Abstract

Aristotle says little about moral badness [kakia], but his four central claims about it su????ce to entail arich and plausible account. Badness is the disposition opposed to virtue, and so symmetrical with it invarious ways; it is acquired by habituation; it is unlike akrasia in that the bad person’s reason endorseshis wrong actions; and this endorsement involves the exercise of a corrupted reason. The activity ofcorrupted reason must be a kind of (as we now say) motivated reasoning—rationalization, denial andthe like—which serves to conceal the correct ends of action from the corrupt person and to sustaintheir habitual bad behaviour. Although badness is located in the non-rational soul, it is this corruptionof reason which turns it into a stable disposition.