Okay, so the Classical Eudaimonists think that everybody has an ultimate end,
that everything we do is for the sake of one single unitary overarching end,
which they call Eudaimonia, which is usually translated as happiness, well-being, flourishing,
success at living a good human life, something like that.
The term originally meant having a favorable guardian spirit, being well-demoned, but it had lost that literal connotation by the spirit.
Anyway, so classically, I must think everyone has a single unitary overarching element, and they're aiming at it.
And they defend this claim on something like praxeological grounds.
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.
However, Thomas Hobbes gives something like a praxeological argument against an ultimate end.
He argues that if you really think about the nature of action, you'll see we can't have an ultimate end.
So we've got kind of a celebrity death match here between the Greeks and Hobbes.
You can guess which side I'm going to come down on.
But let me explain what Hobbes' argument is.
Hobbes thinks that if you achieve, if you had null of an end, and you achieved it, then
all your desires would be satisfied.
Because if everything we do is for the sake of this one, one all-consuming end, then once
you have it, then there can't be anything left out.
So once you achieved your elderly end, you would have no unsatisfied desires.
But he says, and the wording of this might remind you of Mises, Hoppe says, all action
is motivated by dissatisfaction.
Whenever you act, clearly you're not happy with the way things are.
If you are happy with the way things were, you just stick with them.
Whenever you act, you're trying to change the situation.
So the fact that you're acting shows that you have some unsatisfied desires, and therefore
Therefore the fact your acting shows that you do not currently have your ultimate end.
Therefore if we ever achieved the ultimate end, it would be the cessation of all activity.
You just have to lie there like a lump. In fact, you know, you'd have to stop inhaling
and exhaling, and that would soon be the end of your career. So there cannot be such a
thing as an ultimate end, at least, you know, not in this life, says Hobbes. And therefore
Or he thinks that all these ancient Greek and Roman and medieval thinkers who all talk about there being this ultimate end
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
However, they did think that there was a kind of a second best ultimate end in this life
And Hobbes is arguing you can't have anything like an ultimate end in this life
Now, Aristotle, for example, might seem to open himself up to this kind of worry, because
he says that odymnia all by itself makes life choice-worthy and lacking in nothing.
That's a quote from book one of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Well then, you can see why some might think, oh, if that's what you've got, then what you've
got is somehow all-inclusive, there's nothing lacking, and therefore there must not be any
unsatisfied desires if you've got odymnia.
But Aristotle also defines the daimonia as a life of virtuous rational activity, in this
case I want to stress the activity part. Aristotle thinks that a person who has achieved or has
got the ultimate end, a happy person, a person who's living a happy life, is going to be
active doing all kinds of things. And there's a puzzle, this is the puzzle that Hobbes is
trying to push, which is if this happy person is doing all sorts of things, what's motivating
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.
Okay, let me give what I think is the first stage of an answer from the classically diamondous perspective to this worry.
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.
But here's some of the, at least the first move, first couple moves.
First of all, it's a mistake to think that action expresses dissatisfaction with the way things are.
Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes action expresses dissatisfaction with the way things would be if you didn't act.
This is a point that Robert Nozick makes, I recall, in his article on Austrian methodology.
So I give this example, since we're talking about Greeks.
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.
He's playing to keep the activity going, so he's dissatisfied with the way things would be if he stopped acting.
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.
Another point is the distinction between instrumental and constitutive means. If you think of all
means as instrumental, it's all means as something external to the end that's going to somehow
will causally bring the end about.
Then it does make sense to think of acting
as trying to change things.
But sometimes an action could be a constitutive means.
The action is itself, keeping the action going
is itself part of the end you want to achieve.
In which case, you wouldn't necessarily be dissatisfied
as you're going along.
Incidentally, I don't say this in the notes,
Incidentally, I think this is a possible objection
to an argument Mises makes in human action.
When he says that if there's a God,
God could not engage in action.
And his argument there is that action
always involves use of means to end.
So if you're omnipotent, you can just have the end instantly.
You don't need the means.
And therefore, an omnipotent being couldn't act.
In this case, it's not so omnipotent.
But, at least as far as that argument goes, I don't think that works because
some of your means might be constitutive rather than instrumental means.
In other words, your goal might include...
It's not that you've got this goal that's defined independently of action
and then you're doing these actions to bring about the goal.
Your performing certain actions might be part of the goal you're aiming at,
in which case, if they're sort of conceptually part of it,
then even an omnipotent being couldn't dispense with those means
and therefore a good act for what it's worth.
All right, well, then these considerations I'm offering show that contrary to what Hobbes says, an ultimate end is not praxeologically impossible.
It's not just inherently impossible given the nature of action for us to achieve an ultimate end.
Now, there's still Hobbesian-type worries about the realisticness of this coming up later,
coming up later, but at least that's to fend off the claim that it's praxeologically impossible.
Now I want to show, here I'm going to borrow heavily from Plato and Aristotle, I want to
show that the notion of an ultimate end is praxeologically required, so I'm going to
try and give some reasons to suggest why you might think that we have to consider ourselves
as having some sort of ultimate end.
all right first of all here's a point that that the Greeks all agreed on by
the Greeks I mean the Greek philosophers not the Greeks in the street which often
had a very different view but the Greek philosophers almost all agree and here's
something that Austrian economists also agree on means get their value from the
ends they serve this is the whole you know whole point of imputation in in
in Austrian economics and same idea in ethics.
If my only reason for doing one thing
is to get some other thing,
then the value of the means
must depend on the value of the end.
