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NOTE The Praxeological Case for an Ultimate End

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Okay, so the Classical Eudaimonists think that everybody has an ultimate end,

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that everything we do is for the sake of one single unitary overarching end,

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which they call Eudaimonia, which is usually translated as happiness, well-being, flourishing,

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success at living a good human life, something like that.

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The term originally meant having a favorable guardian spirit, being well-demoned, but it had lost that literal connotation by the spirit.

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Anyway, so classically, I must think everyone has a single unitary overarching element, and they're aiming at it.

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And they defend this claim on something like praxeological grounds.

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They argue that a conceptual analysis of the nature of action will show that we're committed to regarding ourselves as having such an end.

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However, Thomas Hobbes gives something like a praxeological argument against an ultimate end.

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He argues that if you really think about the nature of action, you'll see we can't have an ultimate end.

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So we've got kind of a celebrity death match here between the Greeks and Hobbes.

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You can guess which side I'm going to come down on.

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But let me explain what Hobbes' argument is.

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Hobbes thinks that if you achieve, if you had null of an end, and you achieved it, then

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all your desires would be satisfied.

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Because if everything we do is for the sake of this one, one all-consuming end, then once

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you have it, then there can't be anything left out.

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So once you achieved your elderly end, you would have no unsatisfied desires.

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But he says, and the wording of this might remind you of Mises, Hoppe says, all action

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is motivated by dissatisfaction.

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Whenever you act, clearly you're not happy with the way things are.

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If you are happy with the way things were, you just stick with them.

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Whenever you act, you're trying to change the situation.

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So the fact that you're acting shows that you have some unsatisfied desires, and therefore

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Therefore the fact your acting shows that you do not currently have your ultimate end.

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Therefore if we ever achieved the ultimate end, it would be the cessation of all activity.

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You just have to lie there like a lump. In fact, you know, you'd have to stop inhaling

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and exhaling, and that would soon be the end of your career. So there cannot be such a

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thing as an ultimate end, at least, you know, not in this life, says Hobbes. And therefore

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Or he thinks that all these ancient Greek and Roman and medieval thinkers who all talk about there being this ultimate end

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Now the medieval thinkers had an out because they thought that the ultimate, really ultimate ultimate end would be union with God in the afterlife

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However, they did think that there was a kind of a second best ultimate end in this life

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And Hobbes is arguing you can't have anything like an ultimate end in this life

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Now, Aristotle, for example, might seem to open himself up to this kind of worry, because

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he says that odymnia all by itself makes life choice-worthy and lacking in nothing.

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That's a quote from book one of the Nicomachean Ethics.

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Well then, you can see why some might think, oh, if that's what you've got, then what you've

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got is somehow all-inclusive, there's nothing lacking, and therefore there must not be any

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unsatisfied desires if you've got odymnia.

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But Aristotle also defines the daimonia as a life of virtuous rational activity, in this

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case I want to stress the activity part. Aristotle thinks that a person who has achieved or has

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got the ultimate end, a happy person, a person who's living a happy life, is going to be

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active doing all kinds of things. And there's a puzzle, this is the puzzle that Hobbes is

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trying to push, which is if this happy person is doing all sorts of things, what's motivating

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What's motivating you to do things? You must have some unsatisfied desires or you wouldn't be running around doing stuff. If you've got unsatisfied desires, you must not be happy.

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Okay, let me give what I think is the first stage of an answer from the classically diamondous perspective to this worry.

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Now we'll see this doesn't completely kill up Hobbes and Hobbes will come back in weaker form later and have to be put down again.

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But here's some of the, at least the first move, first couple moves.

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First of all, it's a mistake to think that action expresses dissatisfaction with the way things are.

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Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't.

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Sometimes action expresses dissatisfaction with the way things would be if you didn't act.

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This is a point that Robert Nozick makes, I recall, in his article on Austrian methodology.

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So I give this example, since we're talking about Greeks.

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So we have Orpheus, here he is strumming on his lyre, playing away, and he's perfectly happy with the way things are, but the way things are isn't a static state, the way things are is his ongoing activity, his playing.

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He's playing to keep the activity going, so he's dissatisfied with the way things would be if he stopped acting.

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He doesn't like this counterfactual way things would be if he weren't making this music, but now as long as it's going on, he's happy with that.

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Another point is the distinction between instrumental and constitutive means. If you think of all

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means as instrumental, it's all means as something external to the end that's going to somehow

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will causally bring the end about.

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Then it does make sense to think of acting

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as trying to change things.

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But sometimes an action could be a constitutive means.

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The action is itself, keeping the action going

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is itself part of the end you want to achieve.

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In which case, you wouldn't necessarily be dissatisfied

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as you're going along.

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Incidentally, I don't say this in the notes,

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Incidentally, I think this is a possible objection

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to an argument Mises makes in human action.

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When he says that if there's a God,

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God could not engage in action.

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And his argument there is that action

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always involves use of means to end.

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So if you're omnipotent, you can just have the end instantly.

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You don't need the means.

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And therefore, an omnipotent being couldn't act.

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In this case, it's not so omnipotent.

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But, at least as far as that argument goes, I don't think that works because

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some of your means might be constitutive rather than instrumental means.

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In other words, your goal might include...

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It's not that you've got this goal that's defined independently of action

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and then you're doing these actions to bring about the goal.

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Your performing certain actions might be part of the goal you're aiming at,

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in which case, if they're sort of conceptually part of it,

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then even an omnipotent being couldn't dispense with those means

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and therefore a good act for what it's worth.

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All right, well, then these considerations I'm offering show that contrary to what Hobbes says, an ultimate end is not praxeologically impossible.

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It's not just inherently impossible given the nature of action for us to achieve an ultimate end.

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Now, there's still Hobbesian-type worries about the realisticness of this coming up later,

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coming up later, but at least that's to fend off the claim that it's praxeologically impossible.

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Now I want to show, here I'm going to borrow heavily from Plato and Aristotle, I want to

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show that the notion of an ultimate end is praxeologically required, so I'm going to

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try and give some reasons to suggest why you might think that we have to consider ourselves

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as having some sort of ultimate end.

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all right first of all here's a point that that the Greeks all agreed on by

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the Greeks I mean the Greek philosophers not the Greeks in the street which often

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had a very different view but the Greek philosophers almost all agree and here's

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something that Austrian economists also agree on means get their value from the

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ends they serve this is the whole you know whole point of imputation in in

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in Austrian economics and same idea in ethics.

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If my only reason for doing one thing

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is to get some other thing,

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then the value of the means

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must depend on the value of the end.

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Now, of course, I might be doing this thing

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both for its own sake and for the sake of some other end,

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in which case it would be both a means and an end.

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But to the extent that I'm doing it as a means,

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to that extent, its value depends

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on the value of the end it serves.

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Aristotle gives this as a reason for thinking that there have to be some final ends. Aristotle says it couldn't be the case that I do A in order to get B and I do B in order to get C and I do C in order to get D and it goes on infinitely.

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He thinks that doesn't make sense because the value of any chain of means to ends depends on the value of the final link in the chain, the final end.

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If there is no final end, then the whole thing would have no value, you think.

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So we have to have final ends. Whenever we value something, there has to be some final end for the sake of which we're doing it.

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However, that doesn't settle whether there's just one end for all our actions.

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All that would show is that for any action you do, there has to be a final end for that action.

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But it might be that every action you do has a different final end, and that they don't all combine into one.

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So we need a separate argument to show that there's just one big end for all our actions.

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Now some people thought the Greeks are just making a silly mistake here.

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Some people thought the Greeks are just sliding from the claim that there's an ultimate end for each of our actions

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to the claim that there's some one ultimate end for all of them together.

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which, that would be an example of the fallacy of composition, thinking that because something is true of each member of a group separately, it's somehow true of the whole group collectively, and that would be a fallacy.

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A lot of people think that the Greeks are making that fallacy, but I don't think so.

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Anyway, I'm going to try to avoid making that fallacy.

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Why might we think that we have not just some final ends, or not just a final end for each of our actions,

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why might we think that we have one big final end, the most final end of all our actions put together?

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Why should we think we're committed to thinking of it that way?

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Well, think about cases when you're making trade-offs.

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Suppose there are two things you want and you can't have both.

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I don't know if it's ever happened to you, but sometimes it happens that there are two things,

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and you'd like to have them both, but you have to pick one. So you're choosing between,

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I'll call them creatively, A and B, and when you can't have both, you have to decide which one to

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pick. And so you weigh the options in your mind. You try to go about deciding. You deliberate.

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You try to make a decision about which one to pick. Well, that process is itself an action.

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When you're deliberating about whether to have A or B, you are engaging in an action.

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All action aims at an end.

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What is the end of this action?

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I'm trying to choose between A and B. What is my goal?

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Well, it can't be A.

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My aim, the thing I'm trying to get in choosing between A and B, can't be A.

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Because I haven't yet settled whether it's A I'm going for.

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I might decide to go for B.

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So the goal can't be A by itself, but for the same reason the goal can't be B by itself.

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Could it be both? Could it be A plus B? Is that my goal in deliberating?

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Well, no, because we've already assumed that A plus B is not an available option.

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I've already given up that option. I have to choose one or the other. I can't have both.

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So when I'm choosing between A and B, my goal is not A and B both together.

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Could it be A or B? My choice is somehow A or B. That's the situation I want to bring about.

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Well, no, because then I wouldn't have to deliberate. I could just randomly pick one and it would get me that.

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I don't just want one or the other and I don't care which. I want something more than that.

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So whenever we deliberate, we've got some goal in mind.

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Whenever we deliberate trying to choose between A and B, we've got some goal in mind that isn't A and it isn't B.

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And it isn't A and B and it isn't A or B. What is it?

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Well, we might say it's something like maximizing the satisfaction of our preferences, which I'm going to call maxpref for short.

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Now, it's going to turn out that that's a slippery description, we're going to need to fiddle with it later, but we can just use it as a first approximation for now.

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When I try and choose from A and B, I'm trying to decide which one would maximize my preferences, which one would give me the most of what I want.

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I mean, not the most in terms of physical quantity, but the most in terms of value, trying to get as much of it as possible of what I want.

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So it turns out that in addition to all my particular ends, I've got to have, you know, if deliberation is an essential feature of rational agency,

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Then, in addition to all my particular ends, I have to have this more general end of maximizing as many of these as possible, or as much of it as possible, or something like that.

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Now, maximizing may be a worrisome term here, to make it sound as though there are some cardinal quantities that you're adding up, and I don't think that's quite the right way to think about it.

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Still, there's some sense in which you're trying to do as best as you can to satisfy your preferences.

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Given that you can't satisfy them all, you want to satisfy the greatest number of the more important ones or something like that.

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And I'm calling that max breath.

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Now someone might say, well, alright, anyone who deliberates must have the goal of maximizing the satisfaction of their preferences.

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But what about beings that don't deliberate? Suppose they're a rational agent that never engaged in deliberation.

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Well, I'm inclined to think that that wouldn't really be a rational agent.

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But if you think that there are rational agents that don't engage in deliberation,

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or that there could be, I'll say, all right, well, then my argument would only apply to the subset of rational agents who deliberate.

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I have a hard time seeing what rationality would be in an agent who didn't deliberate, but I don't want to quibble about the term.

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But I'm going to use the term rational agent in such a way that includes deliberation.

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All right, so it turns out that in addition to all your particular ends, if you're a rational agent who deliberates,

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you must also have this end of satisfying as much as possible of your most important preferences or something like that.

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Now given that, whenever you choose something, that choice expresses a preference for that

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thing over any of its rivals.

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So I'm going to claim that means whenever you choose something, that choice expresses

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a judgment that that thing advances your maxpref better than anything else.

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Now someone might want to quibble about that. Someone might want to say, well, maybe it doesn't express any judgment at all.

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You've got this preference, just sort of like a brute desire. Why assume that there's any judgment involved?

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Well, I guess I just have trouble seeing how an irrational agent, as opposed to, you know, I don't know, an earthworm or something.

