So today I'm going to give you
your money's worth in the sense that some of you might
be taking this class to see whether you would want to take
another philosophy class at some point in the future. And though a lot of what we've
been doing in this class is typical of what one would do in
a philosophy class, one of the things of which we haven't
done that much is close reading of extended passages
from texts. And so what I want to do today
is to read through as a group--which means I talk
and you listen, so it's not really a group. But read through with you all
out there smiling back at me, one section of Aristotle's
Ethics, in particular Book two Chapter four, to try to situate
for you the two responses that we read for today
that both exemplify the theme of the course. So roughly the first quarter
to third of lecture will be going through this passage
from Aristotle. I'll put the text up for you and
I'll talk you through it. And then what I want to do is to
bring out to you how it is that the two articles we read
for today pick up on very specific and very precise
portions of the Aristotelian text. So as I said, we're going
to be looking closely at something in the book that
we've been reading from Aristotle, The Nicomachean
Ethics. In particular, we have heard
many times recitation of Aristotle's claim that virtues
of character are acquired through habituation. That just as one becomes a
player of the harp by playing the harp, so too one becomes
just by acting as the just one does, brave by acting like
the brave one does. But Aristotle himself realizes
that this cannot be the full story and he begins his
discussion in Book two Chapter four something that we've read
twice already in this class--once a few weeks ago
and reread for Tuesday. Aristotle remarks that someone
might be puzzled by what we mean by saying that we become
just by doing just actions and temperate by doing temperate
actions. For one might suppose that if
we do just or temperate actions we are thereby,
just or temperate. Aristotle wants to correct a
possible misconception of what it is that he's claiming. In particular, he wants to point
out that although it is a necessary condition on being
just and temperate that one do just and temperate
actions, it's not a sufficient condition. That is, although it's a
requirement to be just and temperate that you have to act
in the way that the just or temperate person does, it's
not enough to do that. You need some other things
in addition. And what we're doing today is
refining the understanding that we've gotten already. We knew already from the
previous readings and lectures that Aristotle says: in order to
be just you have to act as the just one does and habituate
yourself to that sort of action. And now he's going to give us
some additional conditions on justice, temperance and
the other virtues. So he says, "for actions to be
done temperately or justly, it does not suffice that
they themselves have the right qualities. Rather the agent must also be
in the right state when he does them." Now what could
Aristotle mean by that? What does he mean by saying
for an action to be done justly, it does not suffice,
it's not sufficient, for the action to have the
right qualities. In addition, the agent has
to be in the right state when he does it? Well suppose I act in a
temperate fashion simply because the resources required
for me to act in an intemperate fashion
aren't available. Suppose the reason that I
refrain from drinking the chocolate milk that's typically
in my fridge is because there's no chocolate
milk in my fridge for me to drink. Suppose the reason that I
refrain from going to a party on Saturday night is because
there are no parties available for me to go to. I have in that case, says
Aristotle, acted as the temperate person would. But I haven't done so as
the result of being in the right state. Or I might, intending to give an
object to somebody to whom it doesn't belong, mistakenly
return it to its rightful owner. If I do that, I return the
object to its rightful owner. I act as the just
person would. But I don't do so for
the right reason. Aristotle wants to say that if
you're temperate only because you don't have the opportunity
to act in an intemperate way, but that if you had that
opportunity you would, and that if you act as the just
person would not because you're aiming to be just, but
only because you've got faulty information, your activity
doesn't count as an instance of the virtue with which
he is concerned. In particular, Aristotle says
that there are three conditions that you need to
satisfy for your just act to count as a virtuously just act
or your temperate act to count as a temperate act and so on. First, you need to do the action
knowing that you're doing something virtuous. Second, you need to decide to do
the action exactly because doing so is virtuous. And third, you need to do so
from what he calls a "firm and unchanging state." So the first
condition is that the reason that you be in a
situation where you know what act is the virtuous one. The second is, you choose it
because it's the virtuous one. And the third is that your
choice isn't a one off thing which is happening in this
situation, but not in others. But rather that your choice is
expressive of, indicative of, arising from a state of
character that you have that persists over time. And I'll give some examples
in a minute. Aristotle says in summation that
"actions are called just or temperate when they are the
sort that a just or temperate person would do" where the just
or temperate person is not the one who merely does the
actions, but the one who does them "in the way that the
just or temperate person does them." So the question that that leaves
us with is this: what is the way that a just or
temperate or brave or otherwise virtuous person
does those acts? So let's run through it with the
example of bravery, how it is that we might satisfy the
three Aristotelian conditions? The first condition you recall
is that you have to do the action knowingly. So suppose I'm out there on
the battlefield and I know that there are two groups
of soldiers-- the brave ones and the
cowardly ones. And I am totally clear that I
have no interest whatsoever in risking my life. So I make the decision that my
plan is to do whatever the cowardly soldiers do. And I set myself up in such a
way that I put myself in the middle of a group of people
whom I take to be cowardly soldiers and I follow along
with what it is that they're doing. If it turns out that I have
mistakenly selected a group of brave soldiers to imitate
rather than a group of cowardly soldiers to imitate, I
will perform a behavior that is the same behavior that the
brave person would, but I won't perform it in the way
that the brave person did. I thought that I was imitating
the cowardly soldiers, but because I was mistaken about
who the brave ones were and who the cowardly ones were, I
mistakenly imitated an action that turned out to be brave.