Now, of course, I might be doing this thing
both for its own sake and for the sake of some other end,
in which case it would be both a means and an end.
But to the extent that I'm doing it as a means,
to that extent, its value depends
on the value of the end it serves.
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.
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.
If there is no final end, then the whole thing would have no value, you think.
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.
However, that doesn't settle whether there's just one end for all our actions.
All that would show is that for any action you do, there has to be a final end for that action.
But it might be that every action you do has a different final end, and that they don't all combine into one.
So we need a separate argument to show that there's just one big end for all our actions.
Now some people thought the Greeks are just making a silly mistake here.
Some people thought the Greeks are just sliding from the claim that there's an ultimate end for each of our actions
to the claim that there's some one ultimate end for all of them together.
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.
A lot of people think that the Greeks are making that fallacy, but I don't think so.
Anyway, I'm going to try to avoid making that fallacy.
Why might we think that we have not just some final ends, or not just a final end for each of our actions,
why might we think that we have one big final end, the most final end of all our actions put together?
Why should we think we're committed to thinking of it that way?
Well, think about cases when you're making trade-offs.
Suppose there are two things you want and you can't have both.
I don't know if it's ever happened to you, but sometimes it happens that there are two things,
and you'd like to have them both, but you have to pick one. So you're choosing between,
I'll call them creatively, A and B, and when you can't have both, you have to decide which one to
pick. And so you weigh the options in your mind. You try to go about deciding. You deliberate.
You try to make a decision about which one to pick. Well, that process is itself an action.
When you're deliberating about whether to have A or B, you are engaging in an action.
All action aims at an end.
What is the end of this action?
I'm trying to choose between A and B. What is my goal?
Well, it can't be A.
My aim, the thing I'm trying to get in choosing between A and B, can't be A.
Because I haven't yet settled whether it's A I'm going for.
I might decide to go for B.
So the goal can't be A by itself, but for the same reason the goal can't be B by itself.
Could it be both? Could it be A plus B? Is that my goal in deliberating?
Well, no, because we've already assumed that A plus B is not an available option.
I've already given up that option. I have to choose one or the other. I can't have both.
So when I'm choosing between A and B, my goal is not A and B both together.
Could it be A or B? My choice is somehow A or B. That's the situation I want to bring about.
Well, no, because then I wouldn't have to deliberate. I could just randomly pick one and it would get me that.
I don't just want one or the other and I don't care which. I want something more than that.
So whenever we deliberate, we've got some goal in mind.
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.
And it isn't A and B and it isn't A or B. What is it?
Well, we might say it's something like maximizing the satisfaction of our preferences, which I'm going to call maxpref for short.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
Still, there's some sense in which you're trying to do as best as you can to satisfy your preferences.
Given that you can't satisfy them all, you want to satisfy the greatest number of the more important ones or something like that.
And I'm calling that max breath.
Now someone might say, well, alright, anyone who deliberates must have the goal of maximizing the satisfaction of their preferences.
But what about beings that don't deliberate? Suppose they're a rational agent that never engaged in deliberation.
Well, I'm inclined to think that that wouldn't really be a rational agent.
But if you think that there are rational agents that don't engage in deliberation,
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.
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.
But I'm going to use the term rational agent in such a way that includes deliberation.
All right, so it turns out that in addition to all your particular ends, if you're a rational agent who deliberates,
you must also have this end of satisfying as much as possible of your most important preferences or something like that.
Now given that, whenever you choose something, that choice expresses a preference for that
thing over any of its rivals.
So I'm going to claim that means whenever you choose something, that choice expresses
a judgment that that thing advances your maxpref better than anything else.
Now someone might want to quibble about that. Someone might want to say, well, maybe it doesn't express any judgment at all.
You've got this preference, just sort of like a brute desire. Why assume that there's any judgment involved?
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.
I'm a rational agent. I have a hard time making sense of the notion of a preference.
If a preference can't be expressed as a judgment, this gets me more of what I want than that.
But at least that's the point where someone could try and put up a fight.
But so will she grant that whenever you choose something,
that your choice expresses a judgment that that thing advances your max breath.
Well, it seems to me that that at least comes pretty close to saying
that whenever you choose, it's chosen, whatever else it's chosen as,
It's chosen, among other things, as a means to your max breath.
Whatever you choose, you're choosing it because,
or part of the reason you're choosing it, at least,
is because it promotes your max breath.
And therefore, whatever you choose
is chosen as a means to your max breath.
And this will give us a reason for identifying max breath
with the Greek notion of odymnia, at least initially.
This is just suggestive that there is a goal
that everyone has, in addition to all
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.
But you might think, and this is where the Hobbesian objection is raising its head again, you might think, well, wait a second.
All right, Maxpref was like O'Dymania in that sense.
But there's some fancy features that O'Dymania is supposed to have that Maxpref doesn't seem to have.
Remember that O'Dymania, all by itself, makes life choice-worthy and lacking in nothing.
That's what Aristotle says about it.
That's what the sort of thing the Greek philosophers in general say about this ultimate goal.
But we've just seen that the pursuit of Maxpref involves trade-offs.
The whole example I gave was the case where you want both A and B, and you can't have both.
And so you pick whichever one is going to most maximize your preference satisfaction.
But it seems as if total satisfaction of all your preferences isn't on the cards.
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,
It seems like if you're doing trade-offs, you're already recognizing you can't have everything you want.
So, it might seem as though we haven't got a full conception about diamonia here.
