There are two distinctive features of Aristotle’s ethics that are useful for us, and it so happens they are also key to understanding Aristotle’s “science of happiness.” First, Aristotle focuses not on character as some fixed and immutable quality, like temperament. Rather, his emphasis is on the development of character through the deliberate cultivation of habits of excellencifying. Second, one of his more important principles of deliberation is “moderation,” or the application of the so-called Doctrine of the Mean. Calling a deliberative principle a “doctrine” gives the wrong impression. It’s not a doctrine in the sense of a statement that must be followed; rather, as a principle, it gives us a method for deliberating about the habits we want to cultivate and about inevitable challenges that will arise when our habits are insufficient guides.

So, what does moderation tell us about deliberative empathy? And how do these insights prepare us to navigate our belief ecosystem?

Let’s start where Aristotle did, with a continuum. If deliberative empathy lies someone near the middle of a continuum, what are the extremes? At one end, we might recognize a kind of epistemic gullibility, a willingness to take at face-value any beliefs that present themselves. Now, of course, no one operates entirely in this extreme way: it might not be possible to retain a sense of self if one could literally adopt any belief that came along. But again, this is about mapping extremes, so we can learn how to navigate in the middle.

If one end is gullibility, at the other end we find a state that is not just wariness or skepticism — which in moderate doses is conducive to healthy belief-formation — but rather a sort of echo-chamber of self-absorption. No doubt you’ve encountered the occasional person who seems unwilling or unable to hear any perspective but their own. At this extreme, we find complete epistemic isolation from any alternate beliefs. Or to put it succinctly, from this perspective, other beliefs are automatically false simply because they are other.

It’s interesting to note that, on the extremes of this continuum, grounds for belief are largely missing or perhaps better, misplaced. Someone suffering from epistemic gullibility has essentially abdicated ownership of belief, outsourcing belief-formation to the authority of someone or something else. This leads to circular reasoning, like this:

• S says p.
• p must be true because S said it.

where S is the belief-source and p is some claim. If you express skepticism about S‘s reliability as an arbiter of truth, you may a response like, “S wouldn’t mislead me!” or worse, “S told me not to believe other sources because S is telling the truth and they aren’t.”

At the other end, epistemic self-absorption involves assessing my own belief as true because I believe it. This tendency is amplified by social habits, no doubt accelerated by technology like social media. Think about it: At this historical moment, we have the best technology for connecting with each other in the entire history of our species, and yet we use that almost magical power to isolate ourselves in self-imposed belief safe-houses, echo-chambers where we only encounter ourselves reflected back in a shiny epistemic mirror. No wonder rational animals are susceptible to conspiracy theories: In a sense, conspiracy theories are merely better-organized and better-propagating urban legends, which have found homes in our belief ecosystems since we invented language.

Both epistemic gullibility and self-absorption make us susceptible to ungrounded claims because there are no compensatory mechanisms in place to put on the belief-brakes. And one quirk of our nature is that, in the absence of grounded epistemic habits of mind, anything that “fits” in our existing belief ecosystem and is emotionally satisfying will be all but irresistible.

Because Aristotle recognized our duality as rational animals and — I believe — thought our animal nature required compensatory mechanisms if we are to strive for excellence in thought and deed, his perspective has a lot to offer us today, surrounded as we all by all manner of epistemic pitfalls. It’s not that we stop feeling emotion. On the contrary, we learn to understand emotion as an additional information input into our deliberative process. Briefly, we learn to honor, not ignore, our animal selves.