Okay, so we started out with an argument that everyone has an ultimate end.
This ultimate end is something like the maximum satisfaction of preferences,
but then since then we've been trying to see if we could have some arguments for narrowing the content or finding some kind of conceptual constraints
What can count as a story that makes sense about what the content of our ultimate end has to be?
So first we tried to sort out whether it includes everything worth desiring, or wishing for, or hoping for, or striving for, or what,
or what, and tried to find some account of that that didn't either have an unduly optimistic
or an unduly pessimistic account of how we could get it.
We tried to see whether it could, whether it was possible to show that we can't construct
a conception of happiness that doesn't require us to take account of other people's interests
to see things from other people's perspective and I was arguing that we have to integrate
well, I was claiming anyway, and waving at possible arguments for the claim that we have
to integrate a concern for other people's interests into our conception of happiness.
Now we'll try and narrow it a bit more.
Okay, so first of all, I want to claim that being an agent is a way of being a living
Living Organism. I think that that's a conceptual truth. It's not just an empirical discovery.
It's not just that we find that every agent also is a living organism, but that there's
actually a conceptual connection between the two. We can't make sense of an agent that
isn't alive. Zombies don't count. And it's part of the concept of a living organism that
it has needs and interests. Can't really make sense of the notion of living
organism that doesn't need anything or want anything or have any interest.
Partly because some sort of indirectiveness is part of the very
concept of living organism. I think that's true even of plants. Plants obviously
don't have conscious aims. Well, unless you're from California, maybe they do, but
But otherwise, no, but you can't make sense of a plant except in terms of its having needs and interests and so on, but certainly for living organisms like us.
So if each of us is identical to a living organism, we can't take seriously any account of happiness or well-being that doesn't treat the needs and interests of the living organism as our own needs and interests.
Now, in different ways you could take that. You could think that the needs and interests of the biological organism are already sort of completely fixed and settled by its purely biological nature.
And as a result, the content of eudaimonia will be determined entirely by our pre-existing biological needs and interests.
I don't think that's the most plausible account, because I think there are other things we can say about the nature of agency and so forth that don't have anything specifically to do with our biological needs.
But I think that our biological needs have to enter into the construction of our concept of odimonia.
Now, there's some libertarian thinkers who have tried to construct the content of odimonia out of biological needs and interests alone.
That doesn't mean that they end up solely with biological needs and interests.
I think that by starting with biological needs and interests you somehow...
That's the thing you have to start with, and everything somewhat has to be built up out of that.
So I think Herbert Spencer and Ayn Rand both try to do something like that.
Spencer has this argument about the need to exercise our capacities.
That life is all about exercising our capacities.
and the capacities are defined in biological terms, of course, our biology includes our psychology
and since Spencer thinks that there are these certain psychological traits we have
that also need to be exercised and therefore we need scope to exercise these
and we also have these sympathies for other people that we need to exercise
And the more we expand those, the better social cooperation will go, which will benefit us and enable us to exercise our capacities to further and so on.
So Spencer tries to build, I mean that's sort of an oversimplification of two thick volumes of the principles of ethics, but he's trying to build something like that on biological grounds.
Rand also starts off with an initially biological conception of well-being, survival.
And what she wants to end up with is not an ethics that's based on survival at any price.
She certainly thinks you should risk or even give your life in certain cases to advance your values.
I don't think that relying on biological interests alone,
just stuff about the organism, even including psychological needs,
I don't think that's enough to get a very plausible ethics out of it because, you know, although Spencer and Rand would both say that the many cases in which you should risk or even give your life is part of their ethical theory.
Neither of them embraces survival at any price, but it's hard in some sense to see why they don't if all you're allowed to start with is your biological needs and psychological capacities and so forth.
It's hard to see how you can get out of it.
Now, part of the argument is that our biological needs
commit us to certain principles.
And once we care about those principles,
then those principles, it doesn't work unless we're
committed to the principles for the principles' own sake.
Well, fine, that might be right.
But once you are committed to the principles
for the principles' own sake, you
can no longer regard them as being justified solely
by your biological needs, because now you
regard them as more important than your biological needs.
and so you're going to have from within the perspective you've adopted you've got to have some other story if you're in the if you're in the course of trying to commit yourself to principles and someone asks why are you doing it you say because I got a better chance of surviving or exercising my capacities if I do it well fine once you've done it once you have committed yourself to your principles if someone now comes along and says you know what justifies your commitment to these principles well if you really committed in the way that Rand and Spencer both seem you to want you to be
It's hard to see how you can now say, well, it's justified by biological survival because it looks like now you, you know, biological survival is no longer the be all and end all. It's just one aim among others.
But although I don't think it's promising, I also don't think it's necessary. I think that because we can't help but identify ourselves with the biological organism and identify its needs and interests as ours,
I certainly think that biological needs and interests play a role in determining the content of oedimonia.
But it can go the other way too.
Exactly how we should think about our biological needs and interests is not completely fixed.
It's not fixed by empirical science alone.
Because once we think of those needs and interests as ours,
then in the course of deliberating or engaging in practical reasoning,
We are already bringing the content of those under construction.
Once you regard a goal as your own, then as soon as you start deliberating,
you're embarked on trying to figure out exactly what the content is.
It's not something you can simply regard as handed to you anymore.
And there's a tradition among the classically dimest of thinking of these terms.
Aristotle talks about living a distinctively human life
Distinctively human life is being our best understanding of our biological function.
So he understands it in biological terms, but what we might think of as narrowly biological terms, that's not the whole content of it.
Because once you realize that our function is to live a distinctively human life, then you can raise questions about what counts as a more human way of living.
And those questions are no longer, you know, narrowly biological questions.
Likewise, Seneca starts off saying we are, you know, we have an initial attachment to our own nature and our own constitution and trying to preserve those.
But he thinks that what we're committed to is preserving ourselves as a certain kind of being, and therefore we're committed to living a certain kind of life.
And we would be, and the code of living a certain kind of life ends up taking priority over, say, the length of that life.
So here's a way of seeing what they're getting at.
To survive, we have to survive as a particular kind of thing.
I can't, you know, I don't count as surviving unless I survive as a human being.
You might say, suppose that I'm killed when my corpse is lying up here.
And someone might say, oh well, look, he's still there.
He's not a living human being anymore, he's a corpse now, but people change.
I used to be a toddler, and then I was a teenager, and then I was an adult, and now I'm a corpse.
The next stage in my personal odyssey, but Aristotle is going to say, well, there are some changes you can survive and some you can't.
And the change to a corpse doesn't count. You have to survive as a human being.
Now, of course, there are lots of ways of surviving as a human being, in kind of a minimalist sense.
If I'm lying in a coma, but still alive, you could say I'm surviving as a human being.
So you might say, all right, well, then this doesn't get us much, as long as you're still biologically living human, that's all you need.
But the way the Classical Endowmentist see it is, if your goal is to live a human life, and one life can be described as more human than another,
then that life is going to have more claim to be your goal, so that you can't consistently regard all human lives as on the same level.
If it's the humanness of life that is what makes it a value for you, then you have to treat a more human life as more your goal.
Now, then you can have the question, what does it mean to say that one life can be more human than others?
In case you think, well, it just isn't being human all or nothing. Either you're human or you're not. Either your life is a human life or it's not.
If you're a human being, you've got a human life, and if you're a cockroach, you don't have a human life, and that's it.
How can there be degrees of humanity? Isn't being a human all or nothing?
Well, there's a sense certainly in which being human is pretty much all or nothing.
But think of the analogy with size.
There's a certain sense in which having size is all or nothing.