Now, here's a possible answer, and I think this possible answer is on the right track.
It's not complete. More needs to be said.
But the first thing to say is that maybe we should say that
etymology includes not everything worth wishing for, but everything worth choosing.
After all, what Aristotle says is it includes everything choice-worthy.
He doesn't say it includes everything wish-worthy.
There are also, of course, the things we wish for that we can't choose
because we know that they're impossible.
Or at least, if they're not impossible, at least there's something that you,
there's nothing you can do right now to bring it about.
You know, I'd like to be able to, I'd like to be able to teleport.
You know, that's what they were wishing for, but that's not something worth choosing.
You know, it's not something, you know, so Aristotle doesn't think that the fact that we can't teleport
instantly all around the planet means that our lives are unhappy, that our lives are importantly lacking.
Well, maybe it would be cool if we could teleport, it would be cool if we could live a million years,
It would be cool if we could levitate things by waving our hands around, all kinds of stuff would be cool.
Those are things worth wishing for, worth thinking it would be cool to have, but not worth choosing.
So you might say, well maybe O'Dymania is just stuff worth choosing.
But then comes the problem which I mentioned briefly toward the end of the last lecture.
Suppose something is currently unattainable.
It's not unattainable like teleportation.
It's something that is possible in the ordinary run of things,
but just I can't get it right now.
For example, suppose I fall into a well and I can't get out.
I could get out if someone came along and brought a ladder or something.
But right now, there's no one around with a ladder.
Right now, I can't get out.
Right now, currently, getting out is unattainable.
So all the getting out is worth wishing for.
You might think it's not worth choosing. I mean, it's not even something I can choose in the current situation.
It's not even something I can try to do.
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.
So getting out of the well, you might think, is not worth choosing in that context.
It's not a legitimate object of choice.
If you think that a diminea includes everything choice-worthy, but not everything worth wishing for,
you might think, well, that means, hey, then I should be happy at the bottom of the well.
I'm not lacking anything worth choosing, lacking something worth wishing for,
but we already agreed that we didn't want our conception of a diminea to be so utopian.
It'd include everything you might conceivably wish for, like powers of Superman or something.
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.
And so it ceases to be part of the content of Adaminia.
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.
So if something's not available, then it stops being part of Adamania and it's not worth choosing.
Well, one problem with this is it seems to make Adamania too easy.
Throw me in the bottom of a well and I should be happy because I can't get out.
Throw in some snakes that are biting me. If I can't get rid of the snakes, then once again,
getting rid of the snakes is not worth choosing, so again, I should be perfectly happy down there.
Because as long as the things I lack are things I can't get,
Then it seems like I've got everything worth choosing, and that seems like kind of an icky conception of success.
That didn't stop some Greek philosophers from embracing it.
Socrates and the Stoics both think something along those lines.
Their versions of the story are different.
But Socrates and the Stoics both tend to think that if something is unavailable or outside of your power to get,
then you shouldn't care about it, and therefore you're perfectly happy without it.
For the Stoics, the content of happiness is just nothing but your own virtue,
the only thing under your control.
For Socrates, it seems to expand and contract depending on what's available.
So you're allowed to care about things other than virtue as long as they're available.
Take them away and bang, you shouldn't care about them anymore.
But, you know, not all the Greek philosophers wanted to go for this.
Aristotle, for example, thinks that there are things,
Some things outside our control matter for happiness.
He didn't think it should depend heavily
on things outside our control,
because that would make our happiness very vulnerable.
And if our happiness is very vulnerable,
it seems like we're in a bad state,
to some extent, and that's not happiness.
But he thought that happiness could be
in principle vulnerable to bad stuff that might happen.
It should be largely in your control.
We didn't think it should be entirely so.
And his student, Theophrastus, apparently went farther.
How much farther we don't know
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.
So they at least thought that part of our happiness could depend on things not currently available.
Besides, although the Socrates and Stokes might think that we only should have aimed at things that are presently attainable,
they know that we often don't.
We often aim at things we know or desire or wish for or hanker for or feel unhappy without these other things.
And that needs to be explained, given that we need to have some conception about Ammonia,
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.
Suppose you say that we should include in our daimonia not just what is currently attainable,
but things that are in principle attainable.
So maybe I shouldn't name it teleportation because that's not in principle attainable,
although I don't know that it isn't in principle attainable, but at least it's kind of far
off.
Whereas I'm sitting in the, so it doesn't make sense for me to think my life is going
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, here's the first move of an answer.
This isn't, once again, it's not a complete answer, but it's moving us, I think, in the right direction.
First, we can distinguish between direct versus indirect objects of choice.
It's a mistake to think that you can only choose things that are right here now.
Like, this glass is right here now, I can choose this.
There are things not right here now that I can, in some sense, choose.
For example, I can choose now to go to Paris next May.
And it doesn't mean that right now I can do something that guarantees that I will be in Paris next May.
That's beyond my power.
So the Stoics would think it would be silly for me to choose.
But still, you know, I can start doing things now whose point is that they will eventually get me to Paris then.
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.
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.
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,
Nor just everything directly choice-worthy, which seems to constrict too much,
but maybe Adam and Eve should be everything worth striving for.
Not everything worth directly choosing right here, not everything worth wishing for either.
Teleportation is not worth wishing for.
I mean, sorry, it's not worth striving for. It's worth wishing for.
It's not worth striving for. It's not worth my doing anything to bring about teleportation,
because nothing that I can do is going to have very much of a good chance
of making any significant progress in that direction.
