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Meanness is a personal quality whose classical form, discussed by many from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, characterizes it as a vice of "lowness", but whose modern form deals more with cruelty.
Meanness can take many forms, as there are several ways in which one can deviate from the liberal/generous virtue. It can be a desire for wealth with insufficient desire to benefit others; or a desire to benefit others suppressed by an excessive desire to keep what money one has; or the desire for too much wealth. Aristotle said that "meanness we always impute to those who care more than they ought for wealth" and "there seem to be many kinds of meanness".
The translation of what Aristotle meant is not without problems. Aristotle's actual word ἐλευθερία (eleutheria) corresponds with both liberality and freedom. Its opposite, ανἐλευθερία, is both meanness and servility. Philosophers such as Susanne E. Foster (in ) have attempted to reconcile these by explaining that the connotation is that meanness is enslavement by one's material possessions. A slave has no possessions to give and is not the recipient of gifts from others; whereas a free person, in a gift-exchanging culture, can give and take freely. Meanness, therefore, is the vice of a free person behaving, in such a culture, as a slave does.
Another problem that has taxed philosophers analysing Aristotle is that the expected continuum (on which vices and a virtue lie) is from excess to deficiency; but Aristotle describes meanness as both excess (of taking from) and deficiency (of giving to). Philosophers have attempted to explain this, and characterize what Aristotle was trying to say as an excess or a deficiency in some other form. Howard J. Curzer takes the view that in fact both were meant, and that it is "misguided" to ask whether Aristotelian meanness is excess or deficiency, because what constitutes excess and what constitutes deficiency "depends upon how the parameters are described" and is "purely a verbal matter". Exactly which vice of the two that brackets a virtue is "excess" and which is "deficiency" is entirely arbitrary.
Curzer also contends that Aristotle's statement that meanness is worse than prodigality is "a mistake", based upon an erroneous choice of exemplars of prodigality. There are, in Curzer's contention "true prodigals", who are not merely young and foolish (as Aristotle would have prodigals be, and arguing thereby that youth and foolishness are curable — the former by simple dint of growing old — whereas meanness is not) but "incurably wicked" and thus more proper exemplars of the vice, who demonstrate that it is just as much of a vice as meanness is.
George Crabb described meanness as "whatever a man does in common with those below him" and that "evinces a temper that is prone to sink rather than rise in the scale of society". He considered meanness to be only relatively bad, as what may constitute meanness for one person may be generosity or prudence for another. Seeking to save or to gain for oneself at the expense of others, in particular with respect to what one can afford to pay, "is denominated a mean temper".
Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics held meanness to be both the opposite of liberality and generosity. A mean person "chooses a trifling gain to himself rather than the avoidance of disappointment to others", and meanness is not injustice per se.
In the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure, one of the several ways of defining what psychopathy is, meanness is one of the three components, an index of a person's "callous aggression". It is characterized as callous unemotionality, antagonism, coldheartedness, exploitativeness, remorselessness, and empowerment through cruelty; encompassing destructive acts, the inability to bond with other people, bullying, fight-picking, and other forms of active engagement against other people (in contrast to social withdrawal, which is a passive moving away from other people).
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