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I'm a rational agent. I have a hard time making sense of the notion of a preference.

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If a preference can't be expressed as a judgment, this gets me more of what I want than that.

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But at least that's the point where someone could try and put up a fight.

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But so will she grant that whenever you choose something,

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that your choice expresses a judgment that that thing advances your max breath.

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Well, it seems to me that that at least comes pretty close to saying

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that whenever you choose, it's chosen, whatever else it's chosen as,

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It's chosen, among other things, as a means to your max breath.

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Whatever you choose, you're choosing it because,

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or part of the reason you're choosing it, at least,

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is because it promotes your max breath.

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And therefore, whatever you choose

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is chosen as a means to your max breath.

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And this will give us a reason for identifying max breath

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with the Greek notion of odymnia, at least initially.

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This is just suggestive that there is a goal

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that everyone has, in addition to all

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and other particular goals of, you know, water right now or whatever and then everyone has, you know, this broader, more systematic goal of trying to get as much of what they want as possible.

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But you might think, and this is where the Hobbesian objection is raising its head again, you might think, well, wait a second.

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All right, Maxpref was like O'Dymania in that sense.

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But there's some fancy features that O'Dymania is supposed to have that Maxpref doesn't seem to have.

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Remember that O'Dymania, all by itself, makes life choice-worthy and lacking in nothing.

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That's what Aristotle says about it.

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00:18:21.760 --> 00:18:28.660
That's what the sort of thing the Greek philosophers in general say about this ultimate goal.

204
00:18:28.660 --> 00:18:31.860
But we've just seen that the pursuit of Maxpref involves trade-offs.

205
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The whole example I gave was the case where you want both A and B, and you can't have both.

206
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And so you pick whichever one is going to most maximize your preference satisfaction.

207
00:18:43.060 --> 00:18:49.060
But it seems as if total satisfaction of all your preferences isn't on the cards.

208
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If you're choosing something for the sake of Maxpref, you're not choosing it for the sake of getting all the things you want,

209
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It seems like if you're doing trade-offs, you're already recognizing you can't have everything you want.

210
00:18:56.960 --> 00:19:07.960
So, it might seem as though we haven't got a full conception about diamonia here.

211
00:19:07.960 --> 00:19:14.960
Now, here's a possible answer, and I think this possible answer is on the right track.

212
00:19:14.960 --> 00:19:17.960
It's not complete. More needs to be said.

213
00:19:17.960 --> 00:19:20.960
But the first thing to say is that maybe we should say that

214
00:19:20.960 --> 00:19:26.960
etymology includes not everything worth wishing for, but everything worth choosing.

215
00:19:26.960 --> 00:19:30.960
After all, what Aristotle says is it includes everything choice-worthy.

216
00:19:30.960 --> 00:19:33.960
He doesn't say it includes everything wish-worthy.

217
00:19:33.960 --> 00:19:37.960
There are also, of course, the things we wish for that we can't choose

218
00:19:37.960 --> 00:19:39.960
because we know that they're impossible.

219
00:19:39.960 --> 00:19:43.960
Or at least, if they're not impossible, at least there's something that you,

220
00:19:43.960 --> 00:19:46.960
there's nothing you can do right now to bring it about.

221
00:19:46.960 --> 00:19:50.960
You know, I'd like to be able to, I'd like to be able to teleport.

222
00:19:50.960 --> 00:19:56.960
You know, that's what they were wishing for, but that's not something worth choosing.

223
00:19:56.960 --> 00:20:02.960
You know, it's not something, you know, so Aristotle doesn't think that the fact that we can't teleport

224
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instantly all around the planet means that our lives are unhappy, that our lives are importantly lacking.

225
00:20:08.960 --> 00:20:14.960
Well, maybe it would be cool if we could teleport, it would be cool if we could live a million years,

226
00:20:14.960 --> 00:20:23.960
It would be cool if we could levitate things by waving our hands around, all kinds of stuff would be cool.

227
00:20:23.960 --> 00:20:28.960
Those are things worth wishing for, worth thinking it would be cool to have, but not worth choosing.

228
00:20:28.960 --> 00:20:34.960
So you might say, well maybe O'Dymania is just stuff worth choosing.

229
00:20:34.960 --> 00:20:43.960
But then comes the problem which I mentioned briefly toward the end of the last lecture.

230
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Suppose something is currently unattainable.

231
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It's not unattainable like teleportation.

232
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It's something that is possible in the ordinary run of things,

233
00:20:52.760 --> 00:20:56.760
but just I can't get it right now.

234
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For example, suppose I fall into a well and I can't get out.

235
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I could get out if someone came along and brought a ladder or something.

236
00:21:06.060 --> 00:21:07.560
But right now, there's no one around with a ladder.

237
00:21:07.560 --> 00:21:08.560
Right now, I can't get out.

238
00:21:08.560 --> 00:21:11.760
Right now, currently, getting out is unattainable.

239
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So all the getting out is worth wishing for.

240
00:21:13.360 --> 00:21:19.160
You might think it's not worth choosing. I mean, it's not even something I can choose in the current situation.

241
00:21:19.160 --> 00:21:21.160
It's not even something I can try to do.

242
00:21:21.160 --> 00:21:30.160
It's nothing I can, you know, the walls are, you know, utterly smooth and it's very deep and there's nothing I can do to get out.

243
00:21:30.160 --> 00:21:35.660
So getting out of the well, you might think, is not worth choosing in that context.

244
00:21:35.660 --> 00:21:39.160
It's not a legitimate object of choice.

245
00:21:39.160 --> 00:21:44.760
If you think that a diminea includes everything choice-worthy, but not everything worth wishing for,

246
00:21:44.760 --> 00:21:49.160
you might think, well, that means, hey, then I should be happy at the bottom of the well.

247
00:21:49.160 --> 00:21:53.360
I'm not lacking anything worth choosing, lacking something worth wishing for,

248
00:21:53.360 --> 00:21:59.260
but we already agreed that we didn't want our conception of a diminea to be so utopian.

249
00:21:59.260 --> 00:22:06.760
It'd include everything you might conceivably wish for, like powers of Superman or something.

250
00:22:06.760 --> 00:22:23.360
So suppose you say that Adaminia includes only what is worth choosing, and that therefore, as soon as something becomes unavailable, it's not worth choosing.

251
00:22:23.360 --> 00:22:27.280
And so it ceases to be part of the content of Adaminia.

252
00:22:27.280 --> 00:22:36.320
I'm going to call that accommodationism, the idea that you might also call it adaptationism, the idea that the content of Adaminia adapts itself to what the circumstances are.

253
00:22:36.320 --> 00:22:41.320
So if something's not available, then it stops being part of Adamania and it's not worth choosing.

254
00:22:41.320 --> 00:22:45.320
Well, one problem with this is it seems to make Adamania too easy.

255
00:22:45.320 --> 00:22:49.320
Throw me in the bottom of a well and I should be happy because I can't get out.

256
00:22:49.320 --> 00:22:53.320
Throw in some snakes that are biting me. If I can't get rid of the snakes, then once again,

257
00:22:53.320 --> 00:22:59.320
getting rid of the snakes is not worth choosing, so again, I should be perfectly happy down there.

258
00:22:59.320 --> 00:23:05.320
Because as long as the things I lack are things I can't get,

259
00:23:05.320 --> 00:23:10.320
Then it seems like I've got everything worth choosing, and that seems like kind of an icky conception of success.

260
00:23:10.320 --> 00:23:13.320
That didn't stop some Greek philosophers from embracing it.

261
00:23:13.320 --> 00:23:17.320
Socrates and the Stoics both think something along those lines.

262
00:23:17.320 --> 00:23:19.320
Their versions of the story are different.

263
00:23:19.320 --> 00:23:26.320
But Socrates and the Stoics both tend to think that if something is unavailable or outside of your power to get,

264
00:23:26.320 --> 00:23:33.320
then you shouldn't care about it, and therefore you're perfectly happy without it.

265
00:23:33.320 --> 00:23:37.720
For the Stoics, the content of happiness is just nothing but your own virtue,

266
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the only thing under your control.

267
00:23:39.720 --> 00:23:42.720
For Socrates, it seems to expand and contract depending on what's available.

268
00:23:42.720 --> 00:23:45.820
So you're allowed to care about things other than virtue as long as they're available.

269
00:23:45.820 --> 00:23:50.820
Take them away and bang, you shouldn't care about them anymore.

270
00:23:50.820 --> 00:23:57.020
But, you know, not all the Greek philosophers wanted to go for this.

271
00:23:57.020 --> 00:24:00.220
Aristotle, for example, thinks that there are things,

272
00:24:00.220 --> 00:24:03.380
Some things outside our control matter for happiness.

273
00:24:03.380 --> 00:24:04.660
He didn't think it should depend heavily

274
00:24:04.660 --> 00:24:06.180
on things outside our control,

275
00:24:07.100 --> 00:24:09.700
because that would make our happiness very vulnerable.

276
00:24:09.700 --> 00:24:11.180
And if our happiness is very vulnerable,

277
00:24:11.180 --> 00:24:12.580
it seems like we're in a bad state,

278
00:24:12.580 --> 00:24:15.260
to some extent, and that's not happiness.

279
00:24:15.260 --> 00:24:16.620
But he thought that happiness could be

280
00:24:16.620 --> 00:24:20.020
in principle vulnerable to bad stuff that might happen.

281
00:24:20.020 --> 00:24:21.220
It should be largely in your control.

282
00:24:21.220 --> 00:24:23.780
We didn't think it should be entirely so.

283
00:24:23.780 --> 00:24:27.980
And his student, Theophrastus, apparently went farther.

284
00:24:27.980 --> 00:24:29.180
How much farther we don't know

285
00:24:29.180 --> 00:24:45.180
Aristotle because his writings are mostly lost, but apparently the people of historic persuasion who read Theophrastus found him even more shocking than Aristotle in the extent to which he thought that our happiness depends on external good luck.

286
00:24:45.180 --> 00:24:55.180
So they at least thought that part of our happiness could depend on things not currently available.

287
00:24:55.180 --> 00:25:03.180
Besides, although the Socrates and Stokes might think that we only should have aimed at things that are presently attainable,

288
00:25:03.180 --> 00:25:06.180
they know that we often don't.

289
00:25:06.180 --> 00:25:14.180
We often aim at things we know or desire or wish for or hanker for or feel unhappy without these other things.

290
00:25:14.180 --> 00:25:21.180
And that needs to be explained, given that we need to have some conception about Ammonia,

291
00:25:21.180 --> 00:25:38.180
is somehow that it can be all-inclusive in the way it needs to be and yet somehow be something we do in fact aim at or can be interpreted as aiming at and yet nevertheless be something that somehow can be dependent on external good fortune.

292
00:25:38.180 --> 00:25:49.420
Suppose you say that we should include in our daimonia not just what is currently attainable,

293
00:25:49.420 --> 00:25:51.940
but things that are in principle attainable.

294
00:25:51.940 --> 00:25:55.660
So maybe I shouldn't name it teleportation because that's not in principle attainable,

295
00:25:55.660 --> 00:26:00.260
although I don't know that it isn't in principle attainable, but at least it's kind of far

296
00:26:00.260 --> 00:26:01.260
off.

297
00:26:01.260 --> 00:26:07.380
Whereas I'm sitting in the, so it doesn't make sense for me to think my life is going

298
00:26:07.380 --> 00:26:17.380
I'm going badly because I can't teleport, but it does make sense for me to think that my life is going badly if I'm at the bottom of a well and there's no ladder, because a ladder is in principle something that could be attained.

299
00:26:17.380 --> 00:26:34.380
Well, the problem is that if you define a daimonia as including whatever is in principle attainable, well, the problem is it's going to be unattainable in practice, because we know that not all the things that are in principle attainable are actually going to be jointly realized by us.

300
00:26:34.380 --> 00:26:47.380
If not impossible, at least incredibly improbable. It's incredibly unlikely, and so it seems a bad idea to make our happiness depend on something that's incredibly unlikely.

