The Baha'i Studies Listserv Are virtue and vice defined according to Plato or Aristotle? Plato had a binary view where virtue and vice were opposing traits. Aristotle by contrast had a tertiary view where virtue was the golden mean between two vices.
Christianity took a Platonic definition of virtue and vice, while Judaism and Islam took a more Aristotelian definitions. For example, courage is a virtue. Cowardice, the opposite is a vice. Now imagine, a bar of measurement (to be repeated for other comparisons) with courage on one side and cowardice on the other. The closer to courage the more virtuous and the closer to vicious the more vicious. That's the Platonic view. Now, this time put courage in the middle and put recklessness where courage was. The closer to courage the more virtuous, the closer to cowardice the more vicious by deficient virtue, and the closer to recklessness the more vicious by excessive virtue. The Divine Comedy by Dante is a good summary of the Christian view. Concupiscence or desire is seen as the root of all evil. Virtue is the absence of desire and vice is the presence of desire. Examples can include: temperance versus gluttony, chastity versus lust, generosity versus greed, patience versus anger, kindness versus envy, diligence versus sloth, and humility versus pride. Though virtuous pagans do appear in the Divine Comedy and some vicious Christians as well, virtuous Christians and vicious pagans tend to be the norm. Vices are desires for things people tend to erroneously views as unqualified goods, and virtues as abstaining from them which will lead people to view them as unqualified evils. Though this is backwards, virtues are unqualified goods and vices are unqualified evils. There was a series on the Seven Deadly Sins on the history channel. It focused on the Christian view of vice mainly, but did mention the view of other religions as well. For Christians, vices are the innate inclination/orientation/ tendency in human to desire fleshy/material/physical/worldly desires/pleasures/pursuits rather than spiritual/metaphysical/otherworldly ones. Note:That while vices may lead people to sin, this is not necessary to be a result of vice. Vices are desires or the tendencies to have them and sins are acts. Vices are often conflated with the desire to do proscribed or forbidden things, but it is still vicious to act out of desire, even if the act done is not proscribed or forbidden. On a side note, I never noticed how similar Buddhism and Christianity were. By contrast in Judaism and Islam, vice is defined as immoderate desire. Al-Ghazali for one wrote a book on the Islamic as opposed to the Christian view of concupiscence and desire. Basically do that thing I did at the top of the page with the example of the courage-cowardice binary by adding recklessness to form a tertiary division, but with all those seven pairs given earlier now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concupiscence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_virtues http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins Sent from my iPad __________________________________________________ You are subscribed to Baha'i Studies as: mailto:arch...@mail-archive.com Unsubscribe: send a blank email to mailto:leave-687703-27401.54f46e81b66496c9909bcdc2f7987...@list.jccc.edu Subscribe: send subscribe bahai-st in the message body to ly...@list.jccc.edu Or subscribe: http://list.jccc.edu:8080/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=bahai-st Baha'i Studies is available through the following: Mail - mailto:bahai-st@list.jccc.edu Web - http://list.jccc.edu:8080/read/?forum=bahai-st News (on-campus only) - news://list.jccc.edu/bahai-st Old Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/bahai-st@list.jccc.net New Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/bahai-st@list.jccc.edu
