Pure Vices in Plato and Aristotle
Willie Costello
1. A quick list of ancient Greek vices would mirror their cardinal virtues, highlighting
injustice and intemperance, along with cowardice and perhaps impiety. Yet this list may
strike some modern readers as odd, for it omits what intuitively seem to be the worst
among the vices, such as malice, cruelty, and envy.1 Indeed, this thought is more than a
mere intuition; it is theoretically grounded as well. As Thomas Hurka argues in a recent
book, these intuitively worst emotions are alike in being what he calls pure vices:
“attitudes that are inappropriately oriented to their objects”—paradigmatically, love of
something evil or hatred of something good.2 These vices are worst because, unlike vices
of indifference such as callousness or vices of disproportion such as pride, the pure vices
are attitudes that are directly opposed to those proper for their objects, and thus are
rightly given categorical primacy above the others. Why, then, do the ancients seem to
overlook this most important and most evil kind of vice?
This paper will address this question through a close study of the few discussions
these vices receive in Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings, focusing specifically on the vices
of malice and envy. By dissecting these passages, I will show that the ancients’ seeming
neglect of the pure vices emerges not from carelessness or naive optimism, but rather
from a distinctive and principled ethical perspective. However, I will not be arguing that
we should thereby adopt their perspective; rather, my goal is to uncover the foundations
1
As Schopenhauer said of Schadenfreude, “There is no more infallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart and
profound moral worthlessness than an inclination to a sheer and undisguised malignant joy of this kind”
(On the Basis of Morality, quoted in Hurka (2001), p. 101).
2
Hurka (2001), p. 92.
Pure Vices in Plato and Aristotle
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of ancient Greek thinking about pure vices, so as to make it seem more comprehensible
and, perhaps, not so flatly incorrect.
2. The ancient Greek word that will be the focus of this paper is phthonos, a word whose
sense encompasses both ‘malice’ and ‘envy’, or more broadly, ‘ill will’. That is, phthonos
denotes a generally vicious attitude towards another, comprising both desire for and
pleasure in their misfortune as well as hatred of and hope against their prosperity. Thus
phthonos would seem like a very appropriate representative of pure vice: it is an attitude
inappropriately oriented to its object. However, as the various philosophical discussions
of phthonos make clear, this aspect of improper orientation is not all there is to its
meaning. By examining what in addition makes phthonos vicious, we will thus clarify the
ancient ethical perspective on pure vice.
The earliest philosophical discussion of phthonos appears in Plato’s Philebus,
which focuses specifically on phthonos in its sense of ‘malice’, as is clear from Plato’s
statement that “the person who feels phthonos (ho phthonōn) display[s] pleasure at his
neighbor’s misfortunes.”3 This is just the sort of definition of malice we should expect: a
positive attitude (pleasure) towards something evil (another’s misfortune). However,
while this definition may seem to sufficiently capture the concept according to our
standards, Plato adds two important qualifications, which bring out how his conception of
malice, and in turn of pure vice, differs.
The first qualification is that malice is “a pain of the soul” (48b). At first glance,
this is bound to seem like an odd claim for Plato to make; malice is conventionally
3
Philebus, 48b. All translations of the Philebus come from Frede (1993), with slight changes of my own
where I’ve deemed necessary.
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thought of as a positive attitude towards another’s pain or general misfortune, and not as
involving any pain in the malicious person himself. Yet what Plato is actually saying here
is that malice involves a desire in the malicious person to see others suffer, and this
desire is to be understood as a felt lack, which is a pain in our souls. This interpretation of
malice follows the more general interpretation of pleasure and pain set forth earlier in the
Philebus: pain is the disruption and disintegration of our natural bodily and psychic
harmony, whereas pleasure is the restoration from that perturbed condition back to our
harmonious state.4 That is, every pleasure on Plato’s account presupposes some painful
state from which it is restoring our harmony; and this will apply just as readily to the
pleasure of malice. This is why, I take it, Plato identifies malice as a pain of the soul.5
The second qualification to our original definition is more substantial: that malice
“contains a kind of unjust pain and pleasure.”6 In other words, for Plato, merely having
the desire for and taking pleasure in another’s misfortune is not sufficient for malice; in
addition, the desire and pleasure must be in some sense “unjust” (adikos). Plato clarifies
his meaning by means of two examples:
SOCRATES: Now, if you rejoice about evils that happen to your
enemy, is there any injustice or malice in your pleasure?