If I were a theoretical physicist, maybe you'd be worth it, but I don't know.
I'd have to be a theoretical physicist in order to know that.
But that still doesn't help us with the well, because you might think,
if I'm stuck at the bottom of the well, and the sides are perfectly smooth,
and there's no ladder, you might think it's not even worth striving to get out.
Because I know I can't, by my own efforts. I can't if some good luck comes along.
I can't if someone comes along with a ladder, but I can't climb out myself.
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.
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.
Even if there's nothing I can do now, I'm sort of alertly watching the opportunities.
I'm intensely watching the opportunities. That's not who I am with teleportation.
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.
Maybe I should, but I'm not.
So, now, when I'm under sort of high tension alertness at the bottom of the well,
you know, maybe striving isn't the right way to put that.
Maybe I'm not exactly striving for a ladder, but I'm doing something like striving.
I'm all geared up to grab the first opportunity to get the ladder if I can.
Whereas I'm not geared up that way for the teleportation.
I'm not scanning every opportunity.
So you could treat that as something like striving.
So maybe a dimedia includes everything worth striving for in this broad sense.
But then you might think, well, why shouldn't it be that way about teleportation?
Teleportation would be a good thing to have.
Why shouldn't I be in a constant state of really alertness and tension and nervousness?
Thinking, you know, I hope I don't die before they come up with teleportation.
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.
Maybe it'll never happen, but should I be in sort of constant nervousness about that?
Well, so we have this tension between what I'm calling utopianism and accommodationism.
Accommodationism is, you know, lower your standards for happiness to fit what you're actually getting.
And utopianism is expand your conception of happiness to include anything that might possibly be worth wanting.
Now the fact that something desirable is in principle possible is a reason to strive for it.
It is a reason to, you know, try to do your best to go after it.
Prima facie, it's a reason. So there is some reason for being a utopian.
for some reason, for including everything anyone could possibly get anything out of in your conception of happiness.
On the other hand, the fact that something is not immediately attainable is prima facie a reason not to strive for it.
Because, you know, it seems like you get a good chance of wasting your efforts.
And that gives you some support for accommodationism.
Well, you might think this is a problem, but I see this as a solution.
If you had lots of reasons for being a utopian and none for being an accommodationist, then go be a utopian.
If you had lots of reasons for being an accommodationist and none for being a utopian, then go be an accommodationist.
If you've got some reasons in each direction, that seems like a reason why you should pick something in the middle.
You've got some reason to resign yourself to whatever's going on.
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.
Well, if we're trying to construct a conception of happiness out of our existing commitments,
which is sort of the way I'm thinking of it here,
well then you've got one vector pulling this way and another vector pulling that way,
the result of the vectors is not going to be either direction, it's going to be somewhere in the middle.
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.
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.
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.
And so therefore, I'm in a suboptimal state if I'm down there.
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,
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.
That's just too unrealistic.
However, now suppose what happens if there's something I've decided isn't worth striving for,
because it's just too unlikely and too far apart from my ordinary needs.
I just think, well, all right, I don't care about the immortality drug or whatever.
But now suppose it does become available.
Now suppose suddenly that everyone in my block is getting immortality drugs, or green lantern rings, or teleportation tubes, or whatever they've got.
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.
It's one thing to be unhappy because you, like everyone else on the planet, cannot teleport.
It's another thing to be unhappy because you can't teleport, but most of your friends can.
It seems now as though it matters now.
I don't mean so much as a matter of envy, although it could be relevant,
but I just mean it's now a regular part of ordinary life that's lacking to you.
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.
The fact that he had slaves in his home probably counts as an objection to his having led a properly happy life.
But the fact that he didn't have electricity, I don't think does.
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.
What counts as crucial to happiness could vary depending on the context.
In the notes they say living to a thousand. I was getting bolder talking about immortality in the speech.
Well, anyway, does this completely kill off the Hobbesian worry? No, not completely.
Corpse of Hobbes keeps coming back zombie-like, because you might think, well, there's still the
following worry. Even if you say that Oedimonia contains not everything worth wishing for, but
only everything worth striving for in this broad sense of striving, it might still seem as though
Oedimonia is practically impossible, because no life can realistically achieve all objects of
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.
Now, how do we deal with that fact? Once again, I want to use the tension between
these two different impulses, not as the problem, but as the solution. The
accommodationist vector, the reasons for being an
accommodationist, would give us a reason not to conceive a constructive dimonia as
is something unattainable.
Because how can it be the end of action?
If we think of a diameter in such a way
that's impossible to get, or virtually impossible to get,
it's hard to see how it could be an end of action.
Because you can't really aim at something
if you think it's impossible.
You can't even aim at something
if you think it's very, very unlikely.
For example, if I went and tried to,
I'll try to crush this lectern.
Apologies to the Mises Institute if I succeed, but I don't think I will.
So I try...
Well, am I really trying to crush the lectern?
No, I mean, I'm pushing and grunting, but trying consists not in pushing and grunting.
It seems as though I don't really count as trying to crush the lectern,
unless I thought there was some reasonable chance.
Maybe less than 50%, but still some decent chance that my doing it would succeed.
If I don't think that there's any realistic chance
If what I was doing would crush the lectern,
then I don't think I really count as trying to.
In fact, if I really thought that what I was doing
had a good chance of crushing the lectern,
I wouldn't have done it, because it's not my lectern.
Even if it were my lectern, I don't want to crush my lectern.
