Summary
Having discussed courage and temperance in Book
III, Aristotle now moves through the rest of the virtues, discussing
them one by one.
Liberality is the right disposition with regard to spending
money, while prodigality and illiberality represent excess and deficiency respectively.
The liberal person will give the right amounts of money to the right
people at the right times and so will take pleasure in giving: giving
money only grudgingly is a sign of illiberality. Feeling no strong
attachment to money, the liberal person manages resources well and
does not squander money as the prodigal person would. Prodigality
is better than illiberality because it is a result of foolishness
rather than vice and can be easily remedied.
While liberality deals with ordinary expenditures of money, magnificence
is the virtue of properly spending large sums of money on liturgies,
or public gifts. Magnificence requires good taste: gaudy displays
of wealth exhibit the vice of vulgarity, while spoiling a liturgy
through penny-pinching is a sign of pettiness.
Magnanimity is the quality of the person who knows himself
or herself to be worthy of great honors. The person who overestimates self-worth
is conceited, and the person who underestimates self-worth is pusillanimous.
Neither vanity nor pusillanimity are so much bad as mistaken, though
pusillanimity is generally worse. The magnanimous person is great
and knows it. This person therefore accepts honors knowing they
are deserved, but does not take excessive pleasure in these honors.
Being aware of his or her greatness and status, the magnanimous
person is uncomfortable when put in a position inferior to anyone
and always seeks his or her rightful superior place. Aristotle asserts
of the magnanimous person that “his gait is measured, his voice
deep, and his speech unhurried.”
With regard to smaller honors, there is a virtuous mean,
which lies between the excess of extreme ambition and the deficiency
of lacking ambition entirely.
The right disposition toward anger is similar
to patience, though patience can sometimes be a deficiency, as some
anger is occasionally appropriate. The excess of irascibility manifests
itself in people with hot tempers, or worse, people who hold grudges
and remain irritable.
