Why is Aristotle's Virtue of Character a Mean?
Lesley Brown
In Polansky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Cambridge, 2014

"[A] character virtue is an in-between-and-so-just-right state (a mesotes), insofar as it aims at and achieves what is in-between-and-just-right (what is meson) in feelings and actions." (BROWN, p. 66)

"Aristotle has given us no reason to interpret him as saying that my virtue is relative to me, yours is relative to you, and so on. The Milo illustration, read in context, should not (mis)lead us to such an interpretation. A virtue is a mesotes relative to us precisely because it attains a meson relative to us, in just the way the trainer and other experts such as craftsmen do. [fn10: The treatment in Eudemian Ethics confirms my reading. There too [1220b21] Aristotle first introduces the meson relative to us, calling it what is best and what knowledge and reason command. Only after that does he introduce virtue as a mesotes.]" (BROWN, p. 71)

"A triad of vice-virtue-vice does *not* conform to a continuum. The sense in which a virtue is 'between' a vice of defect and one of excess is derivative from each of them being related to responses - whether actions or passions or both - which are, in the primary application, either too little or just right or too much. The relevant scales or continua are scales of feelings or actions, not of states or dispositions." (BROWN, p. 72)

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