I'm saying he's making an advance in ethical thinking in pointing out how is/ought frequently get conflated as if they have the same import.

I'd say it's question begging sophistry (in precisely the way Plato frames sophistry). To make the distinction is to have already presupposed that there are not facts about what is good. Now, thanks to the theological issues I mentioned earlier in this thread, such a position was already common by Hume's time. It went along with fideism and a sort of anti-rationalism and general backlash against the involvement of philosophy in faith (and so in questions of value), all a century before Hume.

Hume argues to this position by setting up a false dichotomy. Either passions (and we should suppose the appetites) are involved in morality or reason, but not both. Yet I certainly don't think he ever gives a proper explanation of why it can't be both (univocity is a culprit here of course). For most of the history of philosophy, the answer was always both (granted, Hume seems somewhat unaware of much past philosophy, and his successor Nietzsche seems to get his entire view of it from a particularly bad reading of the Phaedo and not much else from Plato).

It's sophistry because it turns philosophy into power relations and dominance. Hume admits as much. "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (T 2.3. 3.4)." This is Socrates fighting with Thacymachus, Protagoras, and that one guy who suggests that "justice" is "whatever we currently prefer" in the Republic (his name escapes me because he has just one line and everyone ignores him, since, were he right, even the sophists would lose, since there is no need for their services when being wrong is impossible). The only difference is that now the struggle is internalized. This certainly goes along with Hume (and Nietzsche's) view of the self as a "bundle of sensations" (or "congress of souls"). Yet, Plato's reply is that this is simply what the soul is like when it is sick, morbid.

Just from the point of view of the philosophy of language it seems pretty far-fetched. Imagine someone yelling:

"Your hair is on fire."
"You are going to be late for work."
"You're hurting her."
"Keep doing that and you'll break the car."
"You forgot to carry the remainder in that calculation."
"You are lying."
"You didn't do what I asked you to."
"That's illegal."
"You're going to hurt yourself doing that."
"There is a typoo in this sentence."

...or any other such statements. There are all fact claims. They are all normally fact claims people make in order to spur some sort of action, and this is precisely because the facts (generally) imply oughts. "Your hair is on fire," implies "put the fire on your head out." And such an ought is justifiable by the appetites (desire to avoid pain), passions (desire to avoid the opinions of others related to be disfigured or seen to be stupid), and reason (the desire to fullfil rationally held goals, which burning alive is rarely conducive to).

At least on the classical view, the division is incoherent. There are facts about what are good or bad for us. To say "x is better than what I have/am, but why ought I seek it?" is incoherent. What is "truly good" is truly good precisely because it is desirable, choice-worthy, what "ought to be chosen" (of course, things can merely appear choice-worthy, just as they can merely appear true). Why should we choose the most truly choice-worthy? We might as well ask why we should prefer truth to falsity, or beauty to ugliness or why 1 is greater than 0.

For the second, could you perhaps say briefly how analogous predication would apply here, in the case of what looks like two usages of "good"? It's quite possible I don't yet understand how that would work.

Short answer: just as the measure of a "good car" differs from the measure of a "good nurse" (the same things do not make them good) the measure of a "good act" or "good event" will differ from that of a "good human being" (and in this case the former are not even things, not discrete unities at all, which is precisely why focusing on them leads to things like analyzing an unending chain of consequences).

I can share a long (but still cursory) explanation when I get to my PC, but the basic idea is that "good" is said many ways. The "good" of a "good car," a "good student," and a/the "good life" are not the same thing. Yet a good car certainly relates to human well-being, as any

More specifically, to make these sorts of comparisons/predications requires a measure. This is in Book 10 and 14 of the Metaphysics I think (and Thomas' commentaries are always helpful). Easiest way to see what a measure is it to see that to speak of a "half meter" or "quarter note" requires some whole by which the reference to multitude is intelligible. Likewise, for "three ducks" to be intelligible one must have a whole duck as the unit measure.

For anything to be any thing is must have some measure of unity. We cannot even tell what the dimensive quantities related to some abstract body are unless that body is somehow set off from "everything else" (i.e., one cannot measure a white triangle on a white background—there are a lot of interesting parallels to information theory in St. Thomas).

I think I already explained Plato's thing about how the "rule of reason" makes us more unified and self-determining (self-determining because we are oriented beyond what already are and have, beyond current beliefs and desires). Next, consider that organisms are proper beings because they have a nature, because they are the source of their own production and movement (not absolutely of course, they are not subsistent). Some non-living systems are self-organizing to some degree (and stars, hurricanes, etc. have "life cycles").The scientific literature on complexity and dissipative, self-organizing systems is decent at picking up on Aristotle here, but largely ignores later Patristic, Islamic, and medieval extensions.

Yet non-living things lack the same unity because they don't have aims (goal-directedness, teleonomy) unifying their parts (human institutions do).

The goodness for organisms is tightly related to their unity. In general, it is not good for an organism to lose its unity and die. "Ok, but sometimes they do this on purpose, bees sting and stinging kills them."

Exactly! Because what ultimately drives an organism is its goals. Brutes can't ask what is "truly good" but they can pursue ends that lie beyond them. And note, bees sacrifice themselves because they are oriented towards the whole, just as Boethius and Socrates do. This is because goodness always relates to the whole (because of this tight relationship with unity).

So to return to how goodness is said in many ways, goodness is said as respect to a measure. The measure of a "good house" is a house fulfilling it ends (artifacts are a little tricky though since they lack intrinsic aims and essences; people want different things in a house). The measure of the "good duck" is the paradigmatic flourishing duck (no need to posit independent forms existing apart from particulars here BTW).

Because equivocity is so rampant in our day, essentially the norm, let's not use "good person." Let's use "excellent person." The excellent person has perfected all the human excellences, the virtues. "It is good for you to be excellent." Or "it is excellent for you to be good." In either case the measure for "you," as a human, is human excellence, flourishing.

But because reason is transcedent, we can aim at "the best thing possible," which is to be like God. God wants nothing, lacks nothing, and fears nothing. Yet God is not indifferent to creatures, for a few reasons but the most obvious is that the "best" lack no good, and love is one of these.

God can also just be the rational limit case of perfection, having the best life conceivable. We might miss much in this deflation, but it still works.

We want to be the best person and live the best life possible. At the same time, goodness always relates to the whole, to unity. No doubt, we can usefully predicate "good" of events, but this goodness is parasitic on things. There is no good or bad in a godless world without any organisms (anything directed by aims). You can't have goodness without wholes with aims.

The predication vis-á-vis some good event has to be analagous because nothing can be "good for an event." The event is good or bad for some thing, according to its measure.




In the 19th century there were many competing theories of heat and electromagnetism. There was phlogiston, caloric, aether, etc. Are we best of returning to the specific, isolated theories, or looking at how what is good in each can be unified?

You might say "but the natural sciences are different, they make progress." And I would agree. It's easier to make progress when one studies less general principles. Yet they don't always make progress. Recall the Nazi's "Aryan physics" or Stalin's "communist genetics." The natural sciences can backslide into bad ideas and blind allies. It is easier for philosophy to do so.

Yes, the "intellect as a whole" as the image of the cosmos versus "the mathematical model."

Yes, this is the sort of thing we want to be true, and it’s very poetically expressed. But at this point one really has to stop and say, “But what do you mean? If you can’t explain what it means without images of spirals and fractals, aren’t I entitled to wonder if it’s actually (rationally) explicable at all?” For, when all’s said and done, I’m still left with what appear to be two quite different usages of “good,” and the desire, but not the means, to unite them. Simply asserting their union won’t do.

I very much want “the Good” to be univocal, and all the uses of “good” to be instances of the same thing, so that “moral good” would not be sui generis in a worrisome sense, any more than “aesthetic good” would be. But . . . the problem is that, IMO, you haven’t yet shown how it can be the case. Perhaps no one can, but we have to do more than assert what I’ve been calling a “metaphysical union of goods” but not explain how it

Two things:

First, it seems like you keep ignoring the option of analagous predication here, but have you given an argument for why it is implausible?

Second, it possible that the demand that everything be reduced to univocal predication part of the problem? Univocal predication is proper to logic. Starting with Descartes, there is an increasing attempt to reduce philosophy to logic and mathematics. This doesn't work. For example, when Sam Harris tries to lay out an ethics that is, in some key respects, quite close to Aristotle and St. Thomas, the project founders on the problem of univocity.

Harris has to wonder about "moral paradoxes" that arise from trying to maximize either average well-being or total well-being. They are interesting, but do we really think human flourishing and goodness are the types of things that can be summed up? To sum something or to take a mean of it is to have already made it a multitude. This is why Harris is able to offer little more than the conviction that we can muddle through such paradoxes, and fairly unconvincing attempts to solve collective action problems, prisoner's dilemmas, etc. using appeals to the observation that "fairness activates reward centers in the brain" in some highly controlled, large sample studies.

This gets back to Banno's idea of a "moral calculus," by which we sum things up and get, I would assume, a numerical value of how good they are. And the idea of some sort of database of rules all rational agents should agree too seems if anything more of a stretch because it seems to ignore the social and historical contextuality of the Good in human life, particularly as expressed in the common good.

But if the good is what "all aims seek," and aims are what allow us (and all things) to become more truly unified, more truly "one," then the good always relates to the whole, and it cannot be anything but an analagous principle because the Good is an extremely general principle (the most general for Aristotle). This is for the same reason that there cannot be one univocal measure of life for all organisms, and yet there are not multiple sui generis lifes (plural) either.

Perhaps no one can, but we have to do more than assert what I’ve been calling a “metaphysical union of goods” but not explain how it works in a way that defeats the objections I’ve raised so far.

But this is precisely what the Physics and Metaphysics (and St. Thomas' respective commentaries on them) argues to (building off the general argument of how the Good is involved in self-determination across the Platonic corpus). It isn't just asserted. If one takes a developmental view of the Aristotlean corpus, this isn't where he started, it's where he ended up.

It just happens that the explanation is also what grounds the sciences and explains discursive reasoning.

How in the world can execution be good for Socrates? Better than the alternatives, sure, but good? You can’t just fold the two meanings of “good” together by fiat, and say that because Socrates has made a good choice, has done a virtuous thing, it therefore automatically becomes good for him. That is what we want for a conclusion, but we lack the argument.

First, you're returning back to "all fortune is good fortune." We need not affirm this to affirm the classical view of the good (Aristotle doesn't ), so we need not affirm that being executed or tortured is "good for you."

Although if something is the "best of all options," then it also has something good about it, no? Do we need to say that something is "the best possible" for it to be good at all?

Second, "being good" is most properly said of beings, not things beings do, and certainly not things they do rarely. Goodness relates to the whole. The measure of a good life is a life, not a sum of moments. Recall Solon and ben Sirach: "count no man happy until he is dead."

You keep pivoting from the whole to the part. This is a different sort of "slide into multiplicity." At the very least, this is unhelpful for understanding the ancients.

I'd argue that it's unhelpful for ethics as well. Trying to generate rules for isolated acts, or calculate the good derived from the consequences of different isolated moments is unhelpful. We can consider the example of the Persian street urchin for whom being unjustly maimed was the "best thing that ever happened to him," or the Frenchman whose rare just act "ruined his whole life."

Plus, if we look at isolated acts, being executed sometimes is good for someone. It might be better to be executed than live in a state of terrible suffering. Just assume that if Socrates had been found innocent he'd catch a disease a week after he would have been executed and would then die a particularly excruciating and drawn out death.

If we say "but surely it is better to live and not be subject to immense suffering," then why not say "it's always better to have what is truly best?" But what is truly best for an individual is going to involve what is truly best for the whole world, and so the focus on isolated acts with break down here anyhow.




To be sure, we can usefully speak of good and bad acts. It is probably most useful to speak of these in terms of what generally follows from them though, the unifying principles at work in them. Otherwise we will be stuck tracing down an endless line of causes tied to some specific act, a butterfly effect by which our decision to cheat on our wife today prevents a genocide 180 years from now.

Rules have the same problem if they are rigidly applied. We either have rules that sometimes seem to force us to do obviously bad things, like turning people over to the SS because we "should never lie," or we end up caveating them so much to avoid preverse outcomes that we might as well just make them general advice, with the true rule being "strive to be the best you can be."

"Because it's good for you", sure -- but which one?

Well, for this you need metaphysics to explain why the Good is a principle and why we should think it is a unified principle.

