DRAFT

PREFACEMy professional career has ended and I am now happily retired. However, there are a few unpublished papers that I would like to make available. While research on the hedonic view of happiness and well-being has flourished very little has focused on Aristotles eudaimonic theory. These might add something to the existing literature.I believe that virtue is the most important, but greatly misunderstood, idea in Aristotles theory. I have included several chapters on the topic of virtue in a recent book entitled THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAPPINESS: A GOOD HUMAN LIFE, published by Cambridge University Press.I have also included a study on crowding that may be of interest. It suggests that crowding and scarcity of resources may lead to both political and social upheaval. Although the study was conducted in the 1970s it may portend the future for some.AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OFARISTOTLE'S CONCEPT OF VIRTUEAND ITS RELATIONSHIP TOWELLBEINGSamuel S. Franklin California State University, FresnoPAPER PRESENTED AT THE MEETING OF THE WESTERN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONLOS ANGELESAPRIL, 1994AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OF ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPT OF VIRTUE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO WELL-BEINGSAMUEL S. FRANKLINCALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FRESNOAristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (NE) contains a well developed and elaborate theory of the good life which he called 'eudaimonia.' Although the eudaimonic theory has been largely overlooked by contemporary researchers of well-being and happiness, we believe it has much to offer. The theory is based upon the assumption that a good life is achieved to the extent that one actualizes or fulfills potentials. Aristotle would probably very much agree with Ryff's observation that "Central emphasis has been given to short-term affective well-being (i.e. happiness), at the expense of more enduring life challenges such as having a sense of purpose and direction, and achieving a sense of self-realization" (Ryff, 1989).Actualization requires the satisfaction of certain needs. According to Aristotle we have both physical and psychological needs, or 'needs of the soul', as he called them, such as the need for friends, art, learning, etc. In eudaimonic theory, how we fulfill our needs is crucial. Aristotle emphasizes the necessity of acquiring the things we need at the right time, in the right amount and in the way. Most of the things we need, or 'real goods' as Aristotle called them, are 'limited'; we need them for actualization, but only in certain amounts and only at certain times, and they may be good only if obtained in certain ways. Food, for example, is a real good but it is not beneficial in unlimited quantities, at any time and under all circumstances. Too little food is damaging and too much food is equally harmful. The same may be said for most all the things we need. In most things we are well advised to seek the 'golden mean'.To correctly obtain what we need, virtue is required....if virtue , like nature, requires more accuracy and is better than any art, then it will aim at the mean.... In feeling fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and in general pleasure and pain, one can feel too much or too little; and both extremes are wrong. The mean and the good is feeling at the right time, about the right things, in relation to the right people, and for the right reason; and the mean and the good are the task of virtue. Similarly, in regard to actions there are excess, deficiency, and the mean. (Nichomachean Ethics [NE] II, 5. Bambrough, 1963, p. 309)While Aristotle may appear to be uncompromising about what is 'right', he is not. Right is always defined relative to the person. Aristotle says "We may now define virtue as a disposition of the soul in which, when it has to choose among actions and feelings, it observes the mean relative to us..." (NE II, 5. Bambrough, 1963, p. 309)Virtue is a complex idea that became terribly misunderstood when it fell into the company of words like sin and chastity during the middle ages (Maclntyre, 1981). As the ancient Greeks used the term, however, virtue is an extremely meaningful concept and I think translatable into the language of contemporary psychology. It is the purpose of this paper to attempt such a translation and to empirically examine the relationship between virtue and well-being. First, I will attempt to show that Aristotle's concept of virtue is composed of several measurable psychological processes.VIRTUE AND REASONThe first component of virtue is reason. For the Greeks, only humans have the capacity to think. Reason is our ergon, our highest and most unique function. "The function of man is activity of soul in accordance with reason..." (NE I. 7. Bambrough, p. 293). According to Aristotle there are two related but distinguishable types of reason. Intellectual virtue refers to something like our general intelligence, abstract reasoning, theory, and the understanding of general principle. It appears to be somewhat similar to what we now call fluid intelligence. Moral virtue, on the other hand, refers to the ability to apply general principles to specific instances. It is sometimes called practical intelligence. Moral virtue must be learned by doing, by practice. "Moral virtue is a product of habit" (NE II, 1. Bambrough, p. 303). And, it is important to acquire moral virtue early in life: "It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference." (NE II, 1. Ross, p.29)VIRTUE AND DESIREA second component of virtue is desire. Today we might calldesire motivation. Action alone cannot be virtuous; themotivation which propels the behavior must also be considered.Wanting to do what is right and best (relative to your life) isas important as the act itself. Urmson notes that the virtuousperson wants to be virtuous and enjoys virtuous action."