tions over a long period which produce not only the right course of action but the right character, the right person who is taking that course.
Another important feature of Aristotle's approach to right action, which also requires much time, is education. The three ingredients for long-time virtue, or moral behavior, of the right course of action, are education, the mean between extremes, and habitual repetition of action based on moral learning and that mean:
Virtue, then, is of two sorts, virtue of thought and virtue of character. Virtue of thought arises and grows mostly from teaching; that is why it needs experience of time. Virtue of character results from habit; hence its name 'ethical'.... It is also clear that none of the virtues arises in us naturally. . . . Rather, we are by nature able to acquire them, and we are completed through habit (Aristotle, 1999, p. 18).
We are neither good nor bad by nature, but we have in us the ability to see what constitutes right action. We follow the course of right action by seeing it as a "course," not as a single action, or numerous separate actions. We move along that path or course through moral education and through taking mean-based actions habitually over one's lifetime.
Aristotle makes clear that moral virtue is a matter of practice, that we become a good person through practicing the virtues, much as one becomes a good musician---or a bad musician---only in the act of playing his or her instrument again and again over a lifetime.
It is also an essential part of the definition of moral virtue, according to Aristotle, that the habits practiced find a middle ground between excess and deficiency. The acts of courage which create the courageous person are, obviously, void of cowardice, but neither do they imply utter fearlessness. The "mean" is what is sought through reason and p
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