Aristotle says: No credit. No credit for virtuous action. The second requirement is that
in addition to knowing which action is the virtuous one and
which is the non-virtuous one, I have to decide to
perform the action because it's virtuous. So suppose now I'm in
a similar situation. I'm out on the battlefield. I know which group is the
cowardly group and I know which group is the brave group
and I decide because I want to get a good reputation that
I will do as the brave soldiers do. So I'm knowingly performing an
act that is brave, but I'm not performing the act that is brave
because it is brave, because in so doing I will
express a virtue, because in so doing I will bring to
fruition this ideal state that Aristotle has emphasized
the importance of. I'm doing it because I'm
interested in getting a medal. I'm doing it because I'm
interested in getting a good reputation. Aristotle says, even if I do the
right thing, even if I do the right thing knowingly,
if I do it with the wrong motivation in mind. No credit. Third, Aristotle says that in
order for an action to count as an expression of virtue,
I not only have to do it knowingly and for the right
reason, I have to do it in such a way that it expresses a
characterological feature of mine that extends over time. So suppose that I just this once
decide to act brave for the sake of being brave, even
though usually I tend to act in a cowardly way. Aristotle says even if I do it
knowingly, even if I do it under the description brave act,
which I'm doing for its own sake, if in so doing I don't
express a continuous feature of my character that
leads me to do this typically in circumstances requiring
bravery, no credit. And in fact, Aristotle imposes
a fourth condition as well. And that's fourth condition is
articulated in the opening paragraph of Book two
Chapter three. And it reads as follows, "We
must take someone's pleasure or pain following on
his actions to be a sign of his state. If someone who abstains from
bodily pleasures enjoys the abstinence, he is temperate. If he's grieved, he
is intemperate. If he stands firm against
terrifying situations and does not find it painful, he is
brave. But if he finds it painful he is cowardly." So let's go back to our list.
