1. Is ethics really an art?

THE PRECEDING CHAPTER ended with a question, which was, in effect, whether ethics or morals could be regarded as simply an art of living. Those who remember Plato’s Dialogues will recognize that such was the way Plato rather consistently chose to regard ethics. And yet Aristotle, despite his insistence that in ethics one is concerned with learning how to live intelligently, seems to make an abrupt about-face, declaring flatly that morals or ethics, while seemingly no more than an art, is actually different from all the other arts: “In the arts, again, a deliberate mistake is not so bad as an undesigned one, whereas in matters to which practical wisdom is applicable [i.e., in moral or ethical matters], it is the other way round.”¹

Even without the authority of Aristotle and without for the moment bothering one’s head over just what is meant by Aristotle’s words, it is not hard, simply on one’s own, to think of any number of objections to the idea that leading a good life is only a matter of learning how to strike a mean between the extremes of excess and defect, as if ethics were simply an art or a skill. If it were, such an art of living would involve actually learning rules about such things as when to get angry, and when not, and to what degree; or what we may properly become enthusiastic over and what not; or when we may legitimately feel proud of ourselves and when not; or whether one is ever warranted in feeling resentful or envious, and if so, when and under what circumstances.

To this you may well be inclined to make an emphatic rejoinder: “There is no such art. Indeed, it is fatuous to suppose that anyone can ever acquire knowledge of things of this sort. In ordinary conversation, perhaps, we may speak of knowing when to be indignant and when not. But surely this is only a manner of speaking, for in the literal sense no one can ever learn how to feel or how to respond to a situation, in the way in which a surgeon, for example, learns when and how to perform an appendectomy. Indeed, if one persisted in using the word knowledge in both contexts, it would be clear that the term had become ambiguous. For it is only in the latter context that one can be said to have knowledge in the proper sense of a skill, or an art, or know-how. If the art of living consists in nothing more or less than learning how to feel and react toward persons and things, then there is no art of living, and the claim that ethics is a science and constitutes a legitimate body of knowledge is so much stuff and nonsense. Would anyone in his senses claim that by mastering this so-called art of living a young man or woman will thereby learn just when and with whom he or she should fall in love? Or to take another example, can we suppose that when a man is struck a sharp blow on the jaw, his Socratic self-knowledge will instruct him whether or not he should feel angry, or even, presumably, whether or not he should feel pain?”

2. The uncertainty of ethics as comparable to the uncertainty
in any art: art deals with the particular and individual

Perhaps, though, the edge of this sort of criticism may be dulled somewhat if we recognize that an art or skill in living is not of the same nature as the highly technical skill of the modern engineer or expert on atomic energy. A more apt comparison might be with a chef’s skill in knowing how much seasoning to add to a lamb stew, neither too much nor too little, or with a good driver’s skill in knowing just when and how much to brake his car on a dangerous curve, or a musician’s skill in his choice of tempo in the rendering of a certain sonata.

Our present knowledge of human passions and affections is too rudimentary and inexact to provide anything like the elaborate and detailed scientific foundation that underlies such present-day skills as electronics, metallurgy, agronomy, and medicine. But more fundamentally, in criticizing the notion of morals or ethics as an art, we often forget what is distinctive of all arts and skills, even the most complex and those resting on the most sophisticated scientific foundations, which is that no skill is ever properly exercised by mechanically following certain rules or by simply going by the book. The reason is that the particular concrete situations which are the actual points of application of any art or skill are always so complex and intricate that no set of general rules and principles ever suffices to cover them completely.

We do not, for example, consider that a surgeon is not skilled merely because he cannot draw up a set of instructions so complete and detailed that all one need do is to follow them automatically and the success of a certain type of operation will thereby be guaranteed. On the contrary, each particular case being different from every other, no one will ever be a skilled surgeon merely by following rules, or by applying a technique automatically. Instead, true skill must involve the adaptation of a technique to the immediate and particular circumstances at hand. For this reason, to master an art—be it that of surgery or carpentry, plowing corn or selling shoes—one cannot simply memorize a set of instructions; one has to practice the art himself. Ideally, such practice should involve apprenticing oneself to a master in the craft, watching him as he works and trying to imitate him. Consequently, when one wants to know what to do or how to proceed in a particular situation or set of circumstances, there is, in the final analysis, no other rule to follow save only this: Do what the expert would do.

