Second Nature
Written by Studio AM.
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In Aristotle's account, moral virtue develops through habituation. People become just by doing just acts, as a builder acquires a craft by building. Repetition helps form a stable disposition: a tendency to perceive, choose, and act in characteristic ways. Virtue involves this developed character, not merely knowing a rule or having a passing feeling.
The account raises a difficult question about responsibility. If repeated conduct makes a character settled and difficult to change, why hold someone answerable for what that character now inclines them to do? In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle compares the situation to throwing a stone. Once released, it cannot simply be recalled. Yet the thrower remains responsible for an action that was originally within their control.
He applies the comparison to character: earlier voluntary conduct can help explain responsibility for a later disposition, even when wishing to change is no longer enough. We are, in his account, partly responsible for the characters we develop.
The argument connects two times rather than treating each decision in isolation. Present difficulty does not automatically erase earlier agency. At the same time, tracing responsibility backward requires asking what choices were genuinely available. The question is not whether change is effortless, but how practice, freedom, and accountability fit together.
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Questions
Choose an answer. The explanation appears after you answer.
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Question 1 of 4
Which statement best captures the passage's central claim?
The answer is C: Aristotle connects character formed through practice with responsibility for earlier voluntary actions.
The passage joins habituation with the stone analogy's distinction between an earlier action and later difficulty reversing it.
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Question 2 of 4
What role does the stone analogy play in Aristotle's argument?
The answer is D: It suggests that difficulty reversing an outcome does not erase responsibility for an earlier voluntary act.
The stone cannot be recalled, but the initial act of throwing can still be attributed to the thrower.
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Question 3 of 4
What does “answerable” mean in this passage?
The answer is A: required to take responsibility
The surrounding question concerns responsibility, so answerable means required to take responsibility.
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Question 4 of 4
According to the passage, how does someone become a builder?
The answer is B: By building
The first paragraph uses building as the practical activity through which the craft is acquired.
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