Bullying, Basketball, and Courage

What I consider to be some good news came out of my home state recently -- actually occurring a year ago, but back in public view again just this last week.  By now likely many readers have already glimpsed  in their news feeds the inspirational (but all too brief) story coming out of Kenosha, Wisconsin.

It is about three middle-school basketball players coming to the aid of one of their classmates -- a cheerleader with Downs syndrome who was being made fun of by some fans attending a game.  The players walked off the court in the middle of a game, and up to the stands, where they confronted those fans, and told them to "knock it off."  That would seem to both require and exemplify a certain kind, or at least measure, of courage.  It also raises a number of interesting questions, particularly when we add in some additional background information -- at least from a virtue ethics perspective.

Philosophical Courage and Temperance in Plato's Phaedo

The Phaedo, a recounting of Socrates's last conversations with his friends on his deathbed, ostensibly provided by the young man for whom the dialogue is named, includes early on in the discourse a short and startling discussion of the nature of several virtues -- courage and temperance first, and then wisdom and justice.  Plato has Socrates advance a doctrine that is entirely uncompromising, and in some respects paradoxical -- only philosophers actually possess these virtues.

As Socrates explains, everyone else is not only mistaken about the nature of these two virtues, i.e. temperance and courage -- that would not be surprising after all, given that even Socrates concedes a lack of knowledge about these in aporetic dialogues like the Laches and Charmides (or even virtue itself in the Meno!).  The "virtues" they possess, what they call and consider to be "courage" or "temperance" aren't really so.  In fact, the courage of the many (or even the non-philosopher one) is actually a kind of cowardice.  The temperance of the many really amounts to a sort of intemperance (or if you prefer more contemporary language, self-indulgence, lack of self-control).

Virtues in Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will

We've been studying St. Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will in my Introduction to Philosophy class these last two weeks (here's video 1, 2 and 3 of the sessions).  This book has long been one of my favorite Augustinian works -- ranking up there with his Confessions, the City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and (what might come as a surprise, since they are considered minor works), the treatises On Lying and Against Lying.  On Free Choice of the Will is really quite masterful as a dialogue -- real discussion and exploration is going on in that text -- problems are raised, resolved, just to give rise to new deeper problems -- and gradually, a through what initially appear digressions, a complex picture gets systematically sketched out.

Time is always an issue in teaching Introduction classes -- there's never enough, even if everything goes exactly as it ought to, to devote adequate attention to everything in the monumental texts I am privileged to teach -- and one of the casualties this time around, specifically with respect to this text, is Augustine's discussions about the virtues, mainly carried out in books 1 and 2.  There's nothing like a full-blown and systematic Augustinian treatment of the virtues and vices in On Free Choice of the Will -- we learn much more, and much that is important, from other writings of his, not just from major works and specific treatises, but even from remarks made in his various Letters.  In fact, only the four cardinal virtues are examined in this work.  But, what he does say is interesting in its own right -- if all we had of Augustine was this one work, it would still represent an advance -- or, perhaps a departure -- in the tradition of virtue ethics.

Virtues and Knowledge in Plato's Meno

Anyone who has read the Meno in an Introduction to Philosophy class -- as I started my own batch of students on this semester -- carries away from it the commonplace that the dialogue is about trying to define virtue, and all of the interlocutors fail in this project, though not without making certain efforts and attempts.  This is one of those things that "everybody knows" about that text, a bullet-point, a blurb equally fit for inclusion in Wikipedia, as an examination question, or on a Trivial Pursuit card.

Certainly no useful definition gets arrived at in the back and forth between Socrates and Meno -- the real centerpiece attraction and achievement being articulation of the Platonic doctrine of recollection.  In its failures, the dialogue bears affinities with other aporetic dialogues where specific virtues are supposed to be -- but turn out not to be -- defined through dialectic:  the Euthyphro, where it turns out nobody really knows what piety is; the Laches, where it's courage that remains an enigma; the Lysias, with friendship, the Charmides with temperance -- and one might point out as well, throughout a number of these, justice and wisdom get brought up, but never really worked out.

Is Partisanship a Vice?

We're near the end of the long-dragged-out forced march of another national election season -- though "season" has become a misnomer for a process that now takes well over a year.  The main debates are finished -- those two-side televised contests, a lion's share of limelight going to the presidential contenders, a healthy share taken by their sidekick cubs, with scraps, offal, trimmings, and marrowless bones left for the publicity-starved third-party debaters to wrest away or share -- whatever they may decide. I must register my partial relief now that the debates are finished -- merely partial though, because it takes almost no time in our media-saturated environment for the assessments of these back and forth staged deliberative discussions to proliferate.

