Okay, let's get started.
Good afternoon.
I am Professor Franco Trevino.
Today we'll be focusing on virtue ethics
as an approach to normative ethics.
This is our first reading in the section of the book on doing,
that is that we're moving now away from metaphysics
and epistemology over to ethics.
So my lecture today is going to have five parts.
So first I want to talk about doing, just broadly speaking,
what are the kinds of questions we're going to be asking
in this last section of X-FIL.
Then I'm going to move on to talk a little bit
about the core concepts of virtue ethics,
that is virtue and happiness.
Talk a little bit about how you should understand those.
They're a little bit unfamiliar notions, and I'm going
to be asking you to understand them
in a slightly unfamiliar way.
So that's why I'm going to use some time talking
about the notions.
Then in the third section we'll move on to book one
of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
Talk about Aristotle's views on human nature and happiness.
Then moving on to Aristotle's account of what virtue is,
what virtuous actions consist of, and talk a little bit
about one particular virtue that is courage.
So you get a sense of the structure of Aristotle's theory.
And then finally we'll spend a little bit of time,
we won't have a ton of time to talk
about Foote's article on euthanasia.
Here you can see a contemporary philosopher applying
Aristotle inspired virtue ethical ideas
on a contemporary issue that of euthanasia.
Okay? So let's start.
So do it.
What are the questions we're going to be asking
in this section of the course?
Now I'm going to give you these questions,
I'm not going to give you the answers to these questions.
We will get some answers to these questions along the way,
but of course all these answers are going
to be contested answers.
So one question, what is a good life for human beings?
What is happiness?
What is the right thing to do,
and how do I figure that out?
What is genuinely valuable in the world?
Right? These are all big, difficult questions,
and one thing that the first three theories
in this section are going to be doing is giving you kinds
of answers to those questions.
And then we'll be asking, taking a step back
and asking questions about the nature of morality.
This is the Sharon Street article,
is morality merely subjective?
Is it just a projection of my desires
or something along those lines?
Or is it objective?
Are there real truths about value in the world?
Then it will be sort of broadening our perspective
to the nature of society.
What makes a society just?
What's the best way to organize a society?
And asking more specific questions about gender and race.
What role do they have in society?
What role should they have?
And finally, broadening our perspective even more.
We'll be asking whether we have duties
to animals and the environment.
Now just to give you a brief sort of taste
of what these three theories are going to be doing,
I want you to just think for a second
about different ways you can talk or think about an action.
And I have an example of action.
So imagine someone who lies in order
to avoid hurting someone's feelings,
but the other person ends up being publicly embarrassed.
Other people perceive the lie, and it doesn't go well.
So you have an action.
You have someone who's trying to accomplish something,
maybe with good intentions, acts in a certain way, lies,
and here we have the consequences of the action.
So we can look at this action from the perspective
of the agent, the person who's engaging in the action
or acting, the actor.
We can look at it just from the perspective of the action,
the thing that the agent did, or we can look at it
from the perspective of the consequences.
And these are three different but natural ways
of thinking about how to evaluate an action.
And so the first one, the agent perspective,
you might ask something like, well,
what kind of person does such a thing?
Do I want to be the kind of person who does such things?
That's the agent perspective on this kind of action.
Is this action right or wrong?
Does it violate any norms or rules?
Now we're focusing on the action parts of this little scenario.
And then are the consequences of the action good or bad?
What is the state of the world as a result of the action?
What happens as a result of the thing that I do?
And so these are three different perspectives on how to assess,
look at, and consider a scenario like the one I have up here.
Now the agent perspective is inhabited in the sense
that the agent perspective is inhabited
in what's called normative ethics,
that is ethics about trying to figure out
what kind of person you want to be and what to do.
The agent perspective we see represented by virtue ethics.
Virtue ethics approaches these questions
from the perspective of the agents who are acting.
Deontology, represented by the Kant envelopment readings,
approaches these questions from the perspective
of the action itself, the nature of the action itself.
And utilitarianism, represented by Mill and Benatar,
approaches such questions, ethical questions,
from the perspective of the consequences.
And in each case we look not only at,
in each case these theories are telling us something about
both how we're supposed to think about an action,
so I'm going to act, I need to figure out what to do,
that's deliberation, that's future oriented,
it's gonna tell us how to think about what to do,
sometimes called moral reasoning,
and then also tells us how to think about
what has been done, right?
It's both about deliberation,
thinking about from a first personal perspective
what am I to do, and about evaluation
from a third personal perspective,
thinking about that person did that,
how do I evaluate that action,
was it good or bad, right or wrong, et cetera.
Okay, that's a very sort of rough overview
and comparison of these different theories.
One of the things I want you guys to be doing
in the course of the next three lectures
is thinking about the differences between these theories,
and we'll be talking a little bit about
what kinds of advantages and disadvantages they have
relative to one another.
Okay, so, core concepts of virtue ethics.
I've already told you what these things are
by way of introduction, right,
it's an approach that focuses on the character
or the nature of the agent,
and its two main notions or concepts
are virtue and happiness.
And I wanna say a little bit about what these things are,
because you may have some notions about
or understandings of what virtue and happiness are,
that are a little bit different from the way
contemporary virtue ethicists understand this,
and the way contemporary virtue ethicists
understand these notions is very much indebted
to the way Aristotle and Plato and others
have developed these notions.
So because they're a little bit unfamiliar,
I wanted to spend a little bit of time
talking about them first,
before we launch into Aristotle.
So the term virtue is one way of translating
what the Greek term arete,
another way of translating it,
which is the way that your translator does in this book,
is excellence.
This is actually one thing that's really important
for you guys to remember,
is that when you read the word excellence in this book,
in the Ross translation of the Nicomachean Ethics,
that is, behind that word is the Greek word arete,
and that's the word for virtue.
So these are sometimes,
so this word is sometimes translated as virtue,
sometimes translated as excellence,
but I want you to think,
when you see the word excellence in here, virtue.
And it's important that you think that
otherwise you won't understand at all
what Aristotle is talking about.
And there's an important reason why excellence
is also a good translation of the term virtue.
And we'll see why that is, hopefully,
a little bit later on.
So what is a virtue or an excellence?
Well, it's a character trait or a disposition
that's manifested in the world in habitual action.
So just think about how we use virtue terms.
He's an honest person.
She's a compassionate person.
What we mean by that,
we're saying something deep about those people.
We're saying something that,
both about how they behaved in the past,
so the honest person is someone
who habitually tells the truth,
and how we expect that person to behave in the future.
So if you say someone's an honest person,
you don't say that because they acted,
they were told the truth once.
It's because they have told the truth,
they tend to tell the truth,
and we expect them to tell the truth in the future,
or act in all the ways that honesty entails.
Honesty entails more than just truth telling.
For virtue ethicists,
a virtue has both cognitive and affective components.
What does that mean?