So it is with the art of living. That is why Aristotle tends to reiterate what to many would seem rather obvious: in a moral or ethical situation, the thing to do is simply what the good man, or the man of sense and practical wisdom, would do. Or to express the same thing in terms of the doctrine of the mean: the mean between excess and defect in matters involving our desires and feelings and emotions is always what the good man would determine it to be.²

3. But ethics is not an art, at least not like other arts

However much considerations such as these may tend to reassure us that living wisely or well is after all but a matter of art and knowledge, there is no getting around the fact that morals or ethics, if it is an art, is not an art like the other arts. In fact, it is not solely, or even principally, an affair of skill or know-how at all. And so we are brought back once more to that somewhat enigmatic pronouncement of Aristotle’s which we quoted earlier. Paraphrasing it rather freely, it states that, whereas in all the other arts a deliberate or voluntary mistake is much less serious than an involuntary one, in the art of living it is just the other way round. What does this mean?

4. Being a good man is different from being good at something:
doing is more than knowing

Why is the practice of living to be judged by such different standards from those applicable to the building of bridges, the playing of basketball, the practice of medicine, or any other art? Why isn’t it simply a case of a person’s either knowing or not knowing how to live, just as it is a case of one’s either knowing or not knowing how to play basketball, or how to perform an appendectomy, or how to build a bridge, or how to try a case? To live well, to be a good man, it would seem, one would need do no more than master the art of living, just as to be a good doctor, one need but master the art of medicine. Why not suppose that there is a simple and obvious parallel between the art of living and all the other arts? And yet the very homely considerations, at once so elementary and so undeniable, that we have just run through make us realize that this is impossible. But why?

The most obvious answer to this question is that, in the other arts, nothing is involved save knowledge and knowledge alone—i.e., knowledge in the sense of skill or know-how. But in living one’s life, something else seems to be involved besides mere knowledge. As a first attempt at specifying what this “something else” is, one might put it that in order to live well or to be a good man, it is not enough merely to know how to live, to know what you need to do as a human being; in addition, you have to do it. In something like cabinet making, you may know how to ply your craft, but for one reason or another decide either not to do it, or else to do it badly. This would not in itself be any reflection upon your skill as a cabinet maker: you would still be competent; it’s just that you had chosen not to display or exercise your competence. But in a moral or ethical context, a man who knew what he ought to do but chose not to do it would certainly not be a good man.

5. Being a good man is different from being good at something:
choosing is more than doing

Perhaps, though, the contrast is not quite as simple as this. It’s more than a simple difference between knowing and doing. For one thing, in the practical arts it is clear that there can never be a total or even a prolonged separation of knowing from doing. The knowledge that is involved in these arts is the sort that we call skill or know-how, and there just can’t be any knowledge of this sort without doing. It is only through actually building bridges or practicing medicine or playing tennis that one becomes a bridge builder or a physician or a tennis player in the first place. And while one might cease for a time to use his skill without thereby immediately losing that skill, in the long run no one can continue to be a competent engineer or doctor or athlete without actually practicing his art.

For another thing, in the art of living, while in one sense it is correct to say that merely knowing what one ought to do without actually doing it does not suffice to make one a good man, in another sense whether one actually succeeds in doing what one intends to do or feels that one ought to do is at times quite irrelevant to being a good man or leading a good life. To take the most obvious sort of case: I may know that a friend of mine in San Francisco needs me badly and I may have every intention of going to his assistance, only to find that some outside factor such as a strike on the airlines, bad rail connections, or an automobile accident makes it impossible for me to arrive on time. In such a case, even though my knowing what I ought to do is not matched by my actually doing it, this would hardly constitute a reflection upon my character or my loyalty to my friend.

