Aristotle
Week 4 examines courage, temperance, justice, intellectual virtues, and the puzzle of akrasia — how it is possible for a person to know what is right and still fail to do it.
Discussion Questions
- In Book 3, Aristotle defines courage as the mean between cowardice (excessive fear) and rashness (deficient fear). What is the modern American picture of courage? Does it correspond to Aristotle's account, or does it tend to collapse into one of the extremes? Identify one situation in contemporary public life where genuine Aristotelian courage is required and rarely shown.
- Aristotle distinguishes between justice in the broad sense — lawfulness, the disposition to give each what is due — and justice in the narrow sense, which concerns particular distributions and corrections. He calls justice in the broad sense "complete virtue" because it concerns one's relations with others. Why does Aristotle elevate justice above the other moral virtues? Do you find his argument persuasive?
- In Book 6, Aristotle introduces phronesis — practical wisdom — as the intellectual virtue that allows a person to perceive what action is right in particular circumstances. In Book 7, he takes up the puzzle of akrasia: how it is possible for a person to know what is right and still fail to do it. Which picture matches your own experience?
Cicero
De Officiis is a treatise on duties — what we owe, and to whom. Jefferson called Cicero's De Officiis the "finest piece of morality that has been given to the world by man." Adams said he read it more often than any book except the Bible.
Discussion Questions
- Cicero distinguishes between the honorable and the expedient and argues that, properly understood, they never genuinely conflict. Why does Cicero think this?
- Do the Founders' writings and choices reflect his view?
- Identify one moment in the Founding era — a particular speech, decision, or sacrifice — that exemplifies Cicero's conviction that the honorable and the expedient ultimately coincide.
- For a deeper dive: Consider reading Jack Ferguson's "The Ciceronian Origins of American Law and Constitutionalism," published in 2025 in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin's "Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection" identified thirteen virtues — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility — working on one virtue per week in a thirteen-week rotation.
Discussion Questions
- Was Franklin treating Aristotle's claim that virtue is acquired by habit as a practical hypothesis, and testing it on himself?
- What do you think of Franklin's method for forming virtues? Have you tried anything similar in your own life?
John Adams
The selections from John Adams's Diary run from 1756 — when Adams was a young schoolmaster studying for the bar — to December 1765. These entries are the private record of a young person taking the question of virtue with full seriousness.
Discussion Questions
- What is Adams seeing in himself across these years? What is he doing about it?
- Adams is not someone the tradition normally classifies among the saints; he is, if anything, the patron saint of irritable self-improvement. Is that closer or farther from what Aristotle had in mind than Franklin's tidy ledger? What does the practice of keeping such a diary, sustained over a decade, do to a person?
Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's Query XVIII shows a sober — even terrified — recognition that a society which violates the moral order will be judged by it.
Discussion Questions
- What does it mean for a person to be unable to abandon a moral framework that he simultaneously fails to live by?
- Is Jefferson's anguish a vindication of natural-law thinking — proof that even those who violate the moral order cannot help recognizing it — or is it an indictment of him personally, or both?
- What does Jefferson's example imply about the consequences, for individuals and for nations, of succumbing to vice?