It just means it involves both thinking in a certain way,
so if you're compassionate,
it's not just about having certain feelings.
A compassionate person has certain feelings,
and then has thoughts about how those feelings
are gonna translate into compassionate actions.
So virtue is not just a way of feeling about the world,
it's a way of deliberating and thinking
about how to make the world a better place,
or how to do well in the world.
So it's a rational capacity,
but it's also an emotional capacity.
So it's also, in a certain way,
you can think of it as also something that's holistic,
in the sense that a virtue is something that happens
both, as it were, in your mind, or in your soul,
as Aristotle would say.
It's a way of thinking and feeling,
and it's a way of acting.
So it's manifested both in the world and in your mind.
So that's why, for example, say a kind person,
it's not just about whether a kind person
has, does kind actions, but has kind thoughts.
Kind reactions to other people and how they behave.
So kindness then isn't just about doing stuff in the world,
it's about being a certain way internally, in your mind.
The last point is that virtue is developed
through habituation and education.
So if you understand what I'm getting at about virtue,
it's not the kind of thing you can just do
as a one-off thing.
You have to actually practice at it.
You have to train at it.
You have to be trained in it by others
in order to develop virtue.
And we'll see this is also an important part
of Aristotle's view.
Okay, so I'll leave that as just a,
I mean, one reason I spent, again, time
on the nature of virtue because the term virtue
is kind of old-fashioned.
It's often used in a kind of Victorian sense
about sort of abstinence from sexual activity
or something like that.
That's not what we're talking about
when we're talking about virtue.
We're talking about being a good person.
Being, put it this way, an excellent specimen
of a human being.
That's what virtue is in this sense.
And so we have examples, charity, kindness, courage,
honesty, et cetera.
Okay, happiness.
I'm throwing some more ancient Greek at you there.
The Greek term is eudaimonia.
Sometimes you'll see the word eudaimonia used,
a transliterated word in English.
This is translated either as flourishing or happiness.
This also is a term that needs to be understood
in a particular way in order for you to understand
the virtue ethical perspective
and to make sense of Aristotle.
As we'll see in the first book of Nicobitian Ethics,
happiness is the thing we all strive for.
That is to say it's the thing we want most of all.
And it's not merely on this perspective of feeling.
It's rather the state of one's life as a whole.
So when an Aristotelian or a Neo-Aristotelian
or a virtue skeptic says everyone wants happiness,
they don't mean everyone wants to feel good.
They mean everyone wants to lead a good life.
Everyone wants to live well.
So it's not how I feel right now.
That's one way of thinking about happiness.
But it's how my life is going as a whole.
That's the notion of happiness that we're interested in.
It's not merely a subjective or momentary feeling of pleasure.
It's very, very important in order to understand
virtue ethics in particular because
utilitarians also speak of happiness.
That their notion of happiness is more like
a subjective momentary feeling of pleasure
rather than this way of understanding happiness.
So if you're gonna be able to understand
the difference between utilitarianism and virtue ethics
when it comes to happiness,
this is one thing that's important to have on the table.
Now don't get me wrong when I say that,
and again we'll see this when we get to Aristotle,
the point is not that the flourishing or happy life
doesn't involve pleasure on a virtue ethical perspective.
It's rather that pleasure isn't what makes the life happy.
Pleasure isn't the goal of life.
Now when we say happiness is the goal,
we don't mean that pleasure is the goal.
We mean that your life's going well is the goal.
That's gonna involve pleasure,
but that doesn't mean that what makes that life good
is the fact that it has pleasure in it.
So it's not gonna be a painful life
or a neutral life or something like that.
It will have pleasure in it.
It's just that pleasure isn't the thing
that makes the life go well.
Okay, so I'm gonna, I wanna say now just a couple of things
very briefly about how these two things relate to each other.
Just one or two things here that's also again very important
and hopefully will help you see why it's important
that we understand these notions.
First virtue in a virtue ethical perspective
is necessary for and the most important component
of happiness, right?
Said another way, being a good person is necessary
for living a good life.
Said another way, you can't have a good life
if you're a bad or evil person.
So now if you sort of think back to the difference
between happiness and pleasure, right?
Say, well, you can have a pleasurable life
if you're an evil person, right?
That's true, but on this perspective,
you can't live a good life if you're an evil person.
And again, because the notion of happiness here
is not made up by the notion of pleasure.
And then because of this, right?
So since I started by saying,
when I was talking about happiness,
everyone wants to be happy.
If it's true that everyone wants to be happy,
everyone wants to live a good life,
then everyone should be motivated to become a good person.
And to become a good person means then to develop
these character traits called the virtues.
So you should all want to become virtuous.
Are these virtues defined by itself
or what is considered virtues by society?
Good.
The question is, are the virtues defined by yourself
or by society?
The answer is neither.
The virtues here are gonna be decided by
in a function of human nature.
So they're not relative to individuals.
They're not supposed to be relative to society.
They're supposed to be relative
to our nature's qua human beings.
And that's one of the first points that Aristotle
makes in book one.
So then we'll talk about that.
So before we move on to Aristotle,
I wanna just say a couple of things very briefly
about what advantages virtue ethics has
over the other theories.
Very briefly because we obviously haven't seen
the other theories yet.
But this is something maybe you can come back
and look at after we have gone through the other theories
and see why it has some of these advantages
and disadvantages versus the other theories.
So one advantage is that it has
a richer ethical vocabulary.
So in deontology and utilitarianism,
you can say about an action that it's wrong,
it's forbidden, you ought not do it.
But in virtue ethics you can say it is cowardly,
it is unjust, or you can say things
that don't just communicate the fact that it's wrong,
but something more interesting about why it's wrong.
And then you can say about actions,
it could be both unjust and cowardly.
And I was saying something really interesting
about why the action is wrong apart from the fact
that it is forbidden or immoral or wrong
or something like that.
So some people think that virtue ethics
has an advantage here because it gives you
more information about what makes the actions
both right and wrong.
So you see the same thing on the other side.
That was both honest and courageous and noble.
So you can give a fuller description
about why the action is a good one
apart from saying it's obligatory or it's right
or it's moral or something like that.
Another thing, so I've already mentioned
that feelings play a role because virtues
are constituted partly by feelings.
And another advantage is that emotions
seem to play an important role in the theory.
And this just isn't true in deontology and consequentialism.
In fact, as we'll see on both deontology
and consequentialism, emotions are the sorts of things
that basically get in the way.
So you're really not supposed to listen
to what your emotions tell you.
Whereas in virtue ethics, you're supposed
to train your emotions in such a way
that they're part of feeling the right way
as part of being a good person.
And you might think that actually that is a better way
of thinking about how to become a human being
is to think about how the emotions
are gonna play a supporting role.
And another advantage that virtue ethics has
is that moral education becomes really important
on this view.
It becomes really important to think about
how to train oneself to become the sort of person
that is kind, generous, courageous, et cetera.
Those things don't just happen overnight.
