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Thursday, August 17, 2023

Aristotle, assholes, and the Good Life

"...A few days into my Ph.D. program, I met a fellow-student, a logician, who announced that he didn't share my philosophical interests. "My parents taught me the difference between right and wrong," he said, "and I can't think what more there is to say about it." The appropriate response, and the Aristotelian one, would be to agree with the spirit of the remark. There is such a thing as the difference between right and wrong. But reliably telling them apart takes experience, the company of wise friends, and the good luck of having been well brought up. Even the philosophers who think that we would ideally act in accordance with statable principles must ask themselves how someone without experience could identify such principles in the first place.

I'm convinced that we are all Aristotelians, most of the time, even when forces in our culture briefly persuade us that we are something else. Ethics remains what it was to the Greeks: a matter of being a person of a certain sort of sensibility, not of acting on "principles," which one reserves for unusual situations of the kind that life sporadically throws up. That remains a truth about ethics even when we've adopted different terms for describing what type of person not to be: we don't speak much these days of being "small-souled" or "intemperate," but we do say a great deal about "douchebags," "creeps," and, yes, "assholes."

In one sense, it tells us nothing that the right thing to do is to act and feel as the person of good judgment does. In another sense, it tells us virtually everything that can be said at this level of generality. It points us in the right direction: toward the picture of a person with a certain character, certain habits of thinking and feeling, a certain level of self-knowledge and knowledge of other people. In Aristotle's view, I might, in a couple of years, be just about ready to start studying ethics..."

Nikhil Krishnan
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/how-to-flourish-an-ancient-guide-to-living-well-aristotle-susan-sauve-meyer-book-review

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