..whether one has excellent character (virtue) ... depends not merely on what one does but also on what one likes doing." Virtue is a..."settled disposition to want to act and to act in a way appropriate to the situation." (Urmson, 1988. p.26 ff)VIRTUE AND CHOICEReason and desire combine to produce the third component of virtue: choice. "Choice, therefore, is thought along with desire, or desire along with thought." (NE VI. 2. Bambrough p. 345.) Adler (1980) notes "... moral virtues are habits of making the right choices..." (p.94). Once we know the appropriate action, and desire it, we must choose to behave appropriately. Choice mediates between knowing - wanting and acting.VIRTUE AND SELF-CONTROLA fourth component of virtue is self-control or restraint. Aristotle acknowledges that desires may compete with each other and that restraint is often required. We may know the best thing to do, and desire it too, but we may also know and desire a contrary action. Self control influences our choice. "Virtue is within our power, and so, too is vice. The point is that where we can act, we can also refrain, and vice versa" (NE III. 5. Bambrough p. 323). To act one way frequently requires that we inhibit an alternative response.VIRTUE AND ACTION/FEELINGFinally, there is the virtuous action itself. Virtuous action includes behavior and emotion appropriately chosen; at the correct time, in the right amount, for the right reason. For Aristotle, action and feeling go together, feeling 'supervenes upon acts'. That is why punishment can be effective; pain and act go together. "...to feel delight and pain rightly or wrongly has no small effect on our actions." "...virtue then, is concerned with pleasures and pains, and ....the acts from which [they arise]" (NE II, 3. Ross, p. 33).Virtue then, includes several psychological functions all of which serve to guide us toward the goods we need for actualization. Virtue "...is concerned with passions and actions, in which excess is a form of failure, and so is defect, while the intermediate is praised and is a form of success..." (NE II, 6. Ross p. 38).Summarizing what we have said above, the concept of virtue includes the following psychological functions:KNOWING the appropriate thing to do and feel, boththeoretically and practically, by application of correct principle to the current circumstance.DESIRING/WANTING to act and feel appropriately.

CHOOSING the appropriate action and feeling.SELFCONTROL, or the inhibition of competing behaviors and emotions.ACTING and FEELING appropriately.The present investigation was an attempt to examine this theoretical structure of virtue and its relationship to well-being.PROCEDURESSubjects were 68 advanced undergraduate psychology students, 16 males, 48 females and 4 subjects who did not declare their gender. Their mean age was 25.55 years. The disproportionate number of females was the result of our psychology department's student population in which females are strongly over represented. This is not particularly disconcerting to the author since in this study, and in earlier investigations of theproblem, age and sex have not been important to the study of well-being and its causes. (Costa, et. al., 1987; Franklin, LaMarca, & Barton 1991; Franklin and Torzynski, 1993).The subjects were given three different packets of psychological scales over the course of a semester. The scales were completed both in class and out of class. The rate of return was 86%. Not all subjects completed all scales or all items of each scale so the N's for different variables and analyses vary slightly.SCALESREASON/THINKINGThree scales were used to measure virtuous thinking. Moral virtue or practical thinking, was measured by the Decision Making Scale (DMS) consisting of 12 items. The items identified 12 different domains of life; family, education, friends, work, etc., and Ss rated their 'decision making ability' and 'the quality of the solutions they usually find' for the day to day problems in each domain. A Likert type scale was used where 1 was bad and 5 described excellent decision making. This was the first time the DMS has been used and the correlation alpha of .72 seems quite reasonable. Because the 12 items of the scale refer to different life domains we might expect a less than perfect inter-item correlation.A second measure of moral virtue consisted of the four 'ways' items fromthe Will And Ways Scale (). A similarLikert type scale was used here to rate statements like "I can think of many ways to get out of a jam" and "Even when others get discouraged, I know I can find a way to solve the problem." The alpha obtained in the present study was .69, not especially impressive, but since the scale had only 4 items and since it correlated reasonably well (r = .55, p < .00) with the DMS measure it was decided to combine the two to derive our measure of moral virtue.The third measure of reason was an attempt to tap the more generalized, theoretical thinking that Aristotle called intellectual virtue. For this purpose four subscales from the Constructive Thinking Inventory (Epstein & Meier, 1989) were used. The subscales are designed to measure categorical thinking, superstitious thinking, esoteric thinking, and naive optimism. All these subscales are potential impediments and blocks to good generalized thinking. A person high in 'categorical thinking', ('making... undifferentiated judgments'), for example, would be likely to exhibit poor intellectual virtue because of a prevailing tendency toovergeneralize. A person high in superstitious thinking, e.g.one who agrees with the statement 'When something bad happens tome, I feel that more bad things are likely to follow' would alsoseem to reason poorly. Of the four intellectual virtue measures, only two; the Superstitious Thinking and the Categorical Thinking scales were shown to be statistically tied to the variables of the present study. Therefore, early in the data analyses a new measure consisting of the 8 item Superstitious Thinking scale and the 12 item Categorical Thinking scale was created and used in all analyses involving intellectual virtue. In the present study, the inter-item alpha's of the two measures were .80 and .74 for the superstitious and categorical thinking scales, respectively. Since intellectual virtue was measured by scales designed to tap the opposite of good generalized thinking, the label 'Contra-Intellectual Virtue' is used throughout the paper to refer to performance on this scale.DESIRE AND CHOICEAristotle claims that the truly virtuous persons wants to feel and act appropriately. Some like and enjoy doing the right thing while others do not. The present study does not include the