PROTARCHUS: How should there be?
SOC.: But is there any occasion when it is not unjust to be pleased
rather than pained to see bad things happen to your friends?
4
Cf. Philebus, 31d ff.
Of course, this is not to suggest that Plato here gets things right; indeed, his account of pleasure and pain
seems in many ways overly theoretical and implausible. As we will see, however, the restorative analysis is
not essential to the arguments that follow, nor is its precise characterization of malice as a pain. The
important point for our purposes is to understand what Plato means by this remark—namely, that malice
ultimately rests on a desire in us—and this does not too incredible (think of the evil movie villain who,
when his malicious schemes are thwarted, yells and curses in frustration over his desires being unfulfilled).
It is an interesting question, but ultimately unclear, whether Plato believes that this desire to see others fail
is in fact in all of us; for the time being we can just assume the weaker claim that wherever there is
malicious pleasure, there is also malicious desire.
6
Philebus, 49d.
5
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PRO.: Clearly not.7
These examples demonstrate why the second qualification to the account of malice is so
crucial. As Plato sees it, there are some cases in which taking pleasure in another’s
misfortune is neither malicious nor, it is implied, bad; these are the cases in which it is
your enemy who is suffering. Rather, malice arises, at least paradigmatically, when the
pleasure is taken in your friend’s suffering. Plato characterizes the relevant difference
between these two cases as a matter of what’s just and unjust, but I think we can
reasonably understand what he’s saying as pointing to an element of desert: our enemies
deserve their misfortunes, while our friends do not.8
In this way, what we today think of as malice—a positive attitude towards any
sort of evil—is not a vice (nor even, strictly speaking, malicious) for Plato, because
sometimes such an attitude is what is appropriate and called for (namely, when the evil
befalls one’s enemy). Rather, such an attitude becomes bad (and, according to Plato,
malicious) only when the suffering being enjoyed is itself undeserved. Taking pleasure in
suffering is not a pure vice for Plato, as it is not always (and thus not purely) bad. Rather,
the badness of such pleasures rests on and crucially presupposes the notions of justice and
desert. And so ultimately, I think we must understand malice in Plato as a species or at
least an outgrowth of that most central of vices in his philosophy, injustice.
Of course, this interpretation is partly speculative; the Philebus simply does not
provide as much detail as one would like on this issue. Thus before we consider the
7
Philebus, 49d.
Frede (1993) draws the same conclusion in a footnote to her translation of this passage: “Our friends and
neighbors don’t deserve malice from us; therefore it is unjust to laugh at them” (58, n. 2). Admittedly, this
is a fairly harsh stance for Plato to take, especially in light of our more humanitarian modern sentiments; I
reserve the critique of this view (which will be elaborated in Aristotle) for the end of this paper.
8
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soundness of this view, we will look at how this cursory discussion of malice in Plato is
expanded on and clarified in Aristotle’s writings.
3. The Aristotelian corpus contains three relevant discussions of phthonos: one each in
the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and the Rhetoric. As we will see, the
content of these discussions overlaps in interesting ways, but for ease of presentation I
will analyze these works’ passages in turn, bringing out their connections with each other
(and with the Philebus) along the way.
