Tag Archives: Aristotle

Two concepts of altruism

08 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Epicureanism, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Modern Hinduism, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Self, Vedānta

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The Catholic Pauls, it seems clear to me, oppose ethical egoism in strong terms. Interestingly, however, they do not spend much time attacking it; instead, they attack a kind of altruism that is very different from their own. And their positions interest me greatly because of the way it highlights differences among philosophical concepts of altruism.

Ethical egoism of some description – say, as advocated by Epicurus – is a perfectly respectable philosophical position. One can say that one’s reasons to benefit others are all ultimately based on benefit to oneself, if one’s own self-interest is rightly understood. Neither Paul has a great deal of sympathy for this position, as far as I can tell, but it is not what they take as a target for their attack.

Rather, they reserve their greatest ire for a position that derives other-orientation from ātmanism – or at least from nondualism. Continue reading →

Monotheists’ humility

04 Sunday Jul 2010

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Early Factions, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Jainism, Judaism, Mu'tazila, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Sufism, Truth, Vedānta

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I’ve been thinking some more about the idea of encounter, which I blogged about in these posts and which I take to be central to the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas: the idea that we can never encompass the wholeness of truth, it must remain irreducibly other to us. I’m wondering whether the basic idea animating encounter philosophies is the virtue of humility – a virtue, I think, in both epistemological and ethical contexts. Aristotle, on the other hand, saw pride as a virtue, modesty as its lack – and while I do think humility is a virtue myself, I would remain an Aristotelian in seeing humility, like justice, as a mean. It is far too easy to be too humble in action, to be servile and self-abnegating – an excess which, I’ve suggested before, hurts women’s struggle for equality. And with respect to knowledge, too little humility can lead us to an inappropriate feeling of certainty; but realizing that lack of certainty can spur us to too much humility, leading us into a self-contradictory denial of truth and knowledge.

The issue surrounding encounter, in that case, goes well beyond one’s relationship with God, even one’s relationship with other human beings. Continue reading →

A relativist gongfu ethics

23 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Confucianism, Epistemology, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Morality, Politics, Sophists, Truth

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In his talk at the conference this year, SACP president Peimin Ni pushed further on the claim he made last year: the idea of philosophy as a technique. I was fortunate to spend a long and enjoyable lunch discussing the talk and its ideas with him further. (I love the SACP conferences because their format is designed to encourage the emergence of mealtime conversations like this; last year I enjoyed a similarly thoughtful discussion with Ted Slingerland.) The present post recounts the ideas expressed at the lunch, naturally from my own side; I hope I am being fair to Ni’s arguments in what follows.

Ni’s talk focused on the Chinese concept of gongfu 功夫, dating from the early centuries CE and meaning any practical art – it could include calligraphy, sports, cooking, good judgement or statecraft. (Although the word gongfu has long ago passed into English with an alternate spelling, it is probably best to keep using the Pinyin spelling rather than confuse people with a term most associate with goofy movies about roundhouse kicks.)

Gongfu as Ni understands it then bears some resemblance to the Greek concept of technē, or Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practice, with one crucial difference. Aristotle’s technē involves a telos; it is embedded within a larger determinate framework of human flourishing. With gongfu, on the other hand, Ni agreed with my earlier characterization of the process as a technique. It is open to us to choose our aims; gongfu merely allows us to achieve those aims. There is a gongfu of killing as well as a gongfu of saving. Continue reading →

Of surprise parties and evil practices

21 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by in Honesty, Politics, Virtue

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A couple weeks ago, several friends and I held a surprise party for my fiancée’s upcoming birthday. Being one of the principal planners, while living with her in a small apartment, was difficult even though the party itself turned out to be a great time for everyone. I managed to keep it a secret, but it stressed me out during the time – I’m not used to withholding things from those closest to me. Especially not after my previous relationship of several years, with someone who was used to sniffing out the slightest deception.

I know there are other people who could have done such a thing much more easily. What I wonder is: is that a skill worth having? I’m inclined to think that it’s probably just as well not to be very good at keeping things from those close to you – it’s too easy for such a skill to lead you into all the wrong places. I suppose it’s not unlike the reasons to prohibit torture in politics, even in the ticking time bomb scenario – if the ability to do something is there, there’s too much temptation to use it wrongly.

