Breaking Bad with Aristotle

Why do some people become bad? Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is often read as suggesting that it’s due to nonrational desires and early upbringing. This book challenges that reading. Reconstructing Aristotle’s account of moral development, it argues that acquiring character through habituation is not a wholly nonrational process, that learners can self-cultivate their character by deliberating about the actions that form it, and that those who become bad do so partly because they deliberate poorly. Vice results from a missed opportunity: careless in their practice, vicious learners fail to discover what would be virtuous. Reason as such does not make them bad. Nevertheless, practical reasoning, imperfectly and myopically exercised, is indispensable for explaining their badness, since the actions leading to vice are co-determined by their rational failures.