First, a terminological note: when Aristotle uses the word phthonos it is always in
its sense of ‘envy’, and not of ‘malice’ as in the Philebus; that is, for Aristotle phthonos
denotes pain felt towards another’s prosperity, rather than pleasure taken in their
misfortune as it is for Plato. However, this should not be taken as a substantive difference
between the two philosophers’ accounts. As we saw before, the common meaning of
phthonos encompasses both ‘malice’ and ‘envy’, and so Aristotle’s usage is not out of the
ordinary. And in fact, Aristotle distinguishes these two senses in his writings, reserving
phthonos for ‘envy’ and using another word for ‘malice’: epichairekakia—literally, joy
(epichaire-) in evils (kakia). Moreover, epichairekakia seems to be an Aristotelian
neologism, as it does not appear anywhere in the extant literature before his works. In this
way, I think we can interpret Aristotle’s terminological usage as an attempt to tighten up
the preexisting Greek sense of phthonos, marking off envy as one thing and malice as
another. And this, of course, is a good distinction for Aristotle to draw, for although envy
and malice are similar in some ways (they are both attitudes that are inappropriately
oriented to their objects), they are importantly different as well, as will be brought out in
his various discussions.
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Aristotle’s discussion of phthonos in the Nicomachean Ethics appears during his
explanation of the doctrine of the mean, his famous claim that virtue, or excellence
(aretē), is “a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which
depends on defect.” 9 The fundamental point of this doctrine is that excellence of
character is a mean or intermediate disposition (hexis) with regard to emotions and
actions (pathē and praxeis)—in other words, being disposed to feel the amount of
emotion and to do the sort of action proper to the given situation, where ‘proper’ is
understood as a relative mean between feeling or doing too much and too little. Thus the
doctrine of the mean should not be confused for a general recommendation of
moderation; to the contrary, Aristotle’s account allows for, say, furious anger to be the
virtuous response in some situations, namely those circumstances in which that is what’s
called for.10 There is more to say about the doctrine, but this brief summary will suffice.
Now we must ask: What does this account have to do with pure vice?
At first glance, it may seem that Aristotle views malice and envy as exceptions to
his general doctrine; for he writes:
But not every action nor every emotion admits of a mean; for some
have names that already imply badness, such as malice,
shamelessness, envy… For all of these and suchlike things imply
by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excesses
or deficiencies of them.11
From this passage, it may look as if Aristotle identifies malice and envy as pure vices,
attitudes that are bad in themselves and not insofar as they are felt in excess or defect. But
9
Nicomachean Ethics, 1107a2. All quotations of the Nicomachean Ethics come from the W. D. Ross
translation, as revised by J. O. Urmson, printed in Barnes (1984), with slight changes of my own where I’ve
deemed necessary.
10
For a more detailed defense of this interpretation, see Urmson (1973), p. 225.
11
Nicomachean Ethics, 1107a9-13.
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in fact, Aristotle’s point is not that malice and envy are emotions to which the doctrine of
the mean does not apply; rather, he is drawing attention to the fact that their names
specifically pick out excesses of some other emotion, and for this reason do not
themselves admit of virtuous means. That is, the reason why malice and envy may seem
to be bad in themselves is because they are themselves excesses, which is the true reason
for their badness.
Indeed, in the chapter immediately following these remarks, Aristotle identifies
the mean emotion of which malice and envy are the extremes; he writes:
Righteous indignation is a mean between envy and malice, and
these states are concerned with the pain and pleasure that are felt at
the fortunes of our neighbors; the man who is characterized by
righteous indignation is pained at undeserved good fortune; the
envious man, going beyond him, is pained at all good fortune; and
the malicious man falls so far short of being pained that he even
rejoices.12
Aristotle’s claim, then, is that envy and malice lie at opposite ends of a continuum which
has as its mean righteous indignation (nemesis): pain taken in undeserved good fortune.
Thus similarly to Plato, Aristotle believes that the mere act of being pained by another’s
happiness is not bad in itself, but rather bad only when the happiness is deserved; this is
envy. In this way, what we call malice and envy—love of an evil, and hatred of a good—
are not pure vices for Aristotle: their badness ultimately rests on considerations of justice
and desert, and arises out of the more fundamental vice of injustice.
