From a young age, we’re told not to do all sorts of things. “Don’t touch that! Don’t punch him! Wait for everyone else.” are sentences we’ve all heard several times during our upbringing. Lots of these rules your parents taught you, would be practical; to tell a kid not to touch something can be for security of the object (toddlers tend to be clumsy). Some of these lessons, however, concern virtue. When I was little my parents taught me the famous phrase “treat others how you want to be treated”. This shows that we’re already confronted with the morals of our society at a very young age.
Medievalists had another look on virtue. Instead of virtuous rules based on agreement of the majority, it was either accessible through the gift of God or through your own rational thinking. They wanted to rid their philosophy of the irreligious influence Aristotle had had on ethics and reconcile it with the notions of Christianity. In short, if you were a good believer, God would reward you with a virtuous and happy afterlife, but if you were a pagan, your actions would never be virtuous, although Dun Scotus disagreed with this theory. We can see that it’s a very reciprocal relationship; if you act the way God intended you to, you will be rewarded.
Aristotle, however, had another explanation for the immoral or even sometimes evil actions people could be capable of. If you refused to be virtuous at all, because acting morally seemed to you as of little value, you we’re pure evil. However, you weren’t always to blame. Aristotle thought that some people had internal disorders; they existed physically and psychologically within you. They would be counter rational, because of which your rational ethical and moral inclinations would be influenced and overthrown by emotions.
When we look at this from a different perspective, actions that could seem counter rational could also be virtuous focused on another moral opinion, than the one that might be obvious. Imagine you take your puppy to the park. You throw him in a pond. The puppy is struggling, because it can’t swim and could drown any moment. From your experience as a dog trainer, you know that you have to let the animal save himself in order to learn how to swim. You’re thus actually thinking about his future and his self preservation, which would seem like the moral thing to do. Bystanders might, however, walk by and think of you as a cruel person with no clue about virtual actions.
This example shows the importance of perspectives on the morality of actions, which I think should be incorporated in the less extensive medieval philosophy.
From Knights to computers 