They certainly don't happen by themselves.
So it's a lifelong project on this view.
And so it's not just moral education then
in terms of like, well, your parents raised you
and then you're virtuous or you're vicious.
No, rather your parents raised you
and that's your starting point.
And then you have to think on your own,
how do I become a better person?
I have these reactions I don't like.
How do I stop having those reactions,
start having better reactions?
Am I selfish?
Am I jealous?
Am I cowardly?
How can I better myself?
That's important pressing questions for all of us.
So of course, a couple of drawbacks.
And these drawbacks, often philosophical theories,
the drawbacks are connected to the advantages
in certain ways.
So, oh, well, you have all this upbringing
and this training and this education
and you have role models,
but then it seems like you're always gonna be stuck
with this, whatever the previous generation thought,
it doesn't seem like it has radical critical potential
because you always seem to be relying
on what previous generations were thinking.
So that's one thing that virtue ethics
has been criticized for it.
It doesn't seem like it has critical potential.
It seems conservative.
Another thing is that it doesn't really give action guidance
in a very straightforward way.
It doesn't behave in a courageous way,
do the honest thing.
Those don't necessarily tell us specifically what to do.
And as we'll see when we get to the other theories,
what they offer you is what's called the decision procedure,
whereby you just kind of use the procedure
and you can figure out what to do,
at least ostensibly in every single case.
Virtue ethics doesn't give you a decision procedure.
And some people think that's a weakness in theory.
Okay.
All right, so now we take a pause.
I'm gonna take a pause and take a sip of water.
Okay, now let's move on to Aristotle.
So the first question that Aristotle is asking
in the opening of the Nicomachean Ethics
is what is the good for a human being?
And what he means by that is, right,
so what is valuable?
What is the thing that human beings want?
What is the thing that makes a human life go well?
That's the question that starts the Nicomachean Ethics.
And he starts his answer
by looking at the nature of an action.
And so what does it mean to act?
How do actions function?
And the first thing he notices,
and this is the very first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics,
I won't read it for you,
is that all action is goal-directed.
All right, another way of saying
that it aims at some good or some end.
Right, when you do something,
and someone says, why did you do that?
You're generally able to say,
unless you are, I don't know, dreaming or really intoxicated,
because, and tell what you were trying to accomplish
by doing that action.
So what that gives you then
is the beginnings of a hierarchy.
Right, because you do the thing,
you commit the action in order to achieve some other thing
that already tells you that the thing you did
is instrumental to the thing that you wanted.
All right, why did you go to the store?
Oh, I wanted to buy bread.
So you have the going to the store is your action,
and in order to buy bread was your goal.
All right, so that starts you with a hierarchical structure
and the action aims at some end.
And it answers the why question, right?
For any action, you ask why you tell me
what your purpose or goal or end was in doing that action.
Now, Aristotle reasons that, well,
if there is some end
that organizes all of my other ends,
then that seems like a good candidate
for the good for a human being.
Right, so back to I went to the store
in order to get bread.
Now I can ask of you, you might've already had this,
so why did you want bread?
And then you're gonna tell me that you need bread
in order to make a sandwich,
something along those lines.
All right, so then you have now an embedded hierarchy.
You have your action in not just one goal,
but a goal that subserves yet another goal.
And he thinks that all of our actions are like this.
They find themselves within these hierarchies.
So someone will ask you, well, maybe not,
but let's say someone does,
why did you attend the Exfil lecture today?
Later someone can ask you that.
And then you can give an answer to that question.
And then someone can ask you why to whatever you are.
So I attended the Exfil lecture
because I need to learn about Aristotle.
Okay, well, why do you need to learn about Aristotle?
Well, because I'm writing one of my obligatory essays
on Aristotle.
Well, why are you doing that?
Well, because I'm taking the seminar version of Exfil
Well, why are you doing that?
Because I want to pass Exfil.
Well, why do you care about that?
Well, I want a university degree.
Yes, but why?
Right, so you can always ask about all of these,
that's like an annoying two year old, right?
You can always ask why.
And then you get these structured hierarchies, right?
You're doing the thing, you're attending the lecture
in order to do something,
which is itself a means for something else.
Now, you have all these actions that you do, right?
During the day, during the week.
And the question Aristotle is,
is there something that's at the top of all those chains,
of all those why answers, that's the same?
Is there one common answer where if you keep asking
the why question, you come to the same answer.
And Aristotle thinks that the answer
to that question is yes.
Not everyone agrees with him, right?
This is one, you know, the very beginning
of Nicomachean ethics, some philosophers say,
no, that's just not true.
And you can think about whether you think it's true as well.
He's gonna tell you, as we come to in a second,
that the answer to that question at the top,
the end of all of your chains is happiness.
The end of all of your why questions is,
well, because I wanna live a good life,
and that's part of living a good life.
Or why do you want that degree?
Because you want a certain kind of job.
Why do you want a certain kind of job?
Because I wanna contribute to making the world
a better place.
Or because I wanna earn a lot of money.
Or because whatever.
And then eventually you think that whatever that thing is,
is part of what it means to live a good life.
And that's just another way of saying
what you want is happiness.
Because happiness just is living a good life.
So Aristotle tells us, well, you know,
happiness is the thing that most people say
when you press them, and what's the answer?
But we have to make sure.
So he comes up with these two tests.
He thinks, well, test whether happiness
is the right sort of thing to be at the top
of all of our hierarchies.
So the first, and this is in, by the way,
that sort of I or one seven, that just tells you what book.
That's book one of Aristotle's Linguine Ethics,
chapter seven, which is marked in your text.
So the first is the completeness test.
And so that's asking, is it true
that all things are done for its sake?
Is it chosen for itself?
And that's another way if you can visualize it.
That's one way of asking, is there some thing
that happiness is instrumental to?
So is my living a good life instrumental
to some other thing?
And Aristotle thinks, no, the answer to that quote,
that couldn't be the case.
It wouldn't make sense.
Whatever it was you said, you know,
that you'd lived happiness for,
would eventually can itself come under happiness.
So all things are underneath happiness,
and there is no thing above happiness
on or in rather the hierarchy of ends.
So Aristotle thinks happiness passes the completeness test
because everything you desire and want
and all your actions lead up to it,
and it itself doesn't lead up to anything else.
The self-sufficiency test is slightly different,
similar but slightly different.
Is it choice worthy by itself,
or does it require anything else in addition?
And this you can visualize in a slightly different way.
So if you had happiness,
I'd say if you were living a good life,
is there something else you could want in addition?
Now, someone might say, well, what about pleasure?
You say, well, but pleasure is already part
of the good life.
And there's a specific philosophical reason
why that's the case, which we'll get to in a little bit.
But so that's not in addition to happiness.
Even though happiness is not identical
with pleasure I mentioned already,
it's still part of the happy life.
So happiness means, what about friends and family?
Well, it's gonna turn out that humans are social animals.