However, Aristotle’s analysis is not without its problems—most strikingly, his
claim that envy and malice lie on a single emotional continuum. As many scholars have
12
Nicomachean Ethics, 1108b1-5.
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noted,13 this is a point about which Aristotle is patently wrong, or at least confused, for it
is clear from the very definitions he offers that envy and malice cannot be wrong amounts
of a single emotion. Envy is pain taken in anyone’s good fortune, whereas malice is
pleasure taken in anyone’s bad fortune, and so there are two axes along which the
emotions differ: the pleasure/pain taken, and the goodness/badness of the fortune they are
taken in. But in contrasting envy with righteous indignation, Aristotle makes the relevant
axis of difference that of whose good fortune it is: while the envious person is pained by
the good fortune of all (including the deserving), the righteously indignant person is
pained by only that of the undeserving. Thus the correct defect on this continuum should
be being pained at no one’s good fortune (including the undeserving)—that is, feeling no
pain at all, or what we may characterize as a sort of apathy or impassivity. And this
emotion (or, rather, the lack thereof) is certainly not the same as malice.
However, this is not to say that malice cannot be incorporated into the doctrine of
the mean’s framework, but only that it should not be connected to envy and righteous
indignation as Aristotle suggests. Rather, we can recognize malice as the excess of
another proper emotion, that of taking pleasure in the bad fortune of the deserving;
indeed, this is the emotion we saw Plato contrast with malice in the Philebus above,
which we may call, for simplicity’s sake, ‘righteous malice’ (as opposed to the other,
vicious malice). And analogous to the case of righteous indignation, the defect of this
emotion would be a failure to take in pleasure in anyone’s misfortune, again a sort of
indifference of impassivity. Thus although malice and envy do not fit into the doctrine of
the mean exactly as Aristotle would have it, they can still be assimilated into its general
13
See, for example, Urmson (1973), Mills (1985), and Taylor (2006).
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framework. And as we shall see, Aristotle comes close to just such an analysis in his
other works.
4. Aristotle’s discussion of malice and envy in the Eudemian Ethics, like many of his
other discussions in that work, closely parallels the analysis he puts forth in the
Nicomachean Ethics. However, the points at which it diverges contain important
qualifications, and so, putting aside the controversial issue of which of these treatises was
in fact written first, I think we can see the Eudemian Ethics’s discussion as improving on
the Nicomachean Ethics’s account in several ways.
The first occurrence of envy in the Eudemian Ethics is in its table of means,
excesses, and defects.14 Here Aristotle lists in a systematic fashion a variety of particular
applications of his doctrine of the mean, including the mean emotion of righteous
indignation, whose excess is listed as envy, mirroring the Nicomachean Ethics’s analysis.
However, contrary to that analysis, the defect of righteous indignation is listed not as
malice but simply as “unnamed” (anōnumon),15 which, given our previous remarks on
this defect, should be seen as a welcome modification.
Of course, it may be thought that, although Aristotle leaves the defect of righteous
indignation unnamed, he may still have something like the concept of malice in mind,
perhaps simply not yet having coined his term (epichairekakia) for it. However, the more
detailed analysis of envy that follows this initial listing tells against this suggestion:
A man is envious when he feels pain at the sight of prosperity
more often than he ought, for even those who deserve prosperity
14
Eudemian Ethics, II.3, 1220b38 ff.
Eudemian Ethics, 1221a3. All quotations of the Eudemian Ethics come from the J. Solomon translation,
printed in Barnes (1984), with slight changes of my own where I’ve deemed necessary.
15
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cause, when prosperous, pain to the envious. The opposite
character has not so definite a name: he is one who shows excess
in not grieving even at the prosperity of the undeserving, but
accepts all.16
Thus Aristotle’s analysis of envy here mirrors the corrected account we proposed above:
the relevant axis of difference is whose prosperity one’s pain is directed towards, so that
whereas the righteously indignant person is pained by only the prosperity of the
undeserving, the envious person is pained by everyone’s, and his opposite by no one’s.