In order for an action to count as virtuous on Aristotle's
picture, you have to do it knowing that it's
the virtuous act. You have to do it because
it's the virtuous act for its own sake. You have to do it as an
expression or result of a standing character feature that
you have. And you have to do it with enjoyment. You have to do it in such a way
that it doesn't feel to you like it's an imposition
to act that way. The brave person on Aristotle's
view is the person who knowingly, for the sake of
being brave regularly, and with pleasure acts as the
brave person does. Now next Thursday, we will start
looking at an ethical theory which challenges
one and two. We're going to look at
an ethical theory, consequentialism. A particular version of it,
utilitarianism which says that the moral worth of an act
doesn't depend in any way on the knowledge or intentions of
the person performing the act. The texts we read for today
consider respectively the fourth and third condition. So the text that we read from
Julia Annas asks the question, what does it mean to satisfy
Aristotle's fourth condition? What does it mean? What does it feel like to be
an individual for whom the performance of acts in
accordance with virtue is something that one does
with enjoyment? And the other text that we read
for today--the John Doris text--calls into question
whether the idea that in order for an act to be virtuous it
has to come from a firm and unchanging state, presupposes
something faulty about human psychology. So the two texts that we're
reading for today actually come straight out of a careful
understanding of what's going on in Book two Chapter four
of The Nicomachean Ethics. So I'm going to turn now to
those texts, but before I do so I'm going to check that
everybody's clear on where we got these four requirements on
what it is that they add to the initial idea that we become
brave by doing brave acts, just by doing just
acts, temperate by doing temperate ones. And that people are clear
how that came out of the Aristotelian text that
we're looking at. So questions before
we move on? All right, so the paper that we
read by Julia Annas, who is a scholar of ancient philosophy,
asks the following question: what would it be like
to be an Aristotelian good person? That is, what is what's
sometimes called the phenomenology--the what it feels
like from the inside--of Aristotelian virtue? Aristotle's told us that the
brave person is the one who acts brave without feeling pain
at the bravery, who finds it natural and pleasurable
to act as the virtuous person does. Annas' question is what
does that feel like from the inside? And her answer is now what it
feels like from the inside is the kind of internal harmony
that we've been talking about in many of the lectures in
this unit of the course. "Exercising virtue is something
that in the virtuous person involves a harmony of
feelings and deliberations, rather than a feeling of
overcoming inclinations." It is to be in a state
of internal harmony. One's reflective commitments,
one's instincts, one's apprehension of the world around
one, the patterns of attention that one has to the
environment, all of those comes together in such a way
that it doesn't even feel like one is contemplating an
alternate possibility. The brave person on the
Aristotelian picture doesn't stand on the battlefield and
think, huh, I wonder what the brave person should
do and what the cowardly one should do. Oh, that cowardly thing
is so tempting, but I guess I'll avoid it. The brave person stands on the
battlefield and--like the person who has turned a
normative law into a descriptive one from last
class--feels as if there's nothing else to be done
then the brave action. On the Aristotelian picture,
the just person, when faced with the possibility of giving
back the right amount of change or the wrong amount of
change in the transaction, doesn't think to himself, hm,
I wonder if whether I ripped off my partner I would
get caught. Hm, I guess I wouldn't. I suppose I'll do
the right thing. The virtuous person on the
Aristotelian picture doesn't even contemplate the alternative
activity. And consequently, feels no
need to overcome the alternative temptation. There's not a feeling
of resisting a pull in the other direction. There's a feeling that the world
presents itself to you with what is to be done, and
that you go on to do that. Just as when you go over to
your friend's for dinner, there is I take it, no thought
on your part what beautiful silver candlesticks: should I
bring them home with me or should I leave them here? So too for the Aristotelian
virtuous one is that feeling with respect to anything
that we might think of as a moral dilemma. Now Aristotle also has quite a
bit to say about what it's like to be in a state where
these feelings come apart, where they pull in different
directions. And the selections that we're
going to read from Aristotle for next Tuesday discuss
exactly that question. What is it like to be somebody
who has to force themselves to be virtuous? Whose instincts run the
other direction? But he's in a position and
need to ask that question exactly because he'd already
told us in Book two what it is like to be in this harmonious,
virtuous state. Now Julia Annas' suggestion is
that we can give articulation to this idea in a contemporary
scientific paradigm by drawing on a particular idea from
positive psychology, this idea of flow. So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a
Hungarian-born psychologist has for the last 30 years or so
talked to people who excel in some domain or other and
asked them what it feels like when they are doing the activity
which they do so well in a way that is completely