Friendship is one of the primary virtues.
So if you have all the virtues,
which are required for happiness,
you have friends as well, so that's also in there.
So he thinks, no, actually, there is nothing else.
Once you have a complete, happy, fulfilling life,
you don't need anything else.
There is no other thing you could possibly want or need.
So it passes the self-sufficiency test.
Now, okay, great, we've made progress now.
We know that we all want happiness.
But Aristotle started there.
He told us we all want happiness.
What we don't know yet is what happiness is.
All right, so all we've done so far, notice,
is verify this common intuition we have
that everyone wants happiness.
And we've said that happiness is living a good life,
but we haven't said anything more specific
about what kind of life that is.
We don't say anything more specific
about what kind of life that is.
We don't give any content to happiness.
Then we don't know what to aim for.
We don't know how to be.
So remember I said the question is,
what is the good for human beings?
So we've identified the good so far as happiness.
And now what we need to do is figure out,
well, what's happiness then for human beings?
Right, so this is now we're getting to this question
of like, how do we give content to the virtues
and to the notion of happiness?
We do that on our cells by looking at human nature.
So we're gonna ground our notion of happiness
in human nature, and that is gonna lead us to this idea
that what we need are the virtues in order to be happy.
And this is the so-called function argument
that you find in book one, chapter seven.
The function argument is a typical thing
that one gets in an obligatory essay or an exam.
So it's on here, page 295.
If you're looking for it and you need to know it
for one of those things.
It's a strange argument in some ways,
and it only makes sense if you understand the question
that Aristotle is asking.
So I'm gonna try and explain it to you
in the clearest way possible.
Okay, so everyone agrees that happiness is the highest good,
but lots of people disagree about what happiness consists
in for human beings.
Some people it's, you know, in the life of money making,
it's the political life, it's the life of honor,
it's all these different competing ways of figuring out
what, again, more concretely, happiness consists in.
Even though we can all agree that happiness,
we all want happiness, but your conception of happiness
is one thing, mine is one, hers is another.
So maybe we need to sort of come up with a common,
grounded, from Aristotle's perspective, objective notion
that's connected to what kind of beings we are.
So the strategy then to do this is to try and figure out,
is there anything that's distinctive in the kinds
of things we do that make us the kinds of beings we are?
So he asks then, is there a distinctive function
or activity that human beings engage in?
The Greek here is argon, which also can be translated
as work.
What work do human beings do?
You can see how this works better
in the flute player example.
What is the kind of thing that it is the work
of human beings to do?
What kind of activity?
So the question, do humans have a distinctive function
or activity, right?
So in order to understand why we have the function
argument, you need to understand that the function argument
answers a specific question that's gonna help him give
content to the notion of happiness.
All right, so if you're gonna write about the function
argument, you should make sure you embed it in this larger
question of what the good is for human beings,
because that's what it's doing in the larger argument
of book one.
The argument itself starts via analogy, right?
So he asks, well, what is the good for a carpenter?
You can ask, what is the good for a knife?
So you have this sort of common structure.
What is the good for a carpenter?
What is the good for a knife?
What is the good for a human being?
And he wants, based on the first two examples,
to tell us something about the last example, right?
So what is the good for a carpenter?
Well, a carpenter, a good carpenter,
what's a good carpenter?
A good carpenter is someone who builds well,
let us put it that way.
Right, someone who's able to construct things
well out of wood.
What is a knife?
What is the function of a knife?
Well, a good knife cuts well,
because cutting is the function, the work of a knife.
So now we ask, well, what about a human being?
Now his strategy here is to just look at all the things,
the activities that human beings engage in,
and see if any of them are distinctive
or unique for human beings.
So really it's an argument by elimination,
which starts with all of the things that we do.
So one thing we do is nutrition and growth.
So we eat, we digest, we grow.
So that's a kind of activity
that human beings typically engage in,
it's a part of function of our biological nature.
That can't be our distinctive activity,
because plants do this, and animals,
lots of other beings in the world.
So that's not gonna be our distinctive function or activity.
What about perception and movement?
We have eyes, we can see, we move around,
we go after things.
Can that be?
That's a sort of activity that humans engage in.
No.
Pleasure, those things are shared with animals.
So that can't be our distinctive function or activity,
because other species also engage in it.
Not plants, but still animals.
And then what about rational activity?
All right, aha, says ourself.
Now we have something that distinguishes us
from all other beings.
This then is the distinctive activity
or work of a human being.
So if we're gonna look for the kind of life
that's going to deliver a good life for us,
it's going to be then the kind of life
that consists in rational activity.
So the good for a human being is rational activity,
and you may have heard this, right?
So a human being is a rational animal,
that's from Aristotle.
You are now reading the origin of this claim.
And so because we have this capability
and engage in this activity
that is distinctive for us as a species,
that is going to be the thing
that's gonna constitute a happy life for us.
Okay, so now we're moving closer, right?
Remember we had happiness as the goal.
We wanna know what it is.
Okay, we filled it out partly with this idea
that it's gonna be rational activity.
So now remember when we talked about the knife
and the carpenter,
we didn't just talk about performing the function
full stop, we talked about performing the function well.
Right, so we want to know what a good carpenter was
and a good knife.
And that's actually really very important here
for understanding how virtue and excellence
come into the picture, right?
Because for Aristotle, a lousy knife, a bad knife,
a dull knife is not really performing its function.
A knife that performs its function is cutting well.
So by analogy, a human being who performs its function
is not just engaging in rational activity,
but engaging in excellent or virtuous rational activity.
So successful rational activity.
So you know people presumably who engage
in rational activity poorly, right?
Who are bad at reasoning,
who are bad at thinking through what they should do.
They're engaging in rational activity poorly.
That's not what Aristotle's talking about.
You have to be engaging in rational activity successfully,
well, with excellence or virtuously.
So happiness then is not just rational activity,
but excellent or virtuous rational activity.
And then he says not just engaging in it once or sometimes
or occasionally or on weekends or every other Tuesday,
but throughout a whole life.
Remember, because happiness is not just about
how you're having it right now,
but how your whole life is going.
So what happiness then is for Aristotle's rational activity
in accord with virtue, again, or excellence
as the translation, your translation has it,
in a complete life.
So, and this kind of rational activity encompasses both,
and this is the beginning move in book two,
a rational activity in the social sphere,
which is called moral virtue or ethical virtue,
and rational activity in the intellectual sphere.
So inquiry.
So there are two ways it turns out
to live a good, happy life for Aristotle.
One has to do with engaging in the life of the mind,
rational inquiry.
This is a highest use, you might say,
for Aristotle of our rational nature,
but then there's the social use of our rational nature.
And these virtues that we're gonna talk about
are then individuated not by,
because we want them to be a certain way
or by in virtue of what our society thinks,
but because human beings need to succeed
in different kinds of spheres and arenas
in the social life, in the social world.
