Aristotle the Virtue Doctor

It is difficult for us to effectively diagnose our current character state such that we can follow Aristotle's advice to aim for the opposite extreme. The law can provide us a general standard, and the household strives to fill in the particular gaps inevitable to laws that must be universal. Neither, however, can ensure a proper diagnosis. Careful attention to Aristotle's discussion (in both his Metaphysics and his Nicomachean Ethics) of how the medical doctor generates health gives us a model we can apply to Aristotle's discussions of character virtues and vices in Book IV of Nicomachean Ethics. The medical doctor must identify the form of health and its various lacks, must have a sufficiently varied set of images by which to properly grasp these in the varied context of human beings, must attend carefully to the patient's impeded form of health, and must trace this impediment back to some cause on the basis of which she can act to correct the problem. By applying this model, we can more profitably employ Aristotle's discussions of individual virtues in our responsible attempts to diagnose and heal the characters of those who belong to us.