absorbing and engaging. So he talks to composers and he
talks to rock climbers and he talks to firefighters and he
talks to musicians and he asks them what it feels like to
be in a state: an athletic state, a musical state, a
creative state, a state of absorption in effective
parenting, whatever it is that you do and you do well
and you enjoy. What does it feel like
to be in that state? And what he says--as you should
know if you had the chance to watch his TED talk--is
that it is when our attention is deliberately
focused on what we are doing that the action is most
experienced as effortless. In a state of complete
absorption, we're attentive to the subtle nuances of
the experience. You're playing basketball and
the location of the hoop and the ball and your hand and the
other players is just there for you has as a single
apprehension. You're engaged in an absorbing
chess game and you have a feel for the location of the
pieces on the board. You're engaged in a conversation
with someone you love or someone you care for and
all of the nuances and all of the subtleties of
that interaction are apparent to you. Now what Annas notices is that
there are two particular features of flow experience that
are actually central to the ancient harmony-of-the-soul notion of virtue. And the first is that flow
activity, activity in which you are fully absorbed
is experienced as what she calls autotelic. She's actually there making
use of terminology that Csikszentmihalyi himself uses. Auto meaning self, telic
meaning end. Something that is autotelic
is an end in itself. It's not a means to an end. It's something that has-- wow, I'm remembering something
from Plato's Republic, from those opening pages from our
very first reading assignment. It's something that
we experience as having intrinsic value. It's something that when we do
it, we're not thinking of it merely as a means to
some other end. We're thinking of it as
something that is enjoyable for its own sake. A painter who's painting
paintings thinking: "How much am I going to be able to sell
this for on the market?" is not at the time of painting
absorbed in painting for its own sake. An athlete who thinks about
their performance only in terms of how many points it
will get for them or their team won't become fully absorbed
in the activity. It turns out that even for
things of instrumental value, the most effective way to do
with them with excellence is to become so absorbed in them
that they feel to us to be of intrinsic worth. And this give us, I think, a new
insight on that three-way divide that we had in the
opening pages of Book Two of Plato's Republic when we were
told that there are things that are instrumentally
valuable, things that are intrinsically valuable and
things that are both. It gives us a way of
understanding how even for things that are merely
instrumentally valuable, we can get caught up in our
engagement with them in such a way that they feel to us to
have intrinsic worth. And this is of course, both
a virtue and a vice. The most famous commodity with
merely instrumental value is of course, money. The bills in your pocket, I
hasten to tell you, are not worth as pieces of paper
much more than a fraction of a penny. But they have instrumental
value within a system of economic give and take. But even within that system of
economic give and take, they are only of instrumental value
because money for its own sake isn't useful. Money is useful because it
allows us to purchase other things that are useful
for their own sake-- beautiful cars, beautiful foods,
time to spend with our friends and family,
opportunities to visit parts of the world. All of those are things that
we can buy with money. But money in itself is of only
instrumental utility. Nonetheless, exactly the human
psychological function that enables us to treat something
like making a shot in a basketball game, which is of
course only of instrumental value, as if it were of
intrinsic value--that allows us to get caught up in
experience, that allows us to have this experience of flow,
can be redeployed so that we come to think that whoever dies
with the largest number in their bank account has
somehow won a game whose point values weren't arbitrary. So there is--as is very often
the case--both an upside and a downside to this fact about
human psychology: the fact that we are capable of
experiencing things that might not have intrinsic value
as if they did. And in fact, experiencing things
in that way is one of the most powerfully engaging
things that we can do. Exactly because when all of
our energies are directed towards the activity, we
lose ourselves in it. There is a feeling--and
Csikszentmihalyi describes this beautifully in the last
five minutes of the TED talk that I sent you to. There is this feeling of
complete absorption, a feeling of unselfconsciousness, a
feeling of a breakdown between the boundaries of the self and
the boundaries of the world. You become part of the scene
with respect to which you're experiencing the flow. And indeed, the moment you let
self-consciousness reemerge, the flow gets disrupted. Any of you who has never played
a sport or a musical instrument or been in a play or
given a lecture knows the danger of stepping out of the
scene and listening to yourself doing it, how
disruptive that can be of the experience. So Annas' suggestion is that
Aristotle's idea of virtue is the idea that virtue
and the activity of virtue should feel flow-like. It should feel absorbing. It should feel non-reflective. It should feel that when you are
in the act of being brave or just or temperate or
magnanimous or magnificent or any of the other Aristotelian