Either something has size or it doesn't.
This lectern has size. Justice does not have any size.
So in that sense, there's no such thing as nearly or almost having size, unless it's a quantum physicist decide there is, but ordinarily there are clear things that have size, physical objects, and things that don't have size, abstract things and so on.
However, once something has size, and it's all or nothing whether it has it, once it has it, it does come in degrees.
This lectern has size, and this water jug has size, but the lectern in some sense has more size than the water jug, that sounds sort of odd, but I mean, you know what he means, they both have magnitude, but this has greater magnitude, greater extension.
So size is an all or nothing matter, but once you've got it, it can come in degrees.
So when you say likewise, humanity is in a sense an all or nothing matter, either you're a human being or not,
If your life is human or it isn't, but there can still be more or less human ways of living, to the extent that your life more fully exemplifies human characteristics to that extent it counts as more human.
And, you know, for people like Aristotle and Seneca, at least, this is why, starting with this biological perspective, doesn't commit us to just survival at any price.
Because a shorter but more human life can be more valuable than a longer and less human one.
And, as you can guess, rationality is a distinctive human feature that tends to take precedence over other aspects.
Human beings are rational and also bipedal, but this tradition generally thinks that rationality is more important than bipedality.
They're both good to have, but if you want to understand what's really fundamental about human beings, rationality is more important than bipedality.
So there's a kind of hierarchy of our various characteristics of various features and functions and needs and interests,
determined by what's most fundamental and explanatory.
You think of various things about a human being.
The fact that a human being is rational, this tradition claims, and I'm going to claim,
is more fundamentally explanatory than some of the other characteristics.
First of all, many of the other characteristics of human beings are explained by rationality.
Someone, I remember George, actually hearing a lecture from George Smith once, where he talked about having a debate with someone,
and he said, well, rationality is important because only human beings are rational, and so that's essential to being human.
And the person he was debating with said, well, only human beings build urinals. Why isn't that essential to being human?
Well, of course, one thing that's essential is that although only do, it doesn't seem that all do, but in any case, even if all human beings built urinals,
still, it seems as though the rationality part is more basic, more fundamental than the urinal building part.
Rationality explains not only the capacity to build urinals, but a whole bunch of other things that humans do.
There's a line from Adam Smith who talks about this distinctively human propensity to truck and barter.
He says in passing, well I won't go into whether I think this is just a basic instinct or not,
He says that it's the product of our more basic capacity for reason and speech.
He's saying that this distinctively human capacity for truck and barter is explained by this even more basic human capacity for reason and speech.
The idea is that rationality is more fundamental because it explains more about us.
about us, just as, you know, there are various features, Aristotle talks about various features of a triangle and he mentions they, the fact that a triangle's internal angles add up to 180 degrees, which at least in Euclidean geometry they do and he says he thinks that's not fundamental, in fact he says it's not essential, you know, anyway, if by essential you just mean necessary then you guys will think surely it's necessary, but when he says it's not essential,
What he means is that it's something that follows from the essence, he thinks.
Now, a non-Euclidean will deny that it follows from the essence, but assume that it does follow from the essence.
Then, the fact that a triangle is a regular three-sided polygon is more fundamental
than the fact that its internal angles add up to 180 degrees, according to Aristotle, because one explains the other.
So, now you might wonder whether rationality really is the most fundamental explainer.
I'm sure it's more fundamental than building urinals, but you might worry that something else is even more fundamental.
I'll talk about that worry in a minute.
What is, what does this mean?
What does it mean? Well, for one thing, it means that on the one hand, since we need to regard our biological needs and interests as our own,
there's something good about exercising our biological functions.
But then on the other hand, we shouldn't regard them all as equal.
Take, for example, suppose that you wear glasses, as I see that some of you have been so bold as to do.
You are using your nose and ears in ways that are not their strictly biological function.
Now, in fact, that doesn't impair the use of your nose and ears particularly.
But suppose it did. Suppose that wearing glasses pinched your nose just enough
so it made it a little bit more difficult to smell than usual.
And so you might say, well, then wearing glasses is going against your biological nature
The role of seeing in our lives is more important than the role of smelling,
or at least if you decide it is, you might decide that takes precedence over the subsidiary function.
I think this also explains why two inferences, two very opposite inferences,
It's usually sex people picking up something like, you know, going to the bathroom or something like that.
But, you know, although that is part of our biological function, other considerations can take precedence over it because it's not as basic.
On the other hand, you could have sort of the opposite.
That's sort of the libertine conclusion you could draw, not libertarian, but libertine conclusion you could draw from the goodness of exercising our biological functions.
Biological Functions. You could also draw the reverse conclusion. You can draw a
conclusion that that all non-reproductive sex is wrong because or
that homosexuality is wrong or the contraception is wrong because these
are things that frustrate the exercise of your biological function. But once again
you can say well no that's like glasses constricting your nose that it's that
that would be treating a lower function that's taking precedence over a higher one.
Okay, well, someone could say,
well, this is all very well if rationality really is the most fundamental explainer.
But you might think it's not.
You might think, well, what's the real most fundamental explainer of my traits?
And it's my selfish genes.
My genes want to reproduce themselves.
And I am just a complex tool for my genes reproducing themselves.
And so therefore, if you really explain why I have rationality,
you might think, well, genetic reproduction is even more fundamental than rationality.
Because the only reason my genes gave me rationality is that they hoped that that would
help keep me alive long enough to reproduce, so they could just go on.
So you might think, well, my rationality is purely instrumental to my selfish genes.
And so therefore, well, therefore in some sense, both the libertine and conservative positions would come up right.
You should have sex at every opportunity and it should all be reproductive sex.
You should be giving constant, constant reproduction every possible occasion would be what your selfish genes would want for you.
So why isn't it the case that what my genes want for me is a more fundamental explainer of my nature than rationality, and that therefore being truly human should give more weight to that?
Well, suppose that I build a missile, and my reason for building the missile is that I want to deter some other country that's got missiles.
And so my plan in building the missile is never to use it.
I don't plan ever to use this missile.
My plan in using the missile is simply
have a deterrent to bring out peace.
So my goal in building the missile,
now whether you think this is a good strategy or not, never mind,
this is the idea, is I build the missile with the intention
that it never be used.
What is the function of the missile?
Well, in some sense, you could say the function of the missile
is never to be used.
There's a sense in which that's true, but nevertheless there's another sense in which the function of the missile is to be launched and hit a target and explode, you know, if you look at the way it's designed, if you look at sort of what explains the greatest number of its features, you know, whether someone built it for warlike purposes or for peaceful purposes doesn't make much difference to the details of the way it's designed. If you really look, you know, not look at the intentions of the designer, but you look at the actual sort of the structure of it, would really make sense.
about the structure is that what would really be fulfillment for a missile
is for it to be launched and hit something and explode.
Everything about it is geared toward that.
Now why someone wants a thing like that is a different question.
One person might want it because they want to launch it and explode things.
Another person might want it because they wanted to deter the first person
and therefore they don't want to launch it.
But these different things don't make much difference
So it seems to me that although the persons end in building the missile might be to never use it, it seems to me that the function of the missile is not dependent solely on the intentions of the designer, at least on these sort of remote long-term intentions of the designer.
It seems that if you focus on just the structure of the missile, the missile is really all about being launched and exploding.
Or likewise, suppose that, you know, I'm Dr. Frankenstein and I create some sort of living creature in my lab.
And my intention in creating this living creature is that it be my slave or that it serve as food for me or something like that.
But I design this living creature as, you know, as a living creature just like you.
And it has all the ordinary biological needs and functions.
