Meanness

Meanness is a personal quality whose classical form, discussed by many from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, characterizes it as a vice of "lowness", but whose modern form deals more with cruelty.

In his dictionary, Noah Webster defined meanness as "want of excellence", "want of rank", "low estate", "lowness of mind", and "sordidness, niggardliness, opposed to liberality or charitableness" pointing out that "meanness is very different from frugality". These, in particular the final one, largely summarize the aspects of the classical definition of meanness that have been propounded by philosophers, Aristotelian and otherwise, over the centuries.

In his Nichomachean Ethics, where each virtue is considered as a midway point on a continuum bracketed by two vices, Aristotle places meanness as one of the two vices that bracket the virtue of liberality/generosity. It is the deficiency of giving to or the excess of taking from others. The other vice is prodigality (excess of giving to or deficiency of taking from), which Aristotle describes as both less common than meanness and less of a vice.

Meanness can take many forms, as there are several ways in which one can deviate from the liberal/generous virtue. It can be a desire for wealth with insufficient desire to benefit others; or a desire to benefit others suppressed by an excessive desire to keep what money one has; or the desire for too much wealth. Aristotle said that "meanness we always impute to those who care more than they ought for wealth" and "there seem to be many kinds of meanness".

The translation of what Aristotle meant is not without problems. Aristotle's actual word ἐλευθερία (eleutheria) corresponds with both liberality and freedom. Its opposite, ανἐλευθερία, is both meanness and servility. Philosophers such as Susanne E. Foster (in Foster 1997) have attempted to reconcile these by explaining that the connotation is that meanness is enslavement by one's material possessions. A slave has no possessions to give and is not the recipient of gifts from others; whereas a free person, in a gift-exchanging culture, can give and take freely. Meanness, therefore, is the vice of a free person behaving, in such a culture, as a slave does.

Another problem that has taxed philosophers analysing Aristotle is that the expected continuum (on which vices and a virtue lie) is from excess to deficiency; but Aristotle describes meanness as both excess (of taking from) and deficiency (of giving to). Philosophers have attempted to explain this, and characterize what Aristotle was trying to say as an excess or a deficiency in some other form. Howard J. Curzer takes the view that in fact both were meant, and that it is "misguided" to ask whether Aristotelian meanness is excess or deficiency, because what constitutes excess and what constitutes deficiency "depends upon how the parameters are described" and is "purely a verbal matter". Exactly which vice of the two that brackets a virtue is "excess" and which is "deficiency" is entirely arbitrary.

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