ABSTRACT
We might well feel that neither of these two exhibits any of the types of character that we might find entirely admirable. The sense of strangeness in the middle of much that is entirely familiar is reinforced when we recall that Aristotle thought that women were incapable of public responsibility, and that some humans were natural slaves,
or that menial work was somehow dehumanizing. Such views are not merely strange, they are, from our point of view, shocking. How could he get such things so wrong?1 Less dramatically, what would he have thought of some of the examples I have used in illustrating his discussion – visiting prisoners, volunteering to help in a hospice, to say nothing of women surgeons or barristers? What would he have made of a Mother Teresa or Francis of Assisi? So the question might arise whether, for all the detailed discussion of eudaimonia which Aristotle offers, and despite his account of practical wisdom and its relationship to the virtues of human character, his position as a whole is not seriously undermined by his lack of critical attention to those very virtues on which the whole edifice is based. We have already seen that Aristotle assumes that his students will have been well brought up, and that a good upbringing involves training one’s emotional responses in such a way that the desired ones become second nature. So the entire system, the critic will urge, is geared to the less than critical perpetuation of the attitudes and judgements already accepted in Aristotle’s elitist Athenian society.