We could say, well suppose it finds out that it was actually designed with this intention in mind at my part.
You might say, well what really explains its traits best is for it to serve as my slave or my food or whatever,
and therefore that's what it ought to do to really fulfill itself.
And again, that doesn't seem right.
It seems too tenuous.
If you want to find out the way it's structured, it's structured in terms of its own internal needs.
So likewise I want to say that although, again speaking metaphorically because
selfish genes don't really want anything, but if we say that my genes gave me
rationality because they wanted, you know, me to reproduce them as much as
possible and they thought that that would be the way to do it, so to speak.
Well that tells me something about my genes and that's, you know, reproducing
Transmitting themselves is certainly the biological function of my genes, but it isn't necessarily my biological function.
They gave me certain needs and interests which are not directly their own.
They gave them to me, they had their own purposes in giving them to me, but once I've got them, the goals they gave me are mine, not its.
So, that's why I think that rationale, if you look just at the structure of human being,
you don't know whether the human being was grown in the ordinary biological sense
or was created by a Frankenstein monster, I mean, a Frankenstein doctor.
It shouldn't make any difference.
If I suddenly find out that I wasn't born in the normal way,
but that I was constructed by some mad scientist, some sane scientist for that matter,
It doesn't seem as though that changes much about what's most fundamentally explanatory.
That would be kind of an external explanation, but we're looking sort of at the explanation of how I'm, you know, how I'm put together.
However, this doesn't mean that, when I say that rationality takes precedence over the other goals, it doesn't mean that the other goals drop out or are irrelevant.
They're all included.
But there's a kind of hierarchy.
There's a nice passage in Cicero where he talks about a hierarchy of four roles.
Nature hands each of us 4 roles. There's the role that you're handed to by your human nature, just by the mere fact that you're a human being, that gives you a certain role to fulfill in life.
Then there's your individual nature, specific facts about your own particular needs and interests and talents and limitations and so on.
Then there's the social role, the society, the context, the network of social relationships you find yourself in.
And then finally, if there's anything left over after all that, there's whatever you get to choose for yourself.
And although he doesn't say this explicitly, it's pretty clear that these are in a hierarchy such that
if there's a conflict between the two, the more fundamental one wins.
So, for example, I ought to follow my individual nature.
I ought to develop my own particular...
I ought to be guided by my own particular talents and inclinations in shaping my life.
However, some of my particular talents and inclinations are lying in the way of torturing people or something.
Well, that conflicts with the more fundamental thing, the thing about human nature.
Why it conflicts will depend on stuff later, but also stuff earlier about, that we already had, about why you have to integrate other people's interests into your own.
Likewise, if you're born into a certain social context, Cistro thinks, you have an obligation to fulfill those social roles.
You might feel you want to resist that. You might think, well, why should I fulfill some social role just because I happen to be born into it?
So you happen to be born a medieval serf and so you think, therefore I have to live the role of medieval serf.
However, it seems pretty clear that if your social role conflicts with the requirements of either your human nature or your individual nature, those take precedence.
So it's not as blinding a claim as it might sound.
I think it just simply means that you have to regard yourself not just as part of society in the abstract, but to some extent as part of the society you're living in.
You're also born as the son or daughter of particular people, and that makes some difference to your obligations.
But I don't think it's the sort of all-consuming social collectivism that you might think it is, given that it's subordinate to the other two.
Another distinction is one that Aristotle draws between intellectual and emotional rationality.
Aristotle thinks that we should all live rational lives but he doesn't draw a contrast between reason and emotion the way that some other thinkers do.
Aristotle thinks that the rational part of the soul is divided into two parts.
The Commanding Rational Part and the Responsive Rational Part
And he says that emotions belong to the responsive rational part.
Part of what he means by that is he doesn't think that emotions are just sort of raw feels or blind urges or something.
Emotions embody judgments, and those judgments can be well-grounded or ill-grounded.
And for Aristotle, a lot of moral virtue has to do with having emotions that embody judgments that are appropriate to the situation, as opposed to having emotions that don't.
So for example, if I take the case of fear, if I feel overwhelming, terrifying fear of a mouse, or on the other hand, if I feel very little fear of a volcano or earthquake or something,
And in both cases, there's something defective in the judgment that my fear embodies.
Because fear embodies the judgment that something is a danger, something worth avoiding.
And if the danger is out of proportion, if a fear is out of proportion to the reality of the danger,
either by being too extreme or by not being extreme enough, then the judgment embodies is irrational.
And Aristotle doesn't think that we're just stuck with the judgments embodied in our emotions.
He thinks we can change them through habituation.
The Stoics thought we could change them just bang, like that, not by habituation, but just
by an act of will.
And given what they mean by that, the view, I think, is not as crazy as it sounds.
Because by emotion, they mean not the impulse, but your response to the impulse.
And actually, Sartre has a book on the emotions that presents a surprisingly strong case for the claim that emotions are states that we voluntarily enter and voluntarily exit.
There's a little book, Outline of a Theory of Emotions, interesting book.
But anyway, whether you think the control is direct or indirect, either way we have at least some control over it.
Also, although Aristotle doesn't say this explicitly, I think you can see the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean
as motivated by this concern to live a maximally human life.
Aristotle certainly does say that there are two ways you can go wrong.
Aristotle says that human beings are neither beasts nor gods and should avoid trying to live the life of a beast or the life of a god.
And one way of thinking about that is that you can either over-stress or under-stress the fact that we are embodied beings.
We're not just mere floating, disembodied intellects. We are actually vulnerable, embodied beings with animal needs and impulses.
So you could over-stress our pure intellectual nature and downgrade and pay less attention to our physical embodiedness.
or you could do the reverse. You could place too much emphasis on our physical animal needs and vulnerabilities and impulses and not place enough weight on reason.
And Aristotle tends to think that the more common mistake, the mistake that the many make, all those people voting in the Athenian Assembly,
the mistake they tend to make is the more sub-human mistake, the mistake of overstressing the animal nature.
But Aristotle often seems to think that Socrates and Plato might have made the opposite mistake,
might have been too high-minded and too willing to think things like,
as long as you're virtuous nothing can hurt you, and so on.
Well, Aristotle doesn't explicitly, as far as I can tell,
or at least not terribly explicitly, doesn't line this up or connect this with the doctrine of the mean,
A virtue is a matter of having just the right response as opposed to too much or too little.
So take the case of bravery or courage, which is a matter of having the right response to danger.
Ersel thinks there are two ways you can go wrong, two ways you can fail to have courage.
One, of course, is you can be a coward. You can feel too much fear, or you can give in too much to fear,
or you can over-stress the extent to which this is worth running away from, by running away from it.
Running away from dangers you ought to face, or not having sufficient regard for the danger of something.
But there's the opposite mistake of rashness, which you can make if you don't think that something is dangerous enough or you don't regard it as sufficiently worth running away from.
Rashness might be a matter of taking risks that aren't worth taking.
You might want to say, well, that's not a way of failing to be courageous. The rash person is courageous. They're just stupidly courageous.
Well, you can use the term courageous that way if you want, but Aristotle, again following
in the tradition of Socrates, generally wants to reserve these virtue terms for things that
are admirable.
And if you rush into a burning building to save your best friend, that's admirable.
If you rush into a burning building to save your ham sandwich, that's not admirable.
And therefore, I mean, you can call it stupid courage if you want, but Aristotle would prefer not to call it courage at all,
at least not to call it by the Greek term we translate as courage, which literally means manliness, but sorry about that.
But, you know, so he wants to say that there are two ways you can fail to be courageous, that is, fail to have the virtuous response to danger.
