Virtues and vices

4. Vices, failings and evil

Aristotle named a variety of vices, each of which was basically constituted by the absence of the restraining or shaping influence of virtue, together with the operation of some natural self-centred motive. Thus cowardice was the disposition, in the absence of courage, to give in to fear; self-indulgence and irascibility the dispositions to give in to bodily pleasure and to anger. In this range of what may be called ‘failings’, actions that are expressions of vices do have distinctive motives, but those are not in themselves distinctively bad motives: it is rather that natural motives are expressed in ways in which they would not be expressed by a virtuous person. There are other failings in which the agent’s motivation is distinctively deplorable, because it is constituted by the exaggeration, parody or perversion of a virtue: an ostentatious disposition to distribute gifts or favours, in place of generosity, or, to take a modern example, sentimentality in place of kindness. Aristotle notices some failings of this type, but, in line with his ‘doctrine of the mean’, he oversimplifies their psychology under an unexamined category of ‘excess’.

A peculiar case, in Aristotle’s treatment, is justice. At the level of actions, at least, it might be thought that there were no distinctive motives to injustice; a person can act unjustly from a variety of motives, and indeed Aristotle mentions the possibility that a coward might treat others unjustly, by ‘getting an unfair share of safety’. If this is generalized, an unjust person might be understood not as one with some characteristic motive, but rather as one who is simply insensitive to considerations of justice. However, Aristotle does introduce a distinctive motive for injustice – ‘greed’ or the desire to have more than others. An unjust person, then – as opposed to someone who has some other vice as a result of which he acts unjustly – is, for Aristotle, a particular greedy type, one who might roughly be recognized in modern terms as ‘a crook’.

Aristotle also notices another kind of failing or deficiency, a lack of perception or feeling for others, but this is typically registered by him only as an extreme characteristic, lying off the scale of the ethical, in the form of a brutality or beastliness which virtually falls out of the category of the human. The fact that he does not have anything to say about the more domesticated forms of such a failing, very familiar to us, is a corollary to his not recognizing a virtue of kindness.

It follows from Aristotle’s holistic and teleological conception of virtue as the fulfilment of the highest human capacities that vices should be basically failings, instances of a lack or an absence. This hardly leaves room for a notion of the vicious: the nearest that Aristotle gets to such an idea is the figure of an obsessional and unscrupulous hedonist. We possess, only too obviously, notions of viciousness deeper and more threatening than this. They point to a concept conspicuously lacking from Aristotle (though to a lesser extent, perhaps, lacking from Plato) – the concept of evil (see Evil).

This leads decisively beyond the conception of vices as failings, even very serious failings. Among evil or vicious motivations, a basic type is cruelty, the desire to cause suffering, a disposition which, as Nietzsche pointed out, contrasts markedly with brutality: it has to share, rather than lack, the sensitivity to others’ suffering that is displayed by kindness. In the most typical modes of cruelty, agents derive their pleasure from the sense of themselves bringing about the pain or frustration of others, and their cruel behaviour is directly an attempted expression of power. Rather different from this, though close to it, is maliciousness, as it might be called, a motivation in the style of envy, where the desire is merely that other people’s happiness should not exist. Persons in this state of mind may be pleased if others come to grief, even though they do not bring it about themselves. Alberich, in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, says, ‘Hagen, mein Sohn! hasse die Frohen!’ – ‘hate the happy’; such a hatred can have many expressions, only some of which involve the specifically active pleasures of cruelty.

Sometimes, cruelty may not only share, as it must, the perceptions that kindness uses, but model itself negatively on kindness, calculating what a kind person might want to do, in order to parody or subvert it. It then takes on the character of perversity. This style of reversal can be applied to virtues other than kindness. There is counter-justice, the disposition to frustrate the ends of justice, not simply in one’s own interests, or to hurt or frustrate a particular person whom one hates or envies, but to take pleasure in the frustration of justice as such and the disappointments inflicted on those of good will. At the limit, this can constitute an almost selfless aesthetic of horribleness, one of the less obvious forms that may be taken by the satisfactions of Milton’s Satan, with his resolve that evil should be his good.