Early in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that ethics is about orienting oneself to correct responses to natural pleasures and pains:
Thus ethical virtue is concerned with pleasures and pains; for we do what is bad for the sake of pleasure, and we abstain from doing noble because of pain. In view of this, we should be brought up from our early youth in such a way as to enjoy and be pained by the things we should, as Plato says, for this is the right education. (NE II, 1104b.9-13)
This early statement of the importance of education, especially since young people can easily respond to pleasure and pain without the proper orientation, makes Aristotle’s later statement of the incurability of the vicious man problematic. Why is the vicious man incurable, and is he absolutely incurable, i.e., can a vicious man not be rehabilitated towards virtue, i.e., move up the moral status continuum and at least become an incontinent man? With the aid of Aquinas’ commentary, further analysis of Aristotle’s argument of the moral states, especially between incontinence and vice, clarifies the terms of the vicious man’s incurability and actually implies a possible “cure” which calls for the treatment of the vicious man like a young man who was horribly mistaken in his beliefs or like a bad government which was obediently following its bad laws.
As mentioned above, Aristotle posits a hierarchical, moral status continuum of six qualities of character, of which incontinence and vice are on the lower end of this continuum. From lowest to highest, these qualities are brutality (i.e., beyond the limits of vice), vice, incontinence (moral weakness), continence (moral strength), virtue, and superhuman, or “divine” virtue (NE VII, 1145a.15-20). Human responsibility lies within the vice-to-virtue range, with vice and virtue as two stable points on the continuum. Incontinence and continence are fluid, or unstable, states in which a person could be incontinent or continent depending on his ability or inability to control his passions in accordance to right reason, i.e., in accordance to his correct orientation to what is virtuous or vicious. In regards to the “incurability” of incorrect orientation, what is of concern is the lower end of the continuum, with the incontinent and vicious moral states.
Aristotle is careful to distinguish between vice, or intemperance, and incontinence because common discourse tends to confuse the two since the result – bad acts committed – are the same. As Aquinas points out, Aristotle gives three points of difference between intemperance and incontinence: whether the bad act is or is not the result of deliberate choice, whether the bad act is habitual -- from deliberation, or sporadic – from passion, and whether the bad act is or is not the result of self-deception of the good, i.e., incorrect orientation to virtue (Commentary, paragraphs 1423-25). In regards to the first point, the incontinent man commits bad acts not as a result of deliberate choice, i.e., does not deliberately choose to act bad, but as a result of passion taking control of his reason, for “it is evident that an incontinent man, before getting into a state of passion, does not think that he should do what he does when in passion” (NE VII, 1145b.30-32). In contrast, the intemperate man “is led on to the objects by deliberate choice, thinking that he should always pursue pleasure as it comes, whereas an incontinent man thinks the he should not do so, and yet he does” (NE VII, 1146b22-24). Aristotle continues to make this first point clearer: “incontinence is contrary to one’s deliberate choice while vice is in accordance with it” (NE VII, 1151a.7-8). In regards to the second point, Aristotle compares incontinence, a sickness of the soul, to epilepsy, a sickness of the body, because both are sporadic; in contrast, intemperance is like “dropsy or consumption” because it is “continuous” (NE VII, 1150b.32-35). Finally, in regards to the last point of self-deception of the good, “bad [intemperate] men are unaware of their vice, but the incontinent are not unaware of their incontinence” (NE VII, 1150b.35-37). According to these three criteria, Aristotle makes clear that intemperance is worse than incontinence.