One is refusing to take risks that are worth taking, and the other one is taking risks that aren't worth taking.
Of course, people might do both, in which case they can be sort of cowardly and rash in different respects.
But you're courageous to the extent that you take the risks that are worth taking.
This, incidentally, is why Aristotle thinks that the courage involves practical wisdom.
It's not just sort of being especially resistant to fear.
Being especially resistant to fear might make it easier for you to acquire the virtue of courage.
But it's not courage because if courage requires responding to the risks that really are worth taking,
it involves being guided by some sort of judgment as to which risks are worth taking and which ones aren't.
Now that doesn't mean it's a purely intellectual thing.
I mean, Aristotle thinks that there's a kind of mutual determination here.
That on the one hand, your emotional responses need to be guided by some sort of intellectual insight into which risks are worth taking, which ones aren't.
But this insight isn't purely intellectual because Aristotle thinks that you're not going to fully grasp which risks are worth taking, which ones aren't, without the help of your emotions.
So they go together. It's not that one of them is prior and forms the other.
It's not that your emotions, you know, control your intellect, your intellect controls the emotions,
but there's sort of different, two different sides,
the sort of the motivational and the cognitive sides of practical rationality,
and you can't have either one without the other, he thinks.
This is the sort of thing you develop through a situation.
Well, what I'm struck by is that there's a way in which these at least can line up
with this distinction between the subhuman and the superhuman.
That is to say, if you're a coward, often what that means is that you are placing too much emphasis on your vulnerable embodied physical needs.
You're placing those above some other values that are more important.
By the other end, if you're too rash, that might mean you don't place sufficient stress on that.
So, for example, Socrates, you might think, was from Aristotle's position to rash, in that when Socrates had the opportunity to escape from being executed unjustly, he said no, he thought his duty lay with staying in the city and obeying the laws and not escaping, whereas when Aristotle was in a similar situation, Aristotle hightailed it out of Athens as quickly as he could, saying, you know, he wanted to spare the Athenians the shame of sinning twice against philosophy. Now, it's not clear if this is necessarily
and genuine disagreement, because part of Socrates' argument for why he should stay and accept his execution had to do with his having grown up as a citizen of Athens, and Aristotle was never a citizen of Athens, so you might think that the two positions are consistent, you stay if you're a citizen, run away if you're not, so I don't know that Aristotle would necessarily disagree with Socrates on that specific point, but Aristotle does in general think that, and part of Socrates' argument is that no harm can come to a virtuous person, and Aristotle clearly doesn't think that.
At least one of Socrates' reasons for staying and letting himself be executed is a reason that Aristotle would have disagreed with.
Now, that doesn't mean that Aristotle thinks that every rash person, you know, a sort of a Socratic person, is treating themselves as pure intellect.
After all, Aristotle's favorite example of rashness is the Celts.
He says that the Celts are considered courageous, but they're really not because they don't fear, you know, they don't fear fire or flood or earthquake.
This is sort of the general stereotype of Celts at the time, there's this famous story where Alexander the Great meets some Celtic chieftain and he says to them,
Ah, well you are supposed to be very famous for courage, can you tell me anything on earth that would make you afraid?
And Alexander is hoping they would say, why you, O King?
Instead, the kelp, you know, pulls his beard a little bit, scratches his head and thinks for a while and thinks,
something would make me afraid, something like, if the sky fell.
So, you know, so I'm not saying that, you know, all cases of rashness are cases of being like Socrates.
You know, would that that were true.
But nevertheless, there is a kind of connection here,
between over-stressing and under-stressing the value of our vulnerable embodiedness.
Take another case of, take the virtue of generosity.
There are two ways you can fail to be properly generous, according to Aristotle.
One is you can be stingy. You don't give when you should.
But the other way you can fall short of generosity is through prodigality, giving when you shouldn't.
If you give your entire life savings to the first homeless person that comes along,
we might say that I was being over-generous.
But Aristotle wouldn't want to put it that way.
He wants to say, well, it's not generous at all.
Because again, he thinks that generosity should be something to admire.
And if you are giving away money or helping people in a way that he considers foolish,
he's considering, well, that's not something to be admired.
We shouldn't use a virtue term like generosity for it.
Well, it's something else.
Once again, you could say that being stingy is a way of placing too much emphasis on your own animal nature and your own animal needs.
And then being too prodigal is a matter of giving away too much.
Now again, I don't think that that applies universally across the board.
For example, I don't think that's the right thing to say about Scrooge, a character like Scrooge.
It's not that he's placing too much emphasis on his own animal comforts.
After all, the way in which Scrooge lives in his own home is not all that much more
comfortable than the way that his employees live.
It is more comfortable, but still it's pretty grim.
Scrooge's problem is not that he overvalues his own comforts and undervalues others.
It's that he, at least part of his problem is the undervalues, you know, vulnerable embodiedness in general, and undervalues comfort in general, so he sort of universalizes his grimness.
Kant actually mentions that sort of thing as something he thinks is universalizable. It's problematic for other reasons, but Kant says at one point, you could have a world, you know, although you couldn't have a world where everyone is a liar,
You could have a world where everyone is really grim and stingy, but they universalize it, they never give anyone any help, but they never ask for help either, and Kant has a different argument against it, but he doesn't think that that world is impossible.
He actually says it would be better than our world, because at least there would be, you know, there wouldn't be injustice in it.
Which, incidentally, this has nothing to do with the topic, but I just remember seeing this movie once in which Scrooge is stealing matches from this little match girl on the street, goes up and steals her matches.
And I thought that really gets wrong. What's wrong with Scrooge? That's not Scrooge's problem. He's got problems, but that's not it.
Okay, so again, I'm not claiming that every stingy person is, just as I don't want to claim that every rash person is a Socratic,
I don't want to claim that every stingy person is someone who's sort of deeply enmeshed in their animal needs,
but I just think there's an interesting parallel there.
Likewise, and this example may work better,
temperance, which is an imperfect translation of the Greek term,
moderation is also imperfect, sound-mindedness, which is the most literal translation, is radically imperfect.
But anyway, so temperance is, I guess, close enough. It means having the right attitude toward bodily pleasure, something like that.
And there are two ways you can fall short.
One is, of course, just sort of giving in to bodily pleasures and being, you know, highly susceptible to them.
And I still think that's wrong, but he also thinks that if you're too insensible to them,
if you don't respond to them at all, there's something wrong with you.
He calls that insensibility.
And there, I think it clearly makes sense that you could see the intemperate person
as the one who's placing too much stress on their bodily needs
and treat the insensible person as a person who thinks too little.
Now, Aristotle thinks that most people are more likely to make the subhuman type of mistake.
You know, cowardice is a more frequent problem than rashness, even in ancient Greece.
Stinginess is a more frequent problem than prodigality.
Intemperance is a more frequent problem than insensibility and so on, he thinks.
And he also tends to think that you shouldn't think that the
Aristotelian mean is always going to be halfway between the two vices, you know, you just sort of figure out the two vices and you just slice halfway between, no, it's often not going to be the case, and in general, Aristotle thinks that it's going to be a little bit closer to the superhuman side than the subhuman side, so that the courageous person will look a little bit more like a rash person than a cowardly person, a generous person will look a little bit more like a prodigal person than a stingy one, and so on.
And that presumably is because over-stressing our rationality, the expense of our animal side, is a less serious mistake than the reverse.
Because if our rationality is more important than our biological needs, although we need both,
but if one is more important, then over-stressing the more important one is less of a screwed up mistake than over-stressing the less important one.
