We are starting to go over Aristotle, and at first I didn't think I was going to like him nearly as much as Plato (Plato believing in the physical and nonphysical realms of existence, and Aristotle focusing more on what is detectable by the five senses), but Aristotle had a wonderful opinion on moderation that just matches my worldview so perfectly.

The Greeks in general stress moderation, which I think is good, but Aristotle was the first to really give some concrete to look at.

Here is an example (basing this a little on Kristen's example in class): Let us say that I find out that my girlfriend of two years has been cheating on my with my best friend. Not only that, but neither of them are sorry for what they are doing. There are three basic ways to react to this situation, two of them are wrong, and one of them is right.

What is wrong are the two extremes, and we refer to these as vices. They are wrong because they do not allow oneself or others to flourish to become a better person. The first vice is extreme anger. Why is this not beneficial to you or to mankind? Well, lets say you get so angry you beat up your girlfriend and your best friend. Not only do you go to jail (which impairs your ability to flourish), but also your girlfriend and your best friend will not flourish from the situation either, but rather despise it and learn nothing but anger.

The second vice is to the extreme the other way, which is no anger whatsoever. You keep dating the girl, being friends with the guy, and totally ignore that anything ever happened. Why is this bad? Because you can never develop a good relationship with anyone, and you will become a living doormat.

Aristotle stresses something called the Golden Mean, and I love this idea. That is that somewhere between the two extremes, between absolute anger and absolute apathy, lies the perfect middle ground to handling the situation. This is a virtue. It is being angry, yes, but not so angry that you create a worse situation. In this case, the virtous thing would be to tell your girlfriend and your best friend what they did was wrong and that it hurt you, break off the relationship with both of them, and then leave without any sort of violent action. This will help you grow as a person and it will ATLEAST make them pause and think, and maybe they'll realize what they did was wrong.

Maybe they won't, but that is their fault, not yours.