Ancient Ethics, the Heroic Code, and the Morality of Sophocles’ AJAX

Abstract

While modern ethical philosophy has tended to proceed in an impersonal manner by addressing moral problems from a deontological or consequentialist (or broadly utilitarian) standpoint, ancient ethics was based on character and the development of a virtuous disposition. For Plato at Republic 441d-444e, for example, the ideal was a psuche that balanced the three functions of reason, thumos, and appetite and from which virtuous actions would flow automatically, while for Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (e.g. 2.1, 6.2, 6.5, 6.13) the object was to develop, in part through the exercise of practical intelligence (phronesis), an increasingly refined disposition (hexis) to perform virtuous acts. The focus was on the virtuous intention rather than on the moral quality of the result - a point brought out with striking clarity in the Stoic idea that virtue consisted as it were in the correct aim, whereas the actual hitting of the target was morally irrelevant.