Daniel Awrich
7 April 2013
Jean Valjean and the Ethics of Aristotle in the World of “Les Misérables”
Aristotle’s ethics focus on how peoples’ actions define their character. While the societal point of view defines an action as unethical, Aristotle’s point of view on the same action defines it as good because it was necessary. A film that exemplifies this ethical conundrum is “Les Misérables.” I will show in this essay two situations from the film that demonstrate the positive and negative aspects of Aristotle’s ethics.
“Les Misérables” is a film based on a book by Victor Hugo about Jean Valjean, a man put on parole after a nineteen-year conviction of stealing a loaf of bread and attempting to escape from prison. Afterwards, he breaks parole by tearing up his papers and starts a new life as a factory owner and mayor of a town. When his identity is revealed, he becomes a fugitive on the run from Inspector Javert, who used to be a guard at Valjean’s prison, while taking care of an orphan child named Cosette. The story is set in France after the French Revolution, when lower class citizens suffered poverty, famine, and government oppression.
The acts that Jean Valjean commits can be seen as ethical or just when we understand the environment of poverty from which he comes. In addition, Valjean takes pleasure in the act of tearing up his parole papers, thereby creating a new, more virtuous life for himself. Aristotle’s teachings are important for understanding Valjean’s ethical rationale because they explain the ethics of an individual who exists within a certain environment.
Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics considers how free will and what we do with it as the basis for ethics. In fact, three main themes from The Nicomachean Ethics fit in with the acts committed by Jean Valjean. The first theme, activity, as shown in Books II and III, is how an individual expresses his existence. The second theme, justice, as portrayed by Book V, is complete virtue put to use in relation to someone else. The third theme, pleasure, as demonstrated in Book X, is something that is desired and therefore not the good, but associated with a just or unjust activity. We will use these three themes to examine two actions that Valjean committed and see whether they are ethically good.
First, we will discuss Valjean’s theft of a loaf of bread. Valjean stole the loaf of bread in order to feed his sister’s starving child. However, in his attempt to do so, he was arrested and sent to prison for five years. According to Aristotle, “wish relates rather to the end, choice to the means; for instance, we wish to be healthy, but we choose the acts which will make us healthy, and we wish to be happy and say we do, but we cannot well say we choose to be so; for, in general, choice seems to relate to the things that are in our own power” (Aristotle, pg 42). This quote reveals the difference between will or desire and choice. A person’s virtue is based on his choices. For that reason, the ethics of virtue is concerned with making the right choice. Valjean’s desire was to save his sister’s starving child, but his choice was to steal the loaf of bread. Therefore, in order to understand his choices, we must also understand his desires. Since stealing the loaf of bread was a crime, Valjean ended up getting “dirty hands.” According to Dirtying Aristotle’s Hands? Aristotle’s Analysis of ‘Mixed Acts’ in the Nicomachean Ethics III, 1 by Karen M. Nielsen, “If some coerced actions are (i) voluntary under the circumstances, (ii) right under the circumstances, but nevertheless (iii) shameful or wrong for moral or prudential reasons under the circumstances, it would seem that Aristotle recognizes the existence of situations that require even the decent agent to dirty his hands in such knowledge of what he is doing” (Nielsen, pg 273). In other words, when put in desperate situations, people such as Valjean commit crime.
Valjean’s thievery is shown to have some justice to it. According to Aristotle, “Acts just and unjust being as we have described them, a man acts unjustly or justly whenever he does such acts voluntarily; when involuntarily, he acts neither unjustly nor justly except in an incidental way” (Aristotle, pg 93). Aristotle’s theory that justice is an act of free will justifies Valjean stealing the bread. From the perspective of the government, Valjean knows that what he is doing is wrong and is exercising this knowledge. It believes that he is simply stealing for his own selfish reasons because “[a] person who acts while knowing in an unqualified sense what he is doing is wrong exhibits ‘genuine akrasia’” (Stoyles, pg 96). However, from the perspective of Valjean, he is not akrasiactic.
Next we shall discuss Valjean ripping up his parole papers. When he is released from prison, Valjean is given papers that declare him a dangerous man, even though his only crimes were thievery and attempted prison break. Valjean eventually comes to a church, where a bishop gives him food and shelter for the night. Later that night, Valjean steals silver from the church and attempts to escape that night, but is caught by police authorities. The bishop lies to the authorities by claiming that the silver was a gift, preventing Valjean from being imprisoned again. Upon being spared by the bishop, Valjean realizes that he has done a horrible act, stealing from someone who was kind to him despite his circumstances and vows to change his ways. He eventually rips up his parole papers, discarding his original identity. According to Aristotle, “the pleasures involved in [such] activities are more proper to them than the desires; for the latter are separated both in time and in nature, while the former are close to the activities, and so hard to distinguish from them that it admits of dispute whether the activity is not the same as the pleasure” (Aristotle, 191). This quote declares that pleasure is not good or bad in itself, but depends on the character of the individual. In the act of ripping up the papers, Valjean set himself up for a better life along with the pleasure of freedom. Valjean even has the temperance for a happier, more charitable life because of the silver the bishop let him keep. While he can get money for for self-indulgence by selling the silver, he can also act to secure a more ethically superior life, such as “those which promote health and well-being” (Stoyles, pg 198). For instance, with the money that he makes from the silver, along with creating a new alias, Valjean moves into a higher class, becoming a factory owner and mayor of a town. He uses his newly gained wealth by giving money to the poor. The pleasure that he gains is therefore appropriate because he used his newfound freedom to do the right thing.
In conclusion, one way to better understand the ethics of Aristotle is to examine the character decisions of Jean Valjean throughout the film, “Les Misérables.” His actions are shown through four essential guidelines. First, getting one’s hands dirty is sometimes required in order to do what is ethical. Second, akrasia is when an individual knowingly does the wrong thing, but one’s knowledge of the situation is limited by one’s being in one’s environment. Third, justice depends on the situation in which you are placed in. Lastly, pleasure is only good as long as it is used towards a good action. In order to empathize with Jean Valjean’s actions, one would have to think about ethics in Aristotle’s terms.
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