Boethius on Mistaken Views on Happiness (part 2 of 2)

Last month, in an earlier post, I brought Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy into a conversation that, among Virtue Ethicists, tends to circle around the works and thought of two figures, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.  Both thinkers, as contemporary Virtue Ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre argues, carry out something very important in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Treatise On Happiness, a dialectical examination of various possible contenders to the good for human beings, i.e. happiness -- and what each one of us has to do within the story comprising our own lives, according to MacIntyre, is to carry out a moral inquiry analogous to those landmark dialectical, universal, and in that sense rather abstract investigations of moral philosophy.  For you see, as human beings, as plain persons, we really live in the concrete, we ask about particular goods and whether they will make us happy.  We work these matters out, not necessarily divorced from universal considerations, but within specific contexts and situations.

Boethius' own inquiry into happiness bridges the gap between a philosophical, universal moral inquiry into happiness and a personal, particular, even pressing situation in which he finds himself -- a prison cell, unjustly accused, his happiness in whole and in its parts seemingly undone by an unreliable fortune.  Philosophia -- wisdom, or at least its pursuit, personified -- comes to his aid, engaging in discourse, exhortation, dialogue with the glum philosopher and courtier, and among the topics over which they range is precisely that one:  what is happiness?  Who has got it right, and who has got it wrong?  And most importantly -- what makes this philosophical -- why are the wrong views wrong?  What's wrong about them?  To answer that, of course, also requires setting out something more about what's right, rather than just that it is right.

Boethius on Mistaken Views of Happiness (part 1 of 2)

One of the essays I assign my Ethics students at the beginning of the semester is Alasdair MacIntyre's Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods (included in the Macintyre Reader). One reason I use that short piece is that it introduces an important theme, the idea that we are all, whether we realize it or not, involved in the processes of asking and answering certain fundamental questions:

. . . on an Aristotelian view, the questions posed by the moral philosopher and the questions posed by the plain person are to a certain degree inseparable.  And it is with questions that each begins, for each is engaged in enquiry, the plain person often unsystematically asking"What is my good?" and "What actions will achieve it?" and the moral philosopher systematically enquiring "What is the good for human beings?" and "what kind of actions will achieve the good?"  Any persistent attempt to answer either of these sets of questions soon leads to asking the other.

In MacIntyre's view -- and I think he's right -- we are all of us committed to one or another -- some more some less consistently -- to one moral theory or another, whether explicitly, consciously, deliberately so, or whether only implicitly, accepting it perhaps as the default, following a trajectory of desire we have failed, avoided, or even not had the opportunity to think out.  When we see these sorts of moral matters from a different perspective, we imaginatively place ourselves in the perspective of another, rival moral theory.  When we leave one perspective behind and adopt another -- whether by a gradual process or a sudden conversions -- we shift our allegiance from one moral theory to another.