And so we need then virtues, excellences, dispositions,
informed by reason that tell us how to think correctly
and properly, excellently about what to do
in these particular kinds of situations.
Okay, so let's take our break now,
and we'll come back in 15 minutes,
and we'll talk a little bit more about the nature of virtue
and how we are to become virtuous.
Okay, can I just ask you this one?
So, I don't know if you can hear me,
but I think that one is okay.
Okay, so let's start up again.
So now we've seen so far that on Aristotle's view,
we're asking about the good for human beings.
We all agree that it's happiness.
We look at human nature.
We see that it's rational activity that we need,
and not just rational activity,
but virtuous or excellent rational activity.
So we need to develop these dispositions,
these rational, emotional dispositions called the virtues
in order to be happy.
But there's still a bunch of questions left unanswered
about what virtues are like,
what virtuous action is like,
and how to become virtuous.
So in book two, we turn to some of these questions,
and the first question he asks is,
how do we become virtuous?
All right, so if it's such a pressing matter for us
in order to live good lives,
we wanna know, well, what do we have to do
in order to become virtuous?
The first thing he mentions is habituation,
and it's a classic line from Aristotle.
We become just by doing just acts.
We become temperate by doing temperate acts, et cetera.
Think of tennis, all right?
If you wanna have a good forehand in tennis,
you have to hit the forehand over and over and over again.
All right, you become good at something by practicing it.
And so part of what that means for young children
is that they're raised in ways that praise, reward,
and encourage just acts, temperate acts, et cetera,
and punish, criticize, and discourage
the opposite sorts of actions.
So upbringing is gonna be crucial to it.
He thinks the laws are created in such a way
that it's supposed to encourage us to develop good habits
and to not develop bad habits,
but we also have to practice ourselves.
It's not just about being raised and then,
I'm raised by good parents, I'm lucky, I'm virtuous, no.
When you're done being raised,
that's when the real work begins of habituating yourself.
Practicing to become a better person.
We also need moral exemplars, people we look up to.
People in our community, our parents, teachers, whatever.
People we look to and see, aha, that person is good.
That person dealt with that situation in an excellent way.
Aristotle thinks that we're actually pretty good,
even when we're not very good.
Even when we're not very good at ourselves,
behaving in good ways and acting in ways that virtue demands,
we're actually pretty good at seeing it in others.
We can recognize virtuous action in others,
and that helps us.
Ah, that's how I wanna be.
That's the way to deal with that kind of situation.
Aristotle also talks about the man
or the person of practical wisdom.
Practical wisdom is the virtue of deliberation.
This is, in essence, for Aristotle,
the good or paradigmatic moral agent.
This is someone who has basically
all of the right dispositions
and knows how to reason about all of the situations
in the correct way.
So that's our goal, our model, that's the ideal.
And if you're lucky enough to have
one of these people around, right,
that's someone you can take as your role model.
But that can also be someone we think about
more abstractly, right?
So what would, or how would the man of practical wisdom
think about this sort of thing?
We wanna reason in the way that such a person reasons.
And the other thing we're supposed to do
is aim for the mean.
And you have probably heard this idea of Aristotle's
about the golden mean.
This is one way that Aristotle helps us
think about how to become virtuous.
It's both conceptually built into the nature of virtue,
that it is an intermediate condition,
but it is also a tool for helping us
think about how to hit the mark.
And I'll come back to in a little bit more detail
about how exactly that works for Aristotle.
Okay, so Aristotle here addresses this question of pleasure
which I've been, which I've mentioned a few times now.
What is the role of pleasure in all of this?
Well, it turns out pleasure has a kind of dual role
in this picture.
So Aristotle says that virtue is concerned
with pleasures and pains, very broadly speaking.
And what he means by that is that getting,
acquiring virtue entails or involves
having control over what you are pleased by
and what you are pained by.
And if you can do that, right,
then you won't be a slave to your pleasures and pain.
So pleasure and pain functions here as a danger,
as it were, to our goodness.
Why?
Well, because he thinks that pleasure
causes us to do bad things, right?
We enjoy certain things that are connected
with immoral action.
Sometimes immoral action will allow us to acquire things
that we enjoy.
So pleasure tempts us, right?
It tempts us to do bad things.
And at the same time, pain scares us sometimes
from doing the right thing.
So pleasure and pain, right,
we need to get control over them
because if they control us,
then we'll be tempted to do the wrong things
and scared of doing the right things.
And what we want is exactly the opposite.
We only want to be tempted to do the right things
and pained at doing the wrong things.
So we have to make sure we control what we're pleased by,
what we feel pleasure in relation to,
what we feel pain in relation to.
So good or bad enjoyment or pain
is crucial to our character.
So that's one thing, right?
So pleasure and pain as this sort of dangerous parts
of our nature.
But, right, it's also essential
for being a good person that you do feel pleasure
when you do the good, virtuous thing.
Right, so remember, if you're training your emotions,
if you're training your feelings of pleasure and pain,
and the problem is that you're pained
by the right things to do,
and you feel pleasure at or tempted
by the wrong things to do,
what you want is to switch those things, right?
So what you want then is to feel pleasure, right?
When you do the just act, the temperate act,
the kind act, the charitable act,
you should feel good about acting virtuously.
And only then, according to Aristotle,
are you genuinely virtuous.
Right, the genuinely virtuous person
really enjoys being virtuous
and acting in a virtuous manner.
And that's why pleasure is part
of the happy life on this view.
Because if you're really virtuous
and you enjoy being virtuous,
and virtue leads to happiness,
or virtue is part of what it means to be happy,
then you will have pleasure.
The pleasure of,
the pleasure that accompanies virtuous activity.
And if you do the right thing
or act in the way that the virtuous person acts,
but are pained by it,
then you're not really virtuous
because you haven't fully inhabited,
you haven't fully embraced with your whole soul as it were.
Virtue.
There's still conflict, residual conflict,
you still want to cling to doing the wrong thing,
even if you do the right thing.
And virtue is hard.
This is one thing you should definitely take away.
Virtue, right, one reason why excellence is a good,
is an okay translation is because it shows
that being virtuous is extremely difficult.
It's not something that you can just do,
that anyone can achieve or anyone can acquire.
It's really hard,
it takes a concerted whole person effort.
Okay.
So the virtuous person will enjoy virtuous activity
and that pleasure will accompany their virtuous activity
throughout their whole life.
Now, what about virtuous action?
For what is a virtuous action like?
What is required in order to make an action virtuous?
Well, Aristotle outlines three conditions
and this is book two, chapter four.
This is on page 300 of the book.
First, the agent must know that the action is virtuous.
So for an action to be virtuous,
you can't act virtuously by accident,
you can't act virtuously without understanding
what you're doing.
When you do something,
but you think you're doing something else
and it turns out that was the right thing to do.
No, the virtuous person understands
not only what they're doing,
but why what they're doing is the virtuous thing.
So this is a form of knowledge,
you have understanding about what you're doing.
