just something you admire, but part of who you are?
You’re listening to Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life, with me, Michael Satlow. Readings, resources, and ways to support the podcast are available in the show notes and at mlsatlow.com. I welcome your questions and feedback.
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