So, we can't realistically regard
eudaimonia as something that is impossible
or highly, highly, highly improbable.
We have to regard it as something that,
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.
The chance has to be good enough to be worth trying.
So that's the reason not to think of it as something unattainable.
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.
We don't want to renounce all striving and just be satisfied with whatever is happening.
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.
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.
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.
This gives us a reason to come up with a conception of striving and a conception of happiness that will make sense of this.
Because if we're committed to an end and we're committed to it as in some sense including all these things,
yet in some sense also not being either impossible or radically diminished,
We're sort of driven by our own commitments to try and come up with something.
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.
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.
But I'd hate to think that by adopting anarchism as a goal I have thereby condemned myself to an unhappy life.
Well, the Stoics give a solution which I think is wrong.
It's an accommodationist solution, but as is often the case in philosophy,
I think wrong answers are often very useful because they often contain the seed of a right answer.
So here's the Stoic solution to this claim that the good life is going to involve striving for things you can't get.
The Stokes think it's possible to aim at trying to achieve something without aiming at actually achieving it.
That's something that they call preferred indifference.
And let me try to give you as realistic examples as I can.
I don't actually think that there are any possible examples of this.
I think the notion is actually incoherent.
But I'm going to try to make an incoherent notion seem coherent now.
So here's the example.
Suppose that I'm a telepathic millionaire.
I didn't say it was going to make it seem realistic. I said it was going to make it seem coherent.
I'm a telepathic millionaire, and I offer you a million dollars to try to hit the target.
I'm doing some target practice. I'll say, I'll offer you a million dollars to try your best to hit the target.
And the reason I'm a telepath in this story is so I can tell whether you're trying your best.
You're getting the million does not depend on whether you actually hit the target.
I don't care about that. I just care about you're trying your best.
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.
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.
Whether you hit the target or not has nothing to do with whether you get the money.
You're getting the money depends entirely on whether you try.
Well now suppose that you don't care about the target practice for its own sake, all you want is the money.
What seems now you've got a reason to care about trying to hit the target.
Yet in a sense you don't have a reason to care about actually hitting the target.
You'll be perfectly content if you try your best, fail, and they give you the money.
So the Stokes would say in this case you're treating hitting the target as a preferred indifferent.
You're treating trying to hit the target as good, something you care about.
You're treating actually hitting the target as a preferred indifferent,
something it's good to try to do but doesn't matter whether you succeed.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think you can try to do something without caring about the actual doing of it.
I think in the situation with the target practice, what happens is that initially you have no desire to hit the target.
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.
I think what you then do is you form a desire to hit the target because you have to in order to try to.
I think it's fairly easy to form desires like that.
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.
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.
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.
I think that trying to hit the target includes the idea that hitting the target is your end.
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.
But, here's the piece of the truth that the Stoics are on to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes because it also comes from some other end beyond it.
There might be cases where just the striving itself has some kind of value.
There's an example in Adam Smith where he gives this example of a super accurate pocket watch.
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
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.
Well, Smith thinks that that's wrong. I mean, that happens.
But Smith thinks that the example he gives of the super accurate pocket watch is,
he thinks that there are lots of people who really find it cool that there's a watch that keeps really super accurate time.
But it's not because they have any desire to know the time with great accuracy.
One reason to care about a really accurate watch is you want to know the time really accurately.
We transmit things often. We just think it's really coolivid that something is so good at promoting some goal,
even if the goal itself is not something we care all that much about.
We're more impressed at the efficiency of the tool than we are at the actual result.
If I give you a shovel, an electronic shovel that all by itself could dig 50 holes in a minute,
you might think, well, that's really cool. Not because you want 50 holes, Doug.
You don't care about 50 holes, Doug, but you just think, wow, isn't that cool?
That's really cool, look at that thing going on and digging.
Smith thinks there are lots of cases where the fact that something is good at promoting a goal
gives us a reason to value it over and above the value we put on the goal itself.
Smith is actually borrowing this idea to some extent from the Stoics,
though he's taking it out of the Stoic context and putting it in his own context.
I want to suggest that sometimes striving can be valuable for reasons other than what it's striving for.
I think in order to strive for something you have to care about the thing, not just the striving.
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.
for its role as a constitutive means, a constitutive part of happiness and not just as a means to the further goal.
So here's my suggestion. Suppose we distinguish degrees of odimonia. Suppose we think odimonia can come in degrees.
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.
They thought that all people who were unhappy were completely unhappy.
And all people who were un-virtuous were completely wicked.
They said, you know, if you're drowning in a foot of water or a mile of water, it doesn't matter.
Either way, you're equally dead.
So that's the sense in which, for example, orange is redder than green.
Orange is not red. Green is not red.
Orange is closer to red than green is.
In that sense, we say orange is redder than green.
Well, that's not the sense of degrees of happiness I'm talking about.
I'm talking about cases where two people are genuinely happy, are genuinely el daimon, but one is happier than the other.
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.
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.
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.
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,
think that once you have odymnia, then it can come in degrees and you're going to have more and less of it.
And this would be a reason to redefine max prep.
So this isn't just going to be the maximization of the satisfaction of your preferences.
It's something more complicated.
I warned you that there would have to be a reason to define it in a more complicated way.
So, suppose I say that there's a minimum threshold of things worth striving for.
If you fall below that threshold, you're not happy.
The minimum threshold of your life is not a success.
What that minimum threshold is will be partly context-relative.