And, it actually would not be that bad if in fact most of what passes for commentary actually did comprise something like "assessments" -- even admittedly biased ones. What is so galling, so irritating, and so . . . downright depressing is the spectacle, repeated almost endlessly of people I thought I knew better -- and thought more highly of -- blithely in some cases, snidely and smugly in others, and in yet others accompanied by vitriol, rabidity, fear-mongering and ultimatums, engage themselves in what is really just pure partisanship, plain and simple -- all the while concealing that very behavior from themselves, and projecting it onto their political opponents.  Not only is there a visible, palpable viciousness (in the general sense) coloring both their filters and their statements -- there's also a distinctively moral slippage, a continued and unmarked failure, a different and more troubling viciousness --expression of which, and encounter with which, is rapidly becoming a nearly unavoidable dimension of everyday existence.

The Divided Self in Plato's Republic

Last week, I led my Ethics students about as far as they are likely to go this semester (at least accompanied by myself) into the heart of Plato's Republic, that dense and lengthy tome often assigned and maligned in a whole host of classes. It is one of the great early works of western literature -- of immense imaginative scope, motley as democracy with perspectives, crammed with ideas whose entire importance one cannot realize upon first (or even perhaps on tenth, or hundreth) read, offering so many lenses and mirrors for regarding the world, the soul, society, the self.  

It's a seminal work for Virtue Ethics, one against whose articulation of virtues and vices any other moral theory that wants to claim real membership in that tradition must measure itself.  After the initial sparring of the first several books, Socrates shows his hand plain. Gone are the aporetic and ironic meanderings of earlier dialogues like the Euthyphro, the Lysias, the Laches, or the Charmides. It's as if Socrates takes heart from the city, the guardians, the education he envisions in discourse and imagination, from their certitude and intellectual familiarity with the virtues -- now those virtues can be told. . . and even to some extent taught.

Courage and Consolation

Earlier today, I was prompted to reflection on some material I've read and studied, taught and written upon, for years without ever really pulling back on the particular corner, turning over the ground, putting the grist into the mind's mill.  In one of my online classes, a student who suffered a terrible and harrowing experience, during the course of which their (I'm using the third person plural deliberately here) own actions -- and perhaps luck, chance, or grace -- brought them through with minor injuries, revealed this to the class, as well as what troubled that student even more:  Not all of their friends had been so fortunate.  Reading Sartre and thinking about our responsibility for who we make ourselves got the student thinking, remembering, raising feelings still not entirely processed through back to the fore, leaving them "morally rattled."

Fairly understandably, none of the other students commented on their classmate's post.  It's difficult to know how to respond to such personal revelations, particularly at the beginning of a class, when perhaps one has but the briefest of acquaintance with one's fellow learners.  I tend to think that in these sorts of situations the young find themselves more at a loss, resourcesless than do their elders -- though there are many very insightful, empathetic younger people and enough clueless older people to render that generalization not entirely reliable.  I wrote the student privately, offering condolences, a bit of my own experience, and a few suggestions about how the class and our subject matters might provide some resources for working things through.  Then I commented publicly.

In my public post, I praised the student's decision to write about the matter as "prudent," but in my private remarks, I invoked a different virtue: courage.  What was particularly striking to me was that the student's reply, thanking me for not leaving their post just hanging out there as well as for what I'd written in private, also mentioned and lauded courage, this time on my part.  Does that language, that concept, that virtue, fit this sort of situation?

How Do We Get It Wrong? Let Us Count The Ways

One of the important aspects of a genuine Virtue Ethics approach that does not get as much discussion or examination -- and often isn't taught in Ethics courses -- is determining what ways, to what degrees, and for what reasons one has gone wrong, done wrong, morally failed.  All too often, we confine ourselves to thinking in terms of the virtues and the vices -- which, to be sure, is good, a better approach, one more adequate to the complexities of human beings and moral life than those oriented by other moral theories -- tending to confine evaluation to motives, actions, consequences, or social arrangements.

But, whether our goal is to fully understand the rich intellectual resources contained in the classic texts of Virtue Ethics, or to progressively develop and employ a coherent practical approach adequate to the complexities and demands of concrete moral life as we actually live it out, what is required is a well-differentiated grasp of how we go wrong, how we get things wrong, the range, differing seriousness, and types of moral failures.

Rogue Hormones,Trading, and Courage

An Economist article, Trader’s Brains:  Rogue Hormones, warns us that rogue traders — those who, caught up in the euphoria of successful market trading, allow their normally risk-averse stances and strategies to be overcome — might not be so uncharacteristic of high-volume, high-value, high-reward traders in general.  The research of Cambridge neuroscientist John Coates

suggests that hormones drive investment decisions to a far greater extent than economists or bank executives realise.

This might be somewhat bad news for those of us whose investment stakes and positions, mediated through institutional retirement funds, are measured by a much more modest scale as well, but also — for us Virtue Ethicists — provides an interesting occasion for thinking about the virtue of courage, the vice of foolhardiness, the phenomenon of lack of self-control, and the nature of prudential practical reasoning.