So a virtuous agent understands that the action is virtuous
and that's part of the nature of the action.
The action must be chosen for its own sake,
must be chosen first of all, right?
It has to be the result of a decision,
a decision which is preceded by deliberation,
thinking about what the right thing,
the reason you understand that it's the right thing to do
is because you've deliberated previously about it
and then chosen it.
And you have to choose it for its own sake.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that you have to choose the action
because it's virtuous.
So just to take an easy example, right?
So imagine you realize that the virtuous thing to do
in a particular situation is to help
a struggling older man cross the street.
That's the right thing to do in the situation.
You know that it's the right thing to do in the situation.
And you choose to do it
not because it's the right thing in the situation,
but because the girl that you're with will be impressed
by how kind and generous you are.
That is an example of not choosing the action
for its own sake.
If you do it for its own sake,
you do it whether someone is there or not there,
whether you're seen or not seen,
whether you're rewarded or not rewarded.
None of that stuff matters
if you're choosing the action for its own sake
because it is the virtuous thing to do.
As you can see by contrast,
what it would mean to not choose the action
for its own sake.
And here last, this is the most rigorous criteria.
It has to proceed from a firm
and unchanging state of character.
What that means is that you need to be the sort of person
who acts in this way for the action to be genuinely virtuous.
Again, I can sort of help you see this
by way of the opposite condition.
So imagine someone, a habitual liar,
who on a certain occasion understands
that being honest is the right thing to do,
understand what it is that they should do,
and then chooses honesty for its own sake.
In that one situation, even in that case,
the action doesn't qualify as virtuous
because it proceeds from someone who is not in possession
of a firm and unchanging state of honesty.
So for an action to be truly virtuous,
the agent must also be virtuous.
That's what it means to have a firm
and unchanging state of character.
From Aristotle's perspective, developing virtue,
training yourself to think in a certain way
and feel in a certain way has a certain kind of stability
once it's established in you, which makes it hard to budge.
Also true, unfortunately, of vice.
You establish vices in your character,
they're also hard to budge.
Okay, so there's high standards here
for what really counts as a virtuous action.
Now we get a definition of virtue.
This definition is a mouthful,
so I've broken it up into parts.
This is on page 302.
Okay, virtue is, it's actually sort of,
it's a long sentence that I've now broken up into parts
in order to make it comprehensible to you
because if you read this sentence in the text,
all by itself, you'll just be confused.
So first of all, it's a state concerned with choice.
What does that mean?
Well, it's a state of your character.
It's a disposition, it's a way of being for you
that has to do with what you choose to do or decide to do.
So that's what virtue is, right?
So it's a state or a disposition of character
concerned with action, making choices to do stuff.
That should be easy enough.
Lying in a mean, this is gonna be,
but what does it mean to lie in a mean?
Well, the choice that you're making
is going to be aiming for the intermediate position
which is virtue.
Now I'm gonna ask you to wait a little while
because I'm gonna come back to what exactly that means
in not the next slide but in a few slides.
Okay, it's a mean relative to us
and what that means,
I'm also gonna come back to a bit later
but I'll just say briefly that it's a mean relative to us
because it's relative to the particular circumstances
of the situation that you find yourself in.
So to put it in plainer terms,
the perfect action in a given situation
is a function of the particulars of that situation.
It's not moral relativism, it's not cultural relativism,
it's not relative to what I think personally,
it's relative to the situation that you find yourself in.
And again, I'll come back to this in a second.
This being determined by reason,
crucial that figuring out what the precise thing to do,
the state of character that decides
on the mean state that is virtue, does it via reason?
You deliberate rationally.
Remember, we need reason here
because we started with rational activity
in accord with virtue, which is what happiness is.
Virtue is a kind of rational emotional disposition
so we need it to be rational.
So the choice has to be determined by reason
and not just any old reason
but reason as, to put it again slightly differently
than I have it up here, in the way
that a perfect deliberator would use it.
So it's not good enough to just think about it.
People think about all sorts of things all the time.
People think about it and do really stupid things.
The point isn't that you have to deliberate about it,
you have to deliberate about it well.
You have to deliberate about it in a good way
in the way that someone who possesses virtue would do it.
It is a mean between two vices,
one of excess and one of deficiency.
This I'm gonna also explain when I get to the next slide,
this stuff about the mean.
The Aristotle thinks, this is a peculiarity of his theory,
that each virtue is flanked by two different vices.
One vice that takes too far, whatever the thing is,
and one vice that is, as it were, not enough.
We'll see exactly what that means.
But this is the definition of virtue.
It's a state or disposition that helps you make choices
that are determined by reason,
that aim at getting it exactly right
in the situation you find yourself in,
where you can go wrong in two directions.
I have also drawn another schema for you
to help you see what it means,
or what it could mean to think that virtue
is a mean or intermediate condition,
and why it's a relative versus an absolute mean.
Here we can start with,
you have a line that is bisected in the middle there,
I have the absolute mean.
What that means, that's right in the middle.
And if virtue were an absolute mean,
that would mean that the virtue would always be
right in the middle between the two different vices.
But it's gonna turn out that it's always the case
that the virtue is closer to one of the vices
and further away from the other.
So the virtue is never, it turns out, right in the middle.
So that's one way that the mean is relative.
We'll see this in a second with courage,
but I can give you a different example.
So temperance is the virtue concerned
with bodily pleasures.
And you can be intemperate,
which is someone who indulges in pleasures way too much,
or you can be insensitive,
someone who doesn't indulge in pleasures at all.
Now, if I asked you,
who does the temperate person look more like?
Do they look more like the insensitive person
who doesn't indulge in pleasure at all,
or the intemperate person
who indulges in pleasures too much?
I hope you'll see that the intemperate person
looks much more like the insensitive one,
the one who is the ascetic.
You would never confuse the intemperate one
with the temperate one,
but you would confuse the ascetic with the temperate one
because the ascetic abstains from all pleasures,
whereas the intemperate person
enjoys pleasures to a moderate degree.
The intemperate person enjoys pleasures,
is drunken at orgies, that's the intemperate person.
So vice there is not right in the middle,
it's closer to one side.
So that's one way it's relative.
The other way that it's relative,
and that I have visualized by the two arrows
going back and forth,
is that depending on the situation,
the right action might move in one direction.
It's not always one spot on the scale
that you're aiming for.
It depends on the situation.
You can take another different example.
Sometimes in war, the courageous thing to do is retreat.
And if that's true, then sometimes it'll turn out
that the courageous thing starts to move
in the direction of cowardice.
Yes?
Virtue signaling is a rhetorical strategy
that seems little to do with real virtue.
Because if you're genuinely virtuous,
you're generally not going around
signaling it all the time.
So the whole idea of virtue signaling
indicates already that you're doing something vicious.
However, of course, if you are doing something virtuous,
there's nothing wrong with indicating,
it's not, you should embrace and love what you're doing.
