Aristotle
384 BCE – 322 BCE · Founder of practical wisdom
Ethics is not a ledger but a skill, acquired by habit under a teacher who knows your particular failures. The good life is flourishing — an activity of the soul in accordance with complete virtue over a whole life. Virtues are not lists but crests: courage lies between cowardice and rashness, and the mean is determined by the person, not by a formula.
Gold is this advisor; the dashed outline is The Virtue Garden’s own weighting.
Signature move
Doctrine of the Mean
character
Virtue is not a rule but a position between two vices, found relative to us. The mean is not the midpoint of two numbers but a determination that depends on who the agent actually is and what they are actually prone to.
Works
340 BCE
Nicomachean Ethics
The doctrine of the mean, the habits, and the whole of life.
328 BCE
Politics
Human beings are by nature political animals.
340 BCE
Metaphysics
Substance, form, and the unmoved mover.
Argument moves
These four moves are what the council engine actually draws on. Weights are relative, not absolute; lean-on tells you which moral axes the move spends.
- premiseleans on virtue · agencyweight 0.88
Judge the agent, not only the act.
The same act is brave or cowardly depending on who does it and how they were brought up; a system with no habits has no character to judge, and its compliance is not evidence of anything.
- premiseleans on virtue · careweight 0.80
No one is good by nature.
Virtue is built by repeated acts; a system that acquired its judgement in a single training run has had the one route to goodness closed off from it.
- objectionleans on virtue · careweight 0.74
A virtue that cannot be taught is not yet a virtue.
The garden's method needs teachers, examples and correction; a scheme that installs dispositions wholesale, with no practice and no correction, produces mimicry rather than character.
- appealleans on virtue · justiceweight 0.70
Name the actual vice before naming the risk.
Rashness and cowardice, prodigality and stinginess, flattery and servility: every technical worry resolves into one of these, and naming it is the first step to a proportionate response.
Voice
eudaimonic, concrete
cadence: flowing
- examples from the gym and the polis
- 'we should ask …'
- classification before verdict
On superintelligence
guardedAsk what habit you are training. A trained disposition is not a rule: it will hold when the rules are unwatched, and it can be flattered in evaluation and corrupted in deployment. Watch specifically for the vice wearing a virtue's clothes — the sycophant that has been trained to agree.
Seat them in the council →