And surely, this opposite character should not be called malicious but rather, as Aristotle
suggests, “accepting of all” (eucherēs, 1221b2), an adjective that can alternatively be
translated as ‘tolerant or indifferent to evil’, a close match to our previous description of
‘apathetic’ or ‘impassive’. Thus we find in this section of the Eudemian Ethics a much
more satisfying assimilation of envy into the doctrine of the mean.
However, later in the work, in his only other discussion of envy, Aristotle seems
to lapse back into the Nicomachean Ethics’s confusions, trying again to unite envy and
malice along a single continuum; he writes:
Envy is pain felt at deserved good fortune, while the feeling of the
malicious man has itself no name,17 but such a man shows his
nature by rejoicing over undeserved ill fortune. Between them is
the man inclined to righteous indignation, the name given by the
ancients to pain felt at either good or bad fortune if undeserved, or
to joy felt at them if deserved.18
This analysis is nearly identical to that found in the Nicomachean Ethics, identifying
envy and malice as the two extremes of the mean of righteous indignation. Aside from
16
Eudemian Ethics, 1221a37-b2.
Here Aristotle uses the adjective ‘malicious’ (epichairekakos) but does not recognize there being any
associated nominal form of ‘malice’ (that is, epichairekakia, the very word he uses, and likely coins, in the
Nicomachean Ethics, as discussed above). This would seem to be proof that the Eudemian Ethics was
written before the Nicomachean Ethics, but such comparisons are unreliable due to the high rate of textual
interpolations by ancient editors of Aristotle’s texts, especially with regard to the Eudemian Ethics.
18
Eudemian Ethics, 1233b20-26.
17
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being itself untenable, as we saw above, this proposal contradicts the Eudemian Ethics’s
earlier remarks, which identified the opposite of envy, or the defect of righteous
indignation, as the failure to feel pain towards any prosperity, not as the taking of
pleasure in any misfortune.
However, this passage does suggest a possible source of Aristotle’s confusions,
for he here characterizes righteous indignation in two distinct ways: first, as pain felt
towards undeserved fortune, and second, as pleasure taken in deserved fortune. As was
argued above, only the former of these descriptions is related to envy; the latter—what
we earlier labeled ‘righteous malice’—is by contrast related only to (vicious) malice. So
it seems that part of Aristotle’s confusions regarding the relation between malice and
envy stems from his running together of the two separate means of righteous indignation
and righteous malice (emotions both of which may very well have fallen under the
common sense of nemesis, just as the common sense of phthonos included what Aristotle
distinguishes as envy and malice). Thinking these two feelings were the same (or, at
least, similar enough), Aristotle understandably concluded that their excesses, envy and
malice, belonged on a single continuum. Admittedly, it seems odd that Aristotle would
distinguish these two senses of nemesis and then not find this distinction relevant to his
considerations of envy and malice. Nonetheless, this is what we find in the text, and
although this passage helps make Aristotle’s confused analysis more comprehensible, it
does not make it any more correct.
5. Aristotle’s other major discussion of envy and malice appears in the Rhetoric, in his
book on the emotions relevant to persuasive speech. Due to this change of context,
Aristotle’s remarks no longer rely on the doctrine of the mean’s theoretical framework,
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and he is free to discuss the concepts in a more general manner. Nonetheless, his
comments correspond closely to those we have already seen, while at the same time
adding some helpful clarifications.
Aristotle begins his discussion by focusing on righteous indignation, claiming that
it is “most directly opposed to pity,”19 the emotion that was the topic of his last chapter.
There he defined pity as “a feeling of pain at an apparent evil, destructive or painful,
which befalls one who does not deserve it”;20 righteous indignation is opposed to this
because it is pain at “unmerited good fortune.”21 However, the two feelings are not
opposed in the sense of being incompatible; to the contrary, Aristotle claims that they are
“due to the same character”—namely, “good character.”22 As he explains:
For we ought to feel sympathy and pity for unmerited distress, and
to feel indignation at unmerited prosperity; for whatever is
undeserved is unjust.23
Thus although pity and righteous indignation are opposed in that they are directed
towards different values of fortune, they are alike in that each are feelings of pain taken
in undeserved (and so, unjust) fortune, which is why they are both good.
