Virtue & the Good Life

Six steps into the oldest answer: that to be good is not to pay a tax on happiness but to possess it — the life of flourishing, and how a soul is trained for it.

A course on the thought of Ethics.

What you will learn

  • Distinguish means from ends and see that there must be a final end — something sought for its own sake — on pain of infinite regress; and that this end is eudaimonia.
  • Correct the mistranslation of eudaimonia as 'happiness'-as-feeling: it is living-and-doing-well across a whole life, an activity, not a mood.
  • Reconstruct the function argument: from the characteristic activity of a human being (rational activity) to the human good (rational activity performed WELL, i.e. with virtue).
  • State the definition of moral virtue: a stable state (hexis) concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, determined by reason as the person of practical wisdom would determine it.
  • Apply the doctrine of the mean to particular virtues (courage between cowardice and rashness; generosity between stinginess and prodigality) and see why the mean is 'relative to us,' not an arithmetical midpoint.
  • Explain habituation: virtue of character is acquired by repeated action, as a craft is learned by practice, so that upbringing and law shape the soul.
  • State the puzzle of akrasia and Socrates's denial (to know the good is to do it; apparent weakness is really ignorance).
  • Give Aristotle's resolution: knowledge can be 'had but not used' — present in a general form but not active in the particular, dragged under by appetite — so weakness of will is real but not a counterexample to the role of reason.

Course outline

  1. The Final End — Glaucon asked why be good if vice pays. The answer begins by asking what we are ALL really after — the end behind every end — and finding that it is eudaimonia, flourishing; and then asking what a…
  2. The Golden Mean — What a virtue IS — not a feeling and not a mere capacity but a trained state of character, a disposition to hit the mean between too much and too little — and how such states are built the only way…
  3. The Weakness of the Will — The puzzle of akrasia: how can a person know the better and do the worse? Socrates said it's impossible — no one errs knowingly. Aristotle disagrees, and explains how knowledge can be present yet…
  4. The Stoic Fortress — The Stoics take the lectern to push virtue's answer to its limit: if the good life is virtue, and virtue is entirely up to you, then happiness is invulnerable — no tyrant, no illness, no loss can…
  5. Does Goodness Need Luck? — The wound in virtue's answer, faced honestly: if the good life needs external goods, then flourishing is partly a gift of fortune — Priam was good and ended wretched. And worse: whether you even…

Works read in this course

  • Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle's lectures on the good life: eudaimonia, the function argument, virtue as the mean, habituation, practical wisdom, weakness of will, and the role of fortune and friendship
  • Epictetus, Enchiridion — the Stoic handbook: the dichotomy of control and the invulnerability of the good will
  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations — the emperor's private Stoic exercises: the indifferents, the discipline of assent, life in accordance with nature
  • (secondary spine) Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy — virtue ethics stated and assessed; its advantages over rule-based theory; the problem of incompleteness

Terms introduced

eudaimonia, the function argument, ergon (function), virtue (aretē), the golden mean, hexis (state), habituation, phronesis (practical wisdom), akrasia (weakness of will), the dichotomy of control, the Stoic 'indifferents', moral luck

Part of the Simposeum course library.