The situation reminds me of a more general problem in a virtue-based ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre, generally following Aristotle, likes to talk about virtues as habits which allow us to succeed at practices; practices, in turn, are socially and culturally grounded crafts which have their own internal standards of excellence. But this raises what Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey – feminist critics writing in a volume called After MacIntyre – have called “the problem of evil practices.” There are some skills it is good not to acquire, some practices that it might be corrupting to be good at. Torture itself seems an example; MacIntyre makes some remarks about it on pp. 200-1 of After Virtue. The personal example is deception: I probably wouldn’t want to get better at lying and concealing even if it did mean I could throw surprise parties more easily. More generally one might want to ask: what skills, what crafts is it intrinsically bad to acquire? Not just as a matter of spending one’s precious time on those skills as opposed to more valuable ones, but bad even with unlimited time to learn them?

James Doull and the history of ethical motivation

03 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Death, Deity, Epicureanism, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Friends, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Judaism, Metaphilosophy, Serenity, Sophists, Stoicism, Truth, Virtue

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In examining my previous question on internalism and externalism I’ve been trying to explore a powerful but complex and difficult answer: that this question is expressed in the very history of Western philosophy.

Lately I’ve slowly been making my way through Philosophy and Freedom, a collection of essays by and about the neglected Canadian Hegelian philosopher James Doull (rhymes with towel). Doull, like Socrates or George Herbert Mead, never published a book during his lifetime; his reputation derives almost entirely from being spread by his students and their students, mostly through the classics department at Dalhousie University and the great-books program at its affiliated University of King’s College. (I myself know Doull’s work only because a lifelong friend of mine is one of Doull’s “grand-pupils,” a devoted student of Doull’s students at Dalhousie and King’s.)

Doull’s work is difficult, both in the density of its prose and in the wide range of the texts it expects familiarity with – the chapter on ancient Greece covers not only philosophy but the full range of history, tragedy and comedy, viewing their scope all together through a Hegelian philosophical lens. Moreover, because Doull’s concerns are so wide-ranging, a study of his work does not immediately repay the reader with direct application to particular philosophical questions and problems. If ever there was a big-picture thinker it is this man, at least when it comes to Western philosophical traditions.

And yet studying Doull closely has ultimately paid off for me in thinking about the big question I’ve addressed above. I realize that this question of ethical motivation has, in its way, been central to Western philosophical tradition, not merely in the works of individual thinkers but through its history. Continue reading →

Dialetheism

03 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Logic, Mahāyāna, Pre-Socratics, Truth

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In response to last week’s post about contradictions, a reader who goes by “skholiast” (who has his own blog, Speculum Criticum Traditionis) pointed me to the interesting work of analytic philosopher Graham Priest, author of works with provocative titles like “What is so bad about contradictions?” Priest advocates a position that he calls dialetheism, from the Greek for “two truths,” according to which a belief or statement and its opposite can both be true – even at the same time and in the same respect, directly contradicting Aristotle’s classical law of non-contradiction. He concludes the article with this provocative claim: “So what is so bad about contradictions? Maybe nothing.”

Dialetheism is easy to mock. Indeed, the first I’d heard of it, and the only time I’d heard of it before skholiast’s post, was in two of Ryan Lake’s Chaospet comics that made fun of it. Lake’s comics note apparent problems with dialetheism: if nothing is bad about contradictions, as Priest suggests, then doesn’t that basically allow one to say anything at all? Doesn’t one then just immediately solve every hard problem without having to think about it, by saying (as Lake’s character Nester does) that “the mind both is and is not the brain”?
Continue reading →

Without rebirth, suicide?

10 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in Buddhism, Death, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hope, Karma, Serenity, South Asia, Supernatural

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I’ve often heard it said, rightly I think, that Buddhism cannot do without a concept of karma; it is too central to Buddhist thought. I don’t see this as a big problem in itself, even for those (like myself) who would wish to do without the supernatural elements in Buddhism. For karma, as Dale Wright has proposed, can be naturalized on Aristotelian grounds: virtue makes our lives better, because it makes us happier on the inside. In that sense, our good and bad actions come back to us as good and bad results, without any supernatural causation being involved. Buddhism may require karma, but we can have karma without rebirth.

