Aristotle
Aristotelianism / virtue ethics · Ancient Greece, 384–322 BCE
The lens
The Aristotelian lens reads an event by asking what each actor and institution is for—its telos—and whether the activity in question moves toward or away from flourishing. Its vocabulary is virtue as a mean between excess and deficiency, practical wisdom (phronesis), habituation, and eudaimonia as activity of the soul in accordance with excellence. This lens asks what habits a policy or scandal cultivates, since the Nicomachean Ethics holds that character is built by repeated action rather than by intention or a single choice. It distinguishes distributive from corrective justice, pressing on whether goods and honors are apportioned by a defensible standard of merit or by faction. Reading the Politics, it treats the community as prior to the individual and asks whether an arrangement serves the common good or the interest of rulers, and whether a constitution is being corrupted toward oligarchy, the excess of democracy, or tyranny. From the Rhetoric it attends to how ethos, pathos, and logos are deployed to move an audience. Where other lenses reach for rules or outcomes, the Aristotelian lens asks after the disposition being formed and the end being served. It notices the practical judgment that no rule can fully specify.
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