Virtue Quest

Distinct, though not divorced

Aristotle says that the point of his book on ethics is to lay the groundwork for politics. He, like most of the Greeks from what I can tell, had a very State-centered view of the world.

But I think there are a couple important points here.

First, personal ethics really does have public implications. How I act in private cannot be separated from how I act in public and how the rest of society acts.

Second, Aristotle’s insight isn’t quite so anti-individual as it seems; after all, he sees that the human person is a social creature, that no man is an island, that it is not good to be alone. So, looking for the good life, he necessarily has to look at the life of the community.

Government and society

The poster I’m using to illustrate this post comes from a Conservative Party campaign in Great Britain. It’s a kind of retraction of a saying of Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister in the 1980’s. She once said, “There is no such thing as society.”

This poster turns that statement on its head by pointing out a distinction that we tend to blur in the 21st century – at least, in the English-speaking world. I can’t count the number of times when, in conversation, I’ve mentioned that “society” or “the whole community” has responsibility for some aspect of life – health care, to take a current example.

My interlocutors often would jump in with either, “No! The government should stay out of health care!” or “Yes! That’s exactly why we need a single-payer program!”

But government is not the same thing as the community.

Instead, it seems to me that people assume government will take responsibility for the problems and duties of the community. I’m not convinced that’s the case.

Neither right nor left

Here’s the thing: the so-called political right has a point in saying that a big government or “nanny state” tends to encourage irresponsible behavior by citizens by absolving them of personal responsibility for themselves and for one another.

And the so-called political left has a point in saying that government is the only entity which really comprehends the entire populace, and so can serve those who fall through the gaps in other social structures.

But while both of these “sides” see a real problem, neither seems to know where the solution lies. The right tends to want government to serve the “private sector”, meaning business; and the left tends to want the private sector to become a branch of government. But neither focus on the truly personal.

Personal virtue

It seems to me that any system, whether in government or business or anything else, is doomed to failure if it bases itself on a fantasy rather than on a reality. And one fantasy is that a system, in and of itself, will make the world better – no matter what quality of people are in the system.

But the fact is, human nature tends to find loopholes and gaps and ways to “work” any and every system it encounters. The answer is not a new system. The answer is to encourage each and every person to strive for excellence, for goodness, for virtue. The answer is to focus on the person.

Well, are you?

Matthew Archibold, whom I only know from his blogging, wrote a post entitled “Atheists love you. They just don’t know why.” Therein he describes the impossibility of deriving a transcendent ethic from a materialist worldview. Here’s a snippet:

I have to wonder from what philosophical grounding does Dawkins’ altruism emanate? Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God? From what philosophical groundwork is he basing his good works on? Dawkins, it would seem to me, hasn’t defined his terms and is only borrowing our definition of “good.” Because without our definitions he’d have to ask the question, “What is good without God?” And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.

Atheists and agnostics and skeptics – oh my!

Let me say up front that I (partly) agree with Archibold’s conclusion. But I think his reasoning is too muddy to pass muster, and therefore is not very useful.

Aristotle defines good as “that at which all things aim” or, essentially, the object of desire. This is not the hedonist manifesto it first appears to be; rather, it is saying that our desire is like a sense calibrated to detect goodness in the way that our eyes are calibrated to detect light.

In other words, according to Aristotle, goodness is a real thing out in the world that we can experience directly and point to.

Now, Aristotle certainly thought that gods, and a Prime Mover above the gods, existed. So he was no atheist in that respect. But his notion of God (with a capital G) was so distant as to be unrecognizable as the Christian Trinity. One could perhaps argue that it was closer to the Muslim Allah, but the Muslims never really took to Aristotle’s notions of God, so that’s debatable. And the Hindu Brahman is even more transcendent – and impersonal, to boot – than Aristotle’s ideas.

And yet, all these traditions have a notion of “good” that is pretty much the same thing. Aristotle’s definition makes sense, even if people would tweak it in one way or another.

So I would say that Dawkins isn’t borrowing the concept of “good” from religion generally or from Christianity specifically. Nor the concept of giving aid, nor the notion of virtue. After all, it’s not hard to find examples of altruistic atheists from various points in history.

What is good without God?

But I said above that I basically agreed with his conclusion, that morality and virtue is impossible without God. Here’s why.