Nevertheless, he does think that even though the subhuman mistake is both more common and more serious,
that doesn't mean that we should embrace what I'm calling the superhuman mistake.
He does think that that mistake exists and does seem to think that Socrates might be guilty of it.
I think you could bring this for some of the other virtues, how it might apply to justice.
We'll wait for the next session, because the next session is the session where you start getting into justice and rights and your long wait for actual libertarian content will finally be redeemed.
Now what about the content of prudence? Now here I'm not going to use the term prudence quite the way Aristotle does, although in the end they may have been the same thing.
But I'm going to use the word prudence the way philosophers often do, simply to mean concern for self-interest.
I'm going to treat concern for your self-interest and consider it as a virtue.
Maybe in the end that's what Aristotle's conception comes to, too, but the entire apparatus of practical reason is embodied in his conception of prudence.
Of course I'm going to end up pumping up prudence so it does that, too, but that's not where I'm starting.
So I'm starting with, you think of prudence as self-interest.
Well, the prima facie content of prudence may be determined very largely by our biological needs and psychological desires and physical needs and so on.
So your initial concept of prudence might be along those lines.
And that will feed into and help to determine our final conception of our self-interest.
But these other elements that I'm arguing are also part of our self-interest are also going to influence and determine prudence.
And so, there's a kind of mutual determination between the two.
Now, I think that one implication of this is that there's a certain category that philosophers call supererogatory actions,
as actions beyond the call of duty.
These are things that are not morally acquired, but still it will be morally praiseworthy to do them.
So the idea is there's sort of a minimum that morality requires of you.
And as long as you do that minimum, you're okay morally.
You get the moral stamp of approval.
But if you go beyond that and do some extra special thing,
then you get an extra degree of moral oomph.
Well, I'm inclined to think that on the Aristotelian mean doctrine,
there can't really be such a thing as superegregation as ordinarily understood.
I think some of the phenomena that get called that can be salvaged under some other description.
But strictly speaking, it doesn't make sense to talk about things being praiseworthy beyond the call of duty,
because the Aristotelian mean rules out not only too little but also too much of the various sorts of things.
So you might think that being excessively willing to risk your life is not merely brave but super brave,
or that giving all your life savings to the first homeless person that comes along is not merely generous but super generous, extra praiseworthy,
or that not merely being moderate in bodily pleasures but disdaining them entirely is super, super temperate.
And I think that on the Aristotelian view, that can't really be the case.
I think part of the reason is that one of the things that supports the doctrine of there being
things that are above and beyond the call of duty, which nevertheless would be more praiseworthy to do,
is this idea that there's a clash between morality and prudence.
And if there's a clash between morality and prudence, then the more demands morality makes on you,
and more potential sacrifices it imposes on you in the way of sacrificing your prudence.
And so you might think at some point, well, although there's some moral reason to do something,
it would require so much sacrifice of your prudence that it becomes too much to ask.
And therefore, the fact that this is requiring so much sacrifice from you in the way of prudence
means, well, we can't strictly require this of you, but still there is moral reason for you to do it.
It would be awfully nice.
However, once you think that the content of morality and the content of prudence are constructed together,
not holding either one fixed but sort of mutually influencing each other,
then it's going to seem as though you can't really have a category of things that are above and beyond the call of duty.
Now, if you just held the content of prudence fixed and adjusted morality,
then that would mean that moral demands on you would be fairly minimal.
and but once you satisfy them then doing more would actually be immoral, you know, so you should just serve just the bare minimum and that's it.
If you held the value of morality fixed and let it determine the content of prudence,
then you might think that, you know, these incredibly risky actions to yourself would be perfectly prudent and, you know, the demands of morality would be very high,
but prudence, you know, would endorse all of them and if you fail to do any of these things, you're being imprudent.
But if it's a matter of mutual adjustment, it's going to be somewhere in the middle.
Probably a little closer to the more demanding than to the less demanding, but not all the way in either direction.
And then once that's the case, once you've found the Aristotelian mean, there isn't going to be a strong case for going farther.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean that the things we call superarrogation don't make sense.
There are cases where there are several different options that are equally okay for you to do,
but some of those might be more beneficial to others than some of the other options are.
And so if you pick one of the ones that's more beneficial to me, that gives me more reason to be grateful to you.
Because you didn't have to pick that one, you could have picked another equally acceptable option that wasn't that beneficial to me.
And therefore I have reason to praise you more, and I ought to praise you more out of gratitude.
So you become more praiseworthy sort of accidentally and that's one example.
Also there can be a lot of imperfect duties where you have to do something from time to time, but you get to pick when.
And you happen to do it now, when that sense doing it now was beyond the call of duty, but doing it at some point wasn't.
All right, well there's a famous doctrine which I've mentioned earlier called the unity of virtue.
It's usually described as the idea that you can't have one virtue without having all the others.
Or at least you can't have one virtue fully without having all the others. That's the usual way it's described.
Now, Socrates seems to hold it in the strong form that there really is just one virtue under different names.
That courage and justice and temperance and wisdom and so forth are all just different names for the same state.
Most of these other guys don't have that strong a form of view.
But they do think that there's some kind of interconnection between them.
And part of the reason they think this is that what one virtue acquires can't be fully settled apart from the others.
So let's take an example.
I'll talk about bravery and justice, even though we haven't really talked about the content of justice yet.
If justice has to do with respecting rights and so forth, then imagine the following case.
Suppose that you give me some object, you lend me some object for safekeeping and I promise to keep it safe for you and to give it back to you tomorrow.
And then I'm often walking with it and up comes a mugger to me and demands that I give him the object.
Now, what are my duties here?
Well, which virtues are relevant?
Bravery is relevant, or courage, because bravery is the justice that deals with which risks are worth taking.
So bravery is what's going to tell me whether it's worth trying to resist the mugger or not.
And of course this will depend on various facts about the situation.
Is the mugger armed? How strong is the mugger compared to me? Various things.
But it's also going to depend on the nature of justice.
Justice requires me to do the best I can to give this object back to you.
Now, what does the best I can mean? What constraints determine what the best I can is?
It doesn't seem as though it necessarily requires me to give the object back to you, come what may,
or to run every possible risk to give it back to you.
But exactly what justice requires has to be informed by bravery.
You need to understand bravery in order to understand which risks are worth taking
The Theory of Money and Credit
taken into consideration. So you can't fully work out what justice requires even the situation
without understanding what courage requires of you and vice versa. Now that's not going to be true
in every case. There are going to be lots of cases where there's no particular issue of justice
involved. There's no other people around, let's say, and the threat you're facing is not a person.
You know, so maybe issues of justice that have nothing to do with courage.
I mean, issues of courage have nothing to do with justice.
You know, I'm trying to get somewhere and I could cross this tree trunk that's over a chasm
or I could go a long way out of my way and use the bridge. Is it worth doing it?
Well, it could be an issue. It might be that I could do it safely, but I'm just too afraid.
The Theory of Money and Credit
There are reasons for saying that courage and justice are not just different names for the same thing.
However, it does suggest that you couldn't be, so it says you could be like, you know, 90% courageous and only 40% just or something like that, maybe.
But it seems like you couldn't be 100% courageous without being 100% just because you can't be guaranteed to do the courageous thing in every situation
unless you have a general understanding of what the right thing to do is in every situation and the various different considerations that are involved.
So that's why I think that unity of virtue is correct, and that the most fundamental thing about it is not just that you can't have one virtue without the others, but that you can't settle the content of one virtue without taking the content of the other virtues into account.
I think this is also going to imply that there cannot, at the end of the day, be a clash of virtues.
Because a virtue isn't just...
