Virtue Ethics— The Golden Mean, Stoicism, and Confucianism
The golden mean in virtue ethics is from the Aristotle and Sacrotes era. Virtue ethics take a look at our actions from a pursuit of good. Aristotle believed that the purpose of life was to pursue the good. He split up different kinds of ideas into intellectual and moral ethics. Things like intellect and facts were determined as intellectual ethics. Moral ethics are where our choices are concerned. Is it right to do this thing? This is where the golden mean comes from. It is the mean, the mathematical term, between absolute destruction and complete complacency. The idea of virtue is one of these means. It is the middle ground of how to approach life. The Stoics took this idea and set out to learn how to be virtuous. They determined not only the action needs to be virtuous, but your intentions as well. If you do something good, but your intent was for malice then the act was not good.
The virtues of justice, fortitude, and prudence show this well. The idea of justice is good and its execution is also good. Fortitude allows you to be strong for yourself and others. This makes it intrinsically good. Prudence is the ability to govern oneself. To life with self-discipline to make the most of your life.
They also believed that if you wanted to become virtuous then you should act virtuously. If you want to be more intelligent then act more intelligently. Stoicism is similar to Confucianism. “Confucianism developed in response to Buddhism and Taoism,” (Wikipedia). It is an anglocentric idealogy. Taoism and Buddhism took in to account the world as a whole, yin, and yang. People withing nature itself instead of above it. The 8 fold path, Buddist followings, is similar to the golden mean idea behind virtue ethics.
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