Boethius on Man's Faulty Pursuit of Happiness

"Alas, how blind are men who stumble
along the wrong path!
They hope to find gold and jewels
hanging in trees.
They cast their nets wide and fish
on the mountaintops,
or they try to hunt for wild goats
out on the sea
Oh, they know where to dive for pearls
and where the murex dwells
the source of our precious purple dye.
They can find shellfish
but they cannot begin to locate the good
that looms high up
over the earth on which they tread
They are hopeless fools
in endless pursuit of money and fame.
When they have reached
their worthless goals they will come to know
how far they went wrong."

-Lady Philosophy in Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy

Aristotle's Ethics

Meditate on these if you please:

"Men's conception of the good or of happiness may be read in the lives they lead" (Nicomachean Ethics, I.3).

REACTION: this is philosophy undetached from lived life and, perhaps, an improvement on the method of Socrates who went around asking (and annoying) people what they thought the good (or the pious or virtue or justice or...) was. You act in accordance with your deepest beliefs. So, you want to know what you really believe, look to your actions. Scary.

"As one swallow or one day does not make a spring, so one day or a short time does not make a man blessed or happy" (NE, II.2).

REACTION: in a culture of quick fixes and instant gratification, this truth is especially tough. You mean I have to commit myself to being good long-term? Just like any other art (painting, writing, music making, surfing), deliberate practice is necessary for substantial improvement.

"Moral virtue is concerned with pleasures and pains. It is pleasure which makes us do what is base, and it is pain which makes us abstain from doing what is noble. Hence, the importance of having a certain training from very early days, as Plato says, so that we may feel pleasure and pain at the right objects" (NE, II.2).

REACTION: I once heard a philosopher (David Horner, I think it was) say something like this: you're gonna do what you wanna do unless you've got a good reason not to. In other words, we naturally act in accordance with our desires, and it takes a really solid reason to convince us to abstain from things we believe will give us pleasure. The only reason I can think of that is strong enough for such work is a conception of the good that excludes the action in question and is deeply entrenched in one's belief structure.

"Most people, instead of acting, take refuge in theorizing; they imagine that they are philosophers and that philosophy will make them virtuous; in fact, they behave like people who listen attentively to their doctors but never do anything that their doctors tell them. But a healthy state of the soul will no more be produced by this kind of philosophizing than a healthy state of the body by this kind of medical treatment" (NE, II.3).

REACTION: theory is probably not good in itself. I'm not a pragmatist, but what good is theory...or, better, what good is a theorist if he doesn't act in accord with his theory?

"There are many different ways of going wrong; for evil is in its nature infinite,...but good is finite and there is only one possible way of going right. So the former is easy and the latter difficult; it is easy to miss the mark but difficult to hit it" (NE, II.5).

REACTION: genius and a common insight to many moral geniuses - Jesus and G.K. Chesterton come to mind. Variety does not equal virtue. Chesterton: “There are many, many angles at which one can fall but only one angle at which one can stand straight.” Maybe this is part of the explanation of why it is so easy for us evil folks to be creative in dreaming up evil scenarios. To be sure, evil is commonly louder and more provocative than the good, but it is also available in more varieties...all the varieties just happen to suck.

"We must also note the weaknesses to which we ourselves are particularly prone, since different natures tend in different ways; and we may ascertain what our tendency is by observing our feelings of pleasure and pain. Then we must drag ourselves away towards the opposite extreme...In all cases we must especially be on our guard against the pleasant, or pleasure, for we are not impartial judges of pleasure" (NE, II.9).

REACTION: good advice. It's easy to avoid doing what would pain us to do anyway; it's also easy to pat ourselves on the back for not doing such undesirable bad things. But attend to the bad things that are pleasurable, and there you shall have your battle.

Thanks Aristotle.

Good and Evil (part 1)

Many of my students seem to think that the existence of goodness is somehow dependent on the existence of evil. They have vague intuitions, that is, that the existence of evil is somehow necessary for the existence of good. Call this the “Metaphysical Necessity View” (MNV). Students often employ this sentiment, or something akin to it, in their attempts to defend God against the charge that the existence of evil (or evil of certain sorts, degrees, or amounts) is logically inconsistent with the existence of God (or at least casts considerable doubt on the idea that God exists). I think these students are wrong: they are wrong both about good and evil and to try to defend the existence of God on such grounds. Another, much more plausible, view lurking in the neighborhood of MNV is what I’ll call the “Epistemic Necessity View” (ENV). This position concerns not the existence of good and evil but knowledge of the existence of good and evil. According to ENV, it is impossible (for humans anyway) to have knowledge of the good without having knowledge of evil too. This position, as I say, strikes me as much more plausible than MNV, though it too seems to me to be mistaken.

The following are some vague thoughts of my own on the matter. My hope is that in the process of writing out these thoughts my (and perhaps even your) understanding of these issues will begin to sharpen.

For this blog, let’s deal with MNV. The advocate of MNV suggests that goodness and evil somehow need each other. Statements like this often contain some offhand remarks about “yin and yang,” though, as of yet, no one has explained to me how that is supposed to help. So, do good and evil need each other? Are they somehow mutually dependent? I don’t know of any good reason to side with mutual dependence folks here. In fact, it seems to me that MNV is among the least plausible theories of good and evil on offer – though perhaps not quite as bad as the “explanation” that good and evil do not exist at all but rather are, say, social constructions or mere subjective feelings about things that have no real connection to the world an sich (“in itself”).

One promising way to criticize MNV is to think about its implications, chief among them that if MNV is true, then it is impossible for there to be a world that is purely good, a world where good exists and evil does not. Is it really impossible for there to be such a world? It doesn’t seem so, at least not to me. Indeed, I have a strong intuition that it is possible for there to be a purely good world. But if there is such a possibility, then MNV is false. It’s an easy argument.

1. If MNV is true, then it is impossible for there to be a purely good world
2. It is possible for there to be a purely good world
3. Hence, MNV is false
   

I see no reason to reject number 2 except that it conflicts with MNV, but to use MNV as a premise in an argument for MNV is clearly question begging, so that won’t do. What other reason might one give for the impossibility of a purely good world? ...I can’t think of any. (Can you? If so, please share!) So I think it’s reasonable to assume that MNV is false.

(Moreover, if one is a theist – especially a Jewish or Christian theist – then one has another powerful reason to reject MNV: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” [Genesis 1:31]. I’d say that pretty much rules out MNV too. Of course, quoting Scripture probably won't satisfy the agnostic inquirer, but it certainly carries a lot of weight with believers. And why prefer the evidential standards of one who admits to not knowing [cf. agnostic] to the standards of one who thinks she does?)

So much then for MNV…See a future post for a discussion of ENV.