I don't think it's completely context-relative, but partly so.
Once you get above that level of the minimum threshold, then you are happy.
But at that point, you can have more or less of happiness.
I think there's something other than happiness that you want.
Because one of Aristotle's arguments is happiness must include everything worth having,
because otherwise it wouldn't be the best thing.
Because happiness plus something else would be better than happiness itself.
But if we think of getting better off not as a matter of adding something external to happiness,
but of getting more of what you already have,
then I think that can allow us to reconcile some of these contradictions.
There's a minimum threshold, below your unhappy, above your happy, but once you're there, then more higher levels can make you happier.
You're not getting something external to happiness, you're getting more of happiness.
And then it might be that there are some things where the striving for them is part of happiness at a lower level.
And actually getting those things is also part of happiness, but at a higher level.
See, if you don't strive for them, you're not happy.
If you strive for them and don't get them, you are happy.
Those things are going to be,
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,
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
and don't get them. Never the less, striving is part of happiness, although at a lower level.
But if you actually get it, well that's, you know, that's even better. Not only is striving good,
but striving plus getting it is even better than striving for it without getting it. And so
you can have these different levels. So here's what I'm saying. I'm saying that I think that
we're committed to thinking of our happiness in this way. You know, the point of this is that
we're trying to figure out what our ordinary desires and preferences and so forth commit
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.
It's going to be something like, you know, maximizing our preferences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For that matter, some of the things worth wishing for are not jointly realizable.
Maybe not even logically jointly realizable.
I mean, you might be in love with two people, and what you want is a monogamous relationship with each of them.
That's your ideal.
You can't have it.
So it can't be that the element of all our actions is something that includes everything worth wishing for.
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.
So we need some conception of happiness that can allow us to have it and yet still be striving for things.
And yet for the things we're striving for, not to be something distinct from happiness, but to somehow be included in it.
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.
questions about that. Yes.
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,
It's a very personal question.
I like that conclusion. I also wonder about, and I think Aristotle included some things like physical health and wealth and things like that.
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,
people might say, well, I'm feeling good today, I've got lots of justice and wisdom today, or something like that.
I often say that.
Or, you know, well, it's okay, my wisdom is way down and my justice is so-so.
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
Health is having constituent parts, so you can talk about the health of your heart and
the health of your lungs and so forth, and I think it's a matter of degree rather than
all or nothing.
And he also mentioned that Aristotle includes health and wealth and things like that, not
just virtue.
Virtue is sort of the centerpiece of Odaimonia, but Aristotle does include health and that
sort of thing in there.
Yeah, I think health is a good analogy, and here's a way of thinking about sort of this
So there's tension between these different ways of thinking about it. You could put it in terms of health.
Suppose you wanted to find health in such a way, so someone could say, someone could have a very utopian conception of health.
And so you don't count as healthy unless there's no conceivable way that you could be improved health-wise.
Well, if you define health that way, then there are no healthy organisms on this planet.
Well, maybe, well, anyway, I'll go with that. Maybe there's some kind of example.
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.
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.
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.
So then you might say, all right, we'll tone down our conception of health to something weaker.
If you say that, then what are these further enhancements you might have? Are they not health?
If I'm healthy even though I've got some negative condition, then what is that further thing?
Well, then you want to say that there are degrees of health. But still you might want to say, well,
there are some things that... So you might want to say, well, maybe there's some cutoff below which
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.
It seems to me that whether or not waiting in a state of tense readiness for something
might depend not only on the probability but also on your alternatives.
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.
Still, there's probably not much that counts as a flourishing human life at the bottom of a well.
And so it would still make sense to devote a lot of your energy to trying to be alert for the possibility of rescue.
But let's say you were lost on a remote desert island instead, where also you were equally unlikely to be found,
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.
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
I'm not going to be spoiling your chances for getting what kind of happiness is available to you on the island.
Yeah, that certainly makes sense to me.
I mean, think about, for example, I didn't use this example earlier, but I was thinking about it.
Suppose that if interplanetary travel were much easier and more common than it is now,
then being stuck on one planet and not being able to get off it would be bad.
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.
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.
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,
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,
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.
At some point, under the ordinary senses that you're describing, Ron has concluded that he's striving to get off the island.
So he didn't stop hoping to get off the island. Once that came up, he was happy to do so.
And he said his happiness improves by getting off the island in some sort of sense.
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.
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.
There are lots of things I could wish for that I don't hope for.
I wish Bill Gates would give me a million dollars, but I don't hope he will.
You can't really hope for something, and hoping is like trying in this sense.
You can't hope for something if you think it's overwhelmingly unlikely.
Now exactly how unlikely, overwhelmingly unlikely is, I'm not sure.
But still it seems as though there are things that you just don't think are realistic possibilities
and so you don't hope for them, but you might still wish for them.
So someone on a desert island might have given up anything like striving, but they might still hope to be rescued.
Yeah, I think that's a good suggestion, but now I think maybe the concept I want is somewhere between hoping and striving.
Because you could be hoping without being in a state of tense readiness.
Well, you could be in a state of tense readiness, but I was kind of stretching the concept of striving to cover that.
So, you know, there ought to be a word for something that is more active than hoping, but not as active as striving.
Hankering, maybe, or longing, maybe.
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,
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.
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.
For some of the things I hope for may be just as unlikely as Bill Gates giving me a million dollars.
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.
We're going to slice this thinner and thinner.
The person who said, oh, I have to be able to plan and start to travel and hopefully be a worthwhile person.
