Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 044 - The Goldilocks Theory - Aristotle's Ethics.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Goldilocks Theory, Aristotle's Ethics. There's this new branch of social science which calls itself happiness studies. I read about it in a magazine article, which related some of the surprising findings made in this field. For instance, it turns out that people who win the lottery are no happier than people who don't, and that, while being poor doesn't make you unhappy, living amongst people who are richer than you does make you unhappy. Now I know what you're thinking. How do they figure out how happy these people are? Well, it's simple. They ask. For instance, they've asked lottery winners and other people to say, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy they are, and discover that the average answers are about the same. Lessons from this research are even being applied to government policy. For instance, it's useful to know, if you are running a society, that income equality may make people happier than absolute increases in wealth. Whenever I read something along these lines, I like to ask myself, what would Aristotle make of this? Would he endorse this new and exciting field of happiness studies? I guess Aristotle would say the same thing he always says, yes and no. He would certainly agree that happiness is worth studying, and even that it is of paramount importance, and the right goal to have in mind when designing a society. But he would also have a reservation, I think. He would raise a quizzical eyebrow at the suggestion that we can find out how happy people are just by asking them. Not only are people poor judges about what will make them happy, as the happiness scientists have shown by studying lottery winners, people are even poor judges about whether they are already happy, or so Aristotle thinks. Here then we have a subject of paramount importance, on which people tend to get badly confused. Looks like a job for a philosopher. Aristotle takes up the challenge in one of his best known works, the Nicomachean Ethics. This is actually one of three works he wrote on ethics, along with the Eudemian Ethics and another, rarely studied text called the Magna Moralia. The Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics share a large section in common, and there is a debate about how they relate to one another, which was written first, and so on. I'll focus on the Nicomachean Ethics, named after Aristotle's son Nicomachus, since that's by far the most commonly studied Aristotelian ethical treatise. It is quite a long work and takes in not only ethical virtue, but also the idea of voluntary action, theoretical virtue, friendship, pleasure, and the superiority of the philosophical life. As with Plato's Republic, I will be devoting two episodes to it, without even scratching the surface. As always, you should take this podcast as an invitation to go read the text for yourself, or to re-read it if you've already had the pleasure. Aristotle begins the Ethics with the surprising announcement that we are here embarking on what he calls political philosophy. The Ethics is thus explicitly linked to another work called the Politics, which I'll reach in a few episodes. His idea is that the political theorist's aim is to figure out what will make the whole community happy. To do that, we need first to understand the happiness of individual people. The Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia, which already gives us a clue as to why Aristotle believes that people can be wrong about how happy they are. The word eudaimonia relates to the word daimon, a kind of spirit or minor divinity, like the guardian spirit that whispered in Socrates' ear whenever he was about to do something wrong. For this reason, eudaimonia has the connotation of blessedness, rather than mere cheerfulness. Thus for Aristotle, happiness consists in living a life that is blessed, a life that right-thinking people would admire and wish to lead themselves. If someone thinks they are happy simply because they are rich or famous, then they are wrong. This isn't the sort of life one should rightly admire. But why not? Couldn't we just say, to each his own, letting everyone decide how happy they are on a scale of 1-10? Aristotle thinks not, because there are good reasons to dismiss certain lifestyles as falling short of happiness. Take the goals I just mentioned, being rich and being famous. If you think wealth will make you happy, Aristotle cautions, you're wrong. After all, when you pursue wealth, what you really want is not wealth, it's what wealth can buy. As Socrates already pointed out, wealth is no good to you without an understanding of what to do with it. Even without the benefit of empirical happiness studies, Aristotle knew that a lottery win will not make you happy all by itself. To think that it could is a crass conceptual error, confusing the end we strive for with a means towards that end. Happiness, by contrast, could never be the means to anything. As Aristotle points out, it is the most final end we have. There is no further purpose for which we wish to be happy. Aristotle levels a similar criticism at the life of fame, or, to put it in a more Greek way, a life of honour. Many Greeks would probably have endorsed this as the most choice-worthy life, a life centred around political success, military conquest, and lasting reputation. Aristotle's own student, Alexander the Great, was perhaps the happiest person in the ancient world, if happiness and honour are the same thing. And like Plato, who deals with this topic extensively in the Republic, Aristotle is well aware of the allure of honour among his readers. But he sets it alongside wealth as a misguided goal to pursue, because honour as such is not good enough. We care why we are honoured. If a bunch of low-life criminals admire me for my successful thievery, that is no reason to think that I am really leading a good life. Nor would we wish to be honoured falsely for things we didn't actually do. So if I am seeking honour, what I must really be seeking is some kind of life that would be worth honouring. In that case, the honour seems to be secondary. What I am really after is the good life that rightfully earns me the admiration