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Discussing Books 1 and 2.
What is virtue, and how can I eat it? Do not enjoy this episode too much, or too little, but just the right amount. Apparently, if you haven’t already have been brought up with the right habits, you may as well give up. Plus, is Michael Jackson the Aristotelian ideal?
You can read the text discussed at http://www.constitution.org/ari/ethic_00.htm.
End song: A newly recorded cover of Billie Jean by Mark Lint and the TransAmerikanishers. (Hear it by itself here.)
Five Stars after 200+ iTunes Ratings.
#1 by matth on August 15, 2010 - 11:41 pm
Interesting discussion, you guys were pretty funny at the end of this one. Funny how you mentioned someone might become an expert on someone we only have one sentence to examine from a shard of a clay pot.
#2 by matth on August 15, 2010 - 11:42 pm
And the idea for the show about debunking popular philosophy myths sounds like it could be a good one.
#3 by Joan Brown on December 18, 2011 - 7:22 pm
Listening to the Aristotelean discussion on ethics, I was reminded of one of the funniest things my mother ever said. Mom, raised very strictly catholic (boardings schools and university in northern Italy), very conservative, lived through WWII in europe and came to the states a soldier’s bride, etc. commented one day to my brothers and father and I, after hearing about Hugh Hefner’s latest engagement a few years ago, “If Hugh Hefner is in heaven, I am going to be really mad!”
This just said it all so succinctly.
Needless to say, I do not share most opinions with my parents, being a liberal anarchic atheist. But I love them!
#4 by Andrew on January 18, 2012 - 12:37 pm
I thought you got a little bogged down in trying to work out what the “good” life was, concentrating too much on trying to include hedonism or personal/subjective judgements of the good without involving the sorts of objective judgements that Aristotle deliberately included.
Modern “virtue ethics” looks back to Aristotle precisely because its proponents want judgements about whether something is good or bad to have some sort of objective source (often, one suspects, the teachings of the Catholic church). There are also links with the stronger forms of communitarianism – the idea that you can’t have values other than those which arise from the community into which you are born. To Aristotle, the “good life” is both living in a way that others in your community will recognise as good (and will want to emulate), and also living in a way that human beings ought to live (a judgement which will depend on community values to some extent, and ties in with the idea that you can only really say a life was good when you can consider it in totality).
It would be interesting to hear your take on Alistair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue”, or some of the more moderate communitarian/virtue ethics types (Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor).
#5 by Wes Alwan on January 24, 2012 - 2:50 pm
Thanks Andrew — we’ll definitely be doing a virtue ethics episode (possibly MacIntyre). And Sandel and Taylor are both good suggestions.
#6 by dmf on January 24, 2012 - 3:13 pm
here’s a bit of Mac on the limits of academic philo on moral issues:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbmPXXO8jpA
if you choose to go with Mac over say Nussbaum it might be worth looking at some of his debates with
Jeffrey Stout.