He also adds that “such a[n intemperate] man is not disposed to regret and is therefore incurable, since he who is without regret is incurable” (NE VII, 1150a.20-23) . This relation of “no regret, thus incurable” makes sense since the intemperate man, through deliberately choosing bad acts such that they have become a habit in accordance to his principles, believes that he is correct. One thinks of Milton’s Satan, the Pharisees of the Gospels, and pre-conversion Saul. He is objectively mistaken but is subjectively “correct” – according to his principles, which follows his desires. In other words, “the intemperate man is not disposed to regret, for he abides by his intention; but every incontinent man is disposed to regret” (NE VII, 1150b.30). The intemperate man does not regret because, for him, there is nothing to regret. His soul is so disordered that he has become like the uneducated youth from the aforementioned quotation: “for we do what is bad for the sake of pleasure, and we abstain from doing noble because of pain” – except that the intemperate man sees the objectively bad as his good and as the objectively good as his evil. He has deliberated and judged that “physical pleasures are to be chosen in every instance” and such a person “does not depart from his judgment so easily” (Commentary, 1430). Aristotle compares the incontinent man and the intemperate man to two kinds of political states:
[T]he incontinent man resembles a state which passes all the right decrees and has good laws but uses none of them…. The wicked [intemperate, vicious] man, on the other hand, resembles a state which uses its laws but uses wicked laws. (NE VII, 1152a.19-24)
As Aquinas states, “the bad or the intemperate man in using his perverse reason is like a city observing bad laws” (Commentary, 1464). The intemperate man is the tyrant of himself, and even if he is faithful to his rule, the rule is still bad. Since one can see in the world examples of tyrannies being overtaken by more just regimes, perhaps Aristotle, by suggesting this man-as-state simile (similar to Plato’s Republic simile), implies that the only way an intemperate man’s bad laws, i.e., mistaken principles, can change is by a sort of moral “coup d’etat” – outside intervention -- by somebody more virtuous (or “super-virtuous,” as in divine grace) than he. The intemperate man cannot cure himself because he is blind to his error. In that sense, the intemperate man’s curability is highly improbable because of the difficulty of convincing the man that his principles are wrong – but the curability is not impossible. Says Aquinas of this difficulty,
It is clear that anyone making a mistake in principles cannot be easily recalled from error because reasoning does not teach the principles. From this point of view he is not amenable or penitent until the habit causing the error is destroyed by a contrary practice of long standing. (Commentary, 1432)
The intervening agent must treat the intemperate man like the insensate man or ignorant child that he has caused himself to be: The agent cannot reason with the intemperate man to choose virtue because the intemperate man’s reason has become twisted, perverted, such that real virtue is painful to him. Therefore, the agent must force the intemperate man to act virtuously “until the habit causing the error is destroyed”. This follows from Aristotle’s prior statement that “[i]n the case of virtues… we acquire them as a result of prior activities; and this is like the case of the arts, for that which we are to perform by art after learning, we first learn by performing” (NE II, 1103a.32). The intervening agent must function as teacher to an unwilling student until the habit of virtues – or at least the habit of thinking of virtues as virtues and not as evils -- becomes, so to speak “muscle-memory.” As a result, his perverted reason becomes reoriented to virtue such that he knows and desires to do good acts but most likely may be unable to act because of his prior strong appetites developed while he was in the vicious state. Thus, one sees the intemperate man moving up to incontinence, a “cure” in the qualified sense such that he is closer to virtue than where he once was.
Therefore, Aristotle actually implies a possible “cure” which calls for the treatment of the vicious man as a young man who is horribly mistaken in his beliefs and needs to be treated like a bad government which is obediently following its bad laws. The movement from vice to incontinence involves forcing the intemperate man to act virtuously as a way of developing his reason and his desires to orient towards virtue. Although such a cure is highly improbable, so improbable that Aristotle explicitly calls the intemperate, vicious state “incurable,” it is not impossible, as suggested in his “bad man as bad government” simile. Since “happiness requires… both complete virtue and a complete life, [and] since many changes and all sorts of events caused by chance occur in a lifetime,” (NE I, 1100a.5, my italics), one cannot entirely dismiss the vicious from rehabilitation or conversion.
Works Cited
Aquinas, St. Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. C. I. Litzinger, O.P. 1964. Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1993.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle. 1975. Grinnell, IA: The Peripatetic Press, 1984.
© 1 December 2000 Rufel F. Ramos