301
00:26:47.380 --> 00:26:54.380
I hear that Bill Gates is giving a lot of money away now. He might decide to give it all to me. It's possible.

302
00:26:54.380 --> 00:27:02.380
But it's so unlikely that it seems like it would be a bad idea to make my conception of happiness depend on his giving it to me.

303
00:27:02.380 --> 00:27:07.380
Well, here's the first move of an answer.

304
00:27:07.380 --> 00:27:13.380
This isn't, once again, it's not a complete answer, but it's moving us, I think, in the right direction.

305
00:27:13.380 --> 00:27:17.380
First, we can distinguish between direct versus indirect objects of choice.

306
00:27:17.380 --> 00:27:21.380
It's a mistake to think that you can only choose things that are right here now.

307
00:27:21.380 --> 00:27:26.380
Like, this glass is right here now, I can choose this.

308
00:27:26.380 --> 00:27:31.380
There are things not right here now that I can, in some sense, choose.

309
00:27:31.380 --> 00:27:36.880
For example, I can choose now to go to Paris next May.

310
00:27:36.880 --> 00:27:40.980
And it doesn't mean that right now I can do something that guarantees that I will be in Paris next May.

311
00:27:40.980 --> 00:27:42.780
That's beyond my power.

312
00:27:42.780 --> 00:27:47.280
So the Stoics would think it would be silly for me to choose.

313
00:27:47.280 --> 00:27:54.880
But still, you know, I can start doing things now whose point is that they will eventually get me to Paris then.

314
00:27:54.880 --> 00:28:04.880
I could make reservations now, or I could, there are various things I could start doing now that would count as my aiming, so in some sense I'm choosing the goal.

315
00:28:04.880 --> 00:28:10.880
Now, of course, I can't do anything now that will guarantee that I'll be embarrassed, but I can do things that will make it a lot more likely.

316
00:28:10.880 --> 00:28:23.880
So you could say, maybe we should define odamonia not, on one extreme, as everything worth wishing for, which is doing us teleportation, all kinds of loopy stuff,

317
00:28:23.880 --> 00:28:28.040
Nor just everything directly choice-worthy, which seems to constrict too much,

318
00:28:28.040 --> 00:28:31.360
but maybe Adam and Eve should be everything worth striving for.

319
00:28:31.360 --> 00:28:35.200
Not everything worth directly choosing right here, not everything worth wishing for either.

320
00:28:35.200 --> 00:28:37.920
Teleportation is not worth wishing for.

321
00:28:37.920 --> 00:28:40.560
I mean, sorry, it's not worth striving for. It's worth wishing for.

322
00:28:40.560 --> 00:28:44.960
It's not worth striving for. It's not worth my doing anything to bring about teleportation,

323
00:28:44.960 --> 00:28:49.760
because nothing that I can do is going to have very much of a good chance

324
00:28:49.760 --> 00:28:53.160
of making any significant progress in that direction.

325
00:28:53.160 --> 00:28:57.160
If I were a theoretical physicist, maybe you'd be worth it, but I don't know.

326
00:28:57.160 --> 00:29:01.160
I'd have to be a theoretical physicist in order to know that.

327
00:29:01.160 --> 00:29:05.160
But that still doesn't help us with the well, because you might think,

328
00:29:05.160 --> 00:29:09.160
if I'm stuck at the bottom of the well, and the sides are perfectly smooth,

329
00:29:09.160 --> 00:29:13.160
and there's no ladder, you might think it's not even worth striving to get out.

330
00:29:13.160 --> 00:29:17.160
Because I know I can't, by my own efforts. I can't if some good luck comes along.

331
00:29:17.160 --> 00:29:21.160
I can't if someone comes along with a ladder, but I can't climb out myself.

332
00:29:21.160 --> 00:29:39.160
Well, it depends how you define striving, or maybe you want some concept that is broader than striving, but anyway there's a sense in which if I'm in the bottom of a well it makes sense for me to be sort of on a kind of high tension alert.

333
00:29:39.160 --> 00:29:49.160
I'm always on alert, you know, ready to hear someone walking by that I can yell out to or something. I'm constantly on high tension alert, you know, to do something that will get me a ladder.

334
00:29:49.160 --> 00:29:53.160
Even if there's nothing I can do now, I'm sort of alertly watching the opportunities.

335
00:29:53.160 --> 00:29:58.160
I'm intensely watching the opportunities. That's not who I am with teleportation.

336
00:29:58.160 --> 00:30:04.160
I'm not constantly, you know, scanning the physics journals looking for the latest evidence that I might be willing to do something to teleport.

337
00:30:04.160 --> 00:30:08.160
Maybe I should, but I'm not.

338
00:30:08.160 --> 00:30:14.160
So, now, when I'm under sort of high tension alertness at the bottom of the well,

339
00:30:14.160 --> 00:30:18.160
you know, maybe striving isn't the right way to put that.

340
00:30:18.160 --> 00:30:22.160
Maybe I'm not exactly striving for a ladder, but I'm doing something like striving.

341
00:30:22.160 --> 00:30:28.160
I'm all geared up to grab the first opportunity to get the ladder if I can.

342
00:30:28.160 --> 00:30:34.160
Whereas I'm not geared up that way for the teleportation.

343
00:30:34.160 --> 00:30:36.160
I'm not scanning every opportunity.

344
00:30:36.160 --> 00:30:40.160
So you could treat that as something like striving.

345
00:30:40.160 --> 00:30:48.160
So maybe a dimedia includes everything worth striving for in this broad sense.

346
00:30:48.160 --> 00:30:53.160
But then you might think, well, why shouldn't it be that way about teleportation?

347
00:30:53.160 --> 00:30:55.160
Teleportation would be a good thing to have.

348
00:30:55.160 --> 00:31:00.160
Why shouldn't I be in a constant state of really alertness and tension and nervousness?

349
00:31:00.160 --> 00:31:04.160
Thinking, you know, I hope I don't die before they come up with teleportation.

350
00:31:04.160 --> 00:31:09.160
I hope I don't die before they come up with, you know, the drug that will make me live for a million years or whatever.

351
00:31:09.160 --> 00:31:14.160
Maybe it'll never happen, but should I be in sort of constant nervousness about that?

352
00:31:14.160 --> 00:31:21.160
Well, so we have this tension between what I'm calling utopianism and accommodationism.

353
00:31:21.160 --> 00:31:27.160
Accommodationism is, you know, lower your standards for happiness to fit what you're actually getting.

354
00:31:27.160 --> 00:31:41.160
And utopianism is expand your conception of happiness to include anything that might possibly be worth wanting.

355
00:31:41.160 --> 00:31:47.160
Now the fact that something desirable is in principle possible is a reason to strive for it.

356
00:31:47.160 --> 00:31:51.160
It is a reason to, you know, try to do your best to go after it.

357
00:31:51.160 --> 00:31:55.160
Prima facie, it's a reason. So there is some reason for being a utopian.

358
00:31:55.160 --> 00:32:02.160
for some reason, for including everything anyone could possibly get anything out of in your conception of happiness.

359
00:32:02.160 --> 00:32:10.160
On the other hand, the fact that something is not immediately attainable is prima facie a reason not to strive for it.

360
00:32:10.160 --> 00:32:13.160
Because, you know, it seems like you get a good chance of wasting your efforts.

361
00:32:13.160 --> 00:32:18.160
And that gives you some support for accommodationism.

362
00:32:18.160 --> 00:32:24.160
Well, you might think this is a problem, but I see this as a solution.

363
00:32:24.160 --> 00:32:31.160
If you had lots of reasons for being a utopian and none for being an accommodationist, then go be a utopian.

364
00:32:31.160 --> 00:32:36.160
If you had lots of reasons for being an accommodationist and none for being a utopian, then go be an accommodationist.

365
00:32:36.160 --> 00:32:44.160
If you've got some reasons in each direction, that seems like a reason why you should pick something in the middle.

366
00:32:44.160 --> 00:32:51.160
You've got some reason to resign yourself to whatever's going on.

367
00:32:51.160 --> 00:32:59.160
You've also got some reason to have your whole life pervaded with longing and anxious longing for all sorts of things you can't have.

368
00:32:59.160 --> 00:33:04.160
Well, if we're trying to construct a conception of happiness out of our existing commitments,

369
00:33:04.160 --> 00:33:06.160
which is sort of the way I'm thinking of it here,

370
00:33:06.160 --> 00:33:11.160
well then you've got one vector pulling this way and another vector pulling that way,

371
00:33:11.160 --> 00:33:16.160
the result of the vectors is not going to be either direction, it's going to be somewhere in the middle.

372
00:33:16.160 --> 00:33:36.160
So what I'm suggesting is the content of our ultimate end isn't something that's just fixed and handed to us, it's something we construct through practical reasoning, we try to figure out what are our commitments, and we see not only that our commitments commit us to having an ultimate end, but that our commitments commit us to a certain understanding of what it is.

373
00:33:36.160 --> 00:33:56.160
Now, so, then the idea is going to be, now this doesn't settle exactly which things fall in which category, but the idea is going to be that there could be some things not currently available that I still have to care about, and I'll have to regard myself as, you know, in a bad way for not having.

374
00:33:56.160 --> 00:34:03.760
If I'm stuck at the bottom of the well without the ladder, having the ladder, being out of the well, that still matters to my happiness.

375
00:34:03.760 --> 00:34:09.260
And so therefore, I'm in a suboptimal state if I'm down there.

376
00:34:09.260 --> 00:34:20.460
But things that are harder to come by, things that are less likely, like immortality drugs and teleportation and green lantern rings and things like that,

377
00:34:20.460 --> 00:34:30.460
Those are things that I shouldn't waste my life longing for in such a way that I'm going to regard my life as a failure if I can't get those.

378
00:34:30.460 --> 00:34:33.460
That's just too unrealistic.

379
00:34:33.460 --> 00:34:38.460
However, now suppose what happens if there's something I've decided isn't worth striving for,

380
00:34:38.460 --> 00:34:43.460
because it's just too unlikely and too far apart from my ordinary needs.

381
00:34:43.460 --> 00:34:47.460
I just think, well, all right, I don't care about the immortality drug or whatever.

382
00:34:47.460 --> 00:34:50.460
But now suppose it does become available.

383
00:34:50.460 --> 00:35:03.460
Now suppose suddenly that everyone in my block is getting immortality drugs, or green lantern rings, or teleportation tubes, or whatever they've got.

384
00:35:03.460 --> 00:35:11.460
Now should I care? Well now it seems as though if it's available now, or closer to being available, it seems like I've got more reason to care about it now.

385
00:35:11.460 --> 00:35:18.460
It's one thing to be unhappy because you, like everyone else on the planet, cannot teleport.

386
00:35:18.460 --> 00:35:22.460
It's another thing to be unhappy because you can't teleport, but most of your friends can.

387
00:35:22.460 --> 00:35:25.460
It seems now as though it matters now.

388
00:35:25.460 --> 00:35:29.460
I don't mean so much as a matter of envy, although it could be relevant,

389
00:35:29.460 --> 00:35:34.460
but I just mean it's now a regular part of ordinary life that's lacking to you.

390
00:35:34.460 --> 00:35:50.460
You know, just as, you know, the fact that Aristotle didn't have, you know, didn't have electricity in his home, I don't think that counts as an objection to his having led a happy life.

391
00:35:50.460 --> 00:35:55.460
The fact that he had slaves in his home probably counts as an objection to his having led a properly happy life.

392
00:35:55.460 --> 00:35:57.460
But the fact that he didn't have electricity, I don't think does.

393
00:35:57.460 --> 00:36:19.460
But you might think lacking electricity now would count more against, I'm not sure about that case, but it seems as though the grain of truth and accommodationism is that although happiness doesn't sort of radically adapt itself to the circumstances, it is somewhat context dependent.

394
00:36:19.460 --> 00:36:27.460
What counts as crucial to happiness could vary depending on the context.

395
00:36:33.460 --> 00:36:40.460
In the notes they say living to a thousand. I was getting bolder talking about immortality in the speech.

