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 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.

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