Ask most ethical theories what you should do in a given situation, and they'll try to give you a procedure: follow this rule, or calculate which action produces the best consequences. Aristotle's virtue ethics, laid out in the Nicomachean Ethics, refuses to play that game. It doesn't offer a rule for any specific dilemma. Instead it asks what kind of character trait — what virtue — the situation calls for, and treats the entire project of ethics as being about cultivating the kind of person who reliably acts well, rather than about deriving the correct action from first principles each time.
Virtue as a mean between two extremes
Aristotle's central mechanism for identifying a virtue is the doctrine of the mean: nearly every virtue sits between two corresponding vices, one of excess and one of deficiency. Courage, for instance, is the mean between recklessness (too much boldness, too little fear) and cowardice (too little boldness, too much fear) — neither extreme counts as virtuous, and the genuinely courageous person has calibrated their disposition to feel and act appropriately given the specific circumstances, not according to some fixed numerical formula. Crucially, Aristotle didn't think this mean could be calculated mechanically for every situation in the abstract; it required practical wisdom, developed through experience, to correctly judge what the appropriate response actually was in any given case.
Character built through habit, not instruction
For Aristotle, virtues aren't innate traits some people are simply born with, nor are they primarily learned through explicit rules or instruction — they're habituated through repeated practice, the way a person becomes a skilled craftsman by actually doing the craft repeatedly rather than only studying it. Acting courageously, again and again, in appropriately calibrated ways, is what actually makes someone a courageous person; the virtue is the settled disposition that habitual right action produces, not a rule you consult before acting. This is a fundamentally different picture of ethical development from theories built around applying moral rules or performing utility calculations in the moment — the emphasis shifts from "what's the correct action here" to "what kind of person have my habitual choices made me, and does that person reliably act well."
What we're still unsure about
Aristotle's texts and the basic structure of virtue ethics — the doctrine of the mean, the emphasis on habituated character over rule-following — are well established as historical and philosophical fact, not in dispute as an account of what Aristotle argued. What remains genuinely contested among moral philosophers today is whether virtue ethics can function as a complete, action-guiding ethical theory on its own, since critics argue it can struggle to give clear guidance in genuinely novel or conflicting situations without smuggling in rule-like reasoning after all — a debate about virtue ethics's adequacy as a full ethical framework that continues without a settled resolution.
This sits inside Virtue Ethics & Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, one of seven topics in Ethics, one of five domains in Philosophy, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.