396
00:36:40.460 --> 00:36:45.460
Well, anyway, does this completely kill off the Hobbesian worry? No, not completely.

397
00:36:45.460 --> 00:36:52.100
Corpse of Hobbes keeps coming back zombie-like, because you might think, well, there's still the

398
00:36:52.100 --> 00:36:57.020
following worry. Even if you say that Oedimonia contains not everything worth wishing for, but

399
00:36:57.020 --> 00:37:03.900
only everything worth striving for in this broad sense of striving, it might still seem as though

400
00:37:03.900 --> 00:37:08.700
Oedimonia is practically impossible, because no life can realistically achieve all objects of

401
00:37:08.700 --> 00:37:33.700
There are some things you're striving for you don't get. It's hard even to imagine a life in which, there may not be crucially important things, but still there are some things. There are some things in your life you're not going to get, that you'll try to get and you'll fail.

402
00:37:33.700 --> 00:37:46.700
Now, how do we deal with that fact? Once again, I want to use the tension between

403
00:37:46.700 --> 00:37:52.100
these two different impulses, not as the problem, but as the solution. The

404
00:37:52.100 --> 00:37:55.080
accommodationist vector, the reasons for being an

405
00:37:55.080 --> 00:38:00.380
accommodationist, would give us a reason not to conceive a constructive dimonia as

406
00:38:00.380 --> 00:38:02.960
is something unattainable.

407
00:38:02.960 --> 00:38:04.540
Because how can it be the end of action?

408
00:38:04.540 --> 00:38:06.380
If we think of a diameter in such a way

409
00:38:06.380 --> 00:38:09.100
that's impossible to get, or virtually impossible to get,

410
00:38:09.100 --> 00:38:11.420
it's hard to see how it could be an end of action.

411
00:38:11.420 --> 00:38:13.980
Because you can't really aim at something

412
00:38:13.980 --> 00:38:15.940
if you think it's impossible.

413
00:38:15.940 --> 00:38:17.020
You can't even aim at something

414
00:38:17.020 --> 00:38:19.740
if you think it's very, very unlikely.

415
00:38:19.740 --> 00:38:24.740
For example, if I went and tried to,

416
00:38:27.220 --> 00:38:28.820
I'll try to crush this lectern.

417
00:38:28.820 --> 00:38:31.700
Apologies to the Mises Institute if I succeed, but I don't think I will.

418
00:38:31.700 --> 00:38:34.180
So I try...

419
00:38:34.180 --> 00:38:37.980
Well, am I really trying to crush the lectern?

420
00:38:37.980 --> 00:38:43.660
No, I mean, I'm pushing and grunting, but trying consists not in pushing and grunting.

421
00:38:43.660 --> 00:38:46.660
It seems as though I don't really count as trying to crush the lectern,

422
00:38:46.660 --> 00:38:49.820
unless I thought there was some reasonable chance.

423
00:38:49.820 --> 00:38:54.620
Maybe less than 50%, but still some decent chance that my doing it would succeed.

424
00:38:54.620 --> 00:38:58.020
If I don't think that there's any realistic chance

425
00:38:58.020 --> 00:39:02.420
If what I was doing would crush the lectern,

426
00:39:02.420 --> 00:39:04.540
then I don't think I really count as trying to.

427
00:39:04.540 --> 00:39:05.820
In fact, if I really thought that what I was doing

428
00:39:05.820 --> 00:39:06.980
had a good chance of crushing the lectern,

429
00:39:06.980 --> 00:39:10.000
I wouldn't have done it, because it's not my lectern.

430
00:39:11.500 --> 00:39:13.900
Even if it were my lectern, I don't want to crush my lectern.

431
00:39:13.900 --> 00:39:19.220
So, we can't realistically regard

432
00:39:19.220 --> 00:39:22.300
eudaimonia as something that is impossible

433
00:39:22.300 --> 00:39:23.980
or highly, highly, highly improbable.

434
00:39:23.980 --> 00:39:25.900
We have to regard it as something that,

435
00:39:25.900 --> 00:39:37.400
Even if we think it's not easy to get, even if we think, you know, we are more likely not to get it than to get it, you might think that, but still, in order to try for it, you have to think that there's, you know, the chance isn't vanishingly small.

436
00:39:37.900 --> 00:39:39.700
The chance has to be good enough to be worth trying.

437
00:39:42.300 --> 00:39:44.500
So that's the reason not to think of it as something unattainable.

438
00:39:44.500 --> 00:39:57.500
On the other hand, the attraction of the utopian vector is that we don't want to shrink our conception of happiness down so that it gives us a reason to renounce all striving.

439
00:39:57.500 --> 00:40:05.500
We don't want to renounce all striving and just be satisfied with whatever is happening.

440
00:40:05.500 --> 00:40:11.500
I mean the Stoics will say maybe you should do that, some Buddhists will say you should do that, but I don't want to do that.

441
00:40:11.500 --> 00:40:28.500
So this gives us a reason to try to interpret max-breadth as something that both, in some sense, contains everything worth striving for, and yet also is in some sense consistent with ongoing striving for things you might not get.

442
00:40:28.500 --> 00:40:37.500
So we have to, you know, so this is going to move us to try and construct exactly what notion of striving we have in mind that will make this possible.

443
00:40:37.500 --> 00:40:42.500
This gives us a reason to come up with a conception of striving and a conception of happiness that will make sense of this.

444
00:40:42.500 --> 00:40:48.500
Because if we're committed to an end and we're committed to it as in some sense including all these things,

445
00:40:48.500 --> 00:40:54.500
yet in some sense also not being either impossible or radically diminished,

446
00:40:54.500 --> 00:40:59.500
We're sort of driven by our own commitments to try and come up with something.

447
00:40:59.500 --> 00:41:08.500
We want to say that one's life can be good even if it's spent, a lot of it's spent striving for something you're ever going to get.

448
00:41:08.500 --> 00:41:15.500
That's a comfort for those of us who are working for anarchism. I don't know whether I'm ever going to get anarchism in my lifetime.

449
00:41:15.500 --> 00:41:22.500
But I'd hate to think that by adopting anarchism as a goal I have thereby condemned myself to an unhappy life.

450
00:41:22.500 --> 00:41:29.500
Well, the Stoics give a solution which I think is wrong.

451
00:41:29.500 --> 00:41:37.500
It's an accommodationist solution, but as is often the case in philosophy,

452
00:41:37.500 --> 00:41:42.500
I think wrong answers are often very useful because they often contain the seed of a right answer.

453
00:41:42.500 --> 00:41:50.500
So here's the Stoic solution to this claim that the good life is going to involve striving for things you can't get.

454
00:41:50.500 --> 00:41:57.500
The Stokes think it's possible to aim at trying to achieve something without aiming at actually achieving it.

455
00:41:57.500 --> 00:42:01.500
That's something that they call preferred indifference.

456
00:42:01.500 --> 00:42:04.500
And let me try to give you as realistic examples as I can.

457
00:42:04.500 --> 00:42:08.500
I don't actually think that there are any possible examples of this.

458
00:42:08.500 --> 00:42:10.500
I think the notion is actually incoherent.

459
00:42:10.500 --> 00:42:13.500
But I'm going to try to make an incoherent notion seem coherent now.

460
00:42:13.500 --> 00:42:15.500
So here's the example.

461
00:42:15.500 --> 00:42:19.500
Suppose that I'm a telepathic millionaire.

462
00:42:19.500 --> 00:42:23.500
I didn't say it was going to make it seem realistic. I said it was going to make it seem coherent.

463
00:42:23.500 --> 00:42:28.500
I'm a telepathic millionaire, and I offer you a million dollars to try to hit the target.

464
00:42:28.500 --> 00:42:33.500
I'm doing some target practice. I'll say, I'll offer you a million dollars to try your best to hit the target.

465
00:42:33.500 --> 00:42:38.500
And the reason I'm a telepath in this story is so I can tell whether you're trying your best.

466
00:42:38.500 --> 00:42:42.500
You're getting the million does not depend on whether you actually hit the target.

467
00:42:42.500 --> 00:42:45.500
I don't care about that. I just care about you're trying your best.

468
00:42:45.500 --> 00:42:52.500
So if you try your best to hit the target, I'll see that in your mind and I'll give you the money, whether you actually hit it or not.

469
00:42:52.500 --> 00:42:58.500
If you don't try to do your best, if you don't do your best to hit the target, then you don't get the money, even if by luck you hit it.

470
00:42:58.500 --> 00:43:01.500
Whether you hit the target or not has nothing to do with whether you get the money.

471
00:43:01.500 --> 00:43:05.500
You're getting the money depends entirely on whether you try.

472
00:43:05.500 --> 00:43:10.500
Well now suppose that you don't care about the target practice for its own sake, all you want is the money.

473
00:43:10.500 --> 00:43:14.500
What seems now you've got a reason to care about trying to hit the target.

474
00:43:14.500 --> 00:43:18.500
Yet in a sense you don't have a reason to care about actually hitting the target.

475
00:43:18.500 --> 00:43:22.500
You'll be perfectly content if you try your best, fail, and they give you the money.

476
00:43:22.500 --> 00:43:28.500
So the Stokes would say in this case you're treating hitting the target as a preferred indifferent.

477
00:43:28.500 --> 00:43:32.500
You're treating trying to hit the target as good, something you care about.

478
00:43:32.500 --> 00:43:35.500
You're treating actually hitting the target as a preferred indifferent,

479
00:43:35.500 --> 00:43:38.500
something it's good to try to do but doesn't matter whether you succeed.

480
00:43:38.500 --> 00:43:48.500
So, the Stoics can say, do say, about happiness, the happy life is filled with strivings, they're constantly things you're trying to do.

481
00:43:48.500 --> 00:43:54.500
We don't care about the goal, you shouldn't care about the goal, it doesn't make sense to care about the goal, you just care about the striving.

482
00:43:54.500 --> 00:44:02.500
Now, I think that's praxeologically incoherent, I gave you an example that's supposed to make it sound plausible, but I don't think it really is.

483
00:44:02.500 --> 00:44:07.500
I don't think you can try to do something without caring about the actual doing of it.

484
00:44:07.500 --> 00:44:16.500
I think in the situation with the target practice, what happens is that initially you have no desire to hit the target.

485
00:44:16.500 --> 00:44:24.500
You have a desire for money. I come along and tell you that the way to get the money is to try to hit the target.

486
00:44:24.500 --> 00:44:30.500
I think what you then do is you form a desire to hit the target because you have to in order to try to.

487
00:44:30.500 --> 00:44:34.500
I think it's fairly easy to form desires like that.

488
00:44:34.500 --> 00:44:44.500
You have to get yourself to care. It's not a lot of work to get yourself to care about hitting a target, but you adopt hitting a target as an aim when you do it.

489
00:44:44.500 --> 00:44:50.500
It doesn't mean that you have a lot of emotional investment in it, but I think you do adopt it as a genuine end.

490
00:44:50.500 --> 00:44:57.500
Of course, the Stoics want to say hitting the target is not an end. You have the end of trying to, but actually hitting the target is not your end.

491
00:44:57.500 --> 00:45:01.500
I think that trying to hit the target includes the idea that hitting the target is your end.

492
00:45:01.500 --> 00:45:06.300
I don't see how you can make sense of the notion of trying otherwise, so I'm at war with the Stoics on this.

493
00:45:06.300 --> 00:45:11.100
But, here's the piece of the truth that the Stoics are on to.

494
00:45:11.100 --> 00:45:19.500
In the case as described, although in order to try to hit the target, you do have to, I think, want to actually hit the target.

495
00:45:19.500 --> 00:45:26.800
This is a case where it's plausible that you care about trying to hit the target a lot more than you care about actually hitting it.

496
00:45:26.800 --> 00:45:33.480
That's because trying to hit the target turns out to be an instrumental means, not just to hitting it, but to getting the money, which you care about more.

497
00:45:33.480 --> 00:45:41.600
But anyway, what it shows is that the value of trying to do something is not always strictly reducible to the value of the end you're trying to do.

