The rule or the situation
On the axis: Criterion of right action · moral judgment
Is acting well a matter of applying principles fixed in advance, or of judging each situation in its singularity, at the risk that rule and case never quite coincide?
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
Justification
Equity (epieikeia) corrects the law where its generality fails in the singular case: it is a rectification of law. It is (phronesis), knowledge of the particular, that judges in situation rather than mechanically applying a rule.
Nicomachean Ethics, V.10 (equity) · Nicomachean Ethics, VI.5 (practical wisdom)
Anchors: Aristotle
leads to: Letter or spirit of the rule