Further Moral Virtues
Book 4 works through the remaining moral virtues — generosity, magnificence, magnanimity, wit — showing the doctrine of the mean in action across the full range of human affairs.
Summary
Book 4 extends the analysis of moral virtue to the full range of social and civic life. Liberality — generosity with wealth — is the first virtue examined. The liberal person gives to the right people in the right amounts at the right times, doing so with positive pleasure or at least without pain. Giving is more characteristic of the virtue than receiving; the liberal person is distinguished from both the prodigal (who gives without discrimination or proportion) and the stingy (who hoards). Magnificence is liberality scaled up: it concerns large public expenditure (temples, festivals, public games) where the appropriate response is grandeur in proportion to the occasion.
The centrepiece of Book 4 is magnanimity — great-souledness. The megalopsychos claims great honours and deserves them. He is slow to act unless something genuinely worthy is at stake; indifferent to small honours from inferiors; candid in his judgments because concealment is beneath him; measured in his gait and voice because nothing small excites him. Aristotle's portrait has divided readers for centuries — it can read as an ideal or as a cautionary type. The book positions it clearly as a virtue (excess: arrogance; deficiency: pusillanimity), but the description of the person of great soul is the most vividly particular in the whole treatise.
The remaining virtues of Book 4 are gentler in scale: proper ambition (a mean between over-ambition and indifference to honour); evenness of temper (the mean with respect to anger); friendliness in social life (between obsequiousness and quarrelsomeness); wit (between buffoonery and boorishness); and truthfulness about oneself (between boastfulness and false modesty). Each section follows the same pattern: identify the matter, identify the excess and deficiency, describe what the person who hits the mean looks like. By the end of Book 4, the doctrine of the mean has been run across the full range of human affairs.
- Book 1Book 1 introduces the question and the method. All action aims at some good; the highest good is eudaimonia. The function argument...
- Book 2Book 2 introduces moral virtue as habit, distinguishes it from intellectual virtue, and gives the doctrine of the mean. Virtue is...
- Book 3Book 3 establishes the theory of voluntary action and moral responsibility, then applies it to the first two virtues: courage...
- Book 4Book 4 works through the moral virtues beyond courage and temperance: generosity, magnificence, magnanimity (the most contested)...
- Book 5Book 5 gives the treatise's full account of justice: general justice (complete virtue toward others) and particular justice...
- Book 6Book 6 introduces the intellectual virtues: scientific knowledge, technical skill, practical wisdom (phronesis), intuitive...
- Book 7Book 7 examines akrasia (weakness of will) — the phenomenon Socrates thought impossible. Aristotle argues it is real: the akratic...
- Book 8Book 8 distinguishes three kinds of friendship — utility, pleasure, and virtue — and argues that only the third is friendship in...
- Book 9Book 9 examines self-love, the dissolution of friendships, the question of how many genuine friends one can have, and the argument...
- Book 10Book 10 revisits pleasure — not a process but an activity, the unimpeded exercise of a faculty — and then answers the treatise's...