498
00:45:41.600 --> 00:45:45.400
Sometimes because it also comes from some other end beyond it.

499
00:45:45.400 --> 00:45:50.680
There might be cases where just the striving itself has some kind of value.

500
00:45:50.680 --> 00:45:56.520
There's an example in Adam Smith where he gives this example of a super accurate pocket watch.

501
00:45:56.520 --> 00:46:26.520
There's a case where Smith is arguing with David Hume, who thinks that the reason we admire really efficient tools, tools that are really good at producing some result, is that we think the result is good, and we care about the result, and we sympathize with the person who gets the benefit of that result, and so forth, so, for example, Hume says, if you see a really well-made fortress, you admire the fortress, because you think, well, that fortress would be really useful in repelling the enemy, and you put yourself in the shoes of the person

502
00:46:26.520 --> 00:46:31.520
A lot of people who has that fortress, and you think, wow, wouldn't it be cool to be so secure from the enemy in that fortress, and so on.

503
00:46:31.520 --> 00:46:34.520
Well, Smith thinks that that's wrong. I mean, that happens.

504
00:46:34.520 --> 00:46:39.520
But Smith thinks that the example he gives of the super accurate pocket watch is,

505
00:46:39.520 --> 00:46:45.520
he thinks that there are lots of people who really find it cool that there's a watch that keeps really super accurate time.

506
00:46:45.520 --> 00:46:50.520
But it's not because they have any desire to know the time with great accuracy.

507
00:46:50.520 --> 00:46:54.520
One reason to care about a really accurate watch is you want to know the time really accurately.

508
00:46:54.520 --> 00:46:59.520
We transmit things often. We just think it's really coolivid that something is so good at promoting some goal,

509
00:46:59.520 --> 00:47:02.520
even if the goal itself is not something we care all that much about.

510
00:47:02.520 --> 00:47:09.520
We're more impressed at the efficiency of the tool than we are at the actual result.

511
00:47:09.520 --> 00:47:16.520
If I give you a shovel, an electronic shovel that all by itself could dig 50 holes in a minute,

512
00:47:16.520 --> 00:47:19.520
you might think, well, that's really cool. Not because you want 50 holes, Doug.

513
00:47:19.520 --> 00:47:22.520
You don't care about 50 holes, Doug, but you just think, wow, isn't that cool?

514
00:47:22.520 --> 00:47:24.520
That's really cool, look at that thing going on and digging.

515
00:47:24.520 --> 00:47:31.520
Smith thinks there are lots of cases where the fact that something is good at promoting a goal

516
00:47:31.520 --> 00:47:36.520
gives us a reason to value it over and above the value we put on the goal itself.

517
00:47:36.520 --> 00:47:39.520
Smith is actually borrowing this idea to some extent from the Stoics,

518
00:47:39.520 --> 00:47:45.520
though he's taking it out of the Stoic context and putting it in his own context.

519
00:47:45.520 --> 00:47:56.520
I want to suggest that sometimes striving can be valuable for reasons other than what it's striving for.

520
00:47:56.520 --> 00:48:00.520
I think in order to strive for something you have to care about the thing, not just the striving.

521
00:48:00.520 --> 00:48:10.520
But there can be cases where you care about the striving not just for the sake of its goal, but also for its own sake.

522
00:48:10.520 --> 00:48:19.520
for its role as a constitutive means, a constitutive part of happiness and not just as a means to the further goal.

523
00:48:19.520 --> 00:48:28.520
So here's my suggestion. Suppose we distinguish degrees of odimonia. Suppose we think odimonia can come in degrees.

524
00:48:28.520 --> 00:48:35.520
And by degrees I don't just mean being closer to or farther from it, which is what the Stoics thought that was the only way you could have degrees of odimonia.

525
00:48:35.520 --> 00:48:40.520
They thought that all people who were unhappy were completely unhappy.

526
00:48:40.520 --> 00:48:42.720
And all people who were un-virtuous were completely wicked.

527
00:48:42.720 --> 00:48:46.820
They said, you know, if you're drowning in a foot of water or a mile of water, it doesn't matter.

528
00:48:46.820 --> 00:48:49.220
Either way, you're equally dead.

529
00:48:49.220 --> 00:48:53.520
So that's the sense in which, for example, orange is redder than green.

530
00:48:53.520 --> 00:48:55.720
Orange is not red. Green is not red.

531
00:48:55.720 --> 00:48:57.220
Orange is closer to red than green is.

532
00:48:57.220 --> 00:48:59.320
In that sense, we say orange is redder than green.

533
00:48:59.320 --> 00:49:03.320
Well, that's not the sense of degrees of happiness I'm talking about.

534
00:49:03.320 --> 00:49:10.320
I'm talking about cases where two people are genuinely happy, are genuinely el daimon, but one is happier than the other.

535
00:49:10.320 --> 00:49:17.320
So think of this not as the way in which orange is more red than green, but in the way in which one shade of red is redder than another.

536
00:49:17.320 --> 00:49:23.320
You can have two shades of red, but we often think one of them is redder, the other one is paler, or something like that.

537
00:49:23.320 --> 00:49:28.320
You've got a pale red and a bright red, and you tend to think the bright red is redder. At least I tend to think that.

538
00:49:28.320 --> 00:49:39.320
So, rather than thinking of odymnia as a cut-off, above which it's all one thing and below which it's all one thing,

539
00:49:39.320 --> 00:49:47.320
think that once you have odymnia, then it can come in degrees and you're going to have more and less of it.

540
00:49:47.320 --> 00:49:53.320
And this would be a reason to redefine max prep.

541
00:49:53.320 --> 00:49:58.320
So this isn't just going to be the maximization of the satisfaction of your preferences.

542
00:49:58.320 --> 00:50:00.320
It's something more complicated.

543
00:50:00.320 --> 00:50:05.320
I warned you that there would have to be a reason to define it in a more complicated way.

544
00:50:05.320 --> 00:50:12.320
So, suppose I say that there's a minimum threshold of things worth striving for.

545
00:50:12.320 --> 00:50:15.320
If you fall below that threshold, you're not happy.

546
00:50:15.320 --> 00:50:25.320
The minimum threshold of your life is not a success.

547
00:50:25.320 --> 00:50:28.320
What that minimum threshold is will be partly context-relative.

548
00:50:28.320 --> 00:50:32.320
I don't think it's completely context-relative, but partly so.

549
00:50:32.320 --> 00:50:39.320
Once you get above that level of the minimum threshold, then you are happy.

550
00:50:39.320 --> 00:50:44.320
But at that point, you can have more or less of happiness.

551
00:50:44.320 --> 00:50:47.320
I think there's something other than happiness that you want.

552
00:50:47.320 --> 00:50:51.320
Because one of Aristotle's arguments is happiness must include everything worth having,

553
00:50:51.320 --> 00:50:53.320
because otherwise it wouldn't be the best thing.

554
00:50:53.320 --> 00:50:57.320
Because happiness plus something else would be better than happiness itself.

555
00:50:57.320 --> 00:51:01.320
But if we think of getting better off not as a matter of adding something external to happiness,

556
00:51:01.320 --> 00:51:04.320
but of getting more of what you already have,

557
00:51:04.320 --> 00:51:10.320
then I think that can allow us to reconcile some of these contradictions.

558
00:51:10.320 --> 00:51:21.320
There's a minimum threshold, below your unhappy, above your happy, but once you're there, then more higher levels can make you happier.

559
00:51:21.320 --> 00:51:26.320
You're not getting something external to happiness, you're getting more of happiness.

560
00:51:26.320 --> 00:51:37.320
And then it might be that there are some things where the striving for them is part of happiness at a lower level.

561
00:51:37.320 --> 00:51:42.920
And actually getting those things is also part of happiness, but at a higher level.

562
00:51:42.920 --> 00:51:46.020
See, if you don't strive for them, you're not happy.

563
00:51:46.020 --> 00:51:49.320
If you strive for them and don't get them, you are happy.

564
00:51:49.320 --> 00:51:53.920
Those things are going to be,

565
00:51:53.920 --> 00:51:58.720
you know, the striving is going to be one of the minimum things. Now there are some things where if you don't get them,

566
00:51:58.720 --> 00:52:03.820
you strive for them, you don't get them, you won't be happy. But there are some things where if you strive for them

567
00:52:03.820 --> 00:52:07.900
and don't get them. Never the less, striving is part of happiness, although at a lower level.

568
00:52:07.900 --> 00:52:11.900
But if you actually get it, well that's, you know, that's even better. Not only is striving good,

569
00:52:11.900 --> 00:52:16.620
but striving plus getting it is even better than striving for it without getting it. And so

570
00:52:19.500 --> 00:52:24.220
you can have these different levels. So here's what I'm saying. I'm saying that I think that

571
00:52:25.100 --> 00:52:29.420
we're committed to thinking of our happiness in this way. You know, the point of this is that

572
00:52:29.420 --> 00:52:33.100
we're trying to figure out what our ordinary desires and preferences and so forth commit

573
00:52:33.100 --> 00:52:45.100
I think what we're committed to thinking of ourselves is having some overarching goal, because when we deliberate and choose between things, there must be some overarching goal that that deliberation means to.

574
00:52:45.100 --> 00:52:49.100
It's going to be something like, you know, maximizing our preferences.

575
00:52:49.100 --> 00:53:04.100
But on the one hand it doesn't make sense to think of that goal as something impossible or virtually impossible because we can't realistically think of ourselves as aiming at something if we think it's virtually impossible.

576
00:53:04.100 --> 00:53:17.100
But on the other hand we don't want to think of this goal as something that's so easy to get that all you need is for something to be unavailable and bang you don't need it anymore because that doesn't really capture what we strive for either.

577
00:53:17.100 --> 00:53:31.100
We want a conception of it that doesn't include everything worth wishing for, because it's not the case that whenever you're acting you're trying to get something that includes teleportation and immortality drugs.

578
00:53:31.100 --> 00:53:45.100
Well, actually, I know some dystopians for whom that might be true, but for most of us, it's not the case that we're aiming at some grand thing or everything worth wishing for.

579
00:53:45.100 --> 00:53:50.100
For that matter, some of the things worth wishing for are not jointly realizable.

580
00:53:50.100 --> 00:53:56.100
Maybe not even logically jointly realizable.

581
00:53:56.100 --> 00:54:01.100
I mean, you might be in love with two people, and what you want is a monogamous relationship with each of them.

582
00:54:01.100 --> 00:54:03.100
That's your ideal.

583
00:54:03.100 --> 00:54:07.100
You can't have it.

584
00:54:07.100 --> 00:54:13.100
So it can't be that the element of all our actions is something that includes everything worth wishing for.

585
00:54:13.100 --> 00:54:24.100
So it has to somehow be adapted to possibility, but we don't want to adapt it to possibility so much that we say that the person trapped at the bottom of the well has got everything they want.

586
00:54:24.100 --> 00:54:31.100
So we need some conception of happiness that can allow us to have it and yet still be striving for things.

587
00:54:31.100 --> 00:54:37.100
And yet for the things we're striving for, not to be something distinct from happiness, but to somehow be included in it.

588
00:54:37.100 --> 00:54:52.100
The only way I can see to do that is to have levels of happiness, where you're happy, but you can still be striving, but what you're striving for is more happiness, more of what you've got, rather than something external to it.

589
00:54:52.100 --> 00:54:57.100
questions about that. Yes.

590
00:55:22.100 --> 00:55:52.100
and I found it more helpful to talk about it with someone with a good interest, with, I guess, a father, a friend like that, a physician, hearts like, the heart could be healthy, and the lungs could be healthy, and if we didn't have one of them, the heart stopped beating, we wouldn't have any of them, and if we didn't have a certain level of health care,

591
00:56:22.100 --> 00:56:24.100
It's a very personal question.

592
00:56:24.100 --> 00:56:36.100
I like that conclusion. I also wonder about, and I think Aristotle included some things like physical health and wealth and things like that.