Do Stoicism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Christianity, Taoism, Confucianism, and Epicureanism all have totally different views of what is good? It doesn't seem to me that they do; there is a lot of overlap. So, we might assume some unity there.

Certainly, the Patristics didn't seem to think "the philosophers," had a totally different idea of goodness from that of Christianity. "All truth is God's truth," after all. Sometimes Pope Francis's: "All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine." is taken to be an arch post-modern hersey, but it's simply the same Logos universalism that has been around since the Church Fathers, and which is enshrined in the Catechism (also, better apologetics than calling people infidels or pagans).

Presumably, there is some way to decide between "is statements," else knowledge is impossible. And there are also arguments that we might say warrant more of less credence, while being far from certain.

The issue of "choice" to me is simply embarking seriously on any ethical life and the life of philosophy itself. As St. Augustine and St. Anselm say, we must "have faith that we might understand," since no practical theory of the ethical life will be fully apparent to us at first glance.

Also, I feel I should note that no one in the classical tradition says that everyone should be contemplatives. St. Thomas and the anonymous "Cloud of Unknowing" say specifically that this is not so. Only a few people have the temperament and aptitude for this path, and not all can follow it even if they do due to other demands and responsibilities. St. Augustine turns away a potential monastic because he is a high ranking Roman military official and is needed there.

The other thing is that the heights of contemplation are not attained through discursive reason. This ties in to classical theories of knowledge. In the Ad Thelassium, St. Maximus goes into depth about how direct experience is superior to discursive reasoning (using I Corinthians to justify this). St. Thomas even has a chapter in the Summa Contra Gentiles that is titled something like: "Why the Happiness of Man is Not Knowledge of God had by Demonstration." By contemplation is meant something like "mystical illumination," and this was often had by people in the "active life" (e.g. St. Francis's vision of the seraphim).

The life of philosophy is adjacent to and supports the life of contemplation, but contemplation is something the laity can engage in. On some views, the entire point of the liturgy is contemplation (e.g. the modern Catholic "liturgical movement.)

On a related note, St. Palladius's "Saying of the Desert Fathers," opens with a story like this. Three saints are together and leave to go do good in the world. One is given the gift of healing and heals. One is given the gift of teaching and teaches. They do this for many years. Yet both eventually grow discouraged because death and dishonesty still abound in the fallen world.

The last saint went out to the desert to pray for the world in solitude. Years later, the other two come to join him, both beaten down by the world. He tells them to stir the well he has dug and look inside. They do, and all they can see is the clouds of dirt, a sea of small granules obscuring everything.

He tells them to wait, and an hour later asks them to look again. This time they can see clear to the bottom, and the light of the Sun is clearly reflected, allowing them to see themselves.

"So it is with the spirit is the moral." To see both the light of God and the inner self requires stillness, hesychasm. But the other moral is that even the hermit ends up helping people, and it's the same way in St. Athanasius' St. Anthony the Great and other hermit stories. There is no fully contemplative life, it's always active as well, because eros leads up and agape pours down.

Harris gets some crucial things right. However, he knows he has serious problems. In particular he:

-Wants to define science broadly such that it is continuous with philosophy. This certainly justifiable, but then he has no theory for how the sciences hang together and form a unity. This is a problem, particularly because different sciences have different measures that are roughly analogous to "goodness." For instance, medicine has health and economics has utility, but people often derive utility from things that are bad for their health, and it is not always obvious which metric is to be preferred.

-He equivocates on what he means by "science" so as to exclude philosophy he doesn't like from consideration (also a general tendency to rely on incredulity rather than actually making arguments).

-Has no real answer to collective action problems, prisoners' dilemmas, or free rider problems, which are all over ethics, because he has any such unifying vision of well-being, goodness, and the sciences. Hence, he has trouble explaining why it is good to be virtuous.

-His exclusion of freedom on incredibly flimsy grounds (i.e. freedom must mean "uncaused action" and something like substance dualism), robs him of the ability to explain why virtue is good and some "forms of well-being" deeper, because they lead to self-determination. Self-determination is, however, a prerequisite for actually turning moral philosophy into real action.

I think his project could really benefit from reading Aristotle and even more so St. Thomas, but given his prejudices, that seems unlikely.

I'm actually writing a paper on this because, from my experience in government, it seems that something like Harris view is dominant amongst policymakers and economists (less the religious bigotry, which most don't share). Yet there is a lot in Harris that is said better in earlier thought.

Harris makes a lot of excellent points:

My critics have been especially exercised over the subtitle of my book, “how science can determine human values.” The charge is that I haven’t actually used science to determine the foundational value (well-being) upon which my proffered science of morality would rest. Rather, I have just assumed that well-being is a value, and this move is both unscientific and question-begging. Here is Blackford:

If we presuppose the well-being of conscious creatures as a fundamental value, much else may fall into place, but that initial presupposition does not come from science. It is not an empirical finding… Harris is highly critical of the claim, associated with Hume, that we cannot derive an “ought” solely from an “is” – without starting with people’s actual values and desires. He is, however, no more successful in deriving “ought” from “is” than anyone else has ever been. The whole intellectual system of The Moral Landscape depends on an “ought” being built into its foundations.

Again, the same can be said about medicine, or science as a whole. As I point out in my book, science is based on values that must be presupposed—like the desire to understand the universe, a respect for evidence and logical coherence, etc. One who doesn’t share these values cannot do science. But nor can he attack the presuppositions of science in a way that anyone should find compelling. Scientists need not apologize for presupposing the value of evidence, nor does this presupposition render science unscientific. In my book, I argue that the value of well-being—specifically the value of avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone—is on the same footing. There is no problem in presupposing that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding and that normative morality consists, at an absolute minimum, in acting so as to avoid it. To say that the worst possible misery for everyone is “bad” is, on my account, like saying that an argument that contradicts itself is “illogical.” Our spade is turned. Anyone who says it isn’t simply isn’t making sense. The fatal flaw that Blackford claims to have found in my view of morality could just as well be located in science as a whole—or reason generally. Our “oughts” are built right into the foundations. We need not apologize for pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps in this way. It is far better than pulling ourselves down by them.

Yet he sometimes makes them very poorly, and St. Thomas is the prime candidate I can think of who makes this same point far more lucidly and in the context of an incredibly tight system.

I'll just share Kenneth Gallagher's metaphysical (as opposed to nomic/physical necessity) principle of causation vis-a-vis mobile being:

For no being insofar as it is changing is its own ground of being. Every state of a changing being is contingent: it was not a moment ago and will not be a moment from now. Therefore the grasping of a being as changing is the grasping of it as not intelligible in itself-as essentially referred to something other than itself.

Kenneth Gallagher - The Philosophy of Knowledge

If you are good, it will be good for you, you will experience something that you perceive as good.” And you’ve been reading it as “It is morally more desirable for you to be a good person.”

I would tend to disagree with both. It is not always good for us to have what we "perceive as good." We can be wrong about what is truly good or truly best. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the bolded part, yet I fear this framing might lead towards the another "slide into multiplicity" whereby we have many sui generis "Goods" with "moral good" constituting just one good among a plurality.

The point of a principle and measure is that it unifies a disparate multitude, resolving the problem of the "One and the Many." We can know the vast plurality of being because, even if there are infinite causes, there are a finite number of principles each realized in many times and places (Aristotle's critique of Anaxagoras at the outset of the Physics).

And I fear your following sentences confirm this suspicion. My point though is that "being good" (i.e. being truly better people, living truly better lives) is "good for us," that is, "it is actually better and more truly desirable," to be "morally good," although I would prefer to say "virtuous," instead of "morally good." Moral good is not its own sort of good here, distinct from the good of a "good car" or "good food." All related to flourishing. Rather, moral good is a more perfect manifestation of a principle analogously realized across a multitude.

That does not mean that we currently desire to be virtuous or morally good, or to act in ways that are virtuous or morally good. In the states of vice, incontinence, and continence we don't desire what is good. Rather, the point is that "if we knew the truth about what is better, we would prefer to act virtuously and to be virtuous," and "if we did not suffer from ignorance or weakness of will, we shall always choose the better over the worse." Again, Milton's Satan does not say "evil be thou evil for me."

Since you agree that it is better to be Socrates, rather than a cowardly version of Socrates, then it should make sense why it is good for Socrates to be virtuous. Socrates is free to "do the right thing," in a way the cowardly Socrates is not.

It could be the case that telling the truth in a particular case will do you no good whatsoever – it is not a good for you -- but truthtelling is still important to our community, so we recommend it nevertheless.

It seems plausible that telling the truth sometimes does no one much good. This is why I prefer the term "virtuous" to "morally good" and to focus on people and not individual acts. In The Dark Knight was Batman right to hide (to lie about) the fact that Harvey Dent degenerated into the monstrous Two Face? That seems to be what the film would lead us to believe. But rather than quibble over whether any individual deception is morally good or bad, given the vast contingencies involved, I think it's easier to say that it is better to be "prudent, loving, and charitable, etc." such that one is virtuous in how one goes about any such decisions.

"Know thyself" is, in part, an ethical command. This is why analyzing acts in abstraction is often unhelpful. Would it be better to stick up for someone who is being unfairly punished and to take the blame oneself (particularly if you are the person truly responsible)? Probably. But if you know yourself well, and you know that you're very likely to buckle under pressure and then shift the blame back onto the person who was going be unjustly punished, and you know that this in turn will make their punishment far worse, then perhaps you shouldn't do that.

More realistically, it isn't always good to over-promise, even if your promises involve doing good, if you know you won't be able to keep those promises.

Yes, the equivocation is a matter of degree. But if they meant exactly the same thing, the statement would be vacuous.

Are the theorems of geometry vacuous because they are already contained in Euclid's postulates? Are syllogisms vacuous because all conclusions are contained in the premises? Is deterministic computation vacuous because its results always follow from the inputs with a probability of 100%?

We might think "2+2" is just another way to say "4," and "1 ÷ 3" just another way to say "1/3," but "179 ÷ 3 " is "59 and 2/3rds" seems genuinely informative unless you're an arithmetic prodigy.

Plus, not all circles are viscous circles. I would say "it's good (truly better) for you to be good—to be a good person and live a good life," is circular in a sense, but the way an ascending spiral is circular. It loops back around on itself at higher levels, with greater depths beneath it, in a sort of fractal recurrence.

The point of a truly transcedent Good, Hegel's "true infinite " as set against the "bad infinite," (the latter being defined in terms of the finite, the former being truly "without limit") is that it is never fully "contained." As St. Gregory of Nyssa has it, the beatific vision is an infinite asymptotic approach to the One who is the Good.

Since I tend to agree with Hegel's case for a circular, fallibalist epistemology, I see no great difficulty in the lack of a "foundation." One cannot find such a foundation for any facts, not "I have hands," nor "the principle of non-contradiction holds." Reason, being transcedent, can always question such foundations—"the Logos is without beginning or end" because it is the ground for "beginning" and "end," "before" and "after."

As to the idea that "all fortune is good fortune," I feel like that is a separable proposition and it only makes sense in framed in the rather complex philosophy of history and Providence that comes up through Eusebius, St. Jerome, Boethius, St. Maximus, etc. and perhaps recovered to some degree by Hegel (a theology student who encountered the Patristics). It requires a corporate view of man and of man's freedom, e.g., St. Gregory of Nyssa's view of Adam as containing all men, the idea that particulars are "in" their principles (Diophantus), like the idea that all Jews , even those alive today, were present at the presentation of the Torah (Deut 29:9-14).

The point is that the identity of Lady Fortuna, properly understood, is Providence.



:up:

Right, it's worth noting that Hume's division on comes up in a particular context where renewed Euthyphro Dilemmas are leading to ideas like Divine Command Theory where "what is good," is ultimately tied to some sort of inscrutable act of will. The question, "is God's freedom limited by the fact that God can only do what is good," is incoherent on the understanding that God is Goodness itself.

I know of no similar move in the Eastern tradition or among the Islamic scholars, and the ancient Western ideas that get somewhat close are still quite different. This is where Taylor's "subtraction narratives" of secularism, where secularism is just "rational thought with superstition removed," are dangerous, because it obscures the setting in which Hume's point is makes any sense at all.

I think that, like so much of Hume's thought, the Guillotine relies on question begging. Hume is a diagnostician, seeing what follows from the assumptions and prejudices of his era. But ask most people "why is it bad for you if I burn out your eyes, or if I burn out your sons eyes," and the responses will be something like:

"If you burn out my eyes it would be incredibly painful and then I would be blind, so of course it wouldn't be good."