Philosophers want to treat a virtue as any sort of admirable trait, or any trait that is nice to have.
But I think that in this tradition, the virtues are thought of as action guiding.
To say that this is the virtuous thing to do settles that it's the thing to do.
The fact that something would be cowardly to do is a decisive argument against it.
Besides the argument against it, the fact that something would be unjust to do, is besides the argument against it, so the virtues, to say that something is required by virtue is to say that it's the thing to do, and given ought implies can, it can't be the case that you ought to do opposite things, it can't be the case that I ought to hand over the object to the mugger and that I ought also to hold on to it, so you know some of those people say
say, well, isn't it a kind of optimism, an unjustified optimism on the part of these
Greek thinkers to assume the virtues are never going to clash? And the answer is, well, that
makes it sound as though it's some sort of accidental feature. Aren't we lucky that they
don't clash? Like, you know, aren't we lucky that, you know, that we can have, you know,
both oxygen and electricity in this room and the electricity doesn't, you know, ignite
the oxygen or something? Well, you know, for all we know, it could have turned out that
You couldn't have them in the same room, and aren't we lucky that it turns out they're compatible.
But in this case, these aren't things that are just sort of handed to us by some sort of empirical discovery.
They're things we're constructing through practical rationality.
We're trying to figure out what our commitments are to do.
And that's why I think that it's not optimism to say that the virtues can't clash.
I say that you just don't count as the demands of virtue if they clash,
because it doesn't make any sense to say you ought to do incompatible things.
All right, well, consider the cases of prudence and benevolence.
And these are not especially Aristotelian terms.
I mean, there are terms in Aristotle that have been translated these ways.
But I'm thinking of prudence primarily as concern for your self-interest
and of benevolence as concern with other people's interests.
And neither of those is the name of a specific Aristotelian virtue, he doesn't slice things up that way.
I mean, the term prudence has been applied to practical wisdom, but again, I think it's not quite the same thing.
But nevertheless, a lot of the virtues do include concern both for yourself and for others.
Generosity pretty clearly involves concern for other people's interests. Courage is often also supposed to.
So the virtues involve concern with self-concern, plus we've already seen that we have reason to have self-concern, we have reason to have prudence, because as biological organisms we can't avoid regarding our biological needs as our own commitments, and I've argued that we also have reason to have concern for other people's interests because we can't coherently
Reject agent neutral value. So we have these values and we have to integrate them into our total value system.
Thus we integrate them with each other and also with any other values we're committed to.
So one of the implications of that is that we can't think of self-interest in such a way that there are fundamental conflicts between my interests and other people's.
Because benevolence concerns for other people's interests and prudence concerns for my own interests have to be integrated.
Now when I say there are no fundamental conflicts, remember what I mean is that there may be conflicts that are licensed by some higher value,
just as it's all right for there to be a conflict of interest between two teams playing a game, that's all right,
but that's because that, you know, there are grounds for that and can be endorsed from an agent-neutral standpoint.
or likewise if there are if there are you know two people in love with the same
person and they can't both have the relationship they want and so it seems
like there's a conflict of interest between the two of them you know I don't
think that we have to deny the existence of that you can say that it's
nevertheless licensed or grounded in some broader background framework of
Values. In fact, Rand has a discussion of this, which she puts in similar terms. She says it more
consequentialistically than I'd like, but she gives this example of two people competing for the same
job. She says, does this mean there's a conflict of interest among rational people? And what she
wants to say is, well, no, if what you mean by there being a conflict of interest is that it would
be better for the person who doesn't get the job to live in a society where the employer was forced
So once you consider the overall background context, you may still wish you had the job, but you realize that you can endorse background values that sanction the employer's freedom to give the job to someone other than you.
Now, just as between two persons, the view I want to defend is not that there are no value conflicts,
but that there are no value conflicts not for an endorseable by higher value,
I want to say that's true within a single person as well.
This is also part of response to the view that the Greek Ethics has too rosy a view of things
and ignores the possibility of real conflicts.
I'm going to talk about a couple of examples, which I talked about either yesterday or the day before, I forget which,
but I said at the time I would mention them again and now I am.
So, take the case of bravery or courage, I can never decide which of those terms I want to use.
You might think that since bravery concerns how much fear you feel,
and it also concerns which risks you decide are worth taking,
you might think what that means is that the risk,
you might think that that means that as soon as you decide that a risk is worth taking,
And if you're a properly courageous person, you will not feel any fear.
You will only feel fear of things worth running away from, and you'll run away from them.
And things that, if you decide it's not worth running away from, if you decide it's a danger
worth facing, then you will feel no fear.
But interestingly, Aristotle does not say that.
Aristotle certainly makes clear that if you feel excessive fear in the face of a danger
you ought to face, that even if you make yourself face it, you're just, you know, you're so
filled with fear that you're not able adequately to face it, you might think, oh, that's some
some kind of moral problem.
And we talked the other day about whether that's the kind of thing that can be habituated
away or not.
But Aristotle seems to think that when it's a danger worth facing, all the same, if you
felt no fear, then somehow your emotions would be not rationally grounded, your emotions
would not be properly expressing the situation.
And I think maybe one way of thinking about that is that fear is, you know, the fear is
is trying to get at a feature of the situation, which is that although the situation is one worth, the danger is one worth facing, it's all, it's also a case that it would be better if you didn't have to face it, you know, it's too bad you have to face this danger and it's not that Aristotle thinks that all challenges should be avoided, but he does think, or that it would be nice if we had no challenges, I'm not sure he thinks that, he certainly does think the danger, it's not an essential feature of human life, we'd be better off without it.
And so, if you just cheerfully, you know, went into the danger with no fear at all and think that some of you wouldn't be,
your emotions wouldn't be responsive to the fact that danger still is a bad thing.
The fact that it's worth facing doesn't mean that somehow, ultimately, it wouldn't be better to avoid it if you could.
Of course, what that means is, since fear involves not just a judgment that something is dangerous,
seems as though it's a mistake to think, as some people have thought, that Aristotle thinks that the virtuous person never feels any temptation to do wrong.
Certainly Aristotle thinks that a virtuous person is not one who feels all-pervading temptations to do wrong,
Temptations to do wrong, in particular temptations to do, you know, things that are very wrong
or things that are easy to avoid or something like that, but seems to think that the courageous
person is going to have some temptation to run away because that's what fear is.
Fear presents the object as something worth running away from.
So it seems as though the virtuous person is going to have some temptation to run away.
Or take the other case, the case from Karen Stohr I mentioned before, where you have the
duty to break the news to someone that a loved one of theirs has died or something like that,
and it falls to you to do this, and certainly you ought to do it, but you ought to feel
If you just cheerfully go and do your duty, that captures the fact that it is choice-worthy to do on this occasion.
It fails to capture the fact that generally this sort of thing is worth avoiding if you can.
I like that Aristotle says that you'd have to be, you know, that only a madman would think that we should try and have wars in order to have more occasions to express bravery.
Aristotle was not a neoconservative. He may have been pro-slavery, but he was not a neoconservative.
In fact, in one point, Aristotle says, actually, the virtuous man is more justified in feeling fear more than anyone else because the life that the virtuous man is afraid of losing is a much more valuable life.
If you're not a terribly virtuous person, then your life isn't worth all that much and so you don't have as much grounds for being afraid of losing your life.
If you're a virtuous person, you know, your life would be a much greater thing to lose and so you'd be justified to being even more fearful.
Now, Aristotle famously doesn't think that you can do virtue by handing out a list of rules.
It's not that he thinks that there are no rules. People sometimes say that, according to Aristotle, there are no rules in ethics at all.
