Moral Responsibility - Nicomachean Ethics III.1

Here Aristotle deals with the opinion that the ultimate goal of action is the experience of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This will take us back to the doctrine that the soul has three parts or faculties and to a discussion about how they relate.

In these chapters, Aristotle discusses what sort of thinking goes into a moral decision. Socrates and other thinkers have claimed that science and morality are fundamentally the same sort of reasoning, but Aristotle differs. Even though deliberation does use universal principles, these are of a different sort from those of theoretical science. This is very useful for keeping in mind just what sorts of moral factors go into a decision and how moral praise and blame differ from the intellectual.

We discuss how someone doing something results in moral blame or praise.

A crucial part of complete eudaimonia is being the right kind of person rather than merely following rules. The right kind of person has "vitrue" or in Greek "arete".

In this episode we focus on how eudaimonia is different from many of the assumptions we make about "happiness", for there is no proper way to translate the Greek word into English. I addition, Ada and Adam debate whether habituation rather than nature or theoretical learning a la Socrates is the best source of virtue.

In this series was ask about the good; not the good of the cosmos or of living creatures, but the good life for humans in so far as it results from our deliberate life decisions and our character.This is a very different sort of study, but one that shares a lot with the metaphysics. However, our primary interest will be to ask how Aristotle's ideas of practical wisdom relate to our modern views of politics and morality on the one hand and our conceptions of function in darwinian biology.

In this episode we summarize all that we have discussed thus far as ask really difficult questions about how the science of First Philosophy coheres with the Darwinian worldview. What sort of study is it? Is it empirical (like phyiscs), formal (like math) or neither? Where exactly does he go wrong? It's hard to say, but it's somewhere in the latter half of Book Lambda. IN this episode we retrace his argument and think about where he might improve it to take account of modern science.

In this episode we try to understand an answer what is the fundamental sort of change that ultimately drives all changes whatsoever all the way up to the most large-scale stages of cosmic evolution. The answer we get (such as we can manage it) is surprising similar to that given us by Aristotle in the final chapters of Book Lambda.

While much of the "Metaphysics" seems to deal with something that one might need to understand our own cognitive architecture, in the last half of Book Lambda Aristotle crosses over into cosmology. Is he really right in doing so? Does the science of being qua being really have authority over the cosmos in this way? Or is this Aristotle making a category mistake?

Book Lambda of Aristotle's "Metaphysics" takes the concept of substance and uses it in a cosmological "Theory of Everything". Based on the idea that substance is most real, he then goes on to explain how substance makes the world go around, as in how it happens that planets go in circles and never seem to stop or slow down. At the same time, there are other material beings here on earth which almost never go in circles in space. Why is this? Aristotle's answer is pretty genius, and utterly different from anything you might have heard thus far.