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

Rational Limits on Pursuit of Pleasure

I've been researching and writing the follow-up post to my Thanksgiving-time reflections on gratitude -- digging into corners and crannies of texts I've run through previously but hadn't reread recently -- portions of writings of Cicero, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Thomas Aquinas, and Adrian Peperzak.  Rather than attempt to draw all those varied threads into one knot, or at least braid at this time, I've decided today to write instead about one of the several topics I'll be discussing tonight at the first in a new series of philosophy-centered events:  Philosophy Eats.  Tonight, it's Hedonism on the menu, both figuratively -- I'll be giving a talk and then leading a discussion -- and quite literally -- the chef and owner of Global Palate, Jessica Winchell, has assembled an amazingly aphrodisiac set of courses.

One of the matters I mean to bring up -- but not to go into full detail about -- has to do with setting rational limitations on the pursuit of pleasure, as well as one the avoidance of pleasure's contrary or opposite, pain.  There are hedonists, of course, for whom there are no restraints upon pleasure-seeking -- the popular conception associating hedonism with the adage "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" -- but in point of fact, most hedonists (and certainly those who thought enough about it to leave behind some coherent moral doctrine) don't act according to such an extreme, and likely short-lived, interpretation of that basic idea. 

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.

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.

Questioning Continuous Improvement (part 1 of 2)

The relatively new term "continuous improvement" is one of those buzzwords that by its very connotative penumbra manages to project a kind of positivity, and it burrowed its way into and eventually set down roots within education circles some time ago.  That's not surprising -- there's a continual back and forth flow between the worlds of education and business, along the channels of marketing, management, training, and that ever-so-ambiguous domain of "leadership."

Throughout my own career in academia, first as a student, then as a professor, a writer, and a coordinator of faculty development and assessment of student learning, a constant background  has been this discourse between the world of business and that of education, sometimes low as an almost soundless murmur, other times out in the open, seemingly subsuming all the available attention from every other kind of activity.  I'd say that in the last five years in particular, "continuous improvement" has shoved and elbowed its way to the front off the line of formulations frequently on the lips and minds of college and university administrators, trickling down to department chairs and committees detailed with laboring that concept, producing plans, reporting data, then doing the whole thing all over again.

Questioning Continuous Improvement

Recently, Harvard Business Review blogger Ron Ashkenas argued a case that It's Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement -- a very welcome suggestion.  I've noted myself, in an Orexis Dianoētikē blog post, that too much weight given to a closely related and similarly endorsed notion, "best practices," not only can easily become a substitute for real thought and good practical reasoning, becoming counter-productive in the process -- the uncritical attitude towards these sorts of buzzword concepts is often indicative of a deeper failure, one which assumes form as institutional culture.

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.

Six Impediments to Happiness

A recent Forbes piece, The Six Enemies of Greatness (and Happiness), succinctly sets out --  with Venn diagrams and graphs hand drawn and labeled by Jessica Hagy (her hallmark -- as you can see in her book, Indexed) -- six major mistakes people often make, whereby in the short term they exchange pursuit of immediate goals, objects of desire, enjoyments of pleasures, or even escapes for the longer term prospects of genuine happiness.  Hagy places each type of mistake under a laconic rubric, a name for an "enemy" of greatness, then appends a brief description or discussion to the title of that type.

For the most part, looked at through a Virtue Ethics perspective on practical reasoning -- rationally determining what one ought to do, how one should act, whether one's typical outlooks and assumptions, actions and desires are actually good for one, as well as how to rightly order the variety of goods we experience and desire -- these "enemies" she identifies are in fact real impediments to happiness.  They're just as much hindrances to greatness -- whether the latter be understood as excellence in its full sense, or as activity both productive and fulfilling, or even just as externally apparent and measured success.  For the most part, those she identifies are tendencies we've developed or temptations attracting us, but also including a condition which robs us of the capacity to settle upon the better choices.  So, she's right, dead on even -- but what else can or ought to be added to her so-brief, almost bullet-point advice?

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.

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.

Forbes: Happiest vs. Most Hated Jobs: Is Bureaucracy a Bad Thing?

Teach an Ethics class, and ask students early on what they consider to be major goods in their present or anticipated future life — what will make them happy, what they deeply desire and value —and in addition to family and friends, money, and occasionally education, they will often tell you: career, work, the job for which they are training.  And yet, what makes for the likelihood that one’s profession will realistically render one happy? Jobs are incredibly diverse, and in our present environment, culture, and economy, subject to change.

Steve Denning, author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, recently published and discussed lists — emerging from a recent surveys by CarreerBliss and the National Oganization for Research — of the Ten Happiest Jobs and the Ten Most Hated Jobs, pointing out important features common in each list.  First, the jobs perceived as worst:

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.