Section 1: Moral virtues are a kind of habit

Virtue, then, is of two kinds: intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtue usually comes about and grows as a result of teaching, _[15] wherefore it requires experience and time. Moral virtue, in contrast, comes about as a result of habit or acquired disposition, which is why its name (ethikê) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit).

From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arise in us by nature, because nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance, the stone which by nature moves downwards _[20] cannot be trained or habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times. Nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Thus, the virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature. Rather, we are by nature receptive to them, and they are made complete in us by _[30] habit.

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the capacity and later exhibit the activity. This is plain in the case of the senses. For it wasn’t by frequently seeing or hearing that we received the capacity to see or hear. On the contrary, we had the capacity to see and hear before we used them, and didn’t come to have them by using them. But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of skills we acquire. For with things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn them by doing them. For instance, people become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre. Similarly, we become just people by doing just actions, temperate people _[1103b1] by doing temperate actions, and courageous people by doing courageous actions.

This is confirmed by what happens in city-states. For legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them. And this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not bring it about it miss their mark, _[5] and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.

Again, it is from the same causes and by the same means that every virtue is both produced and destroyed, and the same goes for every skill. For it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced. And the corresponding statement is true of builders and of all the rest. People will be good or bad builders as a result of _[10] building well or poorly. For if this were not so, there would have been no need of a teacher, but everyone would have been born good or bad at their craft.

This, then, is the case with the virtues as well. By doing the actions we do in our dealings with people we become just or unjust, _[15] and by doing the actions that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become courageous or cowardly. The same is true of bodily desires and of feelings of anger. Some people become temperate and good-tempered while other people become intemperate and excessively angry by behaving in one way or the other _[20] in the appropriate circumstances. In a word, then, states of character arise out of like activities.

This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind, because the states of character correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we, from the time we are young, form habits of one kind or of another. Instead, it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference. _[25]