virtues, that what you experience at that moment is
a feeling that you're doing something about which
there was no choice. This is just the way the world
is--with respect to which you feel there to be intrinsic
value. And where you feel fully
absorbed and unselfconsciuos. And Csikszentmihalyi goes on in
his more systematic work to explain that the reason that
this occurs is because there is profound match between your
skill level and the challenge that the activity
brings with it. When we are presented with a
task, which is not challenging for us and with respect to which
we have low skill, we experience what Csikszentmihalyi
calls apathy. So if there's something that's
not very hard for me, but I'm not very good at it, there's
going to be little motivation to respond to that
with engagement. If my skill level is low and
the task is a little bit harder, I might feel worried
in the face of my inability to do it. And if my skill level is low
and the challenge level is high, I might even
feel anxiety. Moving over, if my skill level
is moderate and the activity is of low challenge to
me, I'll experience a feeling of boredom. I won't find myself
engaged by it. I'll find the situation
to be tedious. If my skill level is medium and
the activity is of high challenge, I might
feel aroused. I might feel intrigued by it. I might feel some motivation
to act in that way. But the cases where we feel
the most excitement in the world are the cases where we
have the coping strategies that enable us to act
effectively as agents. You'll recall that when we
read the material from Jonathan Haidt for last class
and the class before, he described an experiment that
was done on the floor of a nursing home where the patients
were either given the responsibility for caring for
the plants on the floor or somebody else cared for the
plants on the floor. And the happiness level of
those who were engaged in productive activity
was much higher. Skillful coping, being able to
be a force of agency in the world is for human
beings one of the primary sources of happiness. And if we think back to what we
talked about a few classes ago on the importance of early
childhood secure attachment, one way of understanding what
secure attachment includes is a feeling of agency
in the world. If when you cry it causes your
caregiver to come to you and satisfy your needs, you come
to feel yourself to be effective as an agent. And so when our skill level is
high, even if the challenge level is low, we'll feel
performing the activity a certain kind of relaxation. Those of you who play bubble
pop games on your telephone and are good at them are
presumably experiencing that. Many times we have high skill
level with a low challenge activity and it enables us to
feel that we're relaxing. When we have high skill level
and a challenge that's medium for us, we get this
thrill of control. The idea that here's something
you're trying to do. You have pretty good mastery
of it and it gives you this feeling of efficacy. And finally, we have one cell
unexposed in this matrix. And that's the cell that asks us
what it's like when we have both high skill level and
a challenging activity. And it won't surprise you
to learn that that is where flow falls. So Annas' suggestion, drawing
on Csikszentmihalyi as a way of understanding Aristotle, is
that what it is like to be a virtuous being from the inside
is to be fully absorbed in an activity that is in some sense
enormously challenging. It involves scanning the world
in such a way that you recognize what situations are
morally demanding and acting skillfully, naturally,
effortlessly, happily in a state of harmony, in a way that
conforms with what the world demands of you. And in so doing one is fully
absorbed in an activity which feels to one to be of
intrinsic worth. And where the feeling of one's
self as a distinct agent disappears because of
the absorption. So that's the first
of the articles that we read for today. One which says, here's a demand
which Aristotle makes, here's a way of understanding
that demand in the vocabulary of a contemporary work
of social psychology. The second piece that
we read for today does exactly the opposite. John Doris, following a number
of other philosophers including Gilbert Harman and
several others suggests that contemporary social psychology
shows that it's circumstance rather than character
that's the primary determinant of action. What determines how we act in
a situation says Doris, says social psychology--that is,
Doris says social psychology says--when we are in a situation
what determines our action is not something stable
about our character, not Aristotle's condition three
that it be a state that persists over time, but
rather incidental features of the situation. And as a result Aristotelian
moral psychology in particular in its third condition demands
that we commit what social psychologists call the
fundamental attribution error. In order to explain the
fundamental attribution error, let me present you with the
study that serves as the paradigm instance showing the
ways in which circumstance and not character appear to
determine behavior. And I present this study to you
both because it's central to this literature, and because
our very class we read a piece by one of its
authors, Batson. And when we get to the
punishment section, we'll be reading a piece by its other
author, John Darley. So the Good Samaritan parable
as those of you raised in Christian religious traditions
know, is a story that Jesus tells in the book of Luke when
he is asked basically the question which we've asked Plato
and Aristotle to answer for us: How is it that I can
