Pleasure and Pain

In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle talks about the many pains and pleasures involving virtue throughout life. Virtue is showing very high moral standards. Moral virtue is about creating a well developed character and being a good person. Having moral virtue also means it involves both pleasure and pain. You can tell what kind of a person someone is and what they are like by what pleases them and what pains them. According to Aristotle, the pleasure or pain that follows one’s deeds or actions determines their characteristics and what kind of person they are. If they do the easy/wrong thing and it pleases them, instead of doing the hard/right thing and it pains them, you can determine the person’s character.    

There are two different kinds of virtue according to Aristotle. “Virtue, then, is twofold, intellectual and moral. Both the coming-into-being and increase of intellectual virtue result mostly from teaching - hence it requires experience and time - whereas moral virtue is the result of habit, and so it is that moral virtue got its name by a slight alteration of the term habit.” (1103a 1-5). Aristotle here explains the two types of virtues and what they are. Intellectual virtue is experience and/or teaching the values. While moral virtue is out of habit.  Virtue also involves character and the type of person you are. “Further, if the virtues are concerned with actions and passions, and pleasure and pain accompany every passion and every action, then on this account too virtue would be concerned with pleasures and pains.” (1104b 14-16). Since character is highly influenced by pleasure and pain, virtue is also influenced on pleasure and pain. The outcome of someone’s deed whether it be pleasure and pain also dictates a person’s character.

Moral virtue concerns pleasure and pain. Since moral virtue is also a habit, and the type of person you are or in other words, your character is a result of habit, Aristotle says throughout the chapter that a person must be brought up in a certain way so they can be taught the right things dealing with pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are also an important part of a person’s character. What a person does always has an outcome whether it be a pleasure or a pain. Pleasure and pain are a main motivator throughout one’s life. You can look at them as like positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements. “For moral virtue is concerned with pleasures and pains: it is on account of the pleasure involved that we do base things, and it is on this account of the pain that we abstain from the noble ones.” (1104b 10-12). Aristotle explains in this that we seek pleasure and that is why people do base things, or in other words, normal everyday things. Abstaining from the noble things is staying away from things that could eventually cause pain. Pleasure and pain determine if the person is going to do the noble action or the normal action. This is where a person’s character really comes into play. We are easily tempted to do the things that are more pleasurable than the things that are painful because they might be easier and you won’t have to deal with the pain.

All of our actions concern pleasure and pain. You can’t do anything without one of those two outcomes. The type of person you are doesn’t solely depend on just pleasure and pain, there are other things. But a person’s decisions are highly influenced by them and I think someone can be easily tempted to make the wrong decision if it brings pleasure and completely ignore what the right thing is because they don’t want to go through the pain of that decision. What you find pleasurable may not be the right or moral thing to do, but how you know what is right and moral is based on what you believe.