But if it is not a mere difference between knowing and doing that accounts for our differing standards of judgment in matters of skill, and in matters of morals, what does account for it? Does the difference lie in the fact that whereas in matters of skill it is know-how alone that counts, in matters of morals it is something more on the order of good intentions? But (for reasons that we shall consider later) such a way of formulating the difference between art and morals is somewhat over-simple and misleading. Instead, the difference is to be understood, not so much in terms of the distinction between knowing and doing, as in terms of that between knowing and choosing—more specifically, between knowing what needs to be done and actually wanting or choosing to do it.

A man is a good carpenter, we have said, if he knows how to do certain things. But whether he enjoys doing them, whether he chooses to do them well, whether he even chooses to do them at all—all this has nothing directly and immediately to do with his being skilled or competent in his art. On the other hand, for a man to be honest or fair or brave, it is not enough that he merely know what sort of behavior honesty and justice and bravery call for. In addition, he must actually choose to act this way himself. Not only that, but he must choose to do these things for their own sake. For a man who was honest enough in his dealings with others, not because he loved honesty, but only because he wanted to get ahead and be well thought of in the community, or because he was afraid that if he were dishonest, he might get caught—such a person we should hardly consider to be truly honest.

6. The Aristotelian distinction of moral virtues from
intellectual virtues

Accordingly, taking cognizance of the peculiar requirements involved in being a good man as contrasted with those necessary for merely being a good craftsman, Aristotle insisted that to achieve the former one would need to cultivate not just certain habits of knowledge—the kind of knowledge called skill or know-how—but also certain habits of choice, the latter being known, in Aristotelian parlance, as moral virtues in contrast to the more familiar intellectual virtues, or habits of knowledge.

The word “virtue” itself may tend to stick in our craw in this day of disillusionment in general and of “angry young men” in particular. But in its original meaning the term does no more than point up the obvious fact that most of our human activities we can scarcely do at all, much less do them well, without first learning how. And such learned patterns of behavior, or acquired habits of action, as a result of which we come to be able to do well what otherwise we could not do at all, or at best could do only very badly—these are what Aristotle called “virtues.”

7. The good man is no fool: no moral virtue without
intellectual virtue

But the specific term “moral virtue” is likely to give rise to still further misunderstanding. For if we talk about habits of choice and learned patterns of behavior, which we call “moral virtue,” we are apt to associate this with a picture of dear, good old Andy, who had “a heart full of gold,” who never knowingly hurt a fly, but who was an impossible dullard and at times seemed hardly to have the sense to come in out of the rain!

But this is thoroughly to misconstrue the Aristotelian notion of moral virtue. The trouble seems to lie in the use of such expressions as “learned habits of choice” or “patterns of behavior.” For such terms suggest to us choices and actions that are habitual in the sense of being mechanical and unthinking. But Aristotle had in mind something quite different. As he saw it, the reason the so-called moral virtues are needed for the good life is not that they will enable us to dispense with thinking and knowledge, but precisely and solely in order that such thought and knowledge may be brought to bear and become operative in our likes and dislikes and our choices of action. We shall then not merely know what the intelligent thing to do is, but we shall come to want it and actually choose to do it precisely because it is what intelligence dictates.

From this point of view, the honest man or the courageous man or the temperate person will not be one who has merely been conditioned to follow out unthinkingly certain approved patterns of behavior. He will be one who has learned how to let his choices and preferences be determined by such knowledge and understanding as he may have, rather than to proceed simply from chance feelings and impulses of the moment or from long established but mechanical habits of response.

