How Does Anger Seduce Practical Rationality?

Back in the Spring, I gave a talk down at Columbia University, "Sweeter Than Honey" - An Aristotelian Account of Anger's Seduction of Practical Rationality during which I ranged over a number of related topics in Aristotle's moral theory, all of them connected with anger as an emotional response.

Anger is a matter about which Aristotle does have a lot of useful and insightful things to tell us, and I've been researching and writing on Aristotle's theory of anger for about eight years, working on a book-length study of his views and their present applicability.

One of my YouTube subscribers emailed me, raising an interesting question about the talk, to which I've decided to respond here in this blog:  What did you mean by “anger seducing practical reason”?  That anger, through its sweetness, seduces practical reason into giving assent to our doing things that it wouldn’t otherwise assent to?   When you think about it that way, anger can be a terribly destructive force, because it’s a drug – literally; it’s partly chemical --- that clouds our reason.

What is the Emotivist Person Like?

I'm back in full swing once again teaching an Ethics course at Marist College (actually, just coming off of teaching a very intensive 4-week online Ethics course, before launching right back into Spring face-to-face courses), and we just finished discussing Alasdair MacIntyre's diagnosis of Emotivism (in After Virtue) as the moral theory that has become embedded and embodied in our late modern culture.  Last year, around this point in the semester, I wrote two blog posts focusing on that diagnosis (here and here). There's three particularly important features to MacIntyre's account -- precisely why I have my students read chapters 2 and 3 of After Virtue at the start of the semester.

First, MacIntyre does not think that many people in our contemporary culture explicitly endorse one of the academic forms of emotivism (derived from Ayer or Stevenson, Nietzsche or Sartre) -- rather their behavior, actions, expressions betray an implicit reliance on that moral theory as their default, the horizon within which they act and move and work out their being. Second, MacIntyre also does not think emotivism is remotely close to being correct or adequate as a moral theory.  But, if there are many people who on some gut-level do seem to think it the right theory, and act, judge, and communicate as if it was, that has some real implications for our moral environment.  Third, MacIntyre does not see these developments as particularly good ones -- even for the emotivist.  And, that is what I'm going to discuss here -- starting from the question: what kind of person does a lived-out commitment to Emotivism make one into?

Yves Simon on Moral Virtue (part 1 of 2)

Recently, I had the opportunity to indulge myself in a bit of reading of an author I'd long ago enjoyed, the 20th century French Aristotelian-Thomist philosopher, Yves Simon, whose course on "Virtues," taught at the University of Chicago, was later edited into the book, The Definition of Moral Virtue, by Vukan Huic. Simon is a competent and quietly imaginative interpreter of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition in philosophy, and his reexamination of the very notion of virtue, digging out its contours from within, scraping off the varnish-turned-plaque of certain modern reinterpretations or reductions, while at the same time connecting it unnostalgically just as much with the flows, courses, and preoccupations of modern life as with ancient or medieval modes of existence -- his work is eminently worth the hours it requires.

In addition to pointing out three typically modern responses which effectively attempt to substitute for the virtue that we human beings need in order to do well, act well, live well, Simon also introduces, or perhaps much better and more accurately put, briefly elaborates, several distinctions very useful for thinking out more fully what virtue actually is, what it does, how it works within and without it, what it calls forth from us.  Two of those in particular -- ideas admittedly stock in trade for virtue ethicists, but which, like any other inventory, lie unexamined upon the shelf -- the relationship between nature and use as dimensions of the goodness or badness of things, and the difference between mere habits and the difficult-to-translate habitus, are key for any practical, not merely academic understanding of virtue and vice. This post will discuss the first distinction, and the followup post will dig into the second, more complexly developed distinction.

How Do We Get It Wrong? Four Ways Aristotle Addresses

In the piece I started yesterday, I promised to talk about how and why a contemporary virtue ethicist and a classic virtue ethicist distinguish different types of moral failure from each other.  Discussing the contemporary, Alasdair MacIntyre, I placed more focus on the why -- the reasons we ought to be concerned not only whether we've done wrong, but to what degree, for what reasons -- and what we learn about ourselves in the process, including how -- like a bus that has left the road for short-cut dirt paths and is now bouncing over unfamiliar, dusty, and trackless terrain -- we might discern not only the overall direction we need to steer back towards, but how we might discern where trails run, which grooves and ruts we need to avoid and which might lead us back onto the straighter, more reliable roads towards the good.

As the post got longer and longer, I had to defer my promise to discuss Aristotle -- one of the worthies among the Virtue Ethics's classic thinkers -- since the whole goal of Virtue Ethics Digest was to have shorter pieces than those you might find on my other blog, Orexis Dianoētikē.  So, here it is, with more attention tonight to the how and less to the why in Aristotle's works -- though I don't want to give that short shrift, and will accordingly discuss that first.

Junk Food is Not Really Cheaper, But Habits Cost You

A piece in the NYT Sunday Review, Is Junk Food Really Cheaper, provoked some interesting discussion among my culinary friends, many of whom are almost evangelistically committed to food awareness and to reduction of obesity and other food-related illnesses in America.

It’s often taken for granted that junk food is in fact cheaper than healthy home-cooked food.  Those who are content with eating it — or with others feeding on the wide array of readily available but admittedly unhealthy foodstuffs — can point towards the comparative costs and shrug their shoulders and reach for another bite.  Those who are against that situation get ready villains for verbal effigy-conflagrations, usually pretty emotionally satisfying: either the government for providing the tangled net of subsidies, or the big food corporations for lobbying for and benefiting from them — or both.

This Field Required: Poverty and Virtue Ethics

Here’s an interesting blog posting by Pamela Stubbart, exploring the implications of a concept that’s being talked about quite a bit in psychology and some in ethics:  will-power depletion.  The general idea is that each human being has, at any given time, a certain amount of willpower — capacity to stick to or follow through on a difficult decision or action, also, in the older ethical literature, known as “self-control” — on reserve, and it can be exhausted as it gets used over time making decisions.

There have been some empirical psychological studies, which seem to indicate — you should always be rather skeptical of “studies show… ” until you’ve looked carefully at how the study was carried out and what reasoning the researchers employed — that there is something to this idea of “willpower depletion.”  And, this in turn has some implications for those in poverty:

the less money you have, the more sit­u­a­tions you will encounter in which you must restrain your­self and make dif­fi­cult pur­chas­ing trade­offs, and this means you’ll have less willpower left­over later to deal with other sit­u­a­tions in which you might need it