Sadie McCloud

Scholars disagree about how to understand Aristotle’s account of the vicious person. Some argue that he allows the vicious agent internal harmony and principled action; others maintain that vice entails disorder, conflict, and the absence of genuine commitment. This debate turns on an apparent inconsistency in Aristotle’s claims. In Nicomachean Ethics VII, he describes the intemperate person as regretless and motivationally consistent; in NE IX.4, he describes the base person as regretful and motivationally conflicted. I argue that there is no inconsistency because Aristotle is an experiential pluralist about vice: he allows that different vicious people can have different psychological experiences. An agent’s psychological experience depends on how she evaluates her own character. This interpretation reveals that Aristotle denies that internal disunity and motivational conflict are essential to vice. In this, his position marks a sharp departure from that of Plato for whom conflict and disorder are essential to vice.

Some interpreters hold that, for Aristotle, the pleasant is the primary de dicto goal of every vicious person. I argue that this is false and develop an alternative account of vicious motivation by self-interest (to sumpheron). In EN 2.3, Aristotle claims that the vicious person errs with respect to the objects of choice: the pleasant, the sumpheron, and the fine. I argue that the vicious person can commit conceptual errors, ordering errors, and errors of omission in her pursuit of these objects. I develop this reading by providing an interpretation of Aristotle’s account of the sumpheron on which it is both a means and an end.