As soon as we encounter something, say, a bowl of oatmeal, one of the things that happens is desire (or the flip side of the coin, aversion). It’s an instantaneous judgment once we recognize it as oatmeal: we want it or we don’t. Can’t help it. It’s part of being human.

We also desire abstract things, immaterial things, like justice or wisdom. As soon as we form the concept in our minds, we label it as “good” or “bad”.

Now, at this point, a strictly materialist universe is out the window as far as I see. Where, in a strictly materialist universe, does the experience of anything “immaterial” come from? How can there be abstraction if there is nothing abstract in reality?

But beyond that, I’m also strongly of the school that nothing comes from nothing. So, wherever this world came from, however it was formed, it had to come from some principle at least as capable of abstraction and desire as we are. Which, more or less, is what Aristotle meant by God (with a capital G).

Note that I’m not saying anyone has to believe in God to be virtuous. Nor am I saying that any one religion is wrong (though I’m happy to discuss Christianity privately with anyone). Just saying that desire indicates to me that goodness is real, and that it has to come from somewhere, just like everything else.

Just one little bite ...

I was reading an article called “The Difference between Needs and Wants” which to me seemed useful, but not quite on target.

The author cites Aristotle as equating “needs” with “real goods,” i.e., “the things that every human requires for the pursuit of happiness,” and equating “wants” with “apparent goods,” which sometimes are actually bad for people. He goes on to describe how focusing on needs rather than wants will lead to a fuller, happier life.

What’s good and what’s bad?

Don’t get me wrong: I think the article gives basically good advice. But I think he over-simplifies the whole nature of human desire and the objects of our desires. And that can give the wrong idea that “wants” are somehow not “real goods” for us.

One of the fundamentals of Aristotle’s view of nature is that everything that exists is good because existence itself is good. So, if anything exists at all, then it is at least in that minimal way good.

More than that, the idea of “bad” or “evil” is not equal to the idea of “good.” What I mean is that goodness is a real, positive thing that exists. “Badness” or “evil” is not something that is real in itself; it is the absence or the distortion of some real thing – some good thing.

A good example is blindness. Blindness is not a thing in itself; it is only the distortion or destruction of sight. Sight is real, and good. Blindness is nothing except the absence of sight.

Virtue and human desire

Now, desire (and its partner, aversion) is the means by which we sense good and the lack of good. Your eyes see a square of a dark-brown color, and your nose smells a unique combination of sweet and bitter, and your fingers feel a hard smooth texture. In your mind, you combine all these senses into an understanding of the thing itself: a chocolate bar.

But it is desire which judges that chocolate bar to be good or bad. Or rather, it is desire that identifies what is good in the chocolate bar, and what is lacking.

So, you may find yourself with conflicting desires: you know it tastes good, but you also know it will give you a sugar high and subsequent crash, or that it is fattening. In other words, you desire both the flavor of chocolate and the benefits of health.

Thankfully, desire is not the end of the story: our ability to reason enables us to sort out the various good things that we desire, and to make a decision. The trick is to let ourselves be informed by, but not driven by, our desires.

Needs and wants, real and apparent goods

So, everything that we desire is a “real” good, insofar as it exists and has some kind of goodness that we recognize. And everything we desire is an “apparent” good, because it is a good that appears to us. There are goods that we don’t easily recognize (e.g., the value of doing your taxes,) and there are goods whose limitations we overlook (e.g., having another drink with that cute somebody); but desire is always seeking something good.

Prudence means that we let reason sort through all those good things we desire, and search them to figure out if we’re overlooking some limitation or even falsehood about the good we desire. Prudence also applies labels like “need” to goods that we literally cannot live without. Prudence weighs the goods we’d have to give up (time, money, a good night’s sleep) against the good thing we want.

Then, through the virtue of prudence, we can make decisions that we can honestly say are good.

Aristotle’s idea of virtue is that it is the means to an end; virtue is the way to achieve a goal. In Greek-speak, this is called teleology, since telos is the Greek word for “end” or “goal”. Here’s how he puts it:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. (N. Ethics I.1)

If, then, there is some end [i.e., goal] of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this) … clearly this must be the good and the chief good. (N. Ethics I.2)

Now, the “chief good” of people is usually called “happiness” (which, in Greek, is eudaimonea, literalistically good-spiritedness, good-life). He points out that, while everyone seems to agree on the word, many different ideas of what the word means are floating around, ranging from physical pleasure to social honors to philosophical contemplation. It’s important to know what happiness is so that we can know how to use virtue to attain it, just as it’s important for a plumber to know how the pipes are supposed to work so that he knows what tools he needs to install or repair them.