There are no absolute rules. You're just, you know, just purely a matter of the wise man's intuition or something like that.
I don't think that's right.
Aristotle gives a list of some things he thinks are always wrong
and there's no right amount of them to do.
That sounds like a rule to me.
But he thinks that figuring out what the virtuous action is to do is like any other skill.
Think about driving a car.
There are rules you can memorize for driving a car.
Turn the steering wheel in the direction you want to go.
If you want to go faster, step on the accelerator.
If you want to go slower, step on the brake.
Those are rules you can memorize.
These are real rules, and they really apply, unless you're going to try to get out of a skid, and then they don't, but other than that, they apply pretty generally.
You take the list of all the rules, and imagine you've never been in a car. You just memorize all the rules. You memorize them really well, and now you hop in the car, and are you ready to go off and drive?
No, it needs practice too. It's not that the rules are not real, but that you're not going to really sense how to apply them. You're not going to recognize when they apply and when they don't.
There's certain things like, as you're coming into a curve, there's a certain sense you have of how soon you start breaking and how soon you start turning the wheel.
You can't fully state what rule that is, but it's something that you do.
Or like with writing, there are rules for good writing.
Some of the rules are pretty stringent and you should follow them pretty much all the time.
Others of the rules are more like guidelines and they don't always apply.
But even if you, you know, memorized all the rules and applied them robotically, you could still write god-awful stuff.
I mean, George Orwell has a famous list of rules for good writing.
There are things like, you know, use active rather than passive verbs, you know, use short Saxon words instead of long Latin ones and so forth.
But he gets to the very last rule, and the last rule is,
violate any of the preceding rules rather than, say, writing something outright barbarous.
Well, you know, the earlier rules could be, you know, could be memorized and, you know,
computer could apply them pretty well. But the last one clearly involves some sort of judgment.
There's no rule that tells you when you're writing something outright barbarous.
So likewise, Aristotle thinks that although there may be some precisely stateable rules,
they don't exhaust the content of virtue. Of course, when I say Aristotle thinks, you know,
most of these cases I'm endorsing it. Not the slavery thing, but the other things.
And more broadly, you know, there are reasons apart from Aristotle to say that principles of action always involve some tacit elements,
an element that isn't fully stateable as a rule. Hayek famously argues this. Hayek thinks that the reason for this is that no system can fully represent itself.
And think of, if I were making a painting of this room and everything in it, I'd have to include the painting.
and then I'd have to have a full picture of me with the painting and I'd have to fill in all the details of the painting and that would include another little picture of me and so forth.
Any representation that includes itself in what it's representing would have to be infinitely complex.
So Hayek thinks therefore no system can ever fully represent itself and therefore he thinks that implies, and I'm not sure whether it implies, but maybe it implies, that no person can ever fully grasp all the principles in which they act.
And Wittgenstein also thinks something like this for a somewhat different reason.
Wittgenstein thinks that no stateable rule can ever fully capture how to apply it,
because we don't fully grasp what the stateable rule means until it's applied.
And you can have the stateable rule sitting there.
Remember when I talked about plans before, you could write it all out.
Instead of plans, you could write, you know, these are my rules of action.
You could write it out.
But what those mean isn't settled until you actually start applying them.
As Aristotle says, there's a way of following a rule that isn't just another interpretation.
You stick another interpretation on the rule and you have to interpret the interpretation and so forth.
At some point, the interpretation has to stop and action has to start.
So there, it's not that it's something in principle stateable, but we're not complex enough to state it,
which is what Hayek seems to be saying, which for Wittgenstein, it's just not a stateable sort of thing.
It's just an acquired ability.
And Adam Smith talks about this too.
He talks about rules for,
difference between rules of grammar
and rules for having good writing style.
The rules of grammar are things you can memorize
and apply pretty robotically.
The rules for writing style you can't,
that doesn't mean there are no guidelines.
You can give guidelines,
but the guidelines aren't the sort of thing
you can just sort of robotically apply
without understanding the point of them.
But it's also, it's not as though
good writing is purely subjective
There's nothing we can say about it. People can learn to improve their writing. They don't learn it just by memorizing rules, but they can, you know, learn it through practice and experience and looking at existing examples of good writing.
And likewise Aristotle thinks you can't, although there are various guidelines you can say in ethics, you can't become a good person simply by memorizing a list of rules and then always obeying those rules.
You might be a better person than if you didn't obey some of those rules, but that's not enough.
But again, he doesn't think it's a purely touchy-feely thing.
He thinks that we can often tell whether something's better or worse, even though we can't fully state the rule for it.
We can learn through practice and habituation.
It's like learning to be a good writer, just as when you look at good examples of good writing, so you also look at examples of good people.
You might think you need some virtue in order to identify which are good people, and that might be true.
But it's also true that you don't need to be as good a writer as, you know, as either of two great writers to be able to tell that they're great or even to be able to tell that one is greater than the other.
I mean, I was asserting on my website a few months ago or a few years ago that Rembrandt was a greater painter than Poussin.
And I think that I can say that even though I am not as great a painter as either of them.
Not even remotely so. So you can tell who's a good model to follow even if you're not as virtuous as they are.
Okay, questions? Yes?
I have a question about the precedence of rationality, depending on the fact that only humans are rational.
Supposed it turned out that dolphins were rational as well, then while it's true that rationality wouldn't explain what was distinct about humans from dolphins,
you'd have to go to living on land, having opposable homes and things like that,
still it seems to me that there would be a real sense that for both dolphins and humans, then rationality would be the most fundamental thing about it.
Yeah, so the question is, how much stress should one lay on the fact that only humans are rational,
given that if dolphins turn out to be rational or some other species turn out to be rational,
wouldn't it still be the case that rationality is more fundamentally explanatory about us than, say, living on land or whatever?
Yeah, I agree. I don't think that too much stress should be laid on the fact that only human beings are anything in particular.
Some people have put it that way. When I say distinctively human, I, you know, maybe distinctively is the wrong word, but I didn't intend distinctively to convey just the idea of only.
I meant somehow, you know, distinctively means that that's the sort of special mark of them that's most salient or something like that.
But yeah, it wouldn't make much sense to say that as soon as we find another rational species, then it's time for us to, you know, to change what we think is worth doing.
I was going to spend the day giving philosophy lectures, and then suddenly we find out that dolphins are rational.
I think, well, I better do something more distinctively human than that.
Suppose that I find out that dolphins are giving philosophy lectures to each other somewhere.
Well, I better do something more distinctively human. I better spend the day walking around.
How will substantial changes in our biological nature change or to I.D. when human life, how will that change the environment?
you know all these various needs and functions and so forth are included I
think that any change in those is going to make some changes in in what sorts of
goals are worth pursuing if we lived in a hunter-gatherer society where the you
know the average lifespan was 30 or something like that then obviously a lot
of of goals we currently have wouldn't make sense to pursue and the other goals
that would make sense to pursue and likewise if you know if I thought I was
I'm not sure exactly what I would do differently, but certainly it would make sense to do things differently.
Now, so far you might say, let's just practical stuff. What about virtue?
Well, I suppose that how we relate to other people is going to be affected by things like lifespan and so forth.
I don't have an example right off the top of my head,
but certainly what you think counts as helping people what kind and what kinds
of you know let's say of social causes are worth including yourself to in what
way is going to make a big difference depending on you know how how long
people's lifespans are and and certainly also if you know if nanotechnology alters
our vulnerable embodiedness so that our embodiedness is not so vulnerable
If nanotechnology makes me invulnerable anymore, that's certainly going to change a lot of the applications of these virtues.
