More on Virtues In Augustine's Free Choice of the Will

A few weeks back, I started discussing Augustine's conception of the (cardinal) virtues in his work On Free Choice of the Will, promising this follow-up post where I would explore and explain certain of the themes set aside for the time being in the earlier post.  Now also having shot a video delving into the topic in the meantime, and now having some spare time on my hands over Easter Break, it's about time to make good on that pledge to tell the fuller story about virtue -- and vice -- in this classic Augustinian work.

In the first post, I stuck to book 1 -- and admittedly, there's already quite a bit going on in Augustine's examination of the virtues in that early portion of the larger work.  But really, his identification and definition of the four cardinal virtues, the connection between the virtues, the will, and eternal law, even the impediments impose upon a person by the vices opposed to virtue -- these are just starting points, or better, outlines, which will be filled in and expanded in his fuller discussions about virtue and vice in books 2 and 3

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.

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.

Anselm, Justice, and Virtue

Yesterday, I gave a guest lecture on St. Anselm's moral theory in a colleague's Medieval Philosophy class, introducing his students to some Anselmian themes beyond the "ontological argument" they recalled from their earlier Intro to Philosophy classes.  Central among those was Anselm's understanding of justice -- or the variety of goodness distinctive to humans and other rational beings -- as rectitude or uprightness of will.

What is particularly interesting about Anselm's examination of this idea -- which he plays with throughout his works, progressively developing a more and more complex picture of moral goodness and evil -- is that early on he articulates this standard of rectitude not simply in terms of the will conforming to some standards, ideals, or rules, but in a more reflexive manner.  Justice is rectitude of will kept for its own sake (rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata).

Teaching (Virtue) Ethics: Goods and Practical Reasoning

In an earlier post, I provided a peek into some of the introductory materials I provide my face-to-face or online students currently taking Ethics classes with me through Marist College.  This is the really basic, cover-in-the-first-week kind of stuff, but one of the things I like most about the discipline and the texts of Ethics is that you can keep going back to these key distinctions, concepts, objects and experiences -- because moral life is, after all rooted in the rest of our lives, and provides, you might say, the dimension without which that life would be less than human, impoverished in intelligibility, lacking a certain depth of meaning.

To push the metaphor -- which like other analogies will of course eventually exhibit its disappointing limits --  of dimension and depth, I suggest that Ethics or Moral Theory ( a great deal of which gets done outside of academic philosophy, by the way) provides the third dimension to what would otherwise be only two-dimensional, flat, restricted by its own planarity.  That not to say that everything needs to have and exhibit -- even have tacked upon it -- such a dimension of depth.  some things, like blueprints, are perfectly fine in two dimensions.  Paintings, photographs, even cartoons, though -- don't they possess the illusion of depth?  Yes -- by relying on a transfer from experienced depth and perspective -- which they don't posses but which they can mimetically evoke or represent precisely because of our experiences of that dimension in other settings.  Studying Ethics explicitly, deliberately, systematically, means devoting sustained attention -- alas for all too short an apprenticeship -- to the contours, the concealments, the criteria, even in some cases the charlatanry of those who work and warp and weft in this vital dimension of human experience. 

Teaching (Virtue) Ethics: Goods and Values

Last semester, I started teaching Ethics classes for Marist College, and continued it this semester, even picking up an online Ethics class as well, which started in earnest today.  I have to say that, after three years at my previous position confined to teaching mainly just slews of Critical Thinking sections, occasionally punctuated with an "upper-level" (even Intro to Philosophy was dubiously granted that title) class, if it made enrollment -- tough to do with no actual major in Philosophy -- where one of the older profs had staked out Ethics as "her" class, it's really refreshing to be teaching and designing Ethics courses again.

My teaching career actually began more than a decade ago with Ethics, and it was a staple course for me at every other place I taught besides FSU -- a big state university,  a small community college, an extension campus, a struggling 4-year liberal arts college, a prison degree program.  At one time, I worried about being confined to the "Ethics Ghetto" -- not getting to teach what, at the time, seemed more interesting and exotic courses, where I'd have interested philosophy majors rather than students struggling through a required course.  Now, my outlook is very different.  There's nothing like being sent down yet further to make one appreciate what one previously took for granted -- but at FSU, I finally grasped the importance of teaching non-majors in core Philosophy classes, and also incidentally learned how to do it fairly well.

"Corporate Culture" Top Priority for Ethics and Compliance Leaders

A recent report (full version here) by LRN, a company that aims at “fostering ethical cultures” within business environments interprets results from a survey given to Ethics and Compliance executives, and raises some interesting issues adequately visible, perhaps, only from a Virtue Ethics perspective.

The report suggests that, at least for those tasked with promoting some sort of ethics within companies and corporate culture, there is a vital concern with the sorts of moral issues and problems that arise inevitably within business.

Ethics and compliance leaders who participated in the survey see themselves as the champions for creating ethical, values-based cultures: 58 percent of them agree that the primary mandate of their efforts is to ensure ethical behaviors and alignment with core values. In contrast, only 42 percent believe their core mandate is legal and regulatory compliance. Further, 68 percent indicate that creating long-term value for the business is a principal benefit of promoting an ethical culture

Three things need to be pointed out.

Big Think: How Honor Can Remake Society

The interconnections — and at times discordances — between honor and virtue are complicated, not least because these are multifaceted moral phenomena.  Virtue is multiple and each of the virtues possesses its own determinate specificity.  Honor likewise has more than one sense, manifests in more than one manner, is understood in very different ways, is desired by different people as at times almost unrecognizably similar or analogous goods.

In our contemporary moral language, we — and every culture seems to exhibit something along these lines — possess and use numerous not-entire-synonyms for “honor”:  respect, esteem, admiration — just to name a few.  It’s tempting to try to identify moral phenomena strictly along such linguistic differentials, to say:  respect is this, honor is that — not recognizing that inn reality these blur into each other and bifurcate internally as well.

Womens' Fashion, Mens' Sport, Goods -- but how good?

Prospero, one of the blog batches of commentators for the Economist, recently brought up several interesting points, in A Man’s Guide to a Woman’s Wardrobe.  One of these is that, although many would be tempted to write off sport and fashion as mere fluff, unworthy of the serious person, perhaps also vestiges of  gender roles and their assigned provinces, they are indeed goods — or really, whole ranges of interconnected and distinctive goods:

…  fashion is to many women what sport is to many men: a pastime, a passion, a shared language, a form of self-definition, and a temporary escape from the opposite sex, all rolled into one deeply satisfying whole.