For example, to revert to our earlier illustration, anyone will admit to having repeatedly had the distressing and often embarrassing experience of losing his temper and saying and doing things that were exceedingly foolish and unwise, which he himself soon came to regret. Accordingly the virtue of even temper may be understood as simply a learned response in which, instead of giving way to fits of temper, we allow our intelligence and better judgment to prevail. Nor is it otherwise with any of the other moral virtues. Courage, for instance, amounts to nothing more than a disposition to act rationally and intelligently in circumstances that appear to us frightening or alarming. Temperance is a disposition to respond in similar fashion in situations where we are subject to the physical attractions of food, drink, sex, etc. Likewise, as we have seen,³ the virtue of self-respect, or megalopsychia, or whatever you choose to call it, is a virtue that disposes us to think neither too much nor too little of ourselves, but to be guided always by a just estimate of our own capacities and worth.

The moral virtues, then, are to be regarded simply as learned habits and dispositions that are directed solely toward letting reason and intelligence come into play in the determination of our choices of what to do and what not to do. From this point of view it could never properly be said of anyone that he was a man of excellent character, but at the same time a fool. For as Aristotle sees it, to be morally virtuous is precisely to be intelligent in one’s behavior. Nor is there any other way for a man to be intelligent and wise in his conduct, save through the cultivation and exercise of the moral virtues. In short, to be brave, just, honest, temperate, even-tempered, modest, self-respecting is to be wise and intelligent in one’s choices; and to be wise and intelligent in one’s choices is to be brave, just, honest, temperate, and so on.

8. But isn’t this right where we came in two chapters ago?

All this brings us back once again to some of the considerations raised in Chapter 2 regarding what it means to be human. For in Aristotle’s account, we saw that being human or living a characteristically human existence, exercising the ergon or function that is appropriate to man—all this comes down to no more than living intelligently. A truly and properly human existence does not consist simply in being intelligent, in the sense of having a high I.Q. or having a lot of knowledge; rather it consists in living intelligently, in using one’s intelligence in the conduct of one’s life, in letting one’s every choice be guided by such knowledge and understanding as one can bring to bear on the situation. But isn’t this only another way of saying that being human consists in nothing more or less than the exercise of both intellectual and moral virtue—of intellectual virtue, because only so can a man be said to have knowledge and understanding; but also of moral virtue, because only so is one’s knowledge brought to bear on his own life, suffusing and determining his conduct and even his choices and preferences?

9. Doubts and more doubts: can morals ever be supposed to
rest ultimately upon knowledge?

With such a picture, however, contrast the following:

Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced him to President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a dozen Presidents at the White House, and the most famous were by no means the most agreeable, but he found Grant the most curious subject of study among them all. About no one did opinions differ so widely. Adams had no opinion, or occasion to make one. A single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the fewer words he risked the better. Thus far in life he had met with but one man of the same intellectual or unintellectual type—Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers. Adam, according to legend, was such a man.

In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in outward appearance; always needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest stimulant—the instinct of fight. Such men were forces of nature, energies of the prime, like the Pteraspis, but they made short work of scholars. They had commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them than in others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect at once.⁴

Now making due allowance for Henry Adams’ rather tortured and self-conscious predilection for contrasting the doer and the man of action with a Hamlet-like intellectual, the quoted passage does make it frighteningly clear how a man’s life may be completely dominated and motivated by sheer unenlightened energy and drive—a life, indeed, in which such knowledge and intelligence and enlightenment as the man may have are all subordinated and put to the service of a more basic but utterly blind and uncritical, impulse to act and to do.

Now in many ways this represents the very antithesis of the Socratic ideal of the examined life. Still, it is also a serious challenge. For one may ask, in the light of such an example, whether an examined or intelligent life in any such radical sense as Socrates would have it is really possible. Does it pertain to either the nature or the function of human intelligence to provide a guidance and direction to life that is ultimate and not merely relative and instrumental? Intelligence can tell us how to get what we want; but can it tell us what we really want or ought to want in the first place? Is not the posture of a Grant or a Garibaldi (supposing Adams’ picture of them to have been a true one) much more in accordance with the realities of the human situation? If so, men’s drives and impulses and inclinations must be taken as ultimate, and reason and intelligence must be regarded as merely instrumental in enabling us to attain whatever happens to appear valuable to us, not on the basis of any determinations of reason or intelligence, but merely on the basis of such affections and dispositions as may happen to characterize our particular natures.

