What Is Vice?

Direct Answer

A vice is a settled disposition to act, feel, and judge wrongly: a stable trait of character that disposes its possessor toward morally bad action, often accompanied by a distorted perception of what is good. Just as virtues are reliable traits that enable human flourishing, vices are reliable traits that damage it — both the agent's own life and the lives of others. Examples include cruelty, dishonesty, cowardice, intemperance, greed, envy, and arrogance. Vices are not the same as single wrong acts — one lie does not make a liar — nor are they pathological conditions, since the vicious person is culpable because they could, in principle, have formed better character through practice. In Aristotle's framework, each virtue is a mean between two vices: courage lies between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between stinginess and prodigality. Understanding vice matters not only for ethics but for moral psychology, law, and the practical project of self-cultivation.

Historical Context

The Greek tradition treated vice as the core of moral failure. Plato saw vice as the disorder of the soul — the rule of appetite over reason — and the Republic argues that the unjust person, however successful, is worse off than the just person because the vicious soul is internally conflicted and unstable. Aristotle developed the systematic account in the Nicomachean Ethics: virtues and vices are acquired dispositions (hexeis) formed by habituation; vice is not ignorance, since the vicious person knows what they are doing and endorses it, but a corruption of character in which the appetites have been trained to dominate. Hume offered a naturalistic account: virtues and vices are character traits that produce pleasure or pain in observers, so that a vice is a trait a calm and impartial spectator disapproves of. In the Christian tradition, the doctrine of the seven deadly sins — pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth — organized vice around the root disposition of disordered desire, and medieval thinkers developed elaborate analyses of how vices generate and reinforce one another. Nietzsche reversed the evaluation: he argued that what the Christian tradition called vices, such as pride and egoism, were reinterpretations of noble qualities, and that the slave morality of humility and pity was itself a form of resentment. Virtue ethicists today treat vices as the mirror image of virtues: vicious traits are reliable dispositions to act against the human good, sometimes masked as strength or prudence.

Key Arguments & Debates

Philosophers debate whether vices are simply the absence of virtues or positive traits in their own right. Aristotle's doctrine of the mean suggests both: each virtue lies between two vices, so vices are real dispositions of excess and deficiency, not mere privation. A second debate concerns the relation between vice and voluntariness: can a person be blamed for a character that was formed into them by a bad upbringing and unfavorable circumstances? Aristotle's answer is that we are partly responsible for our characters because they were formed by our own actions, but he acknowledges the problem of character formation in corrupt environments, a problem that modern theories of responsibility continue to wrestle with. A third debate, central to the psychology of evil, concerns how ordinary people become capable of cruelty. Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil," the Milgram obedience studies, and the Stanford prison experiment suggest that vicious behavior often proceeds through small steps, obedience, and self-justification rather than an explicit commitment to evil — which raises the question whether such behavior reflects vice or situational pressure, the very question at the heart of the situationist critique of character.

Contemporary Relevance

Understanding vice matters for moral psychology, which studies how bad character develops; for criminal law, which distinguishes character-based culpability from situational excuse; for leadership ethics, which confronts the vices of pride and arrogance in the powerful; and for self-cultivation, since if vices are trained dispositions, they can in principle be untrained, though the longer they are entrenched, the harder the work. The concept also warns against moralizing outcomes alone: a person can be vicious without having yet done great harm, because the character is the moral reality, not merely its external effects.

Related Concepts

Vice is defined in contrast to virtue and connected to moral character, the dispositional structure to which it belongs; to akrasia, the weaker failure of acting against one's own judgment; and to moral responsibility, the accountability that vice grounds. Understanding the contrast between vice and akrasia is essential: the vicious person endorses the wrong, while the akratic person affirms the right and fails to act on it.

Further Learning

See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on "Moral Character" and "Virtue Ethics," and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on "Virtue Ethics." Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics Books II and III give the classical theory of vice as excess and deficiency, while Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morality" offers the most influential modern critique of traditional vice-ascription.