of others. Again, I think we have to admire Aristotle. His argument strikes me as persuasive, and seems to get to the heart of, for instance, the problem with contemporary celebrity culture. There is indeed something empty and absurd about being famous just for being famous. But a big question is left hanging. If what I want is a life that would rightly be honoured, what would such a life look like? Aristotle, adopting an argument found towards the beginning of Plato's Republic, suggests that we can discover the answer if we think about what human beings are for. What is our purpose? What are we, as it were, designed to do? If we do have some purpose, then surely the good life will be the life in which that purpose is fulfilled to the greatest extent possible. Just as being a good flute player will consist in playing the flute well, so being a good human will consist in doing whatever humans are supposed to do, and performing that function well. But hang on a second. Why should we think that humans in general have a purpose or function? Aristotle answers that question with a question of his own. How could it be that the parts of my body, like my eyes, have a function, without my having a function? This would be as if my car were made of functional parts, and yet had no overall purpose. Aristotle's train of thought here runs along tracks laid in his philosophy of nature. Remember that for Aristotle, all animals, plants, even simple things like the four elements, are pursuing some kind of goal. The goal of a plant is to grow to maturity and reproduce. The goal of a stone is to move downwards towards the center of the universe. If Aristotle believes that even these things have purposes, it's no surprise that he should think humans do too. This is not to say that Aristotle actually invokes any heavy-duty theory of nature or metaphysical considerations here in the ethics, but the considerations would be available if we pressed him on the point. So for the sake of argument, let's grant him that humans do have a purpose. How then can we tell what the purpose of humans will be? It can't be merely being alive or having sensation, because these things are shared in common with plants and animals. If there is a human function, it must be characteristic of humans, it must be the performance of the activity that belongs to us alone. What could this be? There's only one possible answer, it must be the use of reason, for it is rationality that distinguishes us from plants and animals. This is Aristotle's so-called function argument, which provides the foundation for the rest of his ethics. Given its importance, we're likely to feel that he should be working harder to convince us. Aristotle seems to think we'll find it immediately plausible, not only that humans do have a function, but also that our function will reside in whichever activity is unique to us. The upshot is that we cannot disentangle the question of what we humans are from the question of what we ought to be. As I've said, this is unsurprising, given Aristotle's conviction that every natural thing has a purpose, but it means that he is starting from a very different place than most modern ethicists. Perhaps the most notorious problem in ethics nowadays is the so-called is-ought gap, pointed out by David Hume. The problem is that we have, on the one hand, a factual description of the world and the things in it, and on the other hand, a set of notions about right and wrong. A description about how things are does not by itself give us an account of how things ought to be. For instance, we can observe that some actions cause pain and suffering, without thereby showing that those actions are wrong. To do that, we'd need to explain why pain and suffering are bad, why they ought not to happen. And yet, it looks like whatever we can observe about the world just gives us factual description, so where do we get morality from? It's an intractable enough problem that it has led some to ethical skepticism, but for Aristotle, it's a problem that never arises. For him, there is no way to describe the way things are without using concepts like purpose and function. These concepts are, as philosophers say nowadays, normative – in other words, they already imply value judgments. To put it more plainly, Aristotle thinks that saying what a giraffe is involves saying something about what a good giraffe would be like, and the same goes for humans. Finally, then, we have a fix on the happy life. It will be a life of reason, because that will be the kind of life that allows humans to achieve their distinctive excellence. We can now see why Aristotle thinks you can be wrong about whether you are happy. Your happiness is determined not by how you feel about yourself, but by how well you are using your rationality. Now though, we're tempted to ask what any of this has to do with ethics. When we imagine ourselves using reason, we're more apt to imagine ourselves, say, doing mathematics than, say, helping old ladies across the street. And if we think about people who are ethically defective, we don't think they are failing in respect of rationality. In short, Aristotle has to tell us what reason has to do with virtue, and what failures of reason have to do with vice. He has a very good story to tell here, and I'll get to it in just a moment. But first, I want to point out that for Aristotle, the excellent use of reason would include things like mathematics. He devotes a whole section of the ethics to excellence in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. He sees understanding, in effect, as a kind of non-practical virtue. Indeed, at the risk of giving away Aristotle's punchline, it will turn out that the life of theoretical inquiry is actually the happiest life of all. For now though, Aristotle is trying to build a picture of human life in which rationality is fully exploited, including rationality in the practical sphere. Virtue arises insofar as the practical sphere is an opportunity to use our reason. But the practical sphere is the sphere in which we form preferences and perform actions, so virtue will be using reason to form the right preferences and to perform the right actions. On this point, Aristotle is admirably modest. He concedes that the range of practical situations we face is effectively