The response: "ah ha! Look, you're tried to justify a value statement about goodness with facts!" and the idea that what is "good" doesn't relate to these facts is prima facie ridiculous here. As JS Mill says, "one has to make some significant advances in philosophy to believe it." You only get to a position where it possible for it to be "choiceworthy" to prefer "what is truly worse," is if you have already assumed that what is "truly worse" is in some way arbitrary or inscrutable in the first place.

Sample: A: “I don’t see what good will come out of exercising and eating a balanced diet.” B: “No, it’s healthy for you to be healthy.” A: “Oh, I see. Exercising and good nutrition will make me healthy, and being healthy is desirable and good for me.” I’m sure you can analyze this for yourself and see why it involves different uses of “healthy” to avoid vacuity.

The terms here aren't completely equivocal either though. They have an analogous relation.

I’m saying that when an individual does good things for their own sake, they are made good as a result. And the way in which they are now good is exactly the same as the way in which those good things are good. The concept of ‛good’ has remained the same; it’s the individual who has united themselves with the Good.”

But the good by which someone is a "good leader" or a "good basketball player," is not univocally the same good as that of a "good pen" or a "good knife." Just as "lentils are a healthy food" a way different from "J is healthy."

And now we return to the question of the “good” of Socrates’ execution. If what you’re saying is that Socrates has become a better person by accepting his death, we have no argument. If you’re saying that Socrates has united himself, as an individual, with something we can broadly capitalize as the Good, again we agree.

Right, but this is the whole point. As respects the human good, good is primarily said of persons. A "good life" is not atomistically divisible into a collection of "good acts" or "good moments," such that we tally up the score at the end via some sort of calculus. François Mauriac's The Viper's Tangle is an excellent example of someone becoming a "good person" only at the end of a "bad life."The relation is to the whole. Socrates is a good person who lives a good life; his death doesn't change this. We could consider Socrates claim in the Phaedo that philosophy teaches us how to die, because it teaches us not to become entrapped by goods that will inevitably be lost.

Laying all this out, I’m aware that it’s partially an appeal to something I find self-evident among English language-users, and I hardly know what more to say to justify that. I don’t mean I couldn’t be wrong, and what I’d actually like would be for you to show me some usages of “good” that contradict this in a relevant way. And mind you, I don’t mean good as in “better than” in the “lesser of two evils" sense. I mean an actual, positive "good for me." Maybe there’s some way we speak of "good for you" that I’m overlooking or failing to see clearly. But I hope this gives you a better sense of why I think the “two equivocal notions” idea is important.

You are pivoting from "'it is good to be good' is vacuous," to "executions and maiming are good." But no one claims this. Indeed, Socrates claims that it will be evil for the citizens of Athens to execute him. The reason it is not primarily bad for Socrates is because it will not rob him of being a "good person" or having lived a "good life," nor of his virtue, nor his grasp on what is truly best.

Again, the focus on the isolated act is probably unhelpful for understanding where the ancients are coming from. Consequentialism is full of strange paradoxes. Is it good to be maimed? On average, no. In some cases, it might be the best thing that ever happened to someone. We can suppose a story about a poor Persian street child, who has been neglected and is driven around by their appetites and passions to survive on the streets of Persepolis. They get caught stealing a loaf of bread and have the offending hand lopped off.

Yet we could well imagine a case where this causes some benefactor to take pity on the child, to take them in and raise them, and this results in the child living a fulfilling and successful life, becoming a virtuous person, etc.

Likewise, it's normally good to send someone to a high end school. Yet we can easily imagine a case where an otherwise successful and virtuous student has trouble adjusting to a wealthy private school, falls in with the wrong crowd, and spirals into vice and ruin.

Yet ethics is primarily about what we can choose, and what we can choose in terms of our own capacity for self-determination often relates to how we respond to fortune, or the acts of the wicked.

When people say "it is good for you to be good," in the overwhelming number of cases they are attempting to draw a contrast between apparent or lesser goods, and true and greater goods. That is, it is "better for you to be virtuous, to enjoy charity, to love, to be prudent." You could probably almost always rephrase it better as "it is better for you to be a good person then to pursue these apparent or lesser goods."

I cannot conceive of being maimed and tortured as not robbing someone of their flourishing – unless you arbitrarily make “flourishing” torture-proof, thanks to previous "patterns of behavior." It seems the very epitome of such a robbery to me. Does it make them a bad person? Of course not. Was it the lesser of two evils?

Again, this seems to be trying to make the case that it isn't evil to torture or maim people. Who is going to claim that?

The point is, as you allow, these things do not rob Origen or Maximus of their virtue, or of their having lived a good life, just as Martin Luther King's being shot did not make his life a bad one. Would it be better for MLK to have not been shot? Sure, but "getting shot" is not an ethical choice he made, it was an evil choice made by James Earl Ray.

Socrates is not saying that good men never stub their toes, or get the flu. He is focusing on what goodness is primarily said of.

This all by way of making the point that we can follow others in valuing virtue-theoretic approaches, but I don't see the virtue theorist as escaping any of the problems which deontologists or consequentialists or specifications therein deal with -- that this is something of an overpromise. The ancients are interesting because they give us a point to reflect from but they don't overcome the problem of choice -- which is to say, should I follow Christ, or should I follow Epicurus?

I'm not particularly sure what you're expecting, someone to decide for you? People refuse to accept that the Earth is round, they deny the germ theory of infectious disease, they think floride in their water is a mind control technique, they disagree about what the value of 1/0 should be, or if something can simultaneously both be and not-be in an unqualified sense. Rarely, if ever, do demonstrations in any sense "force" people to see the correctness of some view.

Is the idea that anyone who affirms a certain ethics or metaphysics shall become perfected by it if it is "the right one?" But this runs counter to the philosophy underpinning many systems of ethics. Epictetus claims most "free men" are, in truth, slaves. Plato doesn't have everyone being easily sprung from the cave. Christ says at Matthew 7:22-23:

"Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’"

I don't understand how the Good would be sought for its own sake.

Aristotle's example of what is sought for its own sake is eudaimonia—roughly "happiness," "well-being," or "flourishing." This appears to be a strong candidate.

Does this imply, as many used to believe, that goodness is a kind of transcendental, independent of contexts and intersubjective agreements?

It can, but it need not. However, if the Good was properly "transcedent," then—by definition—it cannot be absent from that which it transcends (e.g. the contexts of intersubjective agreements).

Likewise, if the Good is absolute, then it is not merely "reality as set apart from appearances," but is rather inclusive of reality and appearances. Appearances are really appearances, and how a thing appears is part of the absolute context. This is why the Good cannot be a point on Plato's divided line, it relates to the whole. But appearances aren't independent of what they are appearances of, and whatever appears good must really appear good in some sense.

At any rate, it is one thing to say that the Good is filtered through or shaped by intersubjective agreements, it would be quite another to say that it is "intersubjective agreements all the way down," or not explicable in terms of anything other than such agreements. Since notions of Goodness apply seemingly everywhere, we might think it is an extremely general principle.

Aristotle, for instance, thinks happiness transcends one's own lifespan. If, for instance, one has lived a life centered around one's family, and one dies trying to save them from a flood, and yet they nonetheless end up drowning later that day, then this is not a "happy ending." "Count no man happy until he be dead," is the famous saying here (actually from Solon), but the Bible has its own version, Sirach 11:28:


Call no one happy before his death;
a man will be known through his children.

Seems to me that goodness varies greatly over time.

Does goodness change, or beliefs about what is good? Beliefs about everything vary by epoch, culture, and individual. Yet we normally don't want to say that the subjects of those beliefs change. For example, the cause of small pox didn't change when people began to believe it was caused by a virus. Rather they came to believe small pox is caused by a virus because it is so. Likewise, the age of the universe is normally not taken to change when beliefs about this fact do, and this holds even though the specific measure of time we generally use to present and understand "the age of the universe"—the year—is a social construct.

While I don't think I'm a total relativist, I don't see how we can move beyond the culturally located nature of goodness. I get that many of us believe in moral progress and argue for various positions (which implies better and worse morality) but is it any more than just pragmatically trying to usher in our preferred forms of social order?

Why prefer some forms of social order over others? Presumably because we think they are truly better. Pragmatism only makes sense if one has an aim in the first place.

Here is a decent start:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities. Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity- as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others- in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued [e.g. for the sake of the rider that we make saddles, or the golfer that we make good golf clubs]. It makes no difference whether the activities themselves are the ends of the actions, or something else apart from the activities, as in the case of the sciences just mentioned.

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art.

https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html

So, one might assume that whatever the Good is, it is sought for its own sake and that it must be a principle realized unequally in a disparate multitude of particulars (e.g. saddle making, painting, argument, health, etc.). One might also assume that other things are sought in virtue of the degree to which the perfect, possess, or participate in this principle.

Plato's image is of the Good as a light by which we see. I think this works in some ways. We can imagine a very bright spotlight, too bright for us to look directly at perhaps. But between us and the light are a vast multitude of variously colored panes of glass through which the light passes, as well as different sorts of mirrors reflecting the light, and all sorts of things lit by the light, which hang from the ceiling.

Depending on how the light travels to us, how we stand and turn our heads or move about, the objects hanging from the ceiling might look very different as refracted through the intervening panes and mirrors. The objects we see are of different sorts, just as the good of a "good car" is different from the good of a "good rifle." And some panes of glass we look at the objects through might be tinted dark, such that very little light gets through, whereas others might be clearer, allowing more of the light to reach us. Some of the things we can see might be larger, as "good health" is more relevant than "a good pen." Some of the mirrors might be fun house mirrors that manage to distort the light, so that we are confused about what we see. Small things might appear large, and large things small. In some cases, we might mistake the brightness of a mirror with the source of the light itself, just as people thought the Moon was the source of its own light for millennia.

Perhaps behind all the things hanging from the ceiling there are many different lights? But I should think just one.

But the achievement of ataraxia is what's truly eudemon, no?

Maybe for many of the Stoics, and arguably for Aristotle, but I think what ataraxia normally describes is just the lower stages of the "beatific vision." We want to ascend beyond that! To henosis and hesychasm, and beyond even that, to the ultimate goal of theosis and deification.

That's the ultimate telos of man in the Christian development of the tradition at least(and from what I understand Sufism is quite similar). As St. Athanasius' says in On the Incarnation "God became man that man might become God." Or St. Paul: "Christ is the firstborn of many brethren," partaking in the "incomparable glory."

For Boethius, the "Stoic medicine" is a numbing agent to help him get back on track for the ascent after the whole death sentence thing. Lady Philosophy likens it to bending a bent stick too far in the other direction in order to straighten it.

This is what I'm skeptical of. Not in principle, but certainly in practice. We need look no further than the success of the Catholic church to realize that the program doesn't teach us to be virtuous -- else the society would have no need for rituals of cleansing.

I feel like there is a wealth of evidence from the psychology literature to support the notion that virtue (or some instrumental approximation of it) can be taught, or that education is conducive to virtue. But, since virtue is self-determining, no education ensures virtue. Alcibiades has Socrates as a teacher and it doesn't save him from vice.

Overall though, I think the effects of mass education, as poorly as it might be implemented, are still a huge net positive. For one, it makes societies more self-determining, more able to reach collective goals. Certain desirable social systems are unworkable without most citizens having some sort of education.

But as it is it's basically set up with the belief that no one can achieve the good. What good is that good?

I'm not sure if I get what you mean here.

Really? I find this dichotomy occurring constantly in the Platonic dialogues. If these two concepts were so inseparable, why do so many of Socrates’ interlocutors dispute it? It reads to me like the debate was hot and heavy then, as it is now.

BTW, this is absolutely true, but Plato is essentially the origin point of the classical metaphysical tradition. He is staking out the ground for what would become the philosophical "tradition." The other thing is that Plato is using the dialogues to contrast bad (and poorly informed) opinions with better ones, and apparent good with what is truly good. The "agreement" MacIntyre references respects what the philosophically/theologically adept generally thought vis-a-vis what constituted the "better opinions" and "real good," not what "everyone thought was good," or what the "learned" actually managed to pursue. Italian mercenaries probably weren't reading too much of Boethius for instance, even if he was the best seller of the middle ages.

