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"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.