Let us try to bring this issue to a head. The moral virtues, we have said, are nothing but habits of choice, such as will dispose us to choose those courses of action which intelligence and understanding prescribe. But do intelligence and reason ever really prescribe anything? Are they even capable of doing any more than describing what we are already inclined to do on other grounds?

For instance, take the virtue of courage. On the analysis we have given, to be brave is simply to be intelligent, i.e., in circumstances that seem dangerous or frightening the brave man is the one who chooses and acts in accordance with the dictates of intelligence. But think about this for a moment. Does it not grow increasingly dubious as one reflects upon it? For in what sense may intelligence be said to prescribe a courageous choice as being more intelligent and less stupid than a cowardly one? Certainly not in the sense in which a correct answer in arithmetic, say, is more intelligent than an incorrect one; or even in the sense in which one might say that a consideration of the evidence makes the hypothesis of a heliocentric universe a more intelligent one than of a geocentric universe.

Even the analogy with the arts seems to break down here. For although it certainly makes sense, in the context of an art such as surgery, to say that one way of performing an operation is more intelligent than another, this judgment is based on the pre-supposition that the operation is desirable in the first place. Moreover, in all the arts, it would seem that any judgment as to what is the more or less intelligent way of doing something is based on a prior assumption of some desired end or goal. Must it not then be concluded that intelligence can prescribe what is better or worse on the presupposition of a prior inclination or desire which determines the end, and which intelligence sub-serves only as an instrument for calculating the means? But if so, then the Socratic project of an examined life would appear to be, in the last analysis, utterly futile: the end we seek is determined by irrational, or at least pre-rational, motives, and intelligence can only prescribe the best means to such ends.

10. In defense of rationality: man’s end or goal is a
rationally defensible one

But this sort of criticism obviously rests upon a misunderstanding. True, human reason and human intelligence do not determine human values in the sense of creating them; rather their job is simply to discover such values. Moreover, when reason sets about to discover what the good life for man is, or what the characteristically human good is, then the results of the investigation, we would suggest, will be along such lines as we indicated in our second chapter. The human good will be found to be that natural end toward which a human being is oriented by virtue of being human, as an acorn is oriented toward its natural end by virtue of its nature as an acorn. In this sense, man’s end, the goal or purpose of human life, is something given; it is a fact of nature. Reason or intelligence may be said to determine what this natural end is only in the sense of discovering or recognizing it, not in the sense of creating or positing it.

Suppose we push this consideration to the point of a seeming paradox. We could say that this natural end or natural disposition of a human being is something pre-rational and pre-intelligent: it is just a fact which reason can do no more than recognize. And yet—and here is the decisive point—having come to recognize this pre-rational and pre-intelligent end, our human intelligence then sees that it is man’s natural end and hence the proper end for a human being to seek. It thus becomes an end which we do not seek merely in fact and automatically, toward which we are impelled uncritically and unreflectingly, but rather an end which we see that we have reason to seek and which we recognize as being the right and proper end for us as human beings. In this latter sense, then, such an end is seen to be a rational end, i.e., an end which can be justified and defended as being worthy of our seeking or as being right for us to seek. It is in these terms that the attitude and performance of a Socrates are to be distinguished from and vindicated against those of a Grant or a Garibaldi.

11. In defense of rationality: the rationally defensible end or
goal of man is to be rational

As we saw in our earlier investigation, when we turn to the question of what this natural, and hence rationally justifiable, end for man consists in, we find that it consists precisely in not settling for any end save one that is rationally justifiable—that is, it consists in living intelligently and leading an examined life. Man’s natural end, on this view, turns out to be that of being the sort of person who is not content merely to go on doing or seeking that which he is naturally impelled to do or to seek, or which he has always been in the habit of doing or seeking, but without knowing why. Rather the good man is the man who knows and understands why he does what he does, and who, instead of acting blindly, has a reason for doing what he does.

