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Ethics 11

Welcome!

As usual, we’re going to check in first!

Mid-term discussion

There’s time to discuss the mid-term essays if we need to. I’ve had a chance to look through some of the papers that you have discovered, and there are some good materials there. Do read through the discussion board yourself for

Make notes for 5 minutes on the following:

On Virtue

We’ve seen that there are some philosophical problems about the ethics of duty. Can we really establish our duties through pure reason? But at the same time, utilitarian approaches are also problematic. They lead to all kinds of questions about how we measure the best outcome, how we agree on this measure, and also about whether outcomes are sufficient to ensure that something is ethical. (Don’t, we might ask, we also need good intentions rather than just good outcomes, even if the road to hell, as they say, is paved with these good intentions…?)

But maybe we’re thinking about ethics all wrong. Perhaps we need to think about ethics not in terms of duties and rules, or calculating outcome, but instead in terms of what kind of character can be considered virtuous. And here, we need the help of Aristotle

Who was Aristotle?

Aristotle was born in the town of Stagira in the year 384BCE. His father was physician to the Macedonian court, and at the age of seventeen, Aristotle travelled to Athens, where he entered Plato’s Academy. When Plato died in the year 367, Aristotle left Athens and spent the next few years in Assos and Lesbos. It was whilst he was in Lesbos that he was famously summoned by Philip of Macedonia to become tutor to his son, Alexander, who later became Alexander the Great. After two years in Macedonia, he returned to Athens and set up his own philosophical school, which was known as the Lyceum. Whilst he was in Athens, over in Macedonia Alexander succeeded his father Philip and set about his short-lived campaign of conquest of the known world, his ambitions taking him as far as the Indus River. But after Alexander’s death in 323, anti-Macedonian feeling broke out in Athens and Aristotle left the city, mindful of the fact that the Athenians had in the past sentenced to death Plato’s teacher, Socrates. His departure from Athens did not do much to extend his life-span: Aristotle died the following year, in the city of Chalcis.

Aristotle’s philosophy was so broad and wide-ranging — encompassing logic, biology, statecraft and politics, physics, ethics, literary theory, history, metaphysics and numerous other issues — that in the Middle Ages in Europe, Aristotle was simply referred to as ‘the Philosopher’: there was no need to ask which one? And much of Aristotle’s thinking still underpins the way we think today, his writings on ethics still informing contemporary debates around happiness and ethics. (Extracted from Introducing Happiness, by Will Buckingham, Icon Books).

On Happiness, Again

We’ve talked about happiness when talking about utilitarianism. But let’s go back and think about it again.

Let us start with the seemingly uncontroversial idea that happiness is a good thing. If we do think of happiness as a good thing, then it might seem that there are many good things for which we might aim, and that happiness is one good thing among many; but Aristotle claims that this is not quite true. Most of these things we aim at, Aristotle points out, we aim at for the sake of something else. So, for example, imagine that you want to become the chief executive of a large company. Why would you ever want to do such a bizarre thing? Because (Aristotle might say), you want wealth and power. But why do you want wealth and power? Because you might want to live in an enormous mansion, waited on by servants day and night. And why would this be desirable? Because, if you managed to live in this way, you might be happy. But — and this question is the clincher — why do you want to be happy? Well, to paraphrase Aristotle, you just do. In other words, there are many things that we might consider ‘good’ that we desire because they might lead to something else, but happiness is a thing that is good of and in itself. So happiness, Aristotle says, ‘standing by itself alone renders life desirable and lacking in nothing.’

Thinking about happiness

Try putting this to the test. Write down something that you desire. Now ask yourself: is this desire an end in itself? In other words, do you want this thing for its own sake, or is there something greater purpose or further desire that you can see at work? For example, you might want to learn Ancient Greek. But why? Perhaps you want to learn to read Aristotle in the original language.

If you find a further desire, write this down. For example, your desire to learn Greek might be an aspect of a further desire to read Aristotle in the original language.

Now repeat the process. Why do you want this next thing that you have written down? What further desire is there? So you may want to read Aristotle in the original so that you can become wise. Keep going with this process until you can find no further desires. Your list might look something like this:

In your own list, do you find yourself ending up with happiness as a final end? Or are other final ends possible?

A Flourishing Life

For Aristotle, happiness is the thing that we desire for its own sake. And the term that Aristotle uses for happiness is eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing But what, more precisely, does it mean to ‘flourish’? The answer to this question is not entirely obvious, so let’s look at how Aristotle sets about answering it.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that the question is essentially that of the question of what the ‘function’ or purpose of human life is. Here Aristotle invokes the term ‘excellence’ or arete, more often translated as ‘virtue’. For Aristotle, excellence can be applied to anything. So, for example, I might have several pens with which to write, but one has ink that continually dries up, one is uncomfortable to hold, and another writes in glitter ink that is distracting when it comes to trying to do serious philosophy. But when it comes to putting thoughts about Aristotle down on paper, my fountain pen seems to exhibit excellence. Similarly, for Aristotle, things like knives and racehorses can be excellent. What makes a thing excellent is its ability to do well that which it is for. Racehorses that race well, pens that write well, knives that cut well, cakes that taste good: these are all examples of excellence.

This raises a tricky question. If human virtue is doing well that which we are for, if it is a matter of fulfilling the purpose of human existence, then what is this purpose? Aristotle answers this by asking what it is that makes human beings distinct from other things. And, being a philosopher, he says that what makes us different is reason. Reason, for Aristotle, is the faculty we have that no other creatures do, it is the particular excellence of being a human being; and so virtue is a matter of acting in a fashion that expresses reason. It is important to note that reason here is not just a matter of sitting and thinking, but also a matter of how we choose to act. It is this — practical action born out of reason — that constitutes virtue, and that best conduces to a flourishing or a happy life. (Again, adapted from Buckingham, Introducing Happiness…)

Thinking About Virtue

So let’s think about virtue. What is virtue? Let’s do an exercise.

You have 15 minutes, then we’ll share.

A Wish-List of Virtues

Now, in groups, discuss your list of virtues, and their exemplars. After the groups, I want you to feed back with a top three list of virtues.

The good thing to do… it is to do what a good person would do!

Once we start thinking about virtues, then we come up with an interesting idea. That we can approach ethics from the point of view of cultivating virtues. This makes us ready for any situation. We do not need to know in advance what any situation is going to be, or talk about hypotheticals. Instead, as long as we cultivate the right virtues, when we are faced by any situation, we will act in the right way. Aristotle claims that ethics, or practical wisdom, is like navigation.

If we take this approach, then if we can identify a way of recognising virtue, then we can cultivate these virtues, and be equal to any situation.

There’s an introduction to Aristotle and his virtue ethics here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csIW4W_DYX4

Homework

The homework is to read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book II ‘Virtue of Character’ [Aristotle
trans. C.D.C. Reeve. (2014), Hackett].

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