Virtue with McCoy and McCabe

1. Virtue in the sense of happiness, or flourishing, to make a success of life.

2. Virtues are comparative to skills because they are acquired through practice. Vices are also perfected by practice.

3. Only with the learning and acquisition of virtue are we able to recognize a good person and these moral perceptions and understandings from the society and tradition in which we are born and raised.

4. Intellect is not just in discovering meaning, but what meaning we impose on the world by our intelligent capability.

5. We need practical reason to develop intellectual virtue, which cannot be exercised without moral virtues, which in turn, are not effective without infused divine virtues.

How do humans come to be virtuous?
McCoy says that Aristotle wants to make a distinction between what we would consider virtue and what he believes virtue to be. Virtue is to acquire the “final good” or happiness. However, happiness is used in the sense of “eudaimonia, or flourishing, to make success of life”(McCoy 109). To become a flourishing human being means using a capacity that only man possesses, the activity of the human mind’s intellect. We use our natural capabilities to make sense of the world. Virtues, therefore, “are concerned with the promotion of human well being, determined by rational judgment and choice about appropriate courses of action or conduct”(113).

Intellect is what distinguishes human beings from animals. Animals can only approach with world through sensation. They see what they want, make a snap decision, and go for it. However, humans not only interpret the world through sensual engagement, “we add our understanding of the world through our intellectual capacity and linguistics” (McCabe 80). “We raise sensual meanings to concepts” (83). This allows us to be able to make a multitude of decisions and the chance to have acted differently. Moral understanding, therefore, is not some mysterious moral sense, but an education of being able to recognize a good act from a bad one. Intellect allows humans to be educated. Aristotle emphasizes the importance of education in becoming virtuous. “Only an educated person, the one who has learnt how to be good at being human, the virtuous person, is in a position clearly to recognize virtue for what it is” (9). Then we use intellect to distinguish and make choices that will fulfill our humanness.

McCabe compares learning virtue to a football game. There are boundaries, or prohibitions, and there are rules that guide the play. When one cheats, or commits a vice, one is not playing the game; one is playing outside the field of play. To play well does not need rule books, however, but training in accordance to the teaching. As children, when we commit a vice in the sense that we do not know it is a vice as of yet, we are reprimanded and taught the virtuous action. Encouragement and practice is what teaches us how to distinguish and use virtue.
We also acquire virtue by a natural inclination to become a flourishing human person. These virtues are not only rooted in our efforts, but in “the initiative of God”(89). Becoming a good human person, a flourishing person, is in part something we share with the gods, with whom we take the example of goodness. These natural inclinations rising from virtue “means taking the path that conforms to and spring from who you are and what you treat as ultimately satisfactory”(90). It is not a chance that we are human, being human is what it takes for us to each exist and we must fulfill it by the practice of practical intelligence in order be “flourishing.”
Is there an absolute truth in being and becoming a virtuous person? Is it possible for people to flourish as a result of vice instead of virtue?