Second, I don't think anyone wants to claim that "most people" had bought into the ethics that flow from "classical metaphysics," even when it was dominant. Due to the technological, political, and economic realities of the time "most people" were illiterate serfs. So, the claim of (relative) consensus is much more about the people serving as tutors for the nobility, those in the university system, the learned, etc.

Also, contemporary scholars might balk at my mixing Plato, Boethius, Aquinas, etc. into unified position. The common thing to do in contemporary analyses of this tradition is to break up the thinkers and show how they differ. But, per this tradition itself, this would be to fall victim to the "slide into multiplicity," to focus on "the Many" rather than the unifying "One," i.e., the unifying principles that run through the whole tradition from Plato up into St. Bonaventure and Meister Eckhart. Part of the reason medievals are comfortable throwing together Plato with Pseudo-Dionysus, right next to Muslim and Jewish scholars, is because of their conviction that the core of everyone's project is the same unifying principles. As St. Augustine says "all truth is God's truth." This is the "Logos universalism" that Tilich speaks about.

I only ask that you acknowledge the “for you” in “It will be good for you to study philosophy.” And it is a sensible and coherent thing to say. But again, consider “It will be good for you to [be good / do good things / live a good life – I’m not sure which way of filling this out you prefer].” What is being said here? That the good you do will also be good for you?

Well, on the classical view, studying philosophy is "good for you" because it makes you a good person who loves justice and acts justly. In the Republic, each of Plato's interlocutors are a stand-in for one of Plato's "types of men" (e.g. 'tyrannical man," "timocratic man," etc.). Through their interactions with Socrates, each one "moves up a step" by the end of the dialogue (Sugrue's lectures on Plato are great for capturing all these subtle dramatic elements). In the conversation with Glaucon, Plato distinguishes between those things that are good in virtue of something else, those that are sought for their own sake, and those that are both. It seems that you are afraid that anything in the "both" category is at risk of becoming either vacuous or else must actually be composed of two equivocal notions, but I don't totally understand why this is.

But yes, doing the right thing is "good for you," this is precisely Boethius point in the Consolation. It's easy to misread his "all fortune is good fortune" as the sort of metaphysical optimism that Voltaire skewers with Candide's Dr. Pangloss. It isn't though. All fortune is good fortune for the one who is beyond fortune.

The only way I can think of for “the good you do will also be good for you” to make sense with a single meaning for “good” is simply to stipulate an arbitrary meaning for “good” that excludes all our normal personal uses, and insist that, even though we don’t realize it, the virtuous person always experiences everything as “good for him.” I find this far-fetched and ad hoc.

To be honest, I am not really sure why you think "good" must become arbitrary here. Do you think it would be "truly better" for Socrates to escape his execution by fleeing or by apologetically recanting at his trial? Would it be better for Carton not to save Darnay?

The point isn't necessarily that "getting executed is good for Socrates," although Boethius will make something like this argument, because it is indeed Socrates' execution that makes his message ring so clear, and which inspires his student Plato. If it was "good for Socrates to have people take his message seriously," then it was "good for him to be executed."

But the more general point would be that it is better not to flee, or more importantly, better to be the sort of person who will not flee. No man is totally self-determining.The world has challenges. Yet it is better to seek after what is truly good and not just what appears good or what others say is good. This is the only way in which one becomes united and self-determining. This is why Socrates says that if his sons fail to love justice they will "think themselves something when they are truly nothing." They will be more "bundles of external causes," less self-determining.

What is being said here? That the good you do will also be good for you? But if, per Aristotle, the highest good is contemplation, then being tortured to death as a result of the good you do wouldn’t seem to qualify.

Perhaps here is where part of the disconnect is. Modern philosophy has a strong tendency to atomize in its analysis. So, when we talk of freedom or goodness, we often speak of "free or good acts." Both rules-based ethical reasoning and consequentialism prioritize the act.

This allows for seemingly paradoxical scenarios. For example, suppose we have a relatively unvirtuous Frenchman, a young guy who is a boaster, a drunk, an adulterer, lazy, gets into fights, and is a bad father. But, due to a pang of conscience, he hides a Jewish neighbor from the Nazis. He does the right thing here. As a result, he gets caught and sent to a concentration camp. He has a terrible time and develops bad PTSD. His wife, thinking him dead, leaves him. He becomes a full time drunk, lives a miserable life, and dies in a Marseilles gutter at 45.

Now suppose that he was young during the war and had a rough childhood but, had he not hidden his neighbor, he would have grown out of some of his bad habits. Maybe he even would have found God and reformed in a major way, becoming deeply spiritual. He would have become virtuous, had a life of contemplation, better fortune, etc. all due to doing the wrong thing. Well clearly, it cannot always be good for us to do the right thing!

But this is the problem of focusing on acts and unknowable contingencies. Aristotle claims being is "primarily said of substances," things, most appropriately beings (i.e. chiefly organisms which possess a principle of self-organization and self-determination). The case for this is that acts don't occur without things. We do not have "running" in the absence of something that runs for instance. So, while we might usefully speak of free or good acts, it is primarily people (and perhaps organizations) that are good or free. And this particularly makes sense if we think of virtue as a habit, and happiness as being defined as a "good life" not a "good state" (Aristotle, Solon, Athens' great lawgiver, and the Wisdom of Solomon all note that we shouldn't consider a man's life happy until he is dead).

So the question is not primarily: "depending on the vicissitudes of fortune, will it always be better to commit to isolated 'good acts?'" The question, at least on the classical view, is: "will it always be better for a person to be more virtuous, to be a better person, to be the sort of person who enjoys doing good?"

In our example, we might say that our Frenchman's problem is not, in the end, that he "did the right thing and suffered for it," but rather that he lacked the virtues necessary to do the right thing and flourish despite the consequences. After all, Aristotle allows that we can be merely continent, forcing ourselves to do the right thing but hating it. The real question I think though is "would we rather be a person like Gandhi, Socrates, or Boethius, and do the right thing and be happy in this choice?" That is, would we prefer:

A. Not to want to do the right thing at all (vice).
B. To want to do the right thing, but to chicken out because of the consequences (incontinence)
C. Do the right thing, but end up hating it, or having it ruin you, like our example (continence)?
D. Do the right thing and be happy about it, and have it strengthen you? (virtue)

It seems to me we want to be D and are better off if we are D, particularly if we think of these as patterns of behavior, not in terms of isolated acts. And this doesn't require the absurdity that someone like Origen or St. Maximus enjoys being maimed and tortured. Rather, the point is that even this, the height of bad fortune, doesn't rob them of their flourishing.

So, we could ask things like: "well didn't Saint Augustine need his wealth, good education, and soaring career at the imperial court to get to the place where he could give up all his wealth, his status, sex, etc.?" Probably. Nowhere does the classical tradition suggest that good things like education, a stable childhood environment, etc. aren't conducive to virtue. The whole idea of the classical education, so well defended in C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man, is that virtue can be taught. The point is rather that these are simply means to what is sought for its own sake.

To sum up: it's better to be the sort of person who loves justice. Continence, doing the right thing when we don't want to, is good because it leads to being a virtuous person, not because every individual continent act situated in the contingency of the world results in long term benefit (how would one even confirm or deny such a thing?)

I guess the other thing is that "doing the right thing" in contemporary ethics tends to be sensuously sterile, and this can make it seem bizarre how it could truly be "best for us."

But Plato talks about the desire to "couple" with the Good, which is apparently every bit as erotic as in the original Greek. We get this vision in the Symposium:

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

Or St. Augustine in the Confessions:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

It's possible my explanation is bad. I don't think these are two different uses at all, and I don't think Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Boethius, etc. intend them as such.

When people say, "it will be good for you to study philosophy," "it will be good for you to start exercising," or "it's good for you to learn to appreciate Homer, Hesiod, and Horace," they certainly don't mean "you will enjoy those things." People often tell people that "x will be good for them," precisely as motivation for them to do things they do not want to do, even when the primary proximate beneficiary of these acts is the person doing them (although it isn't only for the good of the person undertaking these challenges; the champions of the liberal arts tend to argue that all of society benefits from the student's efforts).

Perhaps pornography is a good example here. When people say, "you shouldn't consume pornography, it will mess with your ability to have healthy relationships," they are generally speaking about both one's ability to to enjoy a healthy relationship, but often even moreso one's ability to be a good partner for someone else. Yet what is good for the whole is good for the person who is part of the whole, and someone's inability to be a good "part" is "bad for them" for the same reasons that it is bad "for everyone else." For Aristotle, this analysis tends to stop at the limits of the polis (although not exclusively), whereas for someone like St. Augustine it extends to the entire world, but it's the same idea.

Second, consider Book X of the Ethics where Aristotle identifies the life of contemplation as the highest good, the most divine. Plenty of thinkers agree with Aristotle here (even seemingly some in Eastern traditions). Suppose he is right. Well, in this case, what is most "good for you," is to have your wonder (the first principle of philosophy and science) satisfied. Yet, on the classical view, this is simply impossible for the person who lacks virtue. Indeed, for Plato it seems that it is impossible to truly know the Good and to act wickedly (e.g. the Parmenides). Likewise, the beatific vision, St. Augustine's ascent with St. Monica in Book IX of the Confessions, or St. Bonaventure's ascent in The Mind's Journey to God cannot be accomplished by the wicked. One cannot fully achieve these while giving in to lusts (or perhaps even still being tempted by them), coveting, etc.

It's a contradiction in terms to say that one could "do wrong" while having the best for oneself. Consider St. Augustine's argument that the soul in Heaven, having been perfected, has become so free that it is incapable of sin (for the same reason that the person most free to run never trips and falls over). This isn't just a Christian idea though, Porphyry's Pythagoras and Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana are both saints, and we might add Plato's Socrates here.* They have what is "best for them," and in having this they are going to be doing "the right thing." Likewise, St. Athanasius' St. Anthony has what is truly "best for him," Christ, and it is by/through his possession of this that he also does what is "right." They're the same thing at the limit.


So, perhaps I am explaining it poorly, or perhaps it is just hard to not read the equivocal division of modern ethics back into the earlier ethics (MacIntyre's point).

The reason I find MacIntyre's thesis plausible is because I certainly had this difficulty with ancient thought early on. But, perhaps my own problem was approaching it too hubristically, because, honestly, my original thoughts were that Hume's guillotine, the old "is-ought" chasm simply hadn't occured to prior thinkers precisely because religion and tradition were blinding them to it. I don't think that now though, I think Hume's guillotine simply makes no sense with how Plato and Aristotle see the Good or virtue.

I think history had to pull apart the concepts of "doing right," and this being "what is best to do 'for you.'" And ultimately, I think this goes back into the birth of nominalism, the univocity of being, and the way in which "human virtue," as classically conceived, is often (perhaps not always) problematic for a theology of "faith alone" or "total depravity." You need some changes before Luther can tell Erasmus:

"If it is difficult to believe in God’s mercy and goodness when He damns those who do not deserve it, we must recall that if God’s justice could be recognized as just by human comprehension, it would not be divine."

Here is a great example of the equivocity that separates the unknowable right, "God's Good," from what is or seems "good for us," human good. And of course I mention Calvin and Luther because they are the big names, but this is certainly a shift in Catholic theology too (it starts there in late-medieval nominalism)—some "Baroque Thomism" might be called "more Calvinist than Calvin."

* I really don't think we're supposed to pity Socrates as "receiving something that is 'bad for him.'" He explicitly tells us not to think this way. It's more like Sydney Carton's execution at the end of "A Tale of Two Cities:" "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known." I don't think Carton would think it is better "for him" to have not gone through with his plan to die in Darnay's stead.

I forgot if I shared this quote in this thread:

“For just as men of strong intellect are by nature rulers and masters of others, while those robust in body and weak in mind are by nature subjects . . . so the science that is most intellectual should be naturally the ruler of the others: and this is the science that treats of the most intelligible beings."

St. Thomas - Introduction to the Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics

Or "metaphysics is naturally the queen of the sciences."

Reminds me of a saying of my grandfather's. Whenever he needed help lifting something heavy he used to call out that he needed "somebody with a strong back and a weak mind," to come help him out. He remained full of Depression-era Brooklyn neologisms until his death in the 2010s :rofl: .

Would he, after all what he has said, then truly ramp up the support of Ukraine to pressure Putin?

Potentially, yes. Trump thinks about things very transactionally. He wants to "win" any deal.