Unhappily, though, in thus attempting to characterize man’s proper end and goal as being both naturally determined and intelligently determined at one and the same time, it is difficult to obviate the kind of misunderstanding that springs from a certain ambiguity in the words “natural” and “nature” when used in this connection. On the one hand, we say that the right and honorable thing to do is that which one tends to do or is impelled to do simply by nature. On the other hand, we are equally insistent that in so far as it is human nature that is involved, to do that which one tends to do naturally but without recognizing that it is thus natural and without understanding that it is therefore the right and reasonable thing to do—this is not to behave intelligently, and hence, for a human being, is not even to behave in a way that is natural. In short, for a human being the end can be an intelligent one only in so far as it is rationally recognized and intelligently appreciated as being in this way the natural end for man.

Further, when a man thus becomes intelligently aware of what the natural goal for him as a human being is, he sees that, so far as its content is concerned, what this natural human end consists in is simply to live intelligently. There is thus a two-fold sense in which, on Aristotle’s view, the natural goal or end of man is a rational and intelligent one. It is intelligent in that it is rationally defensible and justifiable: we can see why it is the true and proper end for us, simply because it is the natural end for us. And also, it is intelligent in that what this end consists in and what it calls upon a man to be and to do is simply to be intelligent and to live intelligently. That is to say, the rationally defensible and justifiable end for a human being is simply to be as rational and intelligent as possible in all that he chooses and does.

12. How that which is morally wrong can be said to be
a mistake or an error

Assuming then, that our end or goal consists simply in being intelligent, let us try to arrive at a better understanding of that seeming paradox, according to which being virtuous amounts to no more than being intelligent and being intelligent amounts simply to being virtuous.

What must bother anyone about such a formula is the question of whether and how the virtuous course of action can be regarded as simply the action which intelligence dictates. However much we may admire and respect qualities such as bravery, loyalty, personal integrity, and reliability, why should it be supposed that to exhibit such qualities is the same thing as being intelligent?

Let us remind ourselves of our earlier examples of men whose conduct and general behavior were such as to be adjudged foolish and unwise. It strikes us as being natural and proper to say that Sir Walter Elliott was an ass, that Charles I was curiously deluded and erected his whole life upon a mistake, or that C. P. Snow’s Mr. Nightingale was unwise in his conduct of life, in fact, that his whole outlook was twisted and mistaken. In cases like these we apply to the characters and behavior of human beings epithets like “mistaken,” “in error,” “dead wrong,” etc., which are borrowed from the purely intellectual realm. Yet the mistakes that are involved in such men’s lives do not seem altogether comparable to mistakes in arithmetic, say, or in the sciences or technical arts.

Very well, then, let us look more closely at just what it means to be wrong or mistaken in one’s behavior and in one’s character. In saying that Sir Walter or King Charles or Nightingale made mistakes or got on the wrong track, do we not mean that they were woefully ignorant of the truth about themselves, that they did not know what was best for them? “If only they could see themselves as others see them,” one is tempted to say.

13. What is it to know or not to know the truth about oneself?

What is this truth about themselves of which we say they were ignorant, and what is it that is best for them and that they don’t seem to know about? To answer the latter question in a thoroughly Socratic manner, what is best for any human being is that he live intelligently, that he lead an examined life. But this means that instead of acting blindly from impulse or uncritically from mere force of habit, a man should act from knowledge and understanding.

Presumably, therefore, from Socrates’ standpoint, the fact that our three characters did not know what was best for them could mean only that they did not realize the importance of having intelligent reasons for ordering their lives—that, instead, their general behavior was fundamentally blind and unthinking, proceeding largely from their feelings of vanity, pride, timidity, resentment.

Why is behavior that proceeds from mere impulse, passion, or force of habit to be considered blind or ignorant? The Socratic answer must be that it is behavior which the individual has not bothered to think through or to justify or to give reasons for. This is not to say that there are never good reason’s for one’s doing what one is simply impelled to do or has merely been in the habit of doing. The point is that so long as one does not know what these reasons are, and goes ahead and acts not knowing what they are, then to this extent one is not acting like an intelligent and rational man.