593
00:56:36.100 --> 00:56:47.100
Most of what I've read, or a little bit about what I've read about, when he focuses on the diversity of wisdom and justice and things like that,

594
00:56:47.100 --> 00:56:54.100
people might say, well, I'm feeling good today, I've got lots of justice and wisdom today, or something like that.

595
00:56:54.100 --> 00:56:57.100
I often say that.

596
00:56:57.100 --> 00:57:03.100
Or, you know, well, it's okay, my wisdom is way down and my justice is so-so.

597
00:57:03.100 --> 00:57:33.100
So for all those listening at home, the comment was from someone who's worked in health sciences who points out that these different ways of thinking about health, you can think about health as all or nothing, you've got health or you don't, or you can think of health as a matter of degree, and you can think of health as a matter

598
00:57:33.100 --> 00:57:37.700
Health is having constituent parts, so you can talk about the health of your heart and

599
00:57:37.700 --> 00:57:46.380
the health of your lungs and so forth, and I think it's a matter of degree rather than

600
00:57:46.380 --> 00:57:47.380
all or nothing.

601
00:57:47.380 --> 00:57:52.940
And he also mentioned that Aristotle includes health and wealth and things like that, not

602
00:57:52.940 --> 00:57:53.940
just virtue.

603
00:57:53.940 --> 00:57:57.260
Virtue is sort of the centerpiece of Odaimonia, but Aristotle does include health and that

604
00:57:57.260 --> 00:57:58.260
sort of thing in there.

605
00:57:58.260 --> 00:58:02.780
Yeah, I think health is a good analogy, and here's a way of thinking about sort of this

606
00:58:02.780 --> 00:58:05.780
So there's tension between these different ways of thinking about it. You could put it in terms of health.

607
00:58:05.780 --> 00:58:11.780
Suppose you wanted to find health in such a way, so someone could say, someone could have a very utopian conception of health.

608
00:58:11.780 --> 00:58:19.780
And so you don't count as healthy unless there's no conceivable way that you could be improved health-wise.

609
00:58:19.780 --> 00:58:24.780
Well, if you define health that way, then there are no healthy organisms on this planet.

610
00:58:24.780 --> 00:58:29.780
Well, maybe, well, anyway, I'll go with that. Maybe there's some kind of example.

611
00:58:29.780 --> 00:58:39.780
But, you know, at least there's no healthy human beings on this planet. If you think of, if health means there's no way you could be, no way that your health could be improved.

612
00:58:39.780 --> 00:58:49.780
As you say, well, we don't want this utopian conception of health, where you're not healthy unless, you know, you are Superman or something.

613
00:58:49.780 --> 00:58:57.780
Well, not Superman, because that's what goes beyond health. I mean, you're not healthy unless somehow there is absolutely no physical correction of any kind that could be made.

614
00:58:57.780 --> 00:59:04.500
So then you might say, all right, we'll tone down our conception of health to something weaker.

615
00:59:04.500 --> 00:59:09.540
If you say that, then what are these further enhancements you might have? Are they not health?

616
00:59:09.540 --> 00:59:18.100
If I'm healthy even though I've got some negative condition, then what is that further thing?

617
00:59:18.100 --> 00:59:21.700
Well, then you want to say that there are degrees of health. But still you might want to say, well,

618
00:59:21.700 --> 00:59:26.340
there are some things that... So you might want to say, well, maybe there's some cutoff below which

619
00:59:26.340 --> 00:59:56.340
In which you're just not healthy at all, maybe you want to say that, maybe you don't, but anyway this would be sort of analogous to the story I'm telling with happiness is below a certain point you're not healthy, above that point as long as you got enough of you is working well enough you are healthy, but that doesn't mean that no improvement is possible, you could be even healthier, you could have more of that same thing health that you've already got, so that would be kind of way of drawing analogy with what I'm doing with happiness.

620
00:59:56.340 --> 01:00:09.340
It seems to me that whether or not waiting in a state of tense readiness for something

621
01:00:09.340 --> 01:00:16.340
might depend not only on the probability but also on your alternatives.

622
01:00:16.340 --> 01:00:25.340
That is, let's say you were at the bottom of this well in a fairly isolated area where you're pretty unlikely to be found.

623
01:00:25.340 --> 01:00:31.340
Still, there's probably not much that counts as a flourishing human life at the bottom of a well.

624
01:00:31.340 --> 01:00:42.340
And so it would still make sense to devote a lot of your energy to trying to be alert for the possibility of rescue.

625
01:00:42.340 --> 01:00:50.340
But let's say you were lost on a remote desert island instead, where also you were equally unlikely to be found,

626
01:00:50.340 --> 01:01:08.340
But where at least there were more opportunities for living a flourishing human life on the island, where spending a lot of time in a state of tense readiness might actually interfere with your flourishing in other ways.

627
01:01:20.340 --> 01:01:50.340
should it come along, should depend not only on how likely or unlikely the option is, but also on what your alternatives are, so if you're stuck at the bottom of a well, however likely or unlikely rescue is, being stuck at the bottom of the well offers so little scope for flourishing that you might as well stay in a state of tense readiness, whereas if you're on a fairly well provided desert island, maybe it doesn't make so much sense to spend so much of your time in tense readiness to get off it because you might be

628
01:01:50.340 --> 01:01:56.340
I'm not going to be spoiling your chances for getting what kind of happiness is available to you on the island.

629
01:01:56.340 --> 01:02:01.340
Yeah, that certainly makes sense to me.

630
01:02:01.340 --> 01:02:06.340
I mean, think about, for example, I didn't use this example earlier, but I was thinking about it.

631
01:02:06.340 --> 01:02:13.340
Suppose that if interplanetary travel were much easier and more common than it is now,

632
01:02:13.340 --> 01:02:18.340
then being stuck on one planet and not being able to get off it would be bad.

633
01:02:18.340 --> 01:02:32.340
We're all stuck on this planet and can't get off it, but it doesn't bother us, A, because there aren't that many, it's not that likely for us to get off it, but B, because this planet's not so bad.

634
01:02:32.340 --> 01:02:46.340
If we were stuck on Venus and couldn't get off it, there'd be more reason to be in a state of tense readiness, even if the chances of getting off it were no better.

635
01:02:46.340 --> 01:02:59.340
I'm wondering if there's a better fit for the text box as we're looking for it, and so obviously you might be, rather than starting with something that you're hoping for,

636
01:02:59.340 --> 01:03:07.340
I don't know how to call that hope exactly, I don't know how to use the term, but proposing that there's some way to do so, you can say things like,

637
01:03:07.340 --> 01:03:16.340
You don't necessarily have to paint what you're saying to make it fit things like the well case or the diamond case or whatever.

638
01:03:16.340 --> 01:03:23.340
At some point, under the ordinary senses that you're describing, Ron has concluded that he's striving to get off the island.

639
01:03:23.340 --> 01:03:28.340
So he didn't stop hoping to get off the island. Once that came up, he was happy to do so.

640
01:03:28.340 --> 01:03:34.340
And he said his happiness improves by getting off the island in some sort of sense.

641
01:03:34.340 --> 01:04:04.220
is on the list, but it seems like in ordinary use this is hoping that it's something that's not wishing, but it's also something that's more utopian than what they're actually striving for.

642
01:04:04.220 --> 01:04:26.220
The suggestion is that maybe a closer concept to what I'm talking about than striving might be hoping in cases where you can't really take any active effort to bring it about because the things we hope for that we aren't in any realistic sense striving for, we're not doing anything to bring them about, but nevertheless hoping is narrower than wishing.

643
01:04:26.220 --> 01:04:29.220
There are lots of things I could wish for that I don't hope for.

644
01:04:29.220 --> 01:04:32.220
I wish Bill Gates would give me a million dollars, but I don't hope he will.

645
01:04:32.220 --> 01:04:37.220
You can't really hope for something, and hoping is like trying in this sense.

646
01:04:37.220 --> 01:04:41.220
You can't hope for something if you think it's overwhelmingly unlikely.

647
01:04:41.220 --> 01:04:45.220
Now exactly how unlikely, overwhelmingly unlikely is, I'm not sure.

648
01:04:45.220 --> 01:04:50.220
But still it seems as though there are things that you just don't think are realistic possibilities

649
01:04:50.220 --> 01:04:53.220
and so you don't hope for them, but you might still wish for them.

650
01:04:53.220 --> 01:05:03.220
So someone on a desert island might have given up anything like striving, but they might still hope to be rescued.

651
01:05:03.220 --> 01:05:09.220
Yeah, I think that's a good suggestion, but now I think maybe the concept I want is somewhere between hoping and striving.

652
01:05:09.220 --> 01:05:13.220
Because you could be hoping without being in a state of tense readiness.

653
01:05:13.220 --> 01:05:19.220
Well, you could be in a state of tense readiness, but I was kind of stretching the concept of striving to cover that.

654
01:05:19.220 --> 01:05:31.220
So, you know, there ought to be a word for something that is more active than hoping, but not as active as striving.

655
01:05:31.220 --> 01:05:39.220
Hankering, maybe, or longing, maybe.

656
01:05:39.220 --> 01:05:46.220
Because lots of things I hope for that I don't long for. It does seem as though if you long for something and you don't get it,

657
01:05:46.220 --> 01:05:56.220
I don't know if it necessarily takes your happiness away, but it seems like it's some kind of blow to your happiness if you're longing or yearning for something.

658
01:05:56.220 --> 01:06:03.220
You don't get it. We're just hoping for something and don't get it. There are lots of things that I hope for.

659
01:06:03.220 --> 01:06:10.220
For some of the things I hope for may be just as unlikely as Bill Gates giving me a million dollars.

660
01:06:10.220 --> 01:06:30.220
I hope for the triumph of anarchism, which means I must somehow think that's more likely than Bill Gates giving me a million dollars, and you might wonder whether that's even true, but the question is, do I long or yearn? Now I want something between longing and hoping.

661
01:06:30.220 --> 01:06:33.220
We're going to slice this thinner and thinner.

662
01:07:00.220 --> 01:07:07.220
The person who said, oh, I have to be able to plan and start to travel and hopefully be a worthwhile person.

663
01:07:07.220 --> 01:07:14.220
Someone who doesn't travel is, you know, a really worthwhile or unimportant person.

664
01:07:14.220 --> 01:07:23.220
And so, concepts like that, biology concepts like that, just like we would add in wealth and the traditional virtual,

665
01:07:23.220 --> 01:07:52.220
Yeah, so the question is whether a psychological category like self-esteem might be relevant here.

666
01:07:52.220 --> 01:08:06.220
I'm sure someone might think that they are, you know, that they can't have self-esteem unless they can, you know, have interplanetary travel or get out of the well or whatever, that there are certain things that are necessary for their self-esteem.

667
01:08:06.220 --> 01:08:09.220
And if they lack those, then they won't be happy.

668
01:08:09.220 --> 01:08:16.220
I think it's certainly true that if you lack something that you regard as necessary for your self-esteem, you're not going to be happy.

669
01:08:16.220 --> 01:08:20.420
But I'm not sure it works the other way around. That is, it doesn't seem to me that having

670
01:08:20.420 --> 01:08:23.540
everything you need for your self-esteem is sufficient for happiness. Now, the Stoics would

671
01:08:23.540 --> 01:08:29.020
say it is. The Stoics would say, you know, as long as you can maintain your proper self-esteem,

672
01:08:29.020 --> 01:08:34.980
of course, there has to be justified self-esteem. For the Stoics, you're not kind of as happy

673
01:08:34.980 --> 01:08:40.900
if you falsely think you're cool and you're not. But if you have properly grounded self-esteem,

674
01:08:40.900 --> 01:08:45.300
the Stoics can say it's all you need for happiness. Whereas, Aristotle once can say, well, maybe

675
01:08:45.300 --> 01:08:48.700
Maybe that's one of the most important, that's a very important thing at the core of happiness,

676
01:08:48.700 --> 01:08:55.460
but still Aristotle is going to say that if I've got a healthy self-esteem and I'm at

677
01:08:55.460 --> 01:09:02.420
the bottom of the well being bitten by the snakes, because you've forgotten the snakes.