But Putin is sort of stuck with maximalist aims, which is why Russians are forced to do things like carry out frontal assaults in civilian cars and golf cart style ATVs. What is Putin going to do, declare "victory" while leaving the "Nazi regime" in power in Kyiv with explicit US security guarantees that are for all intents and purposes going to have the same effect as being in NATO, while having triggered NATO expansion to the north and having his war result in 700,000+ killed or wounded and the destruction of most of Russia's military hardware and major economic issues, all to annex some areas in the Donbas (not even the whole Donbas), which Russia already defacto controlled in 2022, plus Mariupol and some sparsely populated areas in the south?

This was what was worth all the deaths, Europe abandoning Russian energy exports, spending through their reserves, and a coup that saw Putin fleeing the capital and warning the nation about civil war on TV? And this will happen in the context of Assad's forces routing in Syria and a protest movement that looks a lot like Euromaidan sweeping Georgia and all the post Soviet states seemingly abandoning Russia for the West or China.

I can certainly see Putin being forced to overreach and this triggering a stronger response.

You recall incorrectly. I attempted to explain how pluralists and monists actually justify their arguments because the versions of the debate being presented made the debate completely trivial, and made the majority position appear ridiculous—refuted by the mere existence of non-classical logics.

Hubris, No?

How is it any more hubristic than:

A. Claiming that nothing is good or bad? Or;
B. Claiming that such knowledge is impossible?

Both of these involve claims that the overwhelming majority of people, both today and throughout history, and the overwhelming majority of philosophers have rejected. Oh well, sometimes the majority is simply wrong, and we have good reasons to reject their opinions. I don't think this necessarily requires "hubris."

However, I'll trade a caricature for a caricature. Certainly common formulations of A (including those regularly repeated on this site) often do have a strong flavor of hubris. Why has everyone been so wrong—wrong about a fundemental aspect of human life and the world? Common explanations often involve "almost everyone" being involved in massive, infantile coping projects. Religion, or sometimes "any notion of morality" as opiates for the weak minded, unready to take responsibility in a world beyond good and evil. Or else morality is simply a form of social control which the sheeple are unable to see through.

Is Nietzsche not hubristic? Or Marx, or Foucault?

Proponents of B are in the position of claiming that both proponents of moral realism and the folks in A cannot know what they think they know. But I think this sort of skepticism is every bit as radical as other forms of radical skepticism. For, to claim that we cannot know if being born addicted to heroin, or having your water filled with lead, is bad for one, or that "helping kids learn to read is better than molesting them," is a statement forever bereft of epistemic warrant, seems to go about as far a denying "I have hands," or "other people exist." Doesn't the embrace of these positions require a sort of hubris? Parmenides needs to tell virtually everyone else that they are delusional for thinking motion exists. The deflationist needs to claim that the truth claims of the sciences and most other philosophy are bunk and that people don't really know what is meant by terms like "true" and "real," which, pace their understanding, are tokens in games.

Of course, one can embrace A, B, or moral realism with relative gradations of enthusiasm or certainty. Perhaps those who are less certain or less committed are less hubristic? But I wouldn't want to fall into the trap of "bourgeoisie metaphysics" where anything is only allowed to be true if it allows everything else to be. My thoughts are that you should be about as certain or committed as you have good reason to be.

What would it be like, to have an ethical calculus that will tell us What To Do in every case?

In particular, how would we tell that we had the calculus right? To know we had it right would require that we had a way to evaluate it's results that was independent of the calculus.

But if we had such an independent way to evaluate the calculus, why not use that instead of the calculus?

A "moral calculus" strikes me as an analytic fever dream to be honest. Could we also have an epistemic calculus that always leads to true judgements? Wouldn't this epistemic calculus cover our moral cases too?

But if it doesn't seem possible to have such an "epistemic calculus," it hardly seems to me that we should conclude that nothing is true or false, or that nothing is knowable as such.

My contention is that they must not be the same concept, in order to avoid conceptual emptiness.

I guess I don't understand why you think this is a problem. Health is also predicated analogously. What is healthy for a person or a society is not what is healthy for a tree or an ant. But all can be more or less healthy. And what is healthy for one person is not always healthy for another. We might say that "peanuts" and "running" are both healthy vis-á-vis men, but peanuts are not healthy for the person with a peanut allergy, nor is running healthy for the person with a broken ankle. In the latter case, what is healthy changes over a relatively short period of time; running will be healthy for the individual when the ankle is healed.

When we speak of what health is for organisms generally and what health is"for you," why it is "healthy (for you) to be healthy," we are not speaking of two totally equivocal concepts, nor do I see how this analagous relationship would render "health" conceptually vacuous. Health is a general principle realized unequally in a multiplicity of particulars.

The Good is the same way, except that it is more general (indeed for Plato and most of the classical tradition, the most general unifying principle).

When Socrates says, "No evil can happen to a good man," do you think he means, "Nothing evil [not-good] can happen to a good man because good men only experience good things"?

No, he says this in part because misfortune cannot rob the man who has attained what is truly best of what he has gained. St. Augustine makes this point more clearly in On The Free Choice of the Will, when he claims that what we should value most is what cannot be taken from us. St. Polycarp lives it out when, upon being threatened with various brutal execution methods if he does not abandon God, he pronounces that it would not make sense to "transform into something worse once we have become something better."

I think to understand entirely how this works requires understanding why Socrates makes the Good analagous to the Sun vis-á-vis the forms. When I first read Plato I thought this was simply because the Good is "best" and so has to be "highest." I also fell into the trap of thinking he picked the Good because he is a moralist simply trying to spin a story to make people act well. Or perhaps it's the old "cope" whereby people make God good because it feels good to have a beneficent all power entity watching out for you.

But Plato has very good reasons for thinking it is the Good by which the forms are knowable and intelligible. And this relates to Plato's psychology, since it's the attempt to attain to what is "truly good," not just what appears to be good, or is said to be good by others, that allows the rational part of the soul to transcend the given of what we already are—current desire and opinion—for what is truly most desirable and what is really true.

This is what allows the rule of reason to make a person more unified, a whole, rather than a collection of competing drives and desires. Pace Nietzsche, this isn't the tyranny of reason, with the appetites and passions being beaten down, but rather what allows for both the appetites and passions to be most fulfilled (rather than competing in a chaotic "civil war within the soul."_

But there is a parallel between the way the Good is what allows people to become self-determining and more fully unified (and so more fully themselves) and the way in which it is the Good that allows anything to be any thing at all. I really like Robert M Wallace's "Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present" for bringing this out, and his book on Hegel brings out the way in which the Logic expands on this (and the way in which Kant still manages to capture a much deflated version of the classical notion). Aristotle picks up from Plato and develops this relationship more, and it develops through the Patristics and Islamic thinkers before making it into the nature "Doctrine of Transcendentals," in St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, Meister Eckhart, etc. I haven't found good secondary sources for these unfortunately.

Conceptually empty? There are criticisms of this tradition, but I don't think this is going to be one of them.

Well, we could start with Plato and my post above:

...as Socrates says in the Republic, we would prefer to always have what is truly best, not what merely seems best at the moment, or what others say is best. The difficulty is that experience teaches us that what we desire most is not always what is truly best. We do things we regret. So, "what we ought to do" is obviously not always "what we want to do" (i.e. what appears to be good to us). Presumably, this is truly what we ought to want, since reason tells us that it makes no sense to prefer that we should possess or achieve what is truly worse, and not what is truly better.

For instance, if someone were to show Tom Storm's "unscrupulous businessman who lives a very pleasant life" that another life would truly be better, presumably he would want that better life and not his current one, even if he lacked the will or means to achieve it. No one says: "I want to be fundamentally deluded about how to live the best life possible, and live a worse life instead."

Yet, if we want to possess or achieve what is truly best, I am not sure how this is accomplished without knowing what is truly best. Thus, we are back to knowing what is truly better or truly worse.

Now, it seems we agree that it's better for people to live in a society that provisions for the common good and where people want to contribute to the common good, rather than living under constant coercion. It is better to live in a society with low levels of violence, where everyone gets a good education, where people do not go hungry, etc. The "Star Trek" post scarcity society.

Your concern seems to touch on the "free rider" problem. Why should I, the individual, not cheat? It seems I can benefit from the common good without bearing the sacrifices of contributing towards it.

For Aristotle this makes no sense, because the ability to actually participate in the common good, such that you prefer what is best for a society that will outlive you is part of living a good life. It is a good "for you" to participate in friendships and institutions where you actually preference the other, rather than only grudgingly entering into these in order to attain some other good. (Aristotle's "levels" of friendship is instructive here.)

I think an example from marriage helps. Most people don't want their spouses to sleep with other people. We can ignore the edge cases here.

Obviously, we can imagine someone who "cheats" in this scenario. However, we might ask, "is the person who is willing to deceive their spouse, or to coerce them into consenting to their affairs, really likely to be enjoying the same good from their marriage as someone who truly wants what is best for their spouse and who, on account of this, doesn't even want to cheat?" Recall, pace Kant, that for Aristotle being virtuous (as opposed to merely continent) involves enjoying doing what is good.

The case where one actually benefits from cheating likewise makes no sense in Plato's description of love in the Symposium, nor in Hegel's conceptualization of how we benefit from identifying with institutions (e.g. the family, the state, etc.).

So, this gets to the Boethius analogy I mentioned above, about climbing a mountain. A person might gain some goods by cheating, by being a free rider, etc., but ultimately being willing to do these means one has missed out on even greater goods. Part of living a good life is the ability to truly enter into a common good. Cheating is like trying to climb a mountain while walking on one's hands. You might make some temporary progress, especially with some help from fortune, but it's
not a stable way to reach the summit.

Jeffery Epstein attains some goods. He has bad fortune, gets exposed and punished and is suicidal. He was dependant on good luck. Boethius in prison, or Laozi out in the wilderness have nothing, and they still flourish.

There is a much deeper metaphysical connection here in the tradition as well, the way in which goodness ties into the unity and intelligibility by which anything is any thing at all, and by which we can even say true things about things—the Doctrine of Transcendentals, and that does make the whole approach more convincing, but it is pretty far afield. Evil, badness, on this view is a privation, a view articulated by Aristotle but which is more fully developed in St. Augustine.

I guess the crux of this matter is the question - are some forms of flourishing more virtuous than others? I think this comes down to the values of the person making that judgement. If you are influenced by Aristotle or Christianity you will say yes.

Well, the difficulty here is that "virtuous" has come to mean something very different in modern ethics. The term can mean simply, "being more in line with a sui generis 'moral good' that is unrelated to other goods."

For Aristotle, the virtues (excellences) are exactly those traits that allow one to achieve happiness. Eudaimonia is a virtuous life. There aren't multiple forms of flourishing, even if there are very many different ways to flourish, which might vary by culture, epoch, and individual.

In particular, for Aristotle in Book X of the Ethics, as for many other thinkers, the life of contemplation is highest. The highest human achievement is to "become like God." As St. Athanasius puts: "God became man that man might become God." But you can also think of the God of the philosophers as simply a transcendental limit case. God is threatened by no one and so hates and fears nothing. God is completely self-determining, impassible, and so God's happiness and beneficence is never threatened.

It seems impossible for the unscrupulous cheat to ever attain to this mode of life, thus the lack of the appropriate virtues harms them.

We could ask, "who led the better life?" and "who would you prefer to be?"

Martin Luther King (imprisoned and assassinated, arguably for doing the right thing);
Mahatma Gandhi (imprisoned and assassinated, arguably for doing the right thing);
Boethius (imprisoned and executed, arguably for doing the right thing), or;
Saint Francis (homeless and subject to extreme privation—although reading his poetry we can note that this in no ways dulled his sensitivity to the sensual, indeed it seems to have heightened it into ecstacy)

...as opposed to say, some example of an unscrupulous, very lucky person who seems happy with their lot (perhaps President Trump is a good example here, although some people see him as mighty virtuous, so perhaps we could imagine Jeffery Epstein if he never got exposed and punished.)? Of course, Jeffery Epstein became suicidal when exposed and punished, and so this makes the point about the stability and freedom associated with true flourishing. No doubt, bad people can have "good luck," but no one can ensure that they have perpetual "good luck" (and is such luck really "good" if it precludes developing the virtues?)

I'd say it's better for us to live a life akin to the former group. If we say that the two are equally worthwhile, then we seem likely to be committed to some sort of relativism. But I think the evidence and arguments for the idea that things can be actually good or bad for people is quite strong.