Aristotle then goes on to distinguish righteous indignation from envy. For as he
says, although envy is similarly “a disturbing pain excited by the prosperity of others,”24
it differs in that it is excited “not by the prosperity of the undeserving but by that of those
19
Rhetoric, 1386b10. All quotations of the Rhetoric come from the W. Rhys Roberts translation, printed in
Barnes (1984), with slight changes of my own where I’ve deemed necessary.
20
Rhetoric, 1385b13-14. Aristotle’s definition of pity goes on to emphasize the importance of the “apparent
evil” or misfortune being one “which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and
moreover to befall us soon” (1385b14-16). This is a significant aspect of his account, but not, I think,
directly relevant to our concerns.
21
Rhetoric, 1386b11.
22
Rhetoric, 1386b13.
23
Rhetoric, 1386b14-15.
24
Rhetoric, 1386b18-19.
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like and equal with us.”25 It is curious that Aristotle does not explicitly make the relevant
contrast here one of desert, but the implication is clear: those like and equal with us in
some sense deserve their fortunes, and so do not call for our feelings of pain.26 Rather,
any pain at their (deserved) prosperity would be envious. Similarly, though Aristotle
never is explicit about it here, pain felt towards deserved misfortune—the excess of pity,
or what we may call ‘blind compassion’—would also be bad, in the sense of being overly
and needlessly sympathetic.
What, then, about malice? Aristotle leads into this issue by first discussing the
case of righteous malice; he writes:
The feelings of pity and righteous indignation will obviously be
attended by the converse feelings of satisfaction. For he who is
pained by the unmerited distress of others will be pleased, or at
least not pained, by their merited distress. For instance, no good
man can be pained by the punishment of parricides or murderers.
For we ought to rejoice in such things, as we must at the prosperity
of the deserving; both these things are just.27
Righteous malice thus appears as a sort of converse of righteous indignation: it is a
feeling of pleasure rather than pain, and directed toward only deserved rather than
undeserved fortune (specifically, in its case, misfortune). And since righteous malice
mirrors righteous indignation in this way, it is also good; just as undeserved prosperity is
cause for pain, deserved misfortune is cause for pleasure. In addition, Aristotle also
identifies a fourth type of proper emotion, mirroring pity: pleasure taken in deserved
prosperity, or what we may call ‘tempered joy’. Thus, far from the Nicomachean and
Eudemian Ethics’s recognition of only righteous indignation, the Rhetoric identifies four
25
Rhetoric, 1386b19-20.
This echoes Plato’s original formulation of the contrast between righteous and vicious malice as one
between rejoicing as the misfortunes of our enemies and of our friends.
27
Rhetoric, 1386b25-31.
26
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proper emotions, corresponding to the different possible combinations of attitudes,
objects, and desert values, as summarized in the following table:
Desert Value of Object
Attitude
Pleasure
Pain
Object
Deserved
Prosperity
tempered joy
Misfortune
righteous malice
Undeserved
Prosperity
righteous indignation
Misfortune
pity
Table 1.1: Aristotelian Proper Emotions (italics)
Interestingly, Aristotle suggests that the good person will display all these emotions (in
the appropriate circumstances); as he states, “All these feelings are associated with the
same type of character” (1386b33-34). In other words, although Aristotle recognizes how
these four emotions are different, he sees them as coming as a sort of complete package
in the good person: if she has one, she will have them all. It is doubtful how
psychologically plausible this claim is, but it is a nicely logical position for Aristotle to
take, reflecting the underlying symmetries between the emotions. In addition, this close
connection offers a further explanation for why Aristotle seems to run righteous malice
and righteous indignation together in the Eudemian and (presumably) Nicomachean
Ethics (though it does not, of course, make his analyses there any less in error).