Someone who doesn't travel is, you know, a really worthwhile or unimportant person.
And so, concepts like that, biology concepts like that, just like we would add in wealth and the traditional virtual,
Yeah, so the question is whether a psychological category like self-esteem might be relevant here.
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.
And if they lack those, then they won't be happy.
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.
But I'm not sure it works the other way around. That is, it doesn't seem to me that having
everything you need for your self-esteem is sufficient for happiness. Now, the Stoics would
say it is. The Stoics would say, you know, as long as you can maintain your proper self-esteem,
of course, there has to be justified self-esteem. For the Stoics, you're not kind of as happy
if you falsely think you're cool and you're not. But if you have properly grounded self-esteem,
the Stoics can say it's all you need for happiness. Whereas, Aristotle once can say, well, maybe
Maybe that's one of the most important, that's a very important thing at the core of happiness,
but still Aristotle is going to say that if I've got a healthy self-esteem and I'm at
the bottom of the well being bitten by the snakes, because you've forgotten the snakes.
Self-esteem is certainly necessary for happiness, and one of the most important things for happiness
for you, I think, well, it can't be sufficient.
sufficient. An example that Aristotle gives is if you are, if the things happen to you that happened to Priam,
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,
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,
through no fault of his own nastiness descended on him so yeah it does seem to
me that you know I'd like to think self-esteem is all you need but but there
And there are the snakes.
Mises has the famous motto of spreading the portfolio of people,
not working towards them ultimately.
I was thinking about that in the previous lecture,
how you may not have endorsed the final goal,
but working towards that goal,
when you need to discuss the allies after.
Yeah, the mention is of Mises' slogan, his motto,
which he got from Virgil,
Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.
The suggestion is, well, should we think of that as an end that you may not ever fully achieve,
but you keep striving for, because I think Mises clearly isn't assuming
that you're automatically guaranteed to win this battle.
It's something to sustain you during the period when you think you might not win it,
but still it's worth striving for it.
In fact, that reminds me of a very un-consequentialist quote from Rand, who says,
He who strives, he who works for the future lives in it today.
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.
Which is, I like that idea.
I'm not sure how exactly it fits in with survival being the ultimate goal.
But, well, I sort of see, but yeah,
so there's a certain sense in which
striving can be worth doing even if you don't succeed.
Now, of course, obviously it's better if you do succeed
and the striving doesn't make much sense
unless there's some value to the succeeding.
But the value of striving doesn't depend solely, I think,
on the value of succeeding.
And that's, you know, in a way that's sort of the point
The thing that I was trying to make here is that you're not going to get everything you strive for.
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.
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.
But those things are worth striving for, and your life isn't a failure if you don't get them all.
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,
but one of the crucial times he quoted that was during a time when he had become very pessimistic.
you know different periods of life he was you know more optimistic or more
pessimistic but you know this was around 1940 I think when he just he just arrived
in the US and this was around the time when he wrote you know he'd hoped to
lead the way to the future but he decided that all those left was to be a
historian of decline so he was very despondent at that point but he I but I
believe it was still in that context he was quoting this line that you know the
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.
I have a question of whether or not you're going to need a further argument for the things
we're striving for, for the preferences that you're striving to satisfy.
Do you think that you can reach this happiness or maximize preferences that are all perhaps
inconsistent with the libertarian values?
Maximizing to be dumb or to be submissive or controlled or something like that.
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.
Preferences, but your preferences could all be for really crappy things or they could be for
un-libertarian things like being dumb or being submissive. Now, if Walter Block were here, he
would say there's nothing un-libertarian about being dumb or being submissive. That's completely
a question of morality. It's got nothing to do with libertarianism, but I won't say that. If he wanted to
say that, he should have been here. No, you're absolutely right and that's what succeeding
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.
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.
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
Okay, so the question is, according to the
Let's start with the story from presenting. We often have to make trade-offs.
We can't have everything you want of one thing and you have to decide which one is more important.
You weigh and balance these things.
You might think that the same thing is going to apply to morality or virtue.
You're going to have conflicting moral claims.
You can't satisfy all of them and so you try and satisfy the most important or something like that.
But I've also endorsed the Greek thesis of unity of virtue.
According to which the claims of the virtues are all harmonious with each other.
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.
I'm going to talk more about this later, but here's the short version.
What you trade off in determining the content of what the virtues require of you, what you trade off are not actual moral claims.
Because if they're actual moral claims, then you're immoral if you don't satisfy them.
That's what it means for it to be a moral claim.
So it can never be the case that you get to dismiss some moral claim, but instead the question is sometimes
sort of prima facie moral claims, when did they become genuine moral claims and when not. So you
might think the distinction is purely terminological. I think it's partly terminological. I don't think
it's purely terminological, but it's cases where you're trying to decide what virtue requires of
and what you've got is not conflicting full-fledged moral claims because that implies you can.
If there's a full-fledged moral claim on you that you ought to do X, then you ought to do X.
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.
Since you can't do both X and not X, it can't be the case that these are both full-fledged moral claims.
However, when you're trying to figure out what your full-fledged moral claims are,
Think of it the way I was talking about accommodationism versus utopianism,
where you just have a kind of compromise between expanding happiness to include everything you can conceive of
versus constricting it to include only what's available.
And there's some reason to expand it, and there's some reason to contract it, and so you do a trade-off.
But during the trade-off, you're trying to come up with the right conception of happiness.
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.
If I can put it that way, I think that the unit of virtue is consistent with trade-offs.