Don't worry

Happiness: more than a feeling

Now, I usually think of happiness as a word to describe how I’m feeling at the moment, as in, “I’m happy to see my friends” or “I’m unhappy that my car has broken down.” But Aristotle is talking about something more permanent. Essentially, he says that happiness is being fully human, of fulfilling one’s nature as a person.

That means, of course, that we need to know what human nature is. It’s certainly a part of human nature to have emotions, and to have physical senses that can receive pleasure or pain, and even (going to the most basic level) just to be alive. But these are things that we share with other creatures in the world, such as plants or animals.

What sets human beings apart, for Aristotle, is that we can reason. More than just thinking logically, this includes the ability to make decisions. That is, it means we have free will. And that means that our happiness depends on our freely chosen actions.

Virtue and happiness for all

So it’s obvious that virtue is all about making good decisions, or, in other words, about choosing to act according to our nature rather than against it. This is why, for example, so many moralists have warned people against acting like animals: if we follow our emotions and ignore our intellect, we’re acting against our own nature, and won’t find happiness.

But there’s one other aspect of human nature that comes into play: our social nature. As John Donne put it, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” None of my actions, no matter how private, can be confined only to myself without affecting others. My simplest thoughts change my choice of words, my body language, my emotional reactions.

This means that the happiness I seek is not merely my own, but is the fulfillment of the human community as a whole. If anyone weeps, I must weep with him, and if any rejoices I share that joy.

I’m currently reading through Aristotle’s Nicomachian Ethics, which is one of the foundations of all Western ethical thought. And I came across the following (Book VII, Chapter 5):

For every excessive state whether of folly, of cowardice, of self-indulgence, or of bad temper, is either brutish or morbid

He goes on to explain that “brutish” means that a person is acting more like an animal (a “brute” beast) than like a human; he gives the example of a man who is afraid of a mouse. Stereotypical, perhaps, but then again…

Now, why fear of mice is particularly “brutish” is beyond me. I might speculate that “cheesy” would be more apt, since the object that has most reason to fear a mouse is a round of cheese. But that’s just me.

Anyway, Aristotle also says that “morbid” means that a person is acting contrary to their own life, giving the examples of people who tear their hair out in anger, or chew their nails in nervousness.

So, seems to me that he’s saying: excessive states, aka, vices, involve either acting like something that you’re not or acting directly against yourself. Or, to put it positively, virtue involves acting like yourself.

Virtue and Nature
This is the key to understanding virtue as a way of life: that we need a certain training to act like ourselves, to act according to our own nature. Acting naturally doesn’t come easy. Indeed, we consider “natural” to be a high complement: when an athlete runs well, when a politician speaks eloquently, when a co-worker accomplishes a task with ease – in cases like these, we often say, “They do it so naturally!” They are fulfilling the potential of their nature.

A more telling phrase is maybe, “second-nature”. Many people have described the virtues in just this way, as developing a way of acting that is almost instinctive. But unless this “second nature” is in harmony with the first nature, with what it is to be human, then it becomes a vice.

Angels and Animals
Now, I often find myself swinging to one of two extremes: I tend either to indulge my merely physical (bestial?) appetites for food or rest or pleasure; or I tend to ignore my body and focus on my mental activity, as if it were somehow purer or higher. It’s sort of the dumb jock vs. the clumsy nerd. Or, in more classical terms, the beast vs. the angel.

Well, I’m neither a beast nor an angel. I’m a human being, a strange and incomprehensible combination of mind and body, of soma and psyche. Which means that the nature I’m striving for will involve improving every part of me, everything that really belongs to being human. Nothing left out. But also, no unrealistic expectations.

I should not try to soar like a hawk; I will crash. I should not try to escape into some abstract or ethereal plane of spiritual purity; I neglect myself if I neglect my body. But I can, and should, use my mind to guide my body towards health and wholeness. I can, and should, explore the kinds of things that my mind and body do well together as a unit – in other words, the things that I do well, the whole me. That is the goal of practicing virtue.