nobility is having a big soul. megalopsychia. magnanimitas. the virtue of magnanimity is characterised by scorning personal comfort and safety and having the will to speak and act openly what is right and against what is wrong
but importantly, the magnanimous man is not petty or vengeful. even more importantly he claims much, and is entitled to do so.
when the magnanimous man, call him Erastes, suffers for his own benefit or for some wider good, everyone will agree that this is good
through his great soul, Erastes claims another, slightly less magnanimous, man, Eromenos. Eromenos suffers similarly through the actions of Erastes, agrees that what Erastes has done is not punishment, but simply an encouragement of magnanimity in the soul of Eromenos. But because he is not quite as magnanimous as Erastes, this is not without some friction, but nothing serious.
Pathikos, on the other hand, is a petty man full of faults and bitter resentment, who does not see Erastes’ actions in the same light. When Erastes claims Pathikos, his attempts at magnanimity all fail and Pathikos inevitably ends up either ruined and dead, either physically or, it is to be hoped, spiritually: reduced to a living tool of Erastes. Thus ever to the parvanimous!
When everyone shows magnanimity, or is flourishing in a way oriented towards it, this all works perfectly. If Pathikos’ lack of nobility is treated justly by the magnanimous then Pathikos is made into a slave. I think it would take a superhuman level of virtue not to see the means by which such a man is enslaved as “punishment”, but that’s the noble ideal.
And that is the problem. Since there are many people who lack even a human level of virtue going around getting jobs in the civil service, one gets petty people dressing up in noble garb and substituting sadism and rules-following for magnanimity, Fucked Up Family Dynamics Writ Large for the magnanimous claiming of other souls, and bitter revenge for justice: the one thing we didn’t want to happen.