The trade-offs are not trade-offs among the demands of the virtues.
They're trade-offs among the demands of the prima facie considerations
that you take into account in order to figure out the content of the virtues.
The basic trade-off between X and Y has some overridden standards that gives the basis for a trade-off.
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.
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
So the question is, part of my argument for there being a single overarching end of a
daimonia is the necessity of making trade-offs. If we make trade-offs then there must be some aim
we have in mind in making the trade-offs. It can't be either of them separately, it must be the
overarching end. But then the question is, well, if I take this unity of a virtual idea according to
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.
My answer is going to be no because the case for the unit of virtue presupposes the case for an overarching end.
Now if there's some other argument for the unit of virtue that bypasses it then there might be a different story.
Plus, I think also, the story of how the unity virtue works does involve, there's still trade-offs going on.
They're not trade-offs among the virtues, but they're trade-offs among considerations.
And in fact, people often think that Aristotle says that a virtuous person will never have any regrets about what they do,
or never feel bad about it, never will do what they do reluctantly.
Now it's true that they won't be reluctant to be virtuous,
they won't be grudgingly virtuous,
but, and we'll talk more about this later,
but no point, there's no reason not to mention it now,
I can mention it again later too.
Aristotle says that the courageous person who faces danger
will feel some reluctance to face it.
They'll feel some fear.
They won't be just overcome with fear,
But, Ersall's conception of courage is not the person who's completely devoid of fear.
It's the person whose fear is appropriate to the situation.
And that doesn't mean that he's only afraid of things he ought to run away from.
It means that if he, if he faces a dangerous situation,
you know, there would be something inappropriate.
He wouldn't be responding to an important aspect of the situation if he didn't feel fear.
And another example from a former student of mine, Karen Storr,
came up with this excellent example.
Suppose you're a virtuous person
and you have the job of breaking bad news to someone.
Well, you ought to feel reluctant to do it.
Now, your reluctance shouldn't,
you shouldn't give into that reluctance
and say, you know, wimp out and not do it.
But nevertheless, if you just did your duty cheerfully,
here I am bringing you news about your loved one's death,
clearly there'd be something wrong.
The virtuous person ought to feel that tension.
and so once again they, you know, you can't get everything worth wishing for, yeah.
Okay, so the question is what is the, can I say anything more about what the
the minimum threshold is, above which you've got some kind of happiness and below which you're unhappy
and whether it's arbitrary, if it isn't arbitrary, what are the grounds for setting it?
Well, I don't have any terribly worked out story about exactly what falls on what side of the line.
I mean, I gave this example that lacking electricity might put you below the line now and wouldn't in Aristotle's day.
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
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.
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.
On the other hand, we've got some reason not to, because electricity is important and it's worth having and so forth.
I don't have any story about whether electricity falls on one side of the line or the other.
But anyway, it doesn't really matter whether I have a story.
I'm not sure this has to be exactly the same for everybody.
I think that happiness is generically the same for everybody,
but I don't think it is specifically.
So I think that what falls on one side of the line or the other
could be different for different people.
There are going to be some values that I think are going to be the same for all,
that everyone's committed to.
But Mises has this nice example of these different levels.
He distinguishes between your universal nature as a human being
and your individual nature.
Universal nature is the most important in determining your happiness, but individual
nature matters too.
So can Mozart live a happy life without access to a musical instrument or a sheet paper to
write notes on?
Probably not.
Probably Mozart without access to musical instruments is going to be unhappy.
That will push him below his minimum threshold.
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
There's going to be some clear definite cut-off.
I think we can still identify things that are pretty plausibly on one side or the other.
If you're on the rack being tortured, then you're on the wrong side of the line.
Now the Stoics didn't think so. As long as you've got your virtue, you're fine.
But it seems for most of us the way we'd construct
our commitments, that would be the wrong line.
But if there's a fuzzy boundary, well so what?
There's a fuzzy boundary about where the outback begins.
Not the restaurant, but the actual area of Australia.
Certainly there is an outback.
We can think of things that are in it and things that are not in it.
But exactly where does it start? Well, the fact that we can't say exactly where it starts.
There's a big puzzle in philosophy about exactly what to say about fuzzy boundaries.
But whatever the right story is to say about them, we know there are such things.
It doesn't invalidate a concept just because we can't figure out how to define a precise line.
I mean, we can't even say exactly where the fuzziness starts, because that's a fuzzy boundary too.
That's the real nightmare about vagueness.
But whatever the right things to say about that, it's not a special problem for any particular area of inquiry.
It's sort of all over the place.
Yeah.
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.
You think the art scholar would have said, well, that's an opportunity to ask for it.
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...
Wouldn't work if I did it.
...to account someone that I still have a horse.
With your thesis, you're not exercising courage by becoming a painting and being an academician, but...
Would be here!
Well, no, it's not courage if it's an un-virtuous end.
Yes so the point is that there are the cases where you're it's worth striving
for something that you're probably not going to achieve are often going to be
cases where it will be more virtuous, more courageous, or more just, or whatever, to
do that striving. And expressing virtue is a valuable thing in and of itself, even apart
from the goals, further goals it promotes. Now, Stokes would have said, you know, completely
apart from the goals it promotes. But Aristotle, at least, would say its value is not exhausted.
The value of trying to save your city from an attack is not exhausted by the value of
of Succeeding. The value of trying to defend freedom is not exhausted by the value of succeeding.
Yeah, that's right. And we are out of time.