“If every being or thing has its specific capacity in which it excels or can excel (e.g. the excellent knife, the excellent medicine), we might well ask what man’s distinctive excellence resides in. For Aristotle, the answer is the rational life, which sets man apart from the animals. But a rational life requires not only reason but many other things as well: desire, education, habit, memory, and so on. A man’s desires are not the same as a horse’s; nor does an educated person desire what a savage or an ignoramus does. All virtues are historical, as are all the qualities that make up what we call our “humanity”; and in the virtuous man, humanity and virtue inevitably converge. It is a man’s virtue that makes him human, or rather it is this specific capacity he has to affirm his own excellence, which is to say, his humanity, in the normative sense. Human, never too human. Virtue is a way of being, Aristotle explained, but an acquired and lasting way of being: it is what we are (and therefore what we can do), and what we are is what we have become. And how could we have become what we are without other human beings? Virtue thus represents an encounter between biological evolution and cultural development; it is our way of being and acting humanly, in other words (since humanity, in this sense, is a value), our power to act well. “Nothing is so fine and so justifiable,” wrote Montaigne, “as to play the man well and duly.” To do so is virtue itself.”
