 Character has an ineluctably ethical aspect: we want (our) character not to be of just any sort, but good. Like Aristotle, Herbart holds that we always stand in some relation to virtue and vice. While not by nature good or bad, our actions and character necessarily fall somewhere on the spectrum of virtue and vice. Virtue is thus not something attached from the outside to an ethically neutral self; rather, it is a natural quality of man that will develop well or poorly. So Herbart, like Aristotle and Plato, does not think that education should aim to inculcate moral truths or commandments, so much as lead the “moral[ly constituted human being] to recognize his own value and dignity, and [then] to elevate it” (PS I: 199). Here again we see the transition from the objective facticity of one’s constitution as a being with some moral charge, to the subjective endorsement of it, of accepting responsibility for the excellence of one’s moral constitution as the source of one’s value and dignity. It is a movement of “awakening self-reflection”, in which the form-law governing our involuntary (aesthetic) approval or disapproval of human actions or situations is elevated to norm-law, i.e., is accepted as binding on me, and to which I have a responsibility that I accept (cf. Weiss 1928: 216).