678
01:09:02.420 --> 01:09:06.620
Self-esteem is certainly necessary for happiness, and one of the most important things for happiness

679
01:09:06.620 --> 01:09:09.140
for you, I think, well, it can't be sufficient.

680
01:09:09.140 --> 01:09:17.140
sufficient. An example that Aristotle gives is if you are, if the things happen to you that happened to Priam,

681
01:09:17.140 --> 01:09:25.140
who was king of Troy in the story of the Trojan War, and all his family was slaughtered and his city was burned and so forth,

682
01:09:25.140 --> 01:09:31.140
and Aristotle gives him as an example of a man that he thinks was basically a good man who was living a happy life and then,

683
01:09:31.140 --> 01:09:42.020
through no fault of his own nastiness descended on him so yeah it does seem to

684
01:09:42.020 --> 01:09:46.300
me that you know I'd like to think self-esteem is all you need but but there

685
01:09:46.300 --> 01:09:49.260
And there are the snakes.

686
01:09:49.260 --> 01:09:54.140
Mises has the famous motto of spreading the portfolio of people,

687
01:09:54.140 --> 01:09:56.540
not working towards them ultimately.

688
01:09:56.540 --> 01:09:58.860
I was thinking about that in the previous lecture,

689
01:09:58.860 --> 01:10:02.940
how you may not have endorsed the final goal,

690
01:10:02.940 --> 01:10:04.380
but working towards that goal,

691
01:10:04.380 --> 01:10:08.140
when you need to discuss the allies after.

692
01:10:08.140 --> 01:10:12.140
Yeah, the mention is of Mises' slogan, his motto,

693
01:10:12.140 --> 01:10:15.740
which he got from Virgil,

694
01:10:15.740 --> 01:10:19.020
Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.

695
01:10:19.020 --> 01:10:27.300
The suggestion is, well, should we think of that as an end that you may not ever fully achieve,

696
01:10:27.300 --> 01:10:33.580
but you keep striving for, because I think Mises clearly isn't assuming

697
01:10:33.580 --> 01:10:36.300
that you're automatically guaranteed to win this battle.

698
01:10:36.300 --> 01:10:39.820
It's something to sustain you during the period when you think you might not win it,

699
01:10:39.820 --> 01:10:44.660
but still it's worth striving for it.

700
01:10:44.660 --> 01:10:50.160
In fact, that reminds me of a very un-consequentialist quote from Rand, who says,

701
01:10:50.160 --> 01:10:55.160
He who strives, he who works for the future lives in it today.

702
01:10:55.160 --> 01:11:01.660
Which is a way of saying, even if you don't achieve the goal, somehow by striving for it, you are somehow realizing that goal in your life now.

703
01:11:01.660 --> 01:11:06.660
Which is, I like that idea.

704
01:11:06.660 --> 01:11:10.160
I'm not sure how exactly it fits in with survival being the ultimate goal.

705
01:11:10.160 --> 01:11:15.160
But, well, I sort of see, but yeah,

706
01:11:15.160 --> 01:11:16.800
so there's a certain sense in which

707
01:11:18.240 --> 01:11:21.360
striving can be worth doing even if you don't succeed.

708
01:11:21.360 --> 01:11:23.660
Now, of course, obviously it's better if you do succeed

709
01:11:23.660 --> 01:11:25.720
and the striving doesn't make much sense

710
01:11:25.720 --> 01:11:27.820
unless there's some value to the succeeding.

711
01:11:28.960 --> 01:11:32.640
But the value of striving doesn't depend solely, I think,

712
01:11:32.640 --> 01:11:37.640
on the value of succeeding.

713
01:11:38.240 --> 01:11:39.880
And that's, you know, in a way that's sort of the point

714
01:11:39.880 --> 01:11:44.880
The thing that I was trying to make here is that you're not going to get everything you strive for.

715
01:11:44.880 --> 01:11:53.880
But that doesn't mean that it's not worth striving for, and it also doesn't mean that you should think your life is a failure if you don't get everything you strive for.

716
01:11:53.880 --> 01:12:02.880
What I'm trying to do is to find a way to be able to consistently say all those things, that you shouldn't think you're going to get everything you strive for.

717
01:12:02.880 --> 01:12:08.880
But those things are worth striving for, and your life isn't a failure if you don't get them all.

718
01:12:11.880 --> 01:12:20.880
You know, so that's part of the point Mises was making, since Mises, you know, at the time he quoted that, well he quoted it more than once,

719
01:12:20.880 --> 01:12:25.880
but one of the crucial times he quoted that was during a time when he had become very pessimistic.

720
01:12:25.880 --> 01:12:29.640
you know different periods of life he was you know more optimistic or more

721
01:12:29.640 --> 01:12:37.000
pessimistic but you know this was around 1940 I think when he just he just arrived

722
01:12:37.000 --> 01:12:40.340
in the US and this was around the time when he wrote you know he'd hoped to

723
01:12:40.340 --> 01:12:43.800
lead the way to the future but he decided that all those left was to be a

724
01:12:43.800 --> 01:12:49.920
historian of decline so he was very despondent at that point but he I but I

725
01:12:49.920 --> 01:12:53.780
believe it was still in that context he was quoting this line that you know the

726
01:12:53.780 --> 01:13:05.780
The fact that you're not going to succeed in your goal is not a reason to stop trying, because the trying itself has a kind of nobility to it, we might say.

727
01:13:05.780 --> 01:13:12.780
I have a question of whether or not you're going to need a further argument for the things

728
01:13:12.780 --> 01:13:16.780
we're striving for, for the preferences that you're striving to satisfy.

729
01:13:16.780 --> 01:13:22.780
Do you think that you can reach this happiness or maximize preferences that are all perhaps

730
01:13:22.780 --> 01:13:25.780
inconsistent with the libertarian values?

731
01:13:25.780 --> 01:13:32.780
Maximizing to be dumb or to be submissive or controlled or something like that.

732
01:13:32.780 --> 01:13:49.780
So I'm wondering how you're going to link that up with, or offer a further argument that will hook it up with the more libertarian values, if you're going to put constraints on the types of things we're fighting for.

733
01:14:02.780 --> 01:14:06.060
Preferences, but your preferences could all be for really crappy things or they could be for

734
01:14:06.060 --> 01:14:13.060
un-libertarian things like being dumb or being submissive. Now, if Walter Block were here, he

735
01:14:13.060 --> 01:14:18.020
would say there's nothing un-libertarian about being dumb or being submissive. That's completely

736
01:14:18.020 --> 01:14:23.780
a question of morality. It's got nothing to do with libertarianism, but I won't say that. If he wanted to

737
01:14:23.780 --> 01:14:30.020
say that, he should have been here. No, you're absolutely right and that's what succeeding

738
01:14:30.020 --> 01:14:54.020
Lectures are going to be about. What I'm going to try to do is give reasons. Again, as I said, I don't think I have a definitive story, but I'm going to give reasons for more and more different ways of specifying the content of Odaimonia in such a way that it is going to force things in non-crappy directions and ultimately in libertarian directions.

739
01:14:54.020 --> 01:15:22.020
And so that's what we're going to do over the next few sessions, going to try and first show why your preferences should involve trying to be rational, why they should involve caring about other people's interests, and ultimately why they should involve not subordinating other people to your will, and not letting other people subordinate you to their will, and so forth.

740
01:15:22.020 --> 01:15:52.020
I don't have sort of a grand deduction of all these things from first principles but I'm going to try to show that it makes more sense to specify our conception of our preferences and our commitments in such a way that they go in that direction and finally end up with wild-eyed anarchy on the last day

741
01:15:52.020 --> 01:16:22.020
Okay, so the question is, according to the

742
01:16:22.020 --> 01:16:25.020
Let's start with the story from presenting. We often have to make trade-offs.

743
01:16:25.020 --> 01:16:29.020
We can't have everything you want of one thing and you have to decide which one is more important.

744
01:16:29.020 --> 01:16:31.020
You weigh and balance these things.

745
01:16:31.020 --> 01:16:34.020
You might think that the same thing is going to apply to morality or virtue.

746
01:16:34.020 --> 01:16:37.020
You're going to have conflicting moral claims.

747
01:16:37.020 --> 01:16:43.020
You can't satisfy all of them and so you try and satisfy the most important or something like that.

748
01:16:43.020 --> 01:16:47.020
But I've also endorsed the Greek thesis of unity of virtue.

749
01:16:47.020 --> 01:16:50.020
According to which the claims of the virtues are all harmonious with each other.

750
01:16:50.020 --> 01:17:08.020
So how do I reconcile, on the one hand, this account of action I'm talking about, which has trade-offs going on all over the place, with this Greek account of virtue I'm trying to defend, according to which there are no ultimate trade-offs in virtue.

751
01:17:08.020 --> 01:17:13.020
I'm going to talk more about this later, but here's the short version.

752
01:17:13.020 --> 01:17:27.020
What you trade off in determining the content of what the virtues require of you, what you trade off are not actual moral claims.

753
01:17:27.020 --> 01:17:32.020
Because if they're actual moral claims, then you're immoral if you don't satisfy them.

754
01:17:32.020 --> 01:17:35.020
That's what it means for it to be a moral claim.

755
01:17:35.020 --> 01:17:42.820
So it can never be the case that you get to dismiss some moral claim, but instead the question is sometimes

756
01:17:42.820 --> 01:17:51.100
sort of prima facie moral claims, when did they become genuine moral claims and when not. So you

757
01:17:51.100 --> 01:17:56.820
might think the distinction is purely terminological. I think it's partly terminological. I don't think

758
01:17:56.820 --> 01:18:03.460
it's purely terminological, but it's cases where you're trying to decide what virtue requires of

759
01:18:03.460 --> 01:18:10.460
and what you've got is not conflicting full-fledged moral claims because that implies you can.

760
01:18:10.460 --> 01:18:15.460
If there's a full-fledged moral claim on you that you ought to do X, then you ought to do X.

761
01:18:15.460 --> 01:18:19.460
And if there's a full-fledged moral claim on you that you ought to do not X, then you ought to do not X.

762
01:18:19.460 --> 01:18:24.460
Since you can't do both X and not X, it can't be the case that these are both full-fledged moral claims.

763
01:18:24.460 --> 01:18:28.460
However, when you're trying to figure out what your full-fledged moral claims are,

764
01:18:28.460 --> 01:18:34.460
Think of it the way I was talking about accommodationism versus utopianism,

765
01:18:34.460 --> 01:18:39.460
where you just have a kind of compromise between expanding happiness to include everything you can conceive of

766
01:18:39.460 --> 01:18:43.460
versus constricting it to include only what's available.

767
01:18:43.460 --> 01:18:49.460
And there's some reason to expand it, and there's some reason to contract it, and so you do a trade-off.

768
01:18:49.460 --> 01:18:54.460
But during the trade-off, you're trying to come up with the right conception of happiness.

769
01:18:54.460 --> 01:19:24.460
So likewise, in cases of what looked like moral conflict, where it seems like you've got some reason to do one thing and you've got some reason to do the opposite, it's not as though these are both full-fledged moral duties pulling you in opposite directions, because moral duties are supposed to be action-guiding. If it's really moral duty, you have to do it. But rather, in figuring out what your moral duty is, there are sort of these prima facie moral duties, or considerations that will feed into your moral duties, and you have to figure out how to do those trade-offs.

770
01:19:24.460 --> 01:19:29.460
If I can put it that way, I think that the unit of virtue is consistent with trade-offs.

771
01:19:29.460 --> 01:19:32.460
The trade-offs are not trade-offs among the demands of the virtues.

772
01:19:32.460 --> 01:19:36.460
They're trade-offs among the demands of the prima facie considerations

773
01:19:36.460 --> 01:19:41.460
that you take into account in order to figure out the content of the virtues.

774
01:20:11.460 --> 01:20:17.960
The basic trade-off between X and Y has some overridden standards that gives the basis for a trade-off.

