Being good or acting rightly
On the axis: Criterion of right action · the agent
Is morality a matter of acts to be judged one by one against rules, or first of all a matter of a person's character, of who one is and how one has learned to see situations?
Justification
Against Socratic intellectualism, for which no one does evil willingly and virtue reduces to knowledge, Aristotle observes that knowing the good does not suffice to do it: virtue is not a science but a disposition (hexis) of character, acquired by the repetition of just acts as one becomes a lyre-player by playing the lyre. The right action thus cannot be deduced from any general rule: it consists in aiming, in each situation, at the relative to us between excess and defect, determined by the of the discerning person. Hence a morality governed neither by consequences nor by a law, but by the kind of person one becomes.
Nicomachean Ethics, II.1 and II.6
Anchors: Aristotle · Anscombe