behave in the way that morality demands? And the story that Jesus
tells runs as follows. "A certain man was going down
from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers who both
stripped him and beat him and departed leaving
him half dead. By chance a certain priest
was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed
by on the other side. In the same way, a Levite also
when he came to the place saw him and passed by
the other side. But a certain Samaritan as he
traveled came where he was when he saw him, he was
moved with compassion. Came to him, bound up his
wounds, pouring on oil and wine." That's apparently a nice
thing to do to wounds. "Set him on his own animal,
brought him to an inn, took care of him." And the
story continues. He gives the innkeeper money
to take care of the man. And Jesus says to the person who
asked for a story, "this too should you do." So the story of the Good
Samaritan is a story that, if you are thinking about it,
should lead you presumably to recognize the virtue of helping
the stranger in need. It should make it particularly
salient to you that among the moral demands that the world
places on you is that if somebody is lying injured along
the wayside, and you are in a position to help them, then
it would be in keeping with the demands of morality for
you to stop and lean down and pour oil and wine onto his
wounds--or whatever the contemporary analog
of that is. So the study that Darley and
Batson did ran as follows. They took a bunch of divinity
school students at Princeton-- young seminarians. You can see them there in their young seminarian outfits. And it asked some of them to
prepare a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. So these are divinity school
students, presumably people who are committed to developing
moral character in themselves. And what they've been asked to
do is to prepare a sermon on something that makes very, very
salient to them that if you stumble upon somebody who
is in need of your help, you should stop and help them. And then what Batson and Darley
did is they told some of these people that they were
in a great rush to get to the other side of campus where
they needed to deliver their lecture. And some of them they
didn't tell this to. And some of the seminarians had
been told to do the Good Samaritan story and some of the
seminarians had been told to prepare another story. Now you might thank if the
hypothesis that what determines behavior is character
were true that those seminarians who had prepared a
lecture on the Good Samaritan would be particularly likely to
recognize the moral needs attaching to stumbling upon
somebody who was injured. And that the question of whether
they were late or early to give their lecture
would have no bearing. Darley and Batson decided
to test this. What they did is they had the
seminarians walk over towards the lecture hall. And on their way there was
somebody lying on the sidewalk in need of their help. Now, what was predictive of
whether the seminarians stopped to help this man on the
wayside was not whether they had prepared a story about
the Good Samaritan. It was whether they were in a
rush to get to their lecture. And those of them who were,
very often not only didn't help the man, they stepped over
his body and rushed over to the theater. Now all of us have
experienced this. If I'm in a rush to pick up my
kids and I have to pull over because there's an ambulance
coming the other way, I feel incredible annoyance. Why? Because I think, "oh that person
in the ambulance, they deserve to die because I've got
to pick up my kids?" No, it's because when our attention
is directed towards an external goal, it is very
hard for us to be attentive to the moral features
of a situation. And it turns out, over and over
and over again that when we're trying to decide what
led somebody to act in a particular way, we have a
tendency to over-credit features on their
character--dispositional features--and under-credit
situational features--features of the circumstance. So we think be for example, that
whether or not-- this is the opening case in Doris'
paper-- whether or not you're likely to help somebody pick up
their papers when they drop them depends upon a feature
of your character. Are you a helpful person
or an unhelpful person? But it looks like you can
manipulate whether people are going to be willing to help
simply by letting them find a dime in a phone booth. (If you don't know what a phone
booth is, there's a movie called The Matrix and they
have phone booths in it.) Whether or not they find a dime
in the phone booth is what determines whether
they help. In the Good Samaritan study,
it's not whether they're thinking about being
helpful--it's whether they're in a rush. In the Milgram experiments,
it's not about whether in general they behave one way or
the other--it's whether they find themselves in a
circumstance where a demand is made of them. In the Vietnam "moral luck"
cases, it's not that these young men who went to Vietnam
and found themselves in a circumstance had a character
that would lead them to act in that way says this theory--it's
that they found themselves in this
circumstance. So says John Doris,
the Aristotelian theory can't be right. It presupposes a faulty picture
of human psychology. It's 11:20 now. At the beginning of next
lecture, I'll pick up again with two results from social
psychology that challenge, in certain ways, the claim that
Doris is making against Aristotle, and then we'll
continue with our discussion of Aristotle's counter side to
this--what we do in cases of weakness of the will and what
strategies are available to us if we don't satisfy Aristotle's
four conditions.