infinite. There is no hard and fast set of ethical rules that can be applied to every case that might arise. Rather, practical rationality is, for Aristotle, the ability to confront each situation as it comes and to choose the right course of action in every case. This could be something as humble as choosing the right amount to eat at each meal time – the virtue of temperance – or choosing to fight on a battlefield – the virtue of courage. Of course, it would be disappointing if all we could say is that virtuous action is the action that would be chosen by the virtuous person. So Aristotle adds a more general observation, perhaps the most famous idea in his ethics – that the virtuous action will lie at the mean between two extremes. This is what a friend of mine likes to call the Goldilocks theory. Virtue is when you choose and enjoy what is not too much, not too little, but just right. Each kind of virtue is a mean between some excessive tendency and a tendency towards deficiency. For instance, temperance is the mean between gluttony and being overly abstemious. Courage is the mean between recklessness and cowardice. Generosity is the mean between stinginess and prodigality, and so on. Of course, this isn't to say that you should literally engage in everything in moderation. You can't do just the right amount of incest or unprovoked murder. These actions shouldn't be done at all, which perhaps poses a problem for Aristotle, unless he can convince us that such actions are excesses in relation to some other type of action which should be done in moderation. For instance, incest might be an excessive use of one's sexual capacities. Sex, unlike incest, is something that should be pursued moderately. Though that sounds reasonable, this part of the ethics is bound to remind us that we are reading an author from a very different culture. Consider how his definition of virtue as a mean would relate to Judeo-Christian morality. The Christian saints were not engaging in chastity, faith, and humility to a moderate degree, but rather striving towards perfect chastity, faith, and humility. If incest is excessive sexuality, then chastity must be deficient sexuality, so not a virtue at all on Aristotle's theory. A nice example of Aristotle's cultural otherness here is his discussion of the man who has greatness of soul. The rather wonderful Greek word is megalosuchos. The great-souled person is perfectly virtuous, is well aware of his virtue, and acts accordingly, behaving with great dignity and seeing himself as significantly superior to those around him. Here we see that Aristotle's ethical exemplar is closer to Achilles than to Mother Teresa. Aristotle would of course admit that you can be overly prideful, but the great-souled man has earned his massive self-esteem by being massively virtuous. A normal person who behaves like Achilles isn't being virtuous, he's being an arrogant twerp. Neither though should Achilles act like a normal person. That would be to rate his own virtue too low. How then do we achieve virtue? This has already been marked as a political question. Aristotle thinks that people who do not grow up in healthy societies have effectively no chance of becoming virtuous. So a complete answer would mean looking at Aristotle's political philosophy. But in the ethics, he already explains why our social upbringing is so important. Virtue is achieved by habituation. The very word ethics shows this, as Aristotle points out. It comes from the Greek εθος, which means habit or custom. Thus, we already develop the virtues when we are children. Parents chastise their kids for being insufficiently bold or truthful, and this inculcates in them a habit towards courage and honesty. On this point, it's traditional to draw a contrast between Aristotle and Socrates. As you'll remember, Socrates apparently thought that virtue involved some sort of intellectual knowledge, so that virtuous people must be able to give a definition of virtue. For Aristotle, this picture is far too intellectualist. As we've seen, he certainly believes that ethical action requires some kind of cognitive process. It is rational excellence, after all. But Aristotelian virtue is more like a kind of rational discernment or perception, in which I rely on my training to find the right response to any given circumstance. Again, the variation between circumstances means that no abstract definition or account can guarantee that I choose rightly. Ultimately, it's down to my ingrained habit, which not only enables me to make the right choice, but also means that I will want to make the right choice. I will take pleasure in doing what is right, since it is what I am used to. It is second nature. The difference between the virtuous excellent man and the vicious defective man is largely the result of training. The virtuous man enjoys, and chooses, the mean between extremes as a matter of course, whereas the vicious man enjoys the wrong things and has ingrained habits for making the wrong choices. Aristotle's picture is rather compelling. He's described virtue as something which brings us enjoyment and allows us to achieve our own personal excellence. My goal, as an ethical agent, is to do what I am meant to do, and do it well. Aristotle compares this to athletic pursuits, observing that we award admiration to those who actually perform virtuous deeds, just as at the Olympics, they give prizes to those who compete and win, not just those who are most fit and beautiful. This makes virtue sound really worth having, and it's obvious why it is in our interest to have it. Virtue makes us the best humans we can be. But doesn't this sort of ethical athleticism leave something out, something that is fundamental to ethics? What about treating others well for their sake? Should I really be generous, help my friends, have healthy relationships with my loved ones, all in order to pursue my own personal excellence? Aristotle makes it sound like other people are mere tools for me to use in attaining perfection. This is a problem we'll look at next time, as I turn to Aristotle's theory of friendship and consider in greater depth how the Aristotelian virtuous man uses and enjoys both the things and the people around him. So join me for that, my friends, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.