Question

Is it possible for someone to be a good person and live a virtuous life even though he or she holds no religious belief in a religious framework. How would Aristotle answer this question.

Answer 1

According to Aristotle friendship, pleasure, virtue, honor and wealth fit together as a whole.Aristotle says that happiness is “perfect” or “complete” (teleios) and something distinctively human. When we are living well, our life is worthy of imitation and admiration.

Aristotle defines virtuous character in Nicomachean Ethics II.7:

Excellence [of character], then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect. (1106b36–1107a3)

By excellence of character, Aristotle means that its not a tendency to behave in specific way.Rather it is the settled condition we are in when we are well off in relation to feelings and actions.