That's the whole idea, you should enjoy it.
So you shouldn't be ashamed by any stretch.
But you shouldn't go around sort of boasting about it,
that seems like it violates other kinds of vices.
Okay, but let's sort of just,
I want to finish explaining my schema.
So then there's going to be the relative mean,
which is the perfect virtuous action that you do
with all the right dispositions and so forth.
And then there's the two vices.
And there's a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess.
So Aristotle says that both feelings and actions
evade of a mean.
So again, just to take a brief example, right?
So let's say you wanted to tell the truth
in a certain situation.
There are lots of ways to tell the truth.
You can tell the truth in a private moment.
You can tell the truth on Facebook.
You can tell the truth on Twitter, right?
There are different ways in which you say
the thing that's true.
Figuring out what the right thing to do,
right, is going to be a matter of taking into account
the different kinds of particulars of the situation.
If the truth is about, you know,
your friend's girlfriend's inviolability,
then Twitter is probably not the right venue for it.
If it's about some grave injustice that's happening,
then maybe Twitter is the right venue for it.
Okay, feelings and actions evade of a mean,
though not all of them.
The closest Aristotle comes to making a joke
in the entirety of his corpus possibly
is where he says that adultery does not admit of a mean.
There's no way to commit adultery with the right woman
at the right time in the right way, right?
So that's the closest Aristotle comes to a joke.
So not all actions admit of a mean
and not all feelings admit of a mean.
So spite, for example, you can't feel spite
in the right way towards the right people, et cetera.
But, and here's where we get sort of a clear articulation,
right, you have to have whatever the feeling is,
and we'll get to one example of this in a second,
you have to have the feelings at the right time
about the right objects, towards the right people,
with the right aim, and in the right way.
All right, so you can go wrong here
in a lot of different ways, right?
You could have the feeling, whatever it is,
in the, you know, for too long,
you could direct it at the wrong people.
You could have it with the wrong aim or end.
You could have it in the wrong way.
You could express it in the wrong way.
All right, so again, this is very demanding,
and the idea of a mean or intermediate
that's characteristic of virtue is supposed to show you
how all of these things need to be taken into consideration
in order to hit the target of a virtuous action.
So let's look at courage, right?
So I said these virtues all have
their different domains or scopes,
so fear and confidence are the relevant emotions here,
and in life and death situations.
I mean, we get courage, also political courage
and other kinds of courage, but the primary case
for our soul is on the battlefield,
and we can see here now, all right,
there's my schema,
how you fill it in in the case of courage, right?
So someone who's fearless, who fears nothing,
or has no fear, is not courageous, right?
They are deficient in their feelings of fear.
Someone who's a coward is excessive
in their feelings of fear, right?
They fear what they shouldn't.
They fear the wrong people at the wrong time
in the wrong way, et cetera,
whereas courage, the virtue or the means state,
fears correctly, right?
See, it's not the point is you should never be afraid
if you're gonna be courageous.
To be courageous, you are afraid.
You just have control over your fear,
and your fear is towards the right things
at the right time in the right way.
So interestingly, right, so here, remember,
the fearless person, you could confuse
the fearless person with the courageous person,
because fearlessness and courage
look more like one another.
Interestingly, although I don't wanna confuse you, right,
if we plugged in confidence here instead of fear,
notice that it would be the excess of confidence,
which would be closer to courage
rather than the deficiency of confidence.
So it depends on which emotion you plug in,
what way the chart goes.
But in that case too, right,
the courageous person is confident, but not overconfident.
Okay, so now I'm afraid we have to leave
our friend Aristotle and begin to talk
for the last 15 minutes or so
about a different kind of life and death situation,
the one that Philippa Foote discusses in her article
on euthanasia.
Now remember, so why are we reading
and talking about Foote on euthanasia?
Well, remember one of the criticisms of virtue ethics
we saw in the first section had to do with
whether it gives us any action guidance,
whether it can help us think through moral dilemmas
or problems or issues, it can help us figure out what to do.
Well, one of the things that this article on euthanasia
is supposed to do is to show us how
using virtue ethical tools,
we can think about the issue of euthanasia.
So,
so what is euthanasia?
Again, I'm gonna give you some ancient Greek, right?
It's a word that combines the word for good
and the word for death, right?
So euthanasia is a good death, right?
Or dying in a good way.
So when we're talking about euthanasia,
the death has to be understood as a good or happy event
for the one who dies.
Now, some people, right?
So there are, have been historically euthanasia programs
in scare quotes, where the people being killed
very much did not want to die
and were killed for the benefit of some fascist regime,
for example, that doesn't count as euthanasia, right?
So we're defining euthanasia here
as a death that's good for the one who dies.
So you can't just sort of declare,
oh, this death is good for you,
therefore it's euthanasia, right?
That's not how it works.
It has to really be good or a benefit for the one who dies.
So an act of euthanasia is one of inducing
or otherwise opting for death
for the sake of one who's going to die.
So the death has to be something good
for the one who's going to die.
Otherwise it's not euthanasia.
It's actually really important to see
that it doesn't count as euthanasia
if you just kill someone against their wishes, right?
Because you think it's good.
What if we,
what if you're gonna have to define it as
a death that is desirable for the person
who made this rather wishful and not good,
because then who decides what good is?
Well, so here, so the question is,
why not define it as something desirable by the person
rather than good?
And I think that the answer is that
not everyone who desires death
is in a position to assess whether it's good for them.
So think about someone who's suffering from depression
and wants to commit suicide
or in general, suicidal people.
They want that, but we don't think,
oh, well, let me help you.
So I think desire here is tricky.
I mean, and here I think the idea is
it has to actually be good for the person
and not just thought good by some person.
So the question that Philippa Foote asked is,
well, are such actions morally permissible
and how do we figure out which ones are morally permissible?
And the first thing she does is distinguish between
different kinds of euthanasia.
And that there are a bunch of different kinds of euthanasia
or different ways of classifying them.
So first is called active euthanasia.
So this first distinction has to do with
what some third party does or does not do
in order to induce the death.
So in active euthanasia,
someone does something to induce death.
So a lethal injection is an example.
So you give a lethal injection, the person dies,
that's active euthanasia because something has been done.
Passive euthanasia is when nothing is done.
So you allow someone to die, for example,
by not giving them liquids or nutrition.
So you don't actually do something specific to kill them,
but you allow them to die.
So that's passive euthanasia.
Then we have a different set of distinctions
that has to do with the way,
the attitude of the person dying.
So first we have voluntary euthanasia.
This is a case where the person consents to
or wants to die.
So this is a kind of version of what you were thinking about.
So you have someone who wants to die,
but you also have involuntary euthanasia,
which would be a case where someone wants to continue living
and the very interesting and difficult case
of non-voluntary euthanasia,
where you don't know and cannot know in principle
what the person wishes because they're incapable
of communicating their wishes.
