“Moral goodness is the result of habit,” he writes, pointing out that the words for character and custom are the same in Greek: ethos.24 A large share of the laws and customs in a city like Athens was set to inculcate the kinds of personal virtues Plato and Aristotle wanted their fellow citizens to have. Aristotle’s point was that learning those virtues took more than laws. It took building habits based on a relative calculus of pleasure and pain.