The question troubling me now is: can we have Buddhism without rebirth? There’s a basic problem posed here by the First Noble Truth, the classic Buddhist idea that all is dukkha: all is suffering, painful, unsatisfactory, sorrowful, bad. If this is so, why not commit suicide? For a classical Buddhist, rebirth is the answer to this question, and the obvious answer. Suicide makes your dukkha even worse; as a bad, un-dharmic activity, it will trap you in a far worse rebirth, leave you far more sorrowful and suffering than you are.

But if there is no rebirth? Then death starts to look disturbingly like nirvana. Continue reading →

Justice without moral responsibility

16 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in Free Will, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Monasticism, Morality, Virtue

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I’ve recently been sympathetic to two different positions which seem to stand in some tension with one another. I’ve blogged about them both here, but on separate occasions. On one hand, to some degree happiness seems to require justice: to live happily with others, we need a sense of obligation and legitimate expectation, in terms of something like an Aristotelian mean. On the other, the assignment of blame and moral responsibility – what we might even associate with morality itself, if we distinguish it from ethics – leads to anger and a drive to punishment. Śāntideva even opposes the idea of free will for this reason, because it’s what allows us blame and moral responsibility. It’s so hard for Śāntideva to take this position against blame – he strives for a monastic life that doesn’t depend on other people, so he doesn’t need justice to be happy. But that’s an option I’ve rejected, and I imagine most of my readers have too.

If one is to live in society, dependent on others, one is likely to require justice. That’s what I learned dealing with my loud neighbours in Texas: without a conception of justice, you cannot have a clear conscience; you cannot arbitrate between the competing demands that others make on you. The rub is that justice seems to require blame and moral responsibility (and therefore some kind or degree of free will). Aristotle says that justice consists of giving people what they deserve; doesn’t that very idea of desert or merit imply moral responsibility?

I don’t know Aristotle well enough to know his answer to that question. But Aristotle or not, I suspect it’s possible to have a conception of justice that doesn’t require moral responsibility. The virtue of justice is a mean, in that just behaviour lies somewhere in between taking too much and giving too little (greed, miserliness) and giving too much and taking too little (submissiveness, servility). How do you decide what’s too little or too much? It depends on the particulars of the situation, but it would surely involve some combination of prevailing social norms and mores (what Hegel would call Sittlichkeit) and something like the Golden Rule, treating others as you would wish to be treated (or in some cases as they would wish to be treated, if their desires are not inordinate). Does that require assigning moral responsibility and blame? Not as far as I can tell.

Following science as a layperson

13 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, Faith, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science, Politics, Social Science, South Asia

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Perhaps the trickiest thing about trying to be a philosopher today is the explosion of information in natural science: we are in the era of “rapid-discovery science,” as Randall Collins calls it in The Sociology of Philosophies. Aristotle could write not merely a Metaphysics but a Physics, and his wide range of general knowledge was enough to make him one of the experts on the subject. Even as recently as the 19th century, Schelling and Hegel could have a decent shot at writing “philosophies of nature,” in which they tried to think philosophically through the whole scope of the way the natural world works. But today, not even a professor of natural science can know all the science that’s out there, even in relatively general terms. To some extent, we need to rely on the authority of experts we trust to know their fields well – what Indian philosophers called the śabdapramāṇa, the source of knowledge beyond inference and personal experience. And even if we somehow could know all the science for a moment, we’d lose it almost instantly as the science changes. Continue reading →

The four explanations and the First Explanation

25 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by in Deity, Epistemology, Greek and Roman Tradition, Islam, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

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I’m really enjoying Alasdair MacIntyre’s new book God, Philosophy, Universities. I appreciate MacIntyre’s ability to get succinctly to the heart of bewildering and perplexing philosophical concepts. Especially, reading MacIntyre on the great Muslim philosopher ibn Rushd (Averroës), I finally feel like I have a handle on Aristotle’s theory of “causes.” We are often told that Aristotle believes in four kinds of causes – formal, material, effective and final – and that these causes lead back in a chain to a First Cause, which later theistic philosophers like ibn Rushd would come to identify with the Islamic or Christian God. This all left me bewildered. How can a thing’s final cause (which is to say its purpose) be considered a cause of it? Can God really be reduced merely to the first link in a causal chain of events? Such a god barely seems to matter. Continue reading →