A lot more can be said here. The lucky Jeffrey Epstein who isn't caught seems incapable of achieving many important goods, and is in a certain sense is less free. Laozi, the Buddha, and St. Francis can flourish out in the wilderness.

Are the examples impossible or do you just not want to call this "pleasure?"


Something like the Gammas in "A Brave New World," doesn't seem impossible to me. Are they flourishing though?

I dont think so. Pleasure and what you are thinking of in ethical terms as ‘human flourishing’ are not independent entities

Well, this is another false dichotomy. They don't need to be "independent" to not be the "the same thing." I would agree that anhedonia is not conducive to human flourishing, but that doesn't make "pleasure" and "flourishing" synonyms, or terms that cannot be usefully differentiated such that one can be present in the relative absence of another.

Human pleasure is very complex because humans are very complex. But causing pleasure can be fairly simple. Sticking an electrode into the appropriate part of the human brain and applying electrical current will result in sensations described as "intensely pleasurable." Monkeys will likewise show signs of pleasure upon similar stimulation and will self-stimulate in this way if given the option, even if it means undergoing demanding tasks or ignoring other goods.

To make the two inseparable is simply to ignore what most people mean by the word "pleasure." Short experiences like watching a movie, sex, eating, etc. can be "pleasant" and "pleasurable," on normal understandings of these terms. Animals are said to respond to "pleasurable stimuli " in research, etc.

But on no conventional usage of "flourishing" or "living a/the good life," does eating a good meal, watching a fun movie, or having an electrode in one's head stimulated, etc. constitute the achievement of those latter terms.

So, while I agree that one is "situated in the other," this does not make "pleasure" a synonym for, or inseparable from "flourishing." This is to use the words in a very different way from how it is employed in psychology/neuroscience and regular usage.

Of course, the other’s criterion of flourishing may not meet your standards, in which case you’re likely to split off their life of pleasures against what you consider robust flourishing, rather than adjusting your construal of their way of life such as to gain a more effective understanding of how they actually see things. That’s more difficult than carrying around a priori concepts of flourishing in your wallet.

This seems like using an uncoventional definition of "pleasure" to equivocate on as a means of supporting relativism without actually making a clear argument for it, i.e the latter part here where "separating pleasure from flourishing is simply choosing the 'easier' and simplistic analysis."

But of course, it isn't obvious why thinking that "people can be wrong about what is good for them," necessitates an inability to be more or less able to "see things as other people see them." Indeed, people often differentiate between pleasure and flourishing in terms of how they see their own flourishing. Watch any documentary on serious drug addicts and your likely to see claims like: "these drugs ruined my whole fucking life," presented with a direct contrast to how pleasurable they are. To refuse to differentiate between pleasure and flourishing here is itself to refuse to "gain a more effective understanding of how they actually see things."

I won't even touch the "a priori" part, except to say this is akin to leaping to "the self as hermetically sealed solipsism," i.e. another extreme false dichotomy/strawman.

After all, wasn't the reason for trying to work out what was good, precisely to enable us to decide what we ought do?

Yes, as Socrates says in the Republic, we would prefer to always have what is truly best, not what merely seems best at the moment, or what others say is best. The difficulty is that experience teaches us that what we desire most is not always what is truly best. We do things we regret. So, "what we ought to do" is obviously not always "what we want to do" (i.e. what appears to be good to us). Presumably, this is truly what we ought to want, since reason tells us that it makes no sense to prefer that we should possess or achieve what is truly worse, and not what is truly better.

For instance, if someone were to show 's "unscrupulous businessman who lives a very pleasant life" that another life would truly be better, presumably he would want that better life and not his current one, even if he lacked the will or means to achieve it. No one says: "I want to be fundamentally deluded about how to live the best life possible, and live a worse life instead."

Yet, if we want to possess or achieve what is truly best, I am not sure how this is accomplished without knowing what is truly best. Thus, we are back to knowing what is truly better or truly worse.

But I don't think making progress on this knowledge is impossible. Plato gives us a decent start with some things that will be key regardless of what the Good turns out to be, As he points out, certain epistemic virtues are a prerequisite for conducting successful inquiry, while one also needs the reflexive freed/will power to act on what one knows if knowledge of the Good is to be useful. So, clearly, the prerequisites for discovering what is "truly best" must themselves be good.



Sure. Is this an objection to the example? Do you think it's impossible? What about the A Brave New World example? I only mention these as limit examples. The more general point is that it seems quite possible to have many pleasurable experiences and a "pleasant life," while avoiding the development of faculties and aptitudes that we tend to think are important for human flourishing.

There's nothing to prevent that wealthy businessman from not having a rewarding and happy life. Access to significantly better food, superior health care, services and accommodation. To be able to provide these for friends, cronies and family as needed. To have sick children obtain preferential treatment. To access the best art, travel, education and advice. To live longer, healthier and safer and to have everyone they care about provided with the best things available in the culture. These are non-trivial matters and while the saying 'money can't buy you happiness' is often provided rather wanly when talking about such folk, sometimes it's the case that precisely the opposite is true.

This depends on how you want to define "happiness" I suppose. In Boethius' sense, this is eudaimonia, "flourishing." No one in this tradition argues that money cannot be useful vis-a-vis the attainment of eudaimonia, just that money does not accomplish this of itself.

You could certainly call what you describe a "pleasurable" life. But let's take this example to the extreme in order to see if pleasure and flourishing are equivalent:

Suppose we have given a power AGI instructions to maximize human pleasure. They go about raising children, tending to their every need, and keeping them awash in pleasurable sensations. The children grow into adults, but never develop much beyond the cognitive equivalent of infants. However, they are experiencing a great deal of pleasure. Is this a "good life? " Is it "human flourishing?"

Or, less extreme, we could consider the Gammas of "A Brave New World," conditioned to enjoy their jobs and fear novelty, enjoying a steady stream of mass media to consume and soma to binge on (a sort of side effect free version of MDMA).

One thing to note is that in all three examples the state of general pleasure felt is not particularly self-determining. If the AI malfunctions the humans are doomed. Likewise, the Gammas turn to enraged rioting when their soma is kept from them. The business cheat is unlikely to remain happy if he is exposed and loses his status and wealth, and is sent to prison. Socrates, St. Paul, St. Ignatius, Boethius, etc. all seem pretty sublime in prison, awaiting execution.

So there is the question of stability, but also of freedom. Is being more free part of flourishing? I would say yes. But someone who would be miserable without all sorts of apparent goods is in a sense less free. Consider the business cheat. Suppose he wants to stop cheating but knows he will be miserable without his wealth and all it buys. Well, without great strength of will he will be unfree to stop cheating, and even if he is continent and he does stop cheating, he will be (at least temporarily) unfree to live a life he finds pleasant.

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So what ought we to say to the unethical businessman? Should we say, "You're being inefficient and improvident. You're not getting as many goods as you'd get if you behaved ethically, and furthermore when the hard winds blow, you won't do as well as the ethical person"?

It's not all we could say, but it's part of what we could say.

That doesn't strike me as ethical discourse at all

Well see, perhaps MacIntyre does have a point, because in ancient and medieval ethics the idea that it is "good (for you) to be good" and never "bad to be good" is a very strong thread. Socrates' lines after being sentenced to die: "Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death," and: "When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing—then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your hands," are not throw-away lines.

The problem here is that you're still allowing "It's good for you to be good" to represent a coherent statement within ethics. But either each instance of "good" means the same thing, in which case the statement provides no information, or else "good" is equivocal, with each "good" meaning something different, in which case you could get a variety of interpretations, such as "You'll receive things you desire (= good1) if you are virtuous (= good2)" or "You'll flourish (= good1) if you are virtuous (= good2)" or "Being virtuous (= good2) will be pleasurable for you (= good 1)." But what you can't derive is a statement that says either "It is not virtuous (= good 2) to achieve good1" or "Good 2 does not refer to the things named as good1". Both of those require ethical argument of a particular sort -- an argument that shows why the goods of personal life (pleasure, success, honor, love, etc.) are distinct from right action. An appeal to any of those goods as a reason for right action takes us once more out of ethics and into . . . well, psychology, or power dynamics, or something.

Only supposing that our only options are total equivocity, "good" means something entirely different when it is "good for you," and total univocity. I don't think these are our only options. The relation here is analogous; pros hen predication is open to us.

The history leading up to Kant is probably relevant here in that it is the denial of analogy, the drive towards the univocity of being, and the voluntarism of Reformation theology that serves as the backdrop for the emergence of the Enlightenment. The relationship between metaphysics and ethics is subtle here, but I think there is a real relevance because you can see something very similar at work in Islamic thought, with the univocity of Fakhr al-Dīn, versus the preference for analogy in other commentators on Avicenna. Univocity leads towards voluntarist theology because God cannot be absolutely sovereign if God's freedom is subject to some sort of outside Good. This elevates the Good above God, such that the Good is really what dictates what God does. This is exactly what Plotinus is trying to avoid in the tractate on divine freedom.

Thinkers make this same sort of argument in atheistic contexts today. "We cannot be free if we are bound to some Good, we can only be free if we decide what the Good is." That's one problem with univocity.

If we're stuck with a univocal good, we can still talk about tradeoffs between different goods or the distinction between apparent goods and real goods (reality versus appearances). Yet, I think we'll still find things quite difficult because we will be trying to explain goodness in a framework where appearances seem to be arbitrarily related to reality. For instance, sex and drinking can be goods in the good life (partaking in the univocal good), but then what does what is sought by the sex addict and the alcoholic lack this good? Or perhaps there is some precise level of each that should be sought? It seems to me though that the Good must be sought as a principle that is manifest in a vast multiplicity of things, which is going to make it extremely challenging to explain univocally. When the lion catches its prey, it seems "good for the lion" and "bad for the prey" by nature for instance.

One solution here is to simply split of "moral good" from any other notion of goodness, and I think this simply leaves the good impotent. People ask "why be good?" and we have no answer for them. People ask "why is x good?" and we find ourselves explaining that "goodness is a non-natural property..."

Edit: BTW, we need not look to MacIntyre's Aristotelian tradition here to find this thread. It's in the work of the Stoic philosopher-slave Epictetus or Laozi and other Eastern philosophers.

If there were such a symmetry, then there would be a schema for "good" that is equivalent to Tarski's schema for "true". There isn't. Hence the supposed symmetry isn't there.

Well no, I explained the symmetry that I think exists. You have invented your own positions to argue with that no one has presented.



An eyebrow raiser to be sure.

You also slide from what is good per se to what is good for an organism.

Yet the two aren't unrelated, even if they aren't identical. Just as beliefs and statements are the sort of things that can be true or false, and these are only made or possessed by entities with minds, so too it doesn't make sense to speak of "goodness" in the absence of any experiencing thing. Nothing is good or bad for a rock or a comet, except perhaps in some very loosely analogous sense (e.g. warm air is "good" for hurricanes to the extent that it sustains them).

This is the difficulty of defining a notion of goodness (or beauty and truth) in per se terms in a metaphysics that has eliminated the transcendent. You have a multiplicity of goods, what is going to unify them?

Sure, and I understand (roughly) how Ethics is taught.

In a lot of ethical thought, it is "good for you" to be good. I would imagine most ethics courses start with these because they tend to dominate the earlier epochs. The pursuit of the good is also the pursuit of freedom and happiness. Hence, acting unethically is simply hurting yourself.

To be sure, you might be able to attain some goods by acting unethically. An unethical businessman might cheat and manipulate his way into having wealth and status, the ability to procure all sorts of goods for himself.

Here is the analogy Boethius draws in the later parts of the Consolation for this situation. Flourishing is like trying to climb a mountain. At the top is the highest good, which is good per se, but alsogood for us. You'll be happiest if you make it to the top, but you'll also be happier if you make it higher up the mountain.

The virtuous person is like someone who learns how to properly climb. They walk up the mountain, or scale the difficult parts. The wicked person can make it up the mountain, but they are like a person who has learned to walk on their hands. Their means are inefficient, and ultimately they will never make it to the summit that way. When a storm comes, bad fortune, the virtuous person can hang on, or if they fall, they can quickly climb back up. The vice addled person unstably walking on their hands topples over and plummets down the mountain (e.g. our wicked business cheat might lose his wealth and status through bad luck, and then where will he be? Meanwhile, Socrates gets sentenced to death and quips that "nothing bad can happen to a good man;" he is unperturbed).

