Aristotle on Learning to be Good
M.F. Burnyeat
In Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics
University of California Press, 1980

"[T]he ultimate goal toward which the beginner's practice is aimed is that he should become the sort of person who does virtuous thing in full knowledge of what he is doing, choosing to do them for their own sake, and acting out of a settled state of character (1105a28-33)." (BURNYEAT-1980, p. 73)

"I may be told, and may believe, that such and such actions are just and noble, but I have not really learned for myself (taken to heart, made second nature to me) that they have this intrinsice value until I have learned to value (love) them for it, with the consequence that I take pleasure in doing them. To understand and appreciate the value that makes them enjoyable in themselves I must learn for myself to enjoy them, and that does take time and practice - in short, habituation." (BURNYEAT-1980, p. 78) [PSA: or 'enculturation', as well as reflection.]

"He is addressing someone who already wants and enjoys virtuous action and needs to see this aspect of his life in a deeper perspective.... [H]e is giving a course in practical thinking to enable someone who already wants to be virtuous to understand better what he should do and why.... Since it is the articulation of a mature scheme of values under the heading of the good, it will itself provide new and more reflective motivation for virtuous conduct. That is why Aristotle can claim (I.3 1095a5-6; II.2 1103b26-29; II.4 1105b2-5; X.9 1179a35-b4) that the goal of the study of ethics is action, not merely knowledge: to become fully virtuous rather than simply to know what virtue requires." (BURNYEAT-1980, p. 81) [PSA: note the role of maturation in the attainment of full virtue (teleia arete).]

"[W]hat needs explanation is not so much why some people succumb to temptation as why others do not. What calls for explanation is how some people acquire continence or, even better, full virtue, rather than why most of us are liable to be led astray by our bodily appetites or unreasoned evaluative responses." (BURNYEAT-1980, p. 85)

"[I]t is second nature to the virtuous man to love and find his greatest enjoyment in the things he knows to be good (cf. VIII.3 1156b22-23). In him the three categories of value are in harmony.... Indeed, one definition of the noble given in the Rhetoric (1366a34) is to the effect that the noble is that which, being good, is pleasant because it is good. (cf. EE 1249a18-19). And with all three categories in harmony, then, and then only, nothing will tempt or lure him so much as the temperate or brave action itself. Nothing else will seem as pleasurable." (BURNYEAT-1980, p. 88)

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