The aim of this chapter is to re-evaluate a central but much-maligned thesis in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the doctrine of the mean. The doctrine of the mean is a prominent thesis in Aristotle's account of virtue, and it enables other aspects of Aristotle's ethics to be understood from a new perspective, as we shall see in the chapters to come. Aristotle's doctrine of the mean has had a bad press, from being dubbed the “Goldilocks theory of Ethics” to receiving Bernard Williams's intended epitaph that the doctrine is “better forgotten”. Most of the unkind comments are based on construing the doctrine of the mean as a decision procedure, and a useless one at that. I wish to examine some aspects of the doctrine that show it in a different light, but that involves solving some long-standing puzzles in the interpretation of the doctrine itself, with special reference to how the doctrine applies to particular ethical virtues.

I argue that Aristotle's doctrine of the mean has the following three aspects. First, virtue, like health, is in equilibrium and is produced and preserved by avoiding extremes and hitting the mean; it is self-sustaining. Second, virtue is in a mean “relative to us”. Third, each virtue is in a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency.

Aristotle himself says that his account is “true, but not at all clear” (EN VI 1138b26), and, at first sight, there are certainly many unclarities. First, it is unclear what Aristotle's positive account of the mean “relative to us” is.