data on desire and choice but leaves them for examination in later papers.SELF-CONTROLSeveral measures of self-control were employed. The Deferred Gratification Scale (Ray and Najman, 1986), the NEO Impulsiveness subscale (Costa and McRae, 1985), The Procrastination Scale (Tuckman, 1991), and two subscales from Epstein and Meier's (1989) Constructive Thinking Inventory: The Emotional Coping (CTIEC) and the Behavioral Coping (CTIBC) subscales. These two subscales consisted in a combined total of 37 items all of which refer to the subjects capacity to moderate his or her feelings and actions. Sample guestions from the emotional coping subscale read as follows: "The slightest indication of disapproval gets me upset" and "I don't worry about things I can do nothing about." Sample behavioral coping items are: "When I realize I have made a mistake, I usually take immediate action to correct it" and " When I have a lot of work to do by a deadline, I waste a lot of time worrying about it instead of just doing it." All self-control measures correlated significantly with each other but a hierarchical regression analysis to virtuous behavior (see below) led us to restrict our attention to only the two coping scales from the Constructive Thinking inventory. Their correlation alpha's reached respectable levels; .89 and .85 for the Emotional Coping and Behavioral Coping scales respectively.VIRTUOUS BEHAVIORThe present investigation did not measure virtuous behavior directly but did examine the disposition to respond appropriately. The Self Appraisal Scale (SAS) was constructed to assess ones ability to attain the right amount, at the right time, and in the right way. From Urmson's list (1988, p.34) of the ancient Greek virtues several of the most commonly recognized (including temperance, courage, liberality, justice, and pride) were selected and used to construct 48 True / False items regarding the tendency to engage in virtuous behavior. For example, the first item "I give too freely of myself" is intended to tap ones ability to give the right amount (liberality) of himself to others. Another item, "I tend to seek the easy way out in most situations" concerns ones 'courage', the ability to endure temporary discomfort for future gains. "I always want to win" was used to measure the virtue Aristotle calls justice. The SAS, designed as a measure of the disposition for virtuous behavior, has been successfully used in previous investigations (Franklin, LaMarca & Barton, 1992, Franklin & Torzynski, 1993). It's alpha in the present investigation was .88.NEED SATISFACTIONThe Satisfaction Index (SI) was developed to assess the acquisition of real goods. The scale consisted of the same 12 life domains appearing in the Decision Making Scale (family, work, money, love, etc.) and subjects rated each on a 1 (terrible) to 5 (Great) Likert scale regarding "... the quality of each area of your life over the last few years?" It was assumed that a qualitative judgment regarding a particular domain would reflect the level of need satisfaction in that area. The domain items were presented in a different order than they assumed on the DMS.WELL-BEINGThe recent literature on happiness and well-being seems to be in general agreement regarding two fundamental components a good life: life satisfaction and a favorable balance of positive and negative affect (Diener, 1984). This modern view seems quite consistent with Aristotle's notion of eudaimonia. Surely, he would agree that happy people, people who fulfill their potentials, would find their lives both satisfying and pleasurable. Thus, well-being, the major dependent variable in this study, was operationalized in this way. Life satisfaction was measured by the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen and Griffen 1983). Affect was assessed by the Affect Balance Scale (Bradburn, 1969). Both measures are widely used by researchers in the area of happiness and well- being and both have much to recommend them. In the present study the alpha for the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) was .87. Separate correlation alpha's for the positive and negative affect sub-scales of the Affect Balance Scale (ABS) were .91 and .50, respectively.RESULTSThe purpose of this investigation was to empirically examine the theoretical structure of Aristotle's concept of virtue and to further assess his claim that virtue is essential to well-being. The scales used are presented in Table 1, along with their means, standard deviations, and alpha's. Table 2 presents a correlation matrix of the variables. It may be noted from Table 2 that most of the scales, although structured very differently and intended to measure very different psychological processes, are quite highly correlated. While alternative explanations for these correlations may be possible, (e.g. all measures may reflect the same psychological construct), we believe the relationships shown in Table 2 lend strong support to the eudaimonic theory.The model presented in Figure I will serve as a guide for our discussion of the results.It should be noted at the outset that neither age nor sex was significantly correlated with any of the measures used in the study.VIRTUOUS THINKING AND MORAL ACTIONIn the eudaimonic model the most important determinant of virtuous behavior is good thinking. One can not do the appropriate thing unless he or she knows what is appropriate. Such knowledge consists of two distinct but related forms of reason. First, intellectual virtue requires that we understand certain principles which can be used to guide our actions. For example, to be just, we must understand the idea of fairness. But an intellectual understanding is not enough. We must also know how to use this knowledge. We must be able to select the right amount of fairness for the situation at hand. We need both intellectual virtue and moral virtue. From Table 2 it can be seen that while contra-intellectual and moral virtue are significantly correlated (r = -.29, p = .03) the correlation is not especially high. This finding is consistent with Aristotle's dichotomous treatment of virtuous thinking.Table 2 also reveals that both contra-intellectual and moral virtue are significantly related to moral action. Poor general thinking, assessed by the categorical and superstitious thinking subscales of the CTI, correlated -.53 (p