Yves Simon on Moral Virtue (part 2 of 2)

Last month, I wrote a rather longish entry (at least for this blog) setting out a few themes from Yves Simon's excellent short work, The Definition of Moral Virtue, focusing in that post on two things in particular:  his identification of three moral positions common in modernity which attempt to dispense with the traditional conception of virtue, and the implications of his distinction between nature and use as modes of goodness or badness.  What I left unaddressed was another major theme of his book, the difference between mere habits and habitus.  

That the virtues -- and for that matter the vices -- are at their bases, in the sort of being which they have, habits is a standard commonplace of Virtue Ethics.  You can find that term readily used in most translations of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, or Aquinas' Disputed Questions on Virtue and Treatise On the Virtues, as well as in other classic texts of Virtue Ethics traditions of moral enquiry.  Simon cautions us against that, however, showing how the Greek hexis and its Latin translation habitus involve something more and something different than the concept "habit" which we so often unthinkingly substitute in their place -- and in telling us why, he also teaches us some important and often overlooked lessons about virtue and vice.

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.

Neophilia: Curiosity by Another Name?

I've been meaning to comment on a New York Times piece, What’s New? Exuberance for Novelty Has Benefits, since I first saw it, since it touches on a matter that has been explored, invoked, exhibited and exemplified, condemned and praised -- whether in narrational passages, speeches, philosophical dialogues, proverbial exchanges, compilations of reflections upon life and wisdom:  Curiosity, the desire not only to know, to connect, to uncover, but also in a certain sense to contrast, to find, experience, or produce the novel.  Researchers are reevaluating and nuancing their assessment of a trait upon which they'd previously taken a more categorically negative stance, "novelty-seeking, a personality trait long associated with trouble."

Originally, employing methods focusing on genetics and the brain:

they linked this trait with problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior.

Now, though, after extensively tracking novelty-seekers, researchers are seeing the upside. In the right combination with other traits, it’s a crucial predictor of well-being.

Bernie Madoff, Happy at Last?

It has been several years since the Bernie Madoff story first broke, gradually  exposing more and more portions of a financial investing scam perpetrated for years, a genuine Ponzi scheme, whereby investors were bilked put of quite literally billions of dollars, which were then used to maintain the appearance of high financial yields for investors earlier in, higher up in the pyramid.   It became a more and more desperate juggling act, bound to bust eventually, but only after the sheer number of accounts in the air became unmanageable.

Much has already been written about the elaborate structure, scope, and details of the scam itself, and the lengthy lists of those individuals and institutions which lost money -- often money they could ill-afford  -- has long been worked out.  In fact, one might think there is little left to say about the whole Madoff affair, if it were not for the recent publication of truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family, penned by Laurie Sandel, who interviewed in depth the surviving members of Bernie Madoff's family -- his son, Mark, killed himself after the revelation of the scam, in which he appears to have been unwittingly involved.

New Yorker: Wild Animals Don't Want to be Owned

The news earlier this month about Terry Thompson’s ill-fated decision to release the exotic, wild, and in many cases dangerous animals he had acquired — and then to kill himself — crossed my path in the same way as it did for so many others:  brief reports without much detail, announcing that among others, Lions and Bengal Tigers had been released near, and were now roaming into, an Ohio town.  Then more substantive follow-up reports and opinion pieces began to pop up, as the media swung to focus on the owner, the sheriff and deputies, the town’s residents, and the animals themselves.  One of the more interesting, and well-balanced pieces is by Susan Orlean.  She asks about the tragic situation the key question:

A small, drowsy town in Ohio, a pile of dead Bengal tigers. How did it come to this? The blame should be doled out carefully. Very little of it should fall on the sheriff of Zanesville, who did what was probably the only thing he could do: give a kill order when darkness fell and Terry Thompson’s wild carnivores were still prowling around town

HBR: The Secret to Dealing with Difficult People

Tony Schwartz, among other things a blogger on the Harvard Business Review network, recently offered advice about a common issue both in the workplace and in one’s non-work life: the need to deal with difficult people, those who fit this description:

Do you have someone at work who consistently triggers you? Doesn’t listen? Takes credit for work you’ve done? Wastes your time with trivial issues? Acts like a know-it-all? Can only talk about himself? Constantly criticizes?

Such people, of course, are not a new or unique feature of modern society.  In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle discussed such people, as did Plato, Epictetus, Augustine and a number of ancient philosophers in their turn.  Aristotle is particularly interesting to point to, though, because he analyses the emotional response of — and virtues and vices associated with — anger.  I've written about this in greater depth elsewhere on the web (here, here, and here), so I'm just going to mention a few features of Aristotle's theory relevant to Schwartz's advice.

The Myth of Closure: How is Emotional Closure Good?

Does the oft-invoked idea of attaining emotional closure really correspond to something genuinely good?  It is something necessary, something desirable, something towards which to counsel people, to move them by whatever appropriate means suggest themselves?  A recent Boston Globe interview with sociologist Nancy Burns raised a strong challenge to the all-too-common call for closure.
Burns’ view is that strictly speaking there really is no such thing as closure:

The idea of closure [is seen] as a new emotional state for explaining what we need and how we’re supposed to respond to trauma and loss. But closure is a rhetorical concept, a made-up term  … .Closure is not something that we can simply find or something we need. It’s a frame used to explain how we should respond to loss.

NPR: Dignity Therapy for the Dying, A Chance to Rewrite Life

Can telling the story of their lives help the dying?  Yes and no, which should come as little surprise, given how varied the situations, responses, desires, and lives of those who are dying turn out to be.  It depends very much on what we mean by “help,” what the process of telling the story of one’s life is intended to do, and how involved of a process the “telling” becomes.

Virtue Ethics, by the very structure of the actual moral theories that comprise that approach — going beyond merely holding that virtues (lasting developed habitual dispositions) are good things and vices bad, and even beyond shifting from evaluating actions alone to evaluating persons and their characters — understands and teaches that one of the key questions for Ethics is generically “What is a good life?” and more specifically:  “What is a good life for me?”  “What is a good life for this or that person?”