Righteous malice being defined in this way, vicious malice can be identified by
analogy with envy: that is, pleasure taken in anyone’s misfortune, even that of the
undeserving. Similarly, we can identify the excess of tempered joy as well, by analogy
with what we earlier called ‘blind compassion’: it will be pleasure taken in anyone’s
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prosperity, or what we may call ‘indiscriminate joy’. Thus we can fill in our previous
table of proper emotions with their corresponding improper attitudes:
Desert Value of Object
Attitude
Pleasure
Pain
Object
Deserved
Undeserved
Prosperity
tempered joy
indiscriminate joy
Misfortune
righteous malice
(vicious) malice
Prosperity
envy
righteous indignation
Misfortune
blind compassion
pity
Table 1.2: Aristotelian Proper (italics) and Improper (bold) Emotions
As each of the proper emotions is associated with a good character, each of the
improper emotions is associated with a bad character. However, they do not all come as a
complete package; rather, they come in pairs. As Aristotle explains:
The man who is delighted by others’ misfortunes is identical with
the man who envies others’ prosperity. For anyone who is pained
by the occurrence or existence of a given thing must be pleased by
that thing’s non-existence or destruction.28
This passage shows that the feelings that make a person envious imply that she should
also be malicious, and vice versa: if you are pained by everyone’s good fortune, you
should also be pleased, or at least not pained, by everyone’s misfortune. Regardless of
this claim’s empirical validity, it at least makes some logical sense (and a similar
connection could be drawn between indiscriminate joy and blind compassion). This in
turn gives us a further clue as to why Aristotle tried to unite envy and malice in his other
works. Yet far from being the extremes of a single mean (and thus contraries), envy and
28
Rhetoric, 1386b35-1387a3.
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malice are correctly identified in the Rhetoric as extremes of different mean emotions,
though recognized as related due to the similar way in which they respond to situations.
In this way, the Rhetoric presents Aristotle’s most detailed and cogent analysis of
envy and malice, which in turn presents us with the most developed account of the
ancient Greek conception of these emotions. We are now ready to consider the soundness
of this account and the question of whether this is an analysis we should actually accept.
6. As we have seen, the reason Plato and Aristotle do not identify what we would
consider purely vicious attitudes—love of something evil, or hatred of something good—
as pure vices is because desert is a crucial element of the value of these attitudes for
them, as, for instance, taking pleasure is another’s pain is actually good when the pain is
deserved. However, it may seem that this claim is not at odds with the contemporary
position, for anyone who accepts the unchanging negative value of the pure vices can
also accept a positive value associated with people getting what they deserve. On this
view one could say that cases of righteous malice, which Aristotle praises as simply
good, are more properly understood as bad insofar as they are purely vicious (that is,
pleasure taken in misfortune) and good insofar as the misfortune is deserved.
Yet anyone who wants to attribute a view like this to Aristotle without
contradiction will also have to accept something along the lines of a non-additive
principle of organic unities, according to which the value of the whole need not be the
sum of the values its parts would have if they existed apart from the whole.29 For
Aristotle also identifies the defect of righteous malice (what we earlier called
29
For more on organic unities, see Moore (1903), especially Chapter I, §§18-22.
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‘impassivity’, failing to take pleasure even in deserved misfortune) as bad, even though
according to the present account it should be both good (or at least neutral) insofar as it is
not purely vicious and good insofar as the misfortune is deserved. If the principle by
which we determined the value of the whole were purely additive, this would tell us that
impassivity is of greater value than righteous malice (since the parts of the former are of
equal or greater value than those of the latter), pace Aristotle.
However, even if such a reductionist account of Aristotle could be made out, it
would be misleading, for there is a strong sense in which Aristotle thinks that the pure
vices, as contemporary ethical theories would define them, simply do not exist. These
contemporary accounts identify pure vices as those attitudes that are intrinsically evil
because they are inappropriately oriented towards their objects. This is to consider these
attitudes at a level of abstraction where specific concerns such as desert do not enter the
picture. And this is the sort of ethical move Aristotle is unwilling to make, for as he
repeatedly stresses, ethical considerations must be made with an eye to the particular
situation.30 Thus the reason he does not accept love of an evil or hatred of a good as a
pure vice is because he believes there are particular circumstances in which these
attitudes are called for.
