Aristotle's golden mean is not the exact middle between two vices
Courage lies somewhere between cowardice and recklessness, Aristotle argued, but not at the halfway point. The right spot shifts with the moment, the person and the purpose. That subtle idea of virtue as a trained habit of excellence runs from ancient Egypt's Maat through Plato to Christian and Islamic ethics.
A virtue is a trait of excellence, whether moral, social or intellectual, and its opposite is vice. In practical ethics it means a settled tendency to choose what is right even when a pure calculation of outcomes would not demand it. Someone who learns to take pleasure in doing right, even when it is hard at first, turns that choice into habit. The English word arrived in the 13th century from the Latin virtus, rooted in vir, man, and once covering physical strength and bravery as well as moral uprightness.
Greek philosophy gave the West four cardinal virtues: prudence, the knack of picking the right action at the right time; fortitude in the face of fear; temperance, or self-restraint; and justice. Plato swapped prudence for wisdom, added piety, and ranked sōphrosynē, sound-mindedness, highest. In the Meno, when Socrates asks what virtue is, Meno answers with a list, and whether Plato thought the virtues formed a single unity remains unclear.
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, placed each virtue at a mean between deficiency and excess: generosity between miserliness and extravagance, confidence between self-deprecation and conceit. The mean is found by reason and fitted to circumstance, sometimes lying nearer one extreme. For him a virtue is simply excellence at being human, a disposition that helps people flourish, and he added intellectual virtues such as practical judgement and intuition.
Other traditions frame virtue differently. Egyptians personified truth, order and justice as the goddess Maat, set against Isfet, chaos and lies. Romans turned many virtues into deities and split them between family life and civic duty. Christianity pairs faith, hope and love, with love the greatest, and later added the four cardinal virtues to make seven. The Tamil poet Valluvar treated aṟam as a way of harmonious living rather than religious ritual, and a hadith reports Muhammad calling virtue good manners.
Source: Virtue