Of course, more often than not, when we act merely from impulse or from habit, what we do is not only something for which we give no reason, but also something for which we could give no reason, or only a rationalization. But what would a good reason be? How is one to justify one’s choices so as to bring them up to this standard of a truly intelligent, thinking human being in the Socratic sense? The answer that we are about to give may seem more like begging the question than answering it. Yet in the final analysis, any justification of one’s actions, at least if it proceeds on Socratic lines, must come down to this: this choice or that act is justified if it is one that is consonant with or contributes to an examined life, i.e., if it proceeds from no other motive save that of wanting to be a truly human being, of wanting to act rationally and intelligently and in the light of such knowledge and understanding as one can muster.

“But,” you will say, “on such a basis almost anyone can justify almost anything he does. Few men consider themselves to be unintelligent and unthinking. Indeed, Sir Walter Elliott no doubt thought himself an eminently reasonable and intelligent man. He would have been the first to claim that reason and understanding, not prejudice and passion, were his sole guides to action.”

The answer to this is that Sir Walter may have thought himself intelligent, but in fact he was not. He may have thought that his only motive in life was to be a man of reason and understanding, but it is all too patent that his real motive was simply vanity. Indeed, this is how Jane Austen was able to make Sir Walter appear such a fool: he was utterly fooled about himself; in the sense of the Socratic injunction, he was not a man who had ever bothered to know himself at all.

14. Moral error and intellectual error—the same and
yet not the same

But don’t we have right here the answer to the question that has been vexing us for so long? Sir Walter did not know the truth about himself, and because of this ignorance his character, far from being admirable, was absurd and ridiculous. Yet his error was certainly no mere intellectual one. One might say that his whole life was one long mistake, but it was not the same kind of mistake as an error in long division or in foretelling a decline in the stock market.

What sort of mistake was it, then? This concerns not only Sir Walter’s error, but King Charles’ or Nightingale’s or Grant’s or yours or mine. May we not say that a mistake of this sort consists not so much in not being able intellectually to see or know the truth about oneself, as in not being willing or disposed to see this truth? To put it a little differently, a man falls into error of this sort not from intellectual weakness, but from having allowed his feelings and passions, rather than his knowledge and understanding, to determine his choices. In other words, this kind of error involves what Aristotle called moral virtue, as much as intellectual virtue.

The same point is borne out when we consider how the ignorance and error that make for folly in human character are to be removed. Again, this is no mere affair of an intellectual passage from ignorance to knowledge. Nor is the purpose of such a removal simply the acquisition of information and knowledge. The fool who is brought to see the truth about himself is not like the young physics student who is brought to see the truth of the quantum theory. The reason for this difference is that, as Aristotle remarks, in a science such as ethics the end is not knowledge but action.⁵

So when we ask: do morals and ethics rest upon knowledge, is the good life an affair of knowing and knowing how? The answer clearly is “Yes.” But the “knowing” that is here needed is a knowing that is inseparable from choosing, just as the choosing must be one that is based on knowing. Of the two, the choosing is the far more difficult to bring off. To make the point in Aristotle’s own words:

Nor will the suggested analogy with the arts bear scrutiny. A work of art is good or bad in itself—let it possess a certain quality, and that is all we ask of it. But virtuous actions are not done in a virtuous—a just or temperate—way merely because they have the appropriate quality. The doer must be in a certain frame of mind when he does them. Three conditions are involved. (1) The agent must act in full consciousness of what he is doing. (2) He must ‘will’ his action, and will it for its own sake. (3) The act must proceed from a fixed and unchangeable disposition. Now these requirements, if we except mere knowledge, are not counted among the necessary qualifications of an artist. For the acquisition of virtue, on the other hand, knowledge is of little or no value, but the other requirements are of immense, of sovran, importance, since it is the repeated performance of just and temperate actions that produces virtue. Actions, to be sure, are called just and temperate when they are such as a just or temperate man would do. But the doer is just or temperate not because he does such things but when he does them in the way of just and temperate persons.⁶