With Russia short on men and material and Hezbollah reeling from having its entire leadership killed, taking heavy losses from air strikes, and seemingly losing a sizeable proportion of its rocket deterrent on the ground, it seems that Syrian rebels (primarily HTS) have taken the opportunity to sever the SAA's lines of communications to Damascus and have now entered Aleppo, Syria's second largest city. The area Assad's forces fought for over five years, with major Iranian, Hezbollah, and Russian support, is being lost in a matter of days.

This is the unfortunate follow on of Russia and Iran's other defeats. The relatively stable stalemate in Syria is likely to keep sliding out of control since Assad has long been highly reliant on foreign support and most of the opposition that is left come in the appealing flavors of "out and out radical jihadis" and "Turkish-supported out and out radical jihadis willing to start fights over Kurdish areas most Arab factions have given up on."

Perhaps there is a happy via media between the "self as a hermetically sealed solipsism," and rejecting that it is primarily people (or more broadly organisms) that possess beliefs? Just as we need not declare that organisms are hermetically sealed nor subsistent beings in order to declare that "only things with legs run." And it is of course things—substances*—that properly run: horses, men, ants, and now robots, as opposed to the world generally or nothing in particular.

*These would have to be substantial unities because to run requires legs and a body, which is to make up a whole with parts. Something lacking much unity, like a cloud, cannot run, except in some equivocal, metaphorical sense. But to have beliefs is also something determinant, since it is to affirm some things but not others is belief is to have any content.

If being good is not your goal, then naturally you will ignore what you “ought” to be doing in order to be good.

If something is good, it's choice worthy. It doesn't make sense to choose the worse over the better. People do choose the worse over the better, but this will be due to ignorance about what is truly good or weakness of will.

What is choiceworthy will depend on what one's goals are. If one is seeking an aim, it doesn't ever make sense to choose what is worse for that aim, unless you face tradeoffs against other aims. But aims themselves can be more or less choiceworthy, more or less good. And we might suppose that in order to determine which aims are most choiceworthy we should seek to discover what is choiceworthy for its own sake and not for some other good or end. For example, acquiring money might be thought not to be an "end in itself," for money is only useful when one parts with it. It is a means to other goods. To be confused about this is to mistake apparent good, appearances, for reality (unless, perhaps one is Scrooge McDuck and enjoys swimming in gold coins for its own sake).

Even Milton's Satan must proclaim, "evil be thou my good." It would not make sense to pursue evil as evil for oneself, "evil be thou evil for me.

Is there a way to separate out truth from goodness as fulfillment of normative expectations and purposes?

Depends on what you mean by "separate." Medicine is a normative practice. However, consider a child with cancer. It's bad for them to have cancer. It's good to cure it. Suppose the doctors give the child a treatment that is thought to be a good treatment for this sort of cancer. It isn't. It actually causes the cancer to become more aggressive.

We wouldn't want to say that the treatment is a good one when the normative standard is to give the treatment and only becomes a bad one later. Indeed, it would come to be deened a "bad treatment" in the normative framework because of the truth about its effects.

Are such norms to be located inside the organism, in the things outside the organism, or in the ways of functioning that take place BETWEEN organism and its world?

Let's start with a simple example of relation, such as "larger than." This involves two subjects. Does truth follow this form?

It's hard to see how it would because we can say true things about what does not exist. This is less "x > y" and more "x > ".

But moreover, people can have beliefs or make statements about themselves. Where is between here? Between the person and themselves?

What sort of things are apt to have beliefs or make claims (the sorts of things apt to be true or false)? It seems to me that "nothing in particular," doesn't believe or claim anything, nor does the interval between speakers and the subjects of their speech.

Well that's just the tip of the iceberg, convertability doesn't entail a perfect symmetry.

Just consider the types of things we call "true" or "false." These will almost always be statements, propositions, beliefs, etc. It does not make sense to call things true in most contexts. A tree standing outside is not true or false. Things said or believed about it are true or false. The act of running is not true or false. Things said of it might be. Same goes for states of affairs. These obtain or fail to obtain, but are not true or false.

Now, occasionally we might call things true, as in "this is a true Picasso." But here we are just saying that something apt to be an imitation is not. Or we might praise a baseball player by saying he is a "true center fielder," or a man by saying he is a "true gentleman," but by this we mean something more like "good," i.e., truly embodying some standard.

It's quite the opposite with "good." Dogs are good, or the Sun, or blue skies, or a baseball pitch, or a presidential term, etc. It is primarily things or states of affairs that are good or bad. It does not generally make sense to call a proposition or belief "good" unless we are either:
A. Referring to the goodness of what the proposition refers to (e.g. a claim about a state of affairs, it is "good that it is true that it obtains.").
B. Expressing that the rhetorical or grammatical form of the proposition is good.
C. Expressing that a belief is good because it is true.

This difference is why very many philosophers locate truth primarily in the mind. Not all of course. Some located the bearers of truth in an infinity of abstract objects—propositions—outside of space and time that are somehow subsistent and intelligible in isolation, and which the mind somehow "grasps." However, the view that "truth is primarily in the mind and secondarily (or only fundamentally) in things," is quite common (it's akin to the idea that time is fundamentally in nature and actually in observers, but more widely embraced).

Today, it's common to hear that the good must be in the mind, on the "subjective" side of the dualistic ledger that splits reality. This is a rather new development. For much of philosophical history it was assumed that goodness must lie primarily in the things that are good. Why?

Well, suppose hungry monkeys tend to find bananas to be good, choiceworthy. Suppose we run an experiment where we lower bananas into their environment periodically. When the monkeys see the bananas they climb up and get them. Without the bananas, they don't bother climbing up. The bananas motivate action in the monkeys without themselves doing much aside from being what they are.

Of course, the bananas don't motivate the same behavior in tigers, things' relations vary, but it's the entities that are apt to find things good (i.e. organisms) that are generally reacting to the good as stimulus, not good things reacting vis-á-vis organisms (aside from the more complex cases involving multiple organisms). A wolf doesn't need to do anything to scare a sheep in the same way, just its ambient scent or appearance is enough.In the simple cases, good things like food and water simply broadcast their desirability through their default interactions with the media around them, e.g. ambient light bouncing off water.

We could go a step further if we identify the good for organisms with, in a general sense, not dying (exceptions apply) and fulfilling key biological functions (e.g. reproducing, even if your a male spider who tends to get eaten doing this). We might suppose that the unity by which any thing is anything at all, by which part/whole relations exist, is related to goodness. And so we might go an extra step in locating goodness in ens reale (things) and not ens rationis (creations of mind). Yet, IMO this is unnecessary for concluding that, if relatively inert things like water motivated complex behavior, the goodness sought by the complex behavior lies primarily in what gets sought, not the seeker. Much good seeking involves actual consumption, the introduction of the good thing into the body/whole of the entity seeking it, and this doesn't make sense if all goodness is already in the organism doing the seeking.

But I suggest we not worry overmuch about the truth/good parallel -- though you're right, it's interesting-- and instead look at the ways that reason does try to justify values

But that's the very point I was putting in question, I'd argue that the good is to practical reason as truth is to theoretical reason (and as beauty is to aesthetic reason). We might claim these are in a sense convertible, as per the Doctrine of Transcendentals, but that's one of the more difficult philosophical doctrines to even frame properly.

So instead, just imagine trying to justify any claims about goodness with someone who denies the concept (or reduces it to current personal preference). Truth appeals don't matter. Imagine trying to convince your child that deciding to start smoking is bad.

You point out that smoking is likely to lead to at least some level of lung disease in the long term, that it will make their teeth unhealthy and ugly, etc. This is a fact claim.

He doesn't deny your claims, but but he denies that it would be good for him not to smoke. He doesn't care about the future, he claims. Good for him is the "live fast, die young," aesthetic. He likes smoking. Why stop?

You point out that when he is older, with poor lung capacity and gum disease he will likely regret smoking.

He doesn't deny this, but says that this will only occur if he becomes an old sad sack and gives up on what is truly better, his current "future he damned mindset." "I'll cry about it if I become a loser. Right now I'm not a loser."

Maybe they keep smoking, and get particularly early lung disease. Maybe they now agree with your earlier judgement, but maybe, through some heroics of cognitive dissonance reduction, they don't. They still say their glad they started smoking. Maybe they have convinced themselves the smoking has nothing to do with their illness (how did you wind up with such a kid!?)

Is it still better for them to have started smoking? Is it better for them to approach these sorts of issues in this way (i.e. to lack prudence in general and prize the rash gratification of appetites as a virtue)?

Is the good reducible to what people currently prefer, or do we perhaps do some economists' technique of weighting how good people are likely to perceive things at various stages across their lifetime? Or do we make an appeal to what "most people would prefer?"

It seems to me that these are at best proxies for what is good, since people can, and often do, prefer things that are bad for them (e.g. slave owners largely preferred to own slaves, but I'd argue it was actually cutting against their own interests). Lots of little kids and plenty of adults would spend all day watching TV if they could. But, could the transition to some other pursuit be choiceworthy? I think so.

Sometimes choiceworthy choices also take time to get habituated to. We do them because we think they are good (continence), but only enjoy them later (e.g. taking up running, or joining a club for an introvert).

But of course, such a position presupposes that there is a truth about what is better or worse for people. Likewise, that it's better to have some desires and not others. These would be truth claims, but truth claims about values, judgements practical good. The good and the true are in some sense convertible, and this is true even with purely theoretical questions because of course we speak in terms of "good evidence," and "correct reasoning" such that "attaining truth is good." But one can coherently ask, "why is reasoning that leads to truth good?"

Interestingly, people often don't deny the judgements of practical good tout court. They will allow that "Tom Brady was a better football player than my grandmother," can be a factual claim, or that some chess moves might really be blunders. I'd argue that these are just simpler questions of values. We could always still ask: "but why is throwing complete passes and not interceptions good? Why is going to the Super Bowl every other year for 20 years good?"

Moral questions are often much harder. They deal with a mix of complex particulars and distant principles (distant from the senses—as Aristotle says, what is "best known to us," concrete particulars, is distal to the principles that are "best known in themselves,"—a flying bird and its wings are more apparent than the principles of aerodynamics). Yet, I do not this makes them somehow immune to the same "facts about values," that render Michael Jordan a "better" basketball player than I am.

However, I think such questions become impossible to resolve if "moral good" is made a sui generis sort of good discrete from say, the good of "good health." This castrates the moral good, it is rendered impotent, no longer the principle of fecundity in which all analagous forms of good participate, but a dead letter.

A version of rational egoism says, "I don't believe 'the good of society' or 'the good of future generations' are goods at all. It's not that I'm unable to act with those goals in mind because it's painful or difficult; I deny that they're worth sacrificing anything for. I want my own desires to be satisfied, period, and no, I'm not a selfish monster, because some of those desires include concern for those I love. But they are still mine. Societal progress has absolutely no claim on me."

Ok. Do you think this is a good position? Is it "as defendable as any other?"

Let me point out a similar problem. While not as popular as "nothing is good, it's all egoistic personal preference," "nothing is true it's all egoistic personal preference," is still a position people take up.

Now how does one argue against such a position? Suppose we give all sorts of reasons for why things might be true in a sense that is not reducible to our personal preferences. Then they reply: "is any of what you said true? I don't think it can be, truth doesn't really exist."

Yet the good is essentially filling the role in practical reason of the true vis-á-vis theoretical reason. To deny it is to deny practical reason tout court—what more can be said? Can one justify reason with reasons? Certainly not without circularity.

Well, if you allow an interlocutor a sacrosanct premise that you believe to be false, or likely to be false, it shouldn't be surprising that it's impossible to refute them.

Plato has it that reason is transcedent. Reasons takes us past the given of what we already are. It allows us to move beyond our current opinions, and current desires, in search of what is truly best. But reason is transcedent in another way. We can always ask of any proposition "but what if it isn't true? What if I am mistaken?' And as G.E. Moore points out, we can do this with practical reason as well. We can always ask with coherence, "but is it really good?" or "why is it good?" 'The Logos is without beginning or end,' indeed.

But then if epistemology is better off without foundationalism we might assume this holds for moral/practical epistemology. Because a good degree of moral relativism has currency in our culture (e.g. "bourgeoisie metaphysics," where anything can be true so long as it allows others to be true), "well not everyone agrees, and this varies by culture and historical epoch," is considered a "good argument" against statements of practical reason. But of course, opinions about the shape of the Earth also vary by person and by culture and historical epoch. This would be considered trivial grounds for doubting the shape of the Earth.