As a someone, for example, who's in a coma
and does not have a living will,
then we don't know what their wishes are.
So that's a case of non-voluntary.
So you can have that active voluntary euthanasia,
passive involuntary, active involuntary.
You can combine the terms over the red line
with the terms under the red line.
Okay, now what Foote does is uses the virtues
of justice and charity to analyze the case of euthanasia.
And you say, well, why are justice and charity
the two virtues that she uses to analyze this case?
You could have thought maybe some other virtues
were relevant, but she chooses justice and charity,
and the question is why?
Well, first, how does she understand justice?
Well, she claims that justice concerns
what people quote, owe each other in the way
of non-interference or positive service.
So she talks about this in terms of one's rights.
So justice has to do with your rights,
and you have rights both to be left alone,
to not to be harmed, not to be killed.
You have all sorts of rights of non-interference,
and you have all sorts of positive rights.
If you go to the doctor, you have a right to be treated.
If you are in an accident, you have a right
to surgery or whatever it is.
You have all sorts of positive rights.
If you lose your job, you have a right to unemployment.
So you have positive rights, rights to get stuff,
and then rights of non-interference,
that is rights to be left alone in certain ways.
Now, so murder and promise making
are cases of injustice, right?
So murder, you have a right to be left alone,
not to be killed, that violates your rights to life,
and promise breaking, right?
Someone has promised you something,
you have a right to that thing,
and the promise breaker has then taken away that right.
So that's a right you have to something positive
that you're not getting.
So one reason that active, sorry,
one reason that justice has to be relevant
for the case of euthanasia is because it looks like
active euthanasia, right?
So actually acting in order to kill someone
looks like it violates the right to life.
And because it looks like it violates the right to life,
it seems like it's contrary to justice.
So one task then for Foote, if she's gonna show
that some cases of euthanasia are morally permissible,
she has to show that some cases of euthanasia
are not contrary to justice,
that they do not violate any rights.
That's one task if it's gonna turn out
that some cases of euthanasia are permissible.
And you've read the article, I hope, or maybe you haven't,
but spoiler alert, it does turn out
that some cases are permissible.
Charity, on the other hand,
attaches us to the good of others.
So charity is the virtue that promotes the good of others,
justice is the virtue that protects the rights of others.
These are different.
So not helping a dying person,
failing to insist those in need are violations of charity.
So to go back to my old man struggling
to cross the street example from before,
if you just walk by and don't help,
that's a violation of charity.
It's not a violation of justice
because you don't owe the old person help.
That person doesn't have a right to your help.
So it's not a violation of justice,
but it's a violation of charity
because you ought to promote the good of that person
by helping them cross the street.
So one reason charity is relevant
is because passive euthanasia,
letting someone die looks like it's a violation of charity
because it looks like you have someone
who's in need of life-saving support
and you on purpose don't give it to them.
So again, if it's gonna turn out
that euthanasia is morally permissible,
then we're gonna have to show
that it's not in violation of or contrary to charity.
Okay, so she starts with an analysis of the right to life.
The right to life entails for most of us
a duty of non-interference.
That's to say you can't just go around killing people.
It also entails for doctors and health practitioners
a duty of interference.
That is a duty to do something.
So if you are in an accident,
the doctors have a duty to help you
because they are contract bound.
That's what their jobs are
as part of the Norwegian health system.
Importantly, the right to life here
is entirely separate from the question
of whether the life is good.
And this is important because it means
that justice and charity sort of come apart.
So imagine someone who's living a terrible life.
We can't kill them for their own sake
if they don't wanna die.
That's murder.
So the fact that someone who's living a bad life,
even a painful, horrible life,
wants to continue that life,
we cannot kill them against their wishes
even though we think they would be better off not living.
And that means involuntary,
involuntary, the person is against it,
active, taking steps in order to do it.
So giving a lethal injection
to someone who doesn't want it is not allowed.
Unsurprisingly, that's just murder.
However, involuntary passive euthanasia,
that is impermissible for doctors.
So a doctor can't let you die if you don't want that
and expressly state that you don't want that,
but it is permissible for some others.
And she has this case of an injured soldier
on the battlefield asking for life-preserving medicine
from his fellow soldiers.
So in the case, again, if you haven't read it,
so there's someone, there's been a slaughter,
lots of soldiers are lying on the ground dying,
the army is going to retreat,
all the enemy is approaching,
they're going to kill and or torture
the soldiers that they come upon.
So one of the soldiers there,
if they, you say, oh, let me kill you now
before they come and torture you.
If you say, no, I don't wanna be killed,
I'd rather be captured,
you don't have a right to shoot them.
That is the case of involuntary active euthanasia.
But you can leave them behind
and not, in the case that she manages,
give them life-extending medicine.
So you can let them die, even though they don't want to,
in that sort of case.
So in certain circumstances,
involuntary passive euthanasia is allowed,
but this is going to be in very extreme sorts of circumstances.
The case of non-voluntary euthanasia is, of course, harder.
What she says is that unless you know specifically
that a person wishes to die,
you can't assume that they wish to die.
So you have to, you don't have to assume
that they wish to live,
but you can't assume that they wish to die.
So that means that non-voluntary active euthanasia
is impermissible for everyone.
So this is the case of a coma patient, for example,
you don't know what their wishes are,
there's no living will, they can't communicate,
you cannot give them a lethal injection.
However, this is the trickiest case,
passive non-voluntary euthanasia may be permissible
except for those that are contract bound.
So doctors can't do it, but others can decide to do it.
And she imagined the case where this is someone
who wishes you can reasonably assume
that they wouldn't want to be kept alive.
Not that they would want to be killed,
but they wouldn't want to be kept alive.
So for her, there's an important difference
between active euthanasia and passive euthanasia,
and that she thinks is brought out by some of these cases
that she talks about.
Now, voluntary euthanasia, and here she relies
on an important analogy, she's in voluntary euthanasia,
if there's no doubt about what the patient wishes,
no right is infringed if she is either killed
or allowed to die.
So that means voluntary active or passive euthanasia
is morally permissible.
And she gives us analogy of the house,
if you own a house and you allow someone to destroy it,
they don't violate any of your rights
by destroying the house.
And we'll see when we come to Bellarmine
that this is one important point in which she disagrees.
Okay, just coming to the end here.
So her analysis of charity is much shorter.
Basically she says, since we've defined euthanasia
as something that promotes the good of others,
and charity is the virtue that promotes the good of others,
it looks like in general, where justice allows euthanasia,
charity will also permit it.
However, this gets back to this issue
that was raised before, because it will turn out
that sometimes people will want things
that's not for their own good.
Charity may require, rather than helping someone
kill themselves, trying to convince them
that their life actually is worth living.
So charity in promoting the good of others
may give you reason to resist engaging in euthanasia,
even in a case where it looks like you have someone
who wants it.
Okay, we're out of time.
Thank you very much, and I'll see you all next time.
Thank you.