11/7/2022 0 Comments Goldilocks theory![]() ![]() ![]() On behalf of this approach I'd point out that if a theory "started from scratch" and then in the end told you for instance that it is morally ok to torture the innocent for no good reason, then you would immediately reject the theory without bothering to look at the details. But other moral theorists, like Aristotle, accept that people generally have pretty good ethical instincts or beliefs and are offering something different, namely a systematization or explanation of those beliefs. In some cases moral theorists want to build morality from the ground up, like Kant's categorical imperative - so that if you started as it were with a blank piece of paper and the rules of reason, you could work out what is right and what is wrong. Regarding your last point, more generally I think that ethical theories can serve different purposes. #GOLDILOCKS THEORY HOW TO#Yes, that is a very good point - we might think that (part of) what Aristotle is doing in the Ethics is giving guidance - maybe to current or potential politicians - about how to organize society such that people will become virtuous, where we all know what sorts of actions count as virtuous but don't understand it in analytical detail. What about the person who has had all the same training and life experience but goes on to do the things Aristotle describes as vices? Are they not suddenly to be considered virtues because the virtuous person is doing them? My criticism is that nobody can ever discern "what the right/mean-between-extremes choice would be" because there will always be further levels of complexity beyond that which they perceive - I'm not sure you (one in general) can ever tell whether any action is really virtuous. As I was reading it again, I was thinking of it as a kind of ancient version of the Kipling poem 'If' - apparently with the idea that if you give someone a few general boundaries and a bit-of-a-nudge, they'll end up a Man, owning all the Earth, and happy. Maybe the idea is to tell these people to believe that their good training and instruction has impacted on their 'state of being' and that they can trust in their own instincts rather than grasping towards some Platonic perfection. I think maybe this begins to pull things together - maybe this is addressed to a Platonic aristocratic group of people trained/in training for leadership. ![]() I was listening to Dominic Scott on one of the next podcasts, and you and he were talking about the beginning of the Ethics and the emphasis on political science in Book 1 Ch 2. I guess I see it as circular because if you don't have any objective standards for behaviour, then the only reason you know adultery is bad is because good (well trained, virtuous, middle aged) people don't do it. This is what distinguishes virtue from mere self-control (enkrateia: where I want to do the wrong thing but force myself to act rightly). But what that leaves out is that the virtuous person will want to do the right thing, s/he will enjoy doing it and do so out of habit, etc. As I say virtue involves discerning what the right/mean-between-extremes choice would be. Neither of these points is circular and both are controversial (when Aristotle considers other contenders he says that others have said that virtue is perhaps knowledge - as Socrates said - or that it is a god-given inspiration these would be very different from the "disposition" view).Īnd then you are right that it has a lot to do with perception. a tendency to do a certain kind of thing in a certain kind of situation and (b) specifically a disposition to spot and then choose the mean between extremes. And he's telling us at least two significant things we might not have noticed, namely that virtue is (a) a disposition, i.e. I might have said in the episode that Aristotle is more trying to analyze what virtue is than telling us how to be virtuous, or what virtue "looks like" (if we are well-brought-up we should be able to recognize virtuous actions and see examples of them). ![]()
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