You can think of self-determination in terms of human organizations as well. The society that follows through on the Durden plan to "return to monke," is just going to get steamrolled by the first competent, technology wielding military that wants their resources and is prepared to use force to get them.

Star Fleet, of course, doesn't do this. Why? I feel like to get at this the Timaeus and the reason that God is ultimately beneficent and not indifferent nor hostile is a good starting point. The entity that is hostile to other things is less than fully transcedent, it is defined by what it is not. Love is the identification of the self with the other. God is love because God has no limits, and because God also faces no threats. But Star Fleet might as well be God compared to most races, and surely their beneficence is helped along by knowledge, which gives them this strength.

Likewise, we might not be able to "prove" the superiority of growing up in the Star Trek universe. However, I would imagine that many carpenters might be unable to write a proof for the Pythagorean theorem they use on a regular basis as well. Certainly though, they shouldn't find this too troubling.

To be honest, this objection seems to beg the question to me. It only makes sense if "flourishing" and "freedom" are relativized such that being the "alpha male" of some apocalyptic band allows for just as much freedom and flourish as say, living in Star Trek's post-scarcity society, where everyone has access to a top tier education, and ample room to pursue their interests. Now, I certainly haven't attempted the long justification for why the latter is superior, but at the same time, I think most people can work this out for themselves.


Ancient hierarchical societies place constraints on their leadership as much as the slaves and plebians. One cannot lift the boot lest one ends up with their throat cut, that another might climb up to the place of honor. Roman Emperors were frequently both ruled over by vice and violently deposed—for long periods most died screaming, cut down by their underlings as often as their explicit foes. This is St. Augustine's point in "The City of God," when he argues that Rome was never a commonwealth, in terms that foreshadow Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic a millennia and a half later (and we might also consider de Beauvoir's extension of this, the ways in which man's flourishing is hindered by the degradation of woman.)

Also, we don't just have control over ourselves. We can have relatives degrees of control over others as well, hence freedom and virtue are in some respects social projects.

But the good is either arbitrary, and unjustifiable in terms of reason or it isn't.

Likewise, Tony Montana's contentment is dependent on good fortune, on the Columbians not sending a death squad against him or the Feds not closing in. Boethius' happiness survives imprisonment, torture, and a death sentence.

The second problem with the objection, which is perhaps more relevant, is that it paints a sort of static picture of the virtues where they are simply "whatever leads to success in one's current context." But Jack isn't flourishing. That's the whole point; the standards are defective, the society sick. Again, relativism is the underlying assumption here if we are going to say that what is virtuous for an SS officer is just those things that gain him status as a committed Hitlerite.

But the virtues are generally not framed in these narrow terms. The proper counterexample would be "rashness or indecisiveness being superior to prudence." Now, in the occasional situation, might the person who acts impulsively fare better than the prudent person, or the person who is paralyzed by decisions? Sure. The person who fails to escape a burning building early because they are paralyzed by doubt might just happen to be in the right place to somehow survive the building's collapse, while the prudent person dies. But will the vices work better on average? Over a lifetime?

We might suppose, "but sometimes it pays to act quickly." And indeed this is true, but prudence includes knowing when this is the case, whereas the brash person acts impulsively in all situations. Even if you're a serial killer rapist, your aims are better served by a certain form of prudence (we might call this cunning instead) then "acting like an idiot."

Courage likewise is the median between rashness and cowardice. Might the extremes sometimes accidentally lead to "better outcomes." It seems possible. Will they tend to? I doubt it. But more importantly, the virtues are what serve us better precisely if we have bad fortune.

If the individual conscience is the sole arbiter of virtue, then who's to say that's not good?

Sure, but this seems in the same vein as: "if the individual is the sole arbiter of truth, then who's to say that anything is or isn't true?"

Yet surely we can be right or wrong about "what is good for us." And indeed, we often realize later that we were in error about what was truly good for us, and even that others understood what was truly better for us more than did we ourselves.

Supposing reason is like a stool, it seems to me that one cannot chop off the leg of practical reason (reasoning vis-á-vis good and bad) and expect the stool not to tip over. For you might maintain that the "true remains true," and yet it certainly cannot be "better" for all to affirm this, or "better" to hold to the truth over falsity, to prefer "good" reasoning to bad, or "good faith" argumentation to bad faith. People should only prefer truth when they find it preferable. And if the good is just what they prefer, they can never be wrong about it.

As Plato points out re Protagoras' version of this doctrine in the Theatetus, this makes philosophy pointless. Who needs teachers when one is always right.

Why should you or I or anyone else value “sustaining society” more than our own comfort or advantage?

Right, as Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich discovers, it is one thing to know that "Socrates is mortal," or that "man is mortal," and another to confront one's own death. The same holds true for suffering and deprivation in the abstract, versus taking them on oneself in order to do what one thinks is truly better.

That is, even leaving aside the question of "what is truly best," people are often unable to bring themselves to do what they truly see as better. Yet this informs the virtues as well, since surely "being good" entails those excellences that make one free to act on their knowledge of what is good, to "actualize the good" as (relatively) self-determining entities.

To do good, one must know what is good, know how to accomplish this good, and be free to do so. Naturalist approaches often get lost in the second of these, spiraling down into the great multiplicity of efficient causes and causal mastery. This focus on particulars lets us know "how to do things," but not what to do. The main problem I see with deontological ethics (and utilitarian consequentialism is just the prioritization of a specific rule in this respect) is that it fails to see how, for a principle to be convincing, it must be found in the Many, in the multitude of concrete particulars. For example, if we can identify "harm" to organisms in analagous biological terms, what is the common principle?

You cannot jump to rules without principles. This sort of moral reasoning sprang from the context where it was assumed that God had clearly revealed the rules in the Bible, and "accessibility to all rational agents," is a poor substitute for divine revelation it seems.

I do have some hopes here. The sea change brought on by the ability of information theoretic approaches and complexity studies' ability to unify disparate fields (including across the "natural" and "social" sciences divide) does seem to be a potent counter to reductionism and the tendency to prioritize the many over any unifying one (e.g. Harris wants to identify the good in neuronal activity, which seems to me like trying to understand flight by looking at primarily at the cells in the wings of flying animals in isolation, rather than for the principle of lift.)

Note the passive voice: everything in nature is determined. Determined by what? If human behavior is determined then it needs to be determined by something other than ourselves, or else it is determined by us, which entails free will.

:up:

To get around this determinists often posit an abstraction of ourselves to be the determiner of our actions.

Yes, or they point to brain regions, neurons, hormones, etc., as if these are not part of us and as if these would not have to be involved if we were doing any thinking/deciding. Sam Harris thinks to think all proponents of freedom are 17th century substance dualists.

I am reading Sapolsky's "Determined" because it seems to have been somewhat influential, but so far it is just layering on tons of empirical findings (some incredibly weak, like the unreplicatable "Lady Macbeth effect") instead of tackling any serious philosophy of free will. This is an unfortunate tendency in popular science, avalanches of citations substituted for clear argumentation.

But I can see how this might come about. A lot of analytical/legal work on free will is incredibly narrow and seems to miss the point to me.

Here would be my proposal: people are free or unfree. This isn't a binary, it's a sliding scale. We can be more or less self-determining. We might describe intentional versus unintentional actions, and free versus unfree acts (these will overlap, and arguably relatively unintentional acts can be free is they involve a freely chosen habit). However, this level of freedom will be parasitic on the freedom of the person. The analytic fixation on "free acts" and not "free people" is unhelpful.

I also don't get the desire to split off political freedom from freedom tout court. They are deeply related.

Why should one, in the general sense, do good is much harder for me to answer than why the good is attractive

I do think this is a problem modern ethics creates for itself. It tends to be more rules based (an after effect of the Reformation and theologies that precluded any strong role for human virtue). Even as the theology has crumbled, the structure has often remained.

Another problem is making the "moral good" a sort of sui generis "goodness" cut off from all other goods (e.g. being a "good baseball player," "good cars," etc. ) I much prefer simply acknowledging that bad things have some good to them, or some apparent good. In this case, it's easier to explain immoral acts in terms of people falling for appearances. This is concupiscence, the love for mere apparent good.

Why engage in vices? Because they are fun, which is a good. Why do so many people, especially (young) men, come to idolize and mimic characters with glaring character flaws (we could consider the long standing appeal of Tyler Durden of "Fight Club" or Tony Montana of "Scarface")? Because these characters do embody some virtues in dramatic fashion. Tyler Durden is smart, courageous, iron willed, etc. They have some of the key ingredients for flourishing in spades. Such characters just also lack other virtues or have glaring vices.

You should want the virtues because they are most likely to make you flourish, and because they help others flourish (which is key to our flourishing and freedom at any rate). You're safest when everyone around you is freer and wants what best for you. If they only do what is good for you because of coercion, then your happiness is unstable because that coercion can break down (and you are not free to remove that coercion without consequences).

As Saint Augustine says: "Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices." Epictetus, the philosopher-slave, makes a similar point.

Biology can inform ethics without ethics being reducible to biology.

You're probably right. But the question seems simple. "Should we do good?" Of course, we should do good. I always feel good when I do the right thing. Then I can better respect mysel

In some sense, intentional action seems to always seek after some good. For example, when we eat, we seek some good, be it the enjoyment of the food, the satiety of our appetite, good health, not offending a cook, etc. Likewise, people generally play games because they enjoy them.

This holds true for bad acts as well. We generally steal because we want the good of getting to possess what is stolen, or else of the thrill of stealing, etc. As points out, the murderer normally seeks some good, the reestablishment of their honor, vengeance, etc.

In ethics, we are concerned with what we should want. It is clear that we can want things that are not good for us, like wanting to engage in adultery even though we know this would be both wrong and disastrous, or the alcoholics desire for a drink they do not wish to have the desire for.

The human good, human flourishing, living a good life, being a good person, etc. involves biology but cannot be wholly explained by it. We might allow that human beings are by nature social animals, and that status is important for self-actualization, but still see that the way status is gained and maintained depends heavily on culture and individual preferences.

Virtue, on the classical view, involves not only doing the right thing but also wanting the right things. Virtue can be trained. Research suggests that people can indeed habituate themselves to wanting good things. The virtues are what allow one to act justly in challenging situations, or just habitually. Doing what is good while not enjoying it is mere continence. Obviously, it's preferable to be happy while doing what is right.

I think another factor here is self-determination. Is our happiness dependent on good fortune. Health, wealth, lovers, status, time for hobbies, etc. can all be lost. They often are at some point in a life. A virtuous person is insulated from these losses. Many historical paragons, saints and sages, seem practically immune to bad fortune, penning sublime works and focusing on a concern for others as they undergo imprisonment or torture, or face immanent execution. In a sense, then, the pinnacle of virtue also becomes a sort of self-determining flourishing.

And of course, virtue helps with freedom even in less extreme cases. Being courageous, prudent, charitable, magnanimous, temperate, etc. help one avoid the traps that land people in situations they cannot easily escape, be it heavy debt, weight they cannot lose, bullied in a relationship, in family feuds, etc. Virtue cannot preclude these, but it both prevents them and makes them manageable.

Right, and the justification will also depend on the experience(s). So, for instance, with a single experience set off by a drug or hypoxia, it is perhaps easier to write off than repetitive experiences with no obvious cause. Likewise, in some ways less utterly foreign experiences might be harder to reconcile, precisely because they fit into the model of all other justification. Recurrence and duration seem relevant.

Ezekiel's visions represent one of the more famous instances of mystical experience and, due to both linguistic evidence and his precise chronology, scholars seem to think they are relatively contemporaneous accounts. But the "hand of the Lord is upon" Ezekiel often and for long durations. At one point he is rendered immobile in episodes lasting 13 and 1 1/2 months respectively, in events scholars have supposed might be catatonic schizophrenic episodes. However, this would make Ezekiel very unique because, while many great artists have had schizophrenia, most people aren't able to carry out this sort of major literary project after the disease has manifested this extreme level of symptoms.

Anyhow, I find the Prophetic literature particularly interesting because it is so often not portrayed as a positive experience. Many of the prophets request that God kill them, with Jeremiah in particular launching into a long death wish narrative (Job also does this). Yet at the same time, none of the doubt, which does appear in the Bible, in apocryphal books, and in later Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mysticism seems to make it in either.