Certainly, just to take the most obvious case, if nanotechnology makes me invulnerable to most physical harms,
that's going to increase the number of burning buildings it's rational for me to go into.
It might be rational for me to stroll into a burning building to pick up my ham sandwich
I can't be harmed by flame.
Now, you know, that's sort of a fairly simplistic example and sort of more interesting questions are questions about human relationships and I don't have anything terribly interesting to say about that.
I suspect that some science fiction stories have probably explored that idea pretty well.
In fact, I've probably read some and just am not thinking of the right ones at the moment.
My next question. In your opinion, are there any modern works of fiction, films, or literature that you think embody or demonstrate this unity of virtue effectively? Maybe not intentionally, but if the characters do so, as part of their writing?
off the top of my head, you know, not that many obvious things are coming to mind. I'm
sure that, you know, I'll think of bunches and bunches later. Yeah, if I think of any, I'll let you know.
How do you know?
Yeah.
Just tell a question about the integration of
provenance and benevolence that is going to give us this
integration of self-concern and other concerns.
Maybe it's just a difference between the difference of
concern or your definition of benevolence or
But I'm just wondering how that concern that we could integrate
gives us any sense of obligation to the other.
Because we could be concerned about feeling morally committed or obligated
to doing anything to other people.
Well, a concern that doesn't move you to act
doesn't seem like a very strong concern, I guess.
Now if you're just worried about whether it has a certain kind of obligatory force, well if you're rationally committed to having a certain kind of concern and you don't have it, then you're not fulfilling one of your rational commitments.
I don't know whether that's the kind of... Oh, sorry, I forgot to repeat the question. The question is if you merely have other concern, is that strong enough to count as an obligation?
Couldn't you have concern for someone without you actually having an obligation to do anything about it?
Well, I guess, you know, at least I want to say that it, you know, this concern should be, you know,
the concern shouldn't just be a kind of, it's supposed to be action-guiding concerns.
It's not just sort of feeling sad when you, you know, you see someone falling off a cliff
and you feel sad but you don't throw them a rope.
you know it seems that it's not clear how sincere the sadness could be and of
course you could do you could feel sad if there are lots of things we can feel
sad about that we can't do anything about because you know we just we did I
don't have the ability to do it there are lots of things that you know there are
people being killed all over the world and you know my ability to help them is
is pretty limited so obviously other concern is gonna involve a lot of things
where we can't really act but in cases where we can act it's going to have some
sort of, you know, it's not real concern unless it has some kind of, you know,
and Put-in-the-Acting, yes, so the question is whether Goldilocks is the is the ideal
She is still exemplar of Aristotelian virtue because Goldilocks rejects the bowl that's too hot and the bowl that's too cold and goes through the porters just right.
She also rejects the bed that's too hard and the bed that's too soft and goes through the bed that's just right.
No, she is not the exemplar of Aristotelian virtue because she is breaking into someone's house, eating their food and sleeping in their bed.
But yeah, no, in a broad sense, certainly that could be useful for explaining the idea
of the mean.
I think one possible drawback of it is that it does tend to encourage this idea of a kind
of what Aristotle calls the arithmetic mean, where you just try to do the exact middle
between two extremes and you're arguing for it as just, oh, it's kind of in the middle
rather than identifying what it is about it that makes the others be too much or too little.
So it's a way of thinking about the mean that might make it seem kind of silly, not just that it's Goldilocks, but you should always do the middle amount of something.
In fact, people sometimes said, oh, does that mean you should do just the middle amount of theft or the middle amount of murder or something like that?
Well, Aristotle clearly says no. Aristotle says it gives a list of things that there's no right amount to do of, and murder and theft are on the list.
So, you know, sometimes the mean amount, you know, I said the mean is often going to be sort of closer to one end than the other,
but there might be cases where the mean is all the way to one end than the other.
You know, the most extreme response in some cases might be the right one. It's going to depend on circumstances.
He gives this example of how much is the right amount for someone to eat.
And he says, well suppose someone just says, well this is, actually this is a perfect example of Goldilocks.
He says, someone says, this is too much, this is too little, and so I'll take the intermediate amount.
And he says, well, too much or too little, you know, depending on what?
He says Milo of Croton, who in addition to being a rather nasty politician, was a famous wrestler.
He says the right amount for Milo to eat would be too much for the ordinary person.
The right amount for the right ordinary person would be too little for Milo.
So it's not just about finding something intermediate, but finding something that's appropriate to the situation.
I don't know if that was an example of one of the works exemplifying virtue ethics.
So I was wondering if you could tell us more about the way in which staple rules don't itself confer to you, because you say there's a couple different things going on in the same way, and there's this distinction that you make, that you get from a lot of people, and you say, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
Hayek and Wittgenstein between the stable rules that you're operating on and then there's the passive stuff that in principle couldn't be stable because it has, from the Wittgenstein angle, it couldn't be stable because it has to do with the application and the state has to turn at some point so you can't be making more rules because the application makes previous rules.
It seems like there's also a substantial difference between Aristotle and a number of other ethicists in a different way that have to do with stave-o's and non-stave-o's.
It's not just that you need sort of application to hook up the content, the stateable content more with what you actually do, but there's also a certain number of virtues that you just can't, you can't even state the content of them in terms of non-trivial rules in the first place.
I could say I'm going to exhaust the content of all morality in a single rule, and the rule is to be good.
But that tells you something interesting about what you can do.
It's like the crest or rad, down with the bad, up with the good.
I think it's also Aquinas' first law of nature.
It seems like Aristotle is in the hope that there are at least some virtues for which there isn't some non-trivial rule that you can spell out.
$15 under a given circumstance is exactly the right amount to give in order to count as generous, anything more than a fraud or anything less than a stint, but, you know, it seems like there are views where it seems like that would be worrisome, that you can't do anything about it.
Yeah, so the question is, isn't it the case for Aristotle that it's not just that you can't fully explain the state of the rule apart from its application, but that the very, but the very content of the rule can't be stated without any
in any non-trivial way. So the idea is going to be something like if you have a rule like be good or
be generous, you know, those are rules of a sort, but you need to have the virtue in order to be
able to understand what the application is. Yeah, and that's one reason I said there's a
difference between sort of the Hayek point and the Wittgenstein point because I think this is closer
to the Hayek point. It's not the same as the Hayek point because the Hayek point is still
I think the Hayek point still assumes the principle stateability of it, but it's closer to the Hayek point.
So the idea is that there are going to be rules that you can't apply because of all things like do the generous thing and there's no way of cashing that out apart from generosity.
And Adam Smith makes the point about the difference between justice and generosity is that injustice is much more rule-oriented in the sense that if I owe you $10, it's clear what I need to pay you, exactly $10.
If I pay you nine, I'm being unjust. If I pay you eleven, I'm not being super just, I'm just being dumb.
So ten is what you need. But for generosity, it says, there's nothing like that.
There's no rule that can tell you, I should give you exactly ten dollars.
And, you know, so you have to have a sense for generosity in order to be able to, you know, to have a rule to apply.
And so the question you raise is, aren't there going to be views for which this is a problem?
Yeah, a lot of people are going to say, you know, what kind of a rule is this?
Be generous when there's no such thing as the, you know, you can't apply the rule
unless you somehow already are applying it.
But, you know, I'm going to say that it's true, but it's not really a problem
because it's a pervasive feature of our lives, that there are lots of, you know,
I think for good writing style, for example, is similar,
that although there are things you can say, no list of things you can say is going to exhaust the rules.
And we have sinned on the side of excess by a minute and a half, so I will cease speaking now.