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. 

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.

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. 

How to Almost Get Moral Dispositions Right

This week, in two face-to-face installments, supplemented and supported by a variety of handouts, summaries located in our Course Management System, and even two lecture videos from previous Ethics classes (#1 and #2), I've been leading my students through the dully dry, compendiously ennumerational, Victorian-tinged prose of Jeremy Bentham's classic moral treatise Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation -- an exercise in demonstrating to them that a book ought not be judged by its cover, nor even by the style of its author -- that the merit of ideas remains to some degree independent of, unindexed by wordcraft, mode of arrangement, ease enabled or rather interest sustained in the reading.

Bentham is well worth the effort of wading through his preferred means of presentation:  seemingly interminable enumerations and exhaustive examples aiming at every step at making the same point -- Utilitarianism has covered every bet, examined every possible case, encompassed every exception or objection (suggestive of a dialogical panopticon).  Why?  Because the ideas conveyed are sound -- at least if not pushed too far -- and eminently worth thinking through, wrestling with, wrapping one's head around.  And today, they were Bentham's notions of intention, motive, and disposition.