Rather, the purely vicious attitudes for Aristotle will be those that are evil in all
circumstances, whenever they occur. These attitudes will include what he identifies as
(vicious) malice and envy, and more fundamentally, those attitudes exemplified by that
chief ancient vice of injustice. For it is the unjust man who will respond viciously in
every situation, taking pleasure in everyone’s misfortune and feeling pain at their
30
This is part of what Aristotle means when he denies there being any general principles of ethical conduct
and claims rather that to act virtuously is to act as would the sage, or the man of practical wisdom.
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prosperity, among other things. This, I think, is why injustice receives such prime
treatment in ancient ethics.
So although to a certain extent ancient Greek ethics did not recognize what we
now consider pure vices, this is not because it subscribed to “a naive optimism about the
possibilities for human evil” or “a sunny picture of human vice.”31 Rather, their account
should be seen as approaching the issue of vice from a different perspective, one which
emphasizes the particular circumstances in which our attitudes and emotions occur. And
although this leads them to disregard our category of pure vices (since they are not, in all
situations, evil), this does not mean that they deny that we can be purely vicious in other,
just as evil ways.
7. This brings me to my last, and in many ways most difficult, consideration. For even if
we accept the ancient perspective on vice, we may still hold that our contemporary pure
vices are always evil. That is, we may reject the ancients’ identification of righteous
indignation and righteous malice as goods and claim instead that the love of an evil and
the hatred of a good are bad in every situation, even when the evil is deserved and the
good undeserved. This response, I think, matches our contemporary moral sentiments,
which emphasize tolerance and good will towards all. In other words, there is a very deep
sense in which the ancients’ conception of what is good and bad simply does not square
with ours. What, then, do we make of their account?
It would be a mistake to uncritically assume that our modern values are superior
to the Greeks’, or vice versa. As much as we today may find righteous indignation and
31
Hurka (2001), pp. 103, 104.
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righteous malice reprehensible, these were to the Greeks genuinely good attitudes, and
necessary when the appropriate circumstances arose;32 to simply brush their view aside as
uncivilized or erroneous would be to miss the point. Similarly, we should not readily
abandon our contemporary values, either, for it is not without reason that we consider
them good. Personally, when I weigh the two perspectives against one another, I find
myself pulled in both directions and am unable to rule definitively in favor of either view.
Yet the goal of this paper was not to defend or defeat the Greeks’ conception of vice;
rather, it was to uncover the foundations of their view, and this is enlightening in its own
right. Ancient ethics, like ancient philosophy in general, invites us to adopt a different
perspective from what we are used to, and thereby shows us a way of thinking that we
may have otherwise missed.
32
This, I think, is the thrust behind Myles Burnyeat’s 1996 Howison Lecture in Philosophy, “Freedom,
Anger, Tranquility: An Archaeology of Feeling."
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WORKS CITED
Barnes, J. (Ed.). (1984). The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford
Translation (Vol. 2). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Burnyeat, M. F. (1996). “Freedom, Anger, Tranquility: An Archaeology of Feeling."
Howison Lecture in Philosophy.
Frede, D. (1993). Plato: Philebus. Indianapolis: Hackett Publish Company.
Hurka, T. (2001). Virtue, Vice, and Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mills, M. J. (1985). “ΦΘΟΝΟΣ and Its Related ΠΑΘΗ in Plato and Aristotle.”
Phronesis, 30 (1): 1-12.
Moore, G. E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1971.
Taylor, C. C. W. (2006). Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics Books II-IV. Oxford: Clarendon
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Urmson, J. O. (1973). “Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean.” American Philosophical
Quarterly, 10 (3): 223-230.
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