Aristotle: Ethics Based on Personal Virtue

You will relate your character selections to the following:

Aristotle: Ethics based on personal virtue.

Epictetus: Ethics based on inner strength of the individual.

Saint Augustine: Ethics based on following a Divine Command.

Aristotle

Aristotle was a student of Plato and lived from 384 to 322 B.C. His ethical theory centered on the attainment of the Good Life and on his theory of happiness. This is not the type of happiness one normally thinks about as in the statement, "I am happy." Rather, you should understand happiness as a sense of well-being or the overall quality of one's life. Yet, this "happy" life does not just happen. It is the result of specific actions and qualities.

To accomplish the Good Life one should look at the nature of action. Aristotle wrote in his book the Nicomachean Ethics that all actions have both an excess and a deficiency. Accordingly, all actions have a mean between those two extremes that is suited to a specific individual. This is a mean that is suited to us as an individual, as a member of society, and leads toward the Good Life. And, it does not have to be the same for everyone. So, how do I find the mean suited to me?

To begin, Aristotle directs us to the nature of habits and the formative influence they have in our lives. He felt that habits have an essential role. They are the creators of one's character, and ultimately one's destiny. In other words, habits produce character and character produces a destiny. And destiny is our life. And what is more interesting, he believed that if we do not like the person we have become, we have the ability to change our habits, and therefore, our character and ultimately our destiny.

In your paper, address how the characters you have selected from the movie represent Aristotelian ethics. How have they demonstrated a mean between excess and deficiency? How have they demonstrated a change in habit or character? How have they made a conscious decision to change?

Epictetus

Epictetus was a Stoic philosopher and lived from 55 A.D. to 135 A.D. This was the time of the Roman Empire and the result had been a loss of personal and ethical control over one's life as considered against the needs of the Empire. This sense of personal and intimate control over one's decisions and actions had been a part of the small Greek City-States from the time of Aristotle and had formed the basis of ethical theory. Now, the Roman Empire had created events and actions that were no longer in the control of the individual person. One simply lived at the mercy of events no longer directly connected to the individual