775
01:20:17.960 --> 01:20:28.460
But then you hold that there aren't any possible trade-offs between full-fledged courage and full-fledged temperance and full-fledged generosity and so forth.

776
01:20:28.460 --> 01:20:40.960
Then it looks like we no longer make the case that there must be this one thing happiness with overarching over all of them on the basis of the standards used to explain trade-offs

777
01:20:40.960 --> 01:20:53.640
So the question is, part of my argument for there being a single overarching end of a

778
01:20:53.640 --> 01:21:00.920
daimonia is the necessity of making trade-offs. If we make trade-offs then there must be some aim

779
01:21:00.920 --> 01:21:04.080
we have in mind in making the trade-offs. It can't be either of them separately, it must be the

780
01:21:04.080 --> 01:21:10.400
overarching end. But then the question is, well, if I take this unity of a virtual idea according to

781
01:21:10.400 --> 01:21:17.400
Which there aren't real trade-offs, and if I push that far enough that doesn't that undermine the case for there being an overarching end.

782
01:21:17.400 --> 01:21:26.400
My answer is going to be no because the case for the unit of virtue presupposes the case for an overarching end.

783
01:21:26.400 --> 01:21:33.400
Now if there's some other argument for the unit of virtue that bypasses it then there might be a different story.

784
01:21:33.400 --> 01:21:42.800
Plus, I think also, the story of how the unity virtue works does involve, there's still trade-offs going on.

785
01:21:42.800 --> 01:21:46.900
They're not trade-offs among the virtues, but they're trade-offs among considerations.

786
01:21:46.900 --> 01:21:54.200
And in fact, people often think that Aristotle says that a virtuous person will never have any regrets about what they do,

787
01:21:54.200 --> 01:21:59.200
or never feel bad about it, never will do what they do reluctantly.

788
01:21:59.200 --> 01:22:01.800
Now it's true that they won't be reluctant to be virtuous,

789
01:22:01.800 --> 01:22:03.680
they won't be grudgingly virtuous,

790
01:22:03.680 --> 01:22:08.280
but, and we'll talk more about this later,

791
01:22:08.280 --> 01:22:12.560
but no point, there's no reason not to mention it now,

792
01:22:12.560 --> 01:22:14.160
I can mention it again later too.

793
01:22:15.160 --> 01:22:20.160
Aristotle says that the courageous person who faces danger

794
01:22:20.240 --> 01:22:24.320
will feel some reluctance to face it.

795
01:22:24.320 --> 01:22:26.140
They'll feel some fear.

796
01:22:26.140 --> 01:22:28.420
They won't be just overcome with fear,

797
01:22:28.420 --> 01:22:33.300
But, Ersall's conception of courage is not the person who's completely devoid of fear.

798
01:22:33.300 --> 01:22:35.500
It's the person whose fear is appropriate to the situation.

799
01:22:35.500 --> 01:22:40.740
And that doesn't mean that he's only afraid of things he ought to run away from.

800
01:22:40.740 --> 01:22:47.700
It means that if he, if he faces a dangerous situation,

801
01:22:47.700 --> 01:22:49.100
you know, there would be something inappropriate.

802
01:22:49.100 --> 01:22:52.780
He wouldn't be responding to an important aspect of the situation if he didn't feel fear.

803
01:22:52.780 --> 01:22:56.100
And another example from a former student of mine, Karen Storr,

804
01:22:56.100 --> 01:22:58.900
came up with this excellent example.

805
01:22:58.900 --> 01:23:00.180
Suppose you're a virtuous person

806
01:23:00.180 --> 01:23:03.520
and you have the job of breaking bad news to someone.

807
01:23:04.620 --> 01:23:07.460
Well, you ought to feel reluctant to do it.

808
01:23:07.460 --> 01:23:08.820
Now, your reluctance shouldn't,

809
01:23:08.820 --> 01:23:10.620
you shouldn't give into that reluctance

810
01:23:10.620 --> 01:23:12.940
and say, you know, wimp out and not do it.

811
01:23:12.940 --> 01:23:15.420
But nevertheless, if you just did your duty cheerfully,

812
01:23:15.420 --> 01:23:18.820
here I am bringing you news about your loved one's death,

813
01:23:18.820 --> 01:23:20.300
clearly there'd be something wrong.

814
01:23:20.300 --> 01:23:22.660
The virtuous person ought to feel that tension.

815
01:23:22.660 --> 01:23:32.420
and so once again they, you know, you can't get everything worth wishing for, yeah.

816
01:23:32.420 --> 01:23:52.300
Okay, so the question is what is the, can I say anything more about what the

817
01:23:52.300 --> 01:23:57.300
the minimum threshold is, above which you've got some kind of happiness and below which you're unhappy

818
01:23:57.300 --> 01:24:03.300
and whether it's arbitrary, if it isn't arbitrary, what are the grounds for setting it?

819
01:24:03.300 --> 01:24:10.300
Well, I don't have any terribly worked out story about exactly what falls on what side of the line.

820
01:24:10.300 --> 01:24:19.300
I mean, I gave this example that lacking electricity might put you below the line now and wouldn't in Aristotle's day.

821
01:24:19.300 --> 01:24:49.300
I guess what I want to say is the way it's determined is that it's the answers got to be whatever it is that our conceptions of happiness or our current desires and preferences commit us to so you know the way to find out is not to you know it's not when we go out and do some empirical research to find out something I don't think just we have to work out exactly what our

822
01:24:49.300 --> 01:24:59.300
What our conceptions of happiness are, we have some reason to construe our happiness in such a way that we could be perfectly happy without electricity.

823
01:24:59.300 --> 01:25:06.300
We have some reason to do that, namely that we'll be better off and we'll be more contented then, should the lights go out.

824
01:25:06.300 --> 01:25:12.300
On the other hand, we've got some reason not to, because electricity is important and it's worth having and so forth.

825
01:25:12.300 --> 01:25:17.300
I don't have any story about whether electricity falls on one side of the line or the other.

826
01:25:17.300 --> 01:25:19.300
But anyway, it doesn't really matter whether I have a story.

827
01:25:19.300 --> 01:25:21.300
I'm not sure this has to be exactly the same for everybody.

828
01:25:21.300 --> 01:25:25.300
I think that happiness is generically the same for everybody,

829
01:25:25.300 --> 01:25:27.300
but I don't think it is specifically.

830
01:25:27.300 --> 01:25:29.300
So I think that what falls on one side of the line or the other

831
01:25:29.300 --> 01:25:31.300
could be different for different people.

832
01:25:31.300 --> 01:25:36.300
There are going to be some values that I think are going to be the same for all,

833
01:25:36.300 --> 01:25:37.300
that everyone's committed to.

834
01:25:37.300 --> 01:25:41.300
But Mises has this nice example of these different levels.

835
01:25:41.300 --> 01:25:44.300
He distinguishes between your universal nature as a human being

836
01:25:44.300 --> 01:25:46.300
and your individual nature.

837
01:25:46.300 --> 01:25:49.860
Universal nature is the most important in determining your happiness, but individual

838
01:25:49.860 --> 01:25:51.920
nature matters too.

839
01:25:51.920 --> 01:26:01.540
So can Mozart live a happy life without access to a musical instrument or a sheet paper to

840
01:26:01.540 --> 01:26:02.540
write notes on?

841
01:26:02.540 --> 01:26:03.540
Probably not.

842
01:26:03.540 --> 01:26:11.260
Probably Mozart without access to musical instruments is going to be unhappy.

843
01:26:11.260 --> 01:26:15.380
That will push him below his minimum threshold.

844
01:26:15.380 --> 01:26:45.380
I think there are other people for whom although they might, you know, they might miss not having musical instruments around to compose, you know, they might like it or something, it's not going to be a big deal for them, it's not going to push them below the threshold, but ultimately it's just a matter of what's the most coherent and consistent way of working out what your preferences commit you to. And so the boundary might be a fuzzy one, in fact it's bound to be a fuzzy one, you know, it's not as though

845
01:26:45.380 --> 01:26:49.380
There's going to be some clear definite cut-off.

846
01:26:49.380 --> 01:26:53.380
I think we can still identify things that are pretty plausibly on one side or the other.

847
01:26:53.380 --> 01:26:57.380
If you're on the rack being tortured, then you're on the wrong side of the line.

848
01:26:57.380 --> 01:27:01.380
Now the Stoics didn't think so. As long as you've got your virtue, you're fine.

849
01:27:01.380 --> 01:27:05.380
But it seems for most of us the way we'd construct

850
01:27:05.380 --> 01:27:09.380
our commitments, that would be the wrong line.

851
01:27:09.380 --> 01:27:13.380
But if there's a fuzzy boundary, well so what?

852
01:27:13.380 --> 01:27:17.380
There's a fuzzy boundary about where the outback begins.

853
01:27:17.380 --> 01:27:21.380
Not the restaurant, but the actual area of Australia.

854
01:27:21.380 --> 01:27:25.380
Certainly there is an outback.

855
01:27:25.380 --> 01:27:29.380
We can think of things that are in it and things that are not in it.

856
01:27:29.380 --> 01:27:33.380
But exactly where does it start? Well, the fact that we can't say exactly where it starts.

857
01:27:33.380 --> 01:27:37.380
There's a big puzzle in philosophy about exactly what to say about fuzzy boundaries.

858
01:27:37.380 --> 01:27:41.380
But whatever the right story is to say about them, we know there are such things.

859
01:27:41.380 --> 01:27:49.620
It doesn't invalidate a concept just because we can't figure out how to define a precise line.

860
01:27:49.620 --> 01:27:53.540
I mean, we can't even say exactly where the fuzziness starts, because that's a fuzzy boundary too.

861
01:27:53.540 --> 01:27:56.580
That's the real nightmare about vagueness.

862
01:27:56.580 --> 01:28:03.980
But whatever the right things to say about that, it's not a special problem for any particular area of inquiry.

863
01:28:03.980 --> 01:28:05.980
It's sort of all over the place.

864
01:28:05.980 --> 01:28:06.980
Yeah.

865
01:28:06.980 --> 01:28:19.980
I was just talking about how you got to know about it and how it was going to describe your payment from Ludwig's role in swimming on lifeboats.

866
01:28:19.980 --> 01:28:30.980
You think the art scholar would have said, well, that's an opportunity to ask for it.

867
01:28:30.980 --> 01:28:45.980
So, like, it wouldn't be good for me to say that one of my applications is not to fall, to challenge all the 10-year-olds in the neighborhood, you know, and be the 20-year-old guy in one game. It might be...

868
01:28:45.980 --> 01:28:47.980
Wouldn't work if I did it.

869
01:28:47.980 --> 01:28:51.980
...to account someone that I still have a horse.

870
01:28:51.980 --> 01:29:01.980
With your thesis, you're not exercising courage by becoming a painting and being an academician, but...

871
01:29:01.980 --> 01:29:03.980
Would be here!

872
01:29:03.980 --> 01:29:07.980
Well, no, it's not courage if it's an un-virtuous end.

873
01:29:07.980 --> 01:29:27.380
Yes so the point is that there are the cases where you're it's worth striving

874
01:29:27.380 --> 01:29:32.860
for something that you're probably not going to achieve are often going to be

875
01:29:32.860 --> 01:29:39.540
cases where it will be more virtuous, more courageous, or more just, or whatever, to

876
01:29:39.540 --> 01:29:47.340
do that striving. And expressing virtue is a valuable thing in and of itself, even apart

877
01:29:47.340 --> 01:29:51.740
from the goals, further goals it promotes. Now, Stokes would have said, you know, completely

878
01:29:51.740 --> 01:29:57.020
apart from the goals it promotes. But Aristotle, at least, would say its value is not exhausted.

879
01:29:57.020 --> 01:30:01.340
The value of trying to save your city from an attack is not exhausted by the value of

880
01:30:01.340 --> 01:30:10.900
of Succeeding. The value of trying to defend freedom is not exhausted by the value of succeeding.

881
01:30:10.900 --> 01:30:13.140
Yeah, that's right. And we are out of time.