Section 9: The mean hard to hit, and is a matter of perception, not of reasoning

We have sufficiently stated, then, that moral virtue is a mean and in what sense it is so, _[20] and that it is a mean between two vices (one involving excess, the other deficiency), and that it is such because it aims at what is intermediate in emotions and actions.

Hence it is no easy task to be good. For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle ground–for example, not everyone can even find the middle of a circle, but only someone who knows how. _[25] In the same way, anyone can get angry or give or spend money–that is easy. But not everyone can to do these things in relation to the right person, to the right amount, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way. To do that is not easy. That’s why goodness is both rare and laudable and noble.

Hence he who aims at the intermediate must first _[30] steer clear from what is the more contrary to it, as Calypso advises:

Steer the ship out beyond that surf and spray.

For of the extremes, one is more in error, the other less so. Therefore, since to hit the mean is extremely hard, we must as a second best, as people say, take the lesser of two evils, and this _[35] will be done best in the way we describe.

But we must consider _[1109a1] what we ourselves are easily drawn towards. For some people are draw to one thing and other people to other things, and this will be recognized from the pleasure and the pain we feel. We must pull ourselves away to the contrary extreme. For we will get into the intermediate state by pulling away from _[5] error, as people do in straightening sticks that are bent.

In everything we must guard most of all against what is pleasant or pleasurable. For we do not judge it impartially. We ought, then, to feel towards pleasure as the elders of the people felt towards Helen, _[10] and in all circumstances repeat their saying. For if we dismiss pleasure in this way, we are less likely to go astray.

To sum up, then, by doing these things we will be best able to hit the mean. Yet hitting the mean is no doubt difficult, and especially in individual cases. For it is not easy to determine, for example, how and with whom and on what provocation and how long one should be angry. We even sometimes praise those who fall short and call them good-tempered, but sometimes we praise those who get angry and call them “manly.”

The person who deviates only a little from goodness, however, is not blamed, whether he does so in the direction of more or of less. We only blame the person who deviates a lot, since such a person does not fail to be noticed. But up to what point _[20] and to what extent a person must deviate before he becomes blameworthy it is not easy to determine by reasoning, any more than anything else that is perceived by the senses. Such things depend on the particulars of the situation, and the decision rests with perception. So much, then, is plain, that the intermediate state is in all things to be praised, but that we must incline sometimes towards the excess, sometimes towards the deficiency, _[25] since in this way we most easily hit the mean and what is right.