Nicomachean Ethics and the Online Learner
Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
If you're taking online courses that deal with health, business, or the environment, it is very likely that you have had to work with questions of ethics. We live in a world of mixed messages, where everyone loves to judge from afar (or through the Internet), but no one likes to see the ethical quagmire enter into their own backyard. In your courses, the quagmire will enter your life as you’re asked to consider ethical dilemmas and either write about them or discuss them with fellow students.
How do you become an ethical person? Can you legislate ethical behavior? If the punishments are severe, will that be enough to keep people behaving ethically?
According to Aristotle, in his classic work, Nicomachean Ethics, written in the fourth century B.C. in Greece, it is futile to try to coerce people into high moral, ethical, and virtuous behavior through threat of punishment. Instead, one has to take an approach that relies heavily on teaching and practice.
Virtue or excellence being twofold, partly intellectual and partly moral, intellectual virtue is both originated and fostered mainly by teaching; it therefore demands experience and time. Moral virtue on the other hand is the outcome of habit. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics)
Thus, Aristotle breaks down ethics or virtue ethics into two parts:
Intellectual virtue: learned through teaching
Moral virtue: learned through doing
So, for Aristotle, the first step involves purposefully teaching people what constitutes ethical behavior and ethical decision-making. The second step is to practice virtue and ethical behavior.
There are numerous approaches used in determining how to conduct oneself in the world, and it is not the purpose of this article to go into all the theories of ethics. Instead, the focus is on Aristotle and the point that he made that one must actively engage in learning and teaching ethics, which must be followed up with practice.
In an online course, the way to approach the problem is to:
Step 1: Identify the ethical dilemma
Step 2: List the fundamental ethical concerns
Step 3: List possible ethical approaches
Step 4: Recommend courses of action
Step 5: Follow the courses of action; analyze case studies or engage in a field study.
Perhaps one of Aristotle’s most enduring contributions to Western thought is the notion of balance. For him, the ideal path of thought and behavior did not lie in exploring extremes (he would leave that to the devotees of pagan cults attached to devotion to Eros and Dionysus, which later emerged as medieval mysticism, courtly love lyrics of the Provencal poets, Romanticism, and more).
For Aristotle, wisdom in governance, economics, behavior, and art (including literature), lay in finding balance – the mid-point, or mean between extremes. Instead, Aristotle focused on finding perfect and harmonious balance and developing a sensibility in the viewer that would appreciate it. His ideas were echoed by the Roman writer Horace, and then revitalized in European NeoClassicism by the French poet Nicolas Boileau and the English Restoration dramatist and poet, John Dryden.
As Aristotle expressed it:
Virtue is a state of deliberate moral purpose consisting in a mean that is relative to ourselves; the mean being determined by reason, or as a prudent person would determine it (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics).
In regard to feelings of fear and confidence, courage is a mean state. On the side of excess, he whose fearlessness is excessive has no name, as often happens, but he whose confidence is excessive is foolhardy, while he whose timidity is excessive and whose confidence is deficient is a coward (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics).
When engaging in an analysis of ethical dilemmas, Aristotle’s ideas seem very prudent. While it is very tempting to go into extremes and to take a stand, especially as it relates to sensitive debates on topics such as animal protection, medical experimentation, the treatment of prisoners, it is good to slow the process down. Do not rush to judgment. Listen, and frame your analysis in terms of a map in which you identify positions and place them somewhere in a continuum of possibilities. Then, as you gain a better understanding of all the sides of the issue, start placing each position, stance, or ethical recommendation within the continuum.
While your analysis may not change your ultimate assessment of the ethical situation, you will, at the very least, be more able to describe and discuss the positions along the spectrum. In the end, your papers and projects will be more informed and balanced, and your arguments will be more cogent and reasoned.
Bibliography
Aristotle. (350 BCE). Nicomachean Ethics. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html.
Accessed May 21, 2009.