Download Chapter 7 Summary Plato (427-347 BC) Teacher of Aristotle High

Chapter 7 Summary
Plato (427-347 BC)
■ Teacher of Aristotle
■ High regard for the good, compared it to the sun
■ "Just as the sun is the source of light and through its light we can see
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things, so the good shines upon all our actions and is in all our actions."
The good is in all things, but isn’t something in itself
■ Ex. Beauty is found everywhere but nowhere do we find beauty itself
■ Abstract, not concrete
You cannot find the good, only good things
Contemplation = the closest we come to the good
High regard for philosophy
Philosophers are closest to the good because they contemplate
■ Act in accordance with their beliefs
■ Make decisions based on the value and worth of their actions
Believed that nations should be ruled by great philosopher kings
■ Not very effective
■ Contemplation must be followed by action
■ Ex. Hearers and doers
Struggled against a movement known as sophism
■ Threatened to diminish morality and ethics
There could be no truth; truth is nothing more than an opinion
Without any absolute truth, there could not be universal moral codes
Morals are individual or cultural opinions
Life is ruled by desires, not reason
■ If it feels good, do it
Ridiculed moral reasoning about the good
■ As sophists were against moral reasoning, no one could agree on how citizens
should act
■ The state deteriorated
■ Plato found that reason could solve society’s issues
■ Reason pervades everything
■ The highest pursuit in life is to contemplate the good
Our modern culture is based upon three major practical philosophies. Historically, they
have been contributing factors to the decline of cultures:
i. Individualism: “What’s in it for me?”
■ You can do whatever you want, wherever you want, and whenever you
want, without interference
■ Weakens the entire community
■ Note: Community’s precedence over individual
i. Hedonism: “If it feels good, do it!”
■ Acting upon pleasure, desires, and cravings
■ Produces only momentary pleasure, not happiness
i. Minimalism: “What is the least I can do?”
■ Putting in the minimum effort to receive the maximum reward
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
■ Agreed with Plato on:
■ All people aspire to be happy
■ Philosophers most successful in finding the good
■ Thought Plato’s ideas were too abstract
■ People don’t find the good, they find a good
■ The good is found in God, traces of it are found everywhere
■ The good is within all things
■ Very practical and reasonable (science + politics)
■ Teleological ethics
■ Everything has a purpose/aim that is oriented towards the good
■ To fulfill one’s purpose (living well + doing well) is to find the good
■ One must ask:
■ What is the purpose/aim of this thing?
■ How can it best achieve this aim or goal?
■ Pleasure does not equal happiness
■ Happiness is achieved through perfectly performing typically human tasks
■ Pleasure is momentary
■ Community takes precedence over the individual
■ Happiness is living well and doing well
■ Habits build our character
■ Humans are intended to be rational; our greatest capacity is our intelligence
and ability to reason
■ Reason must control desire
■ Unlike sophists
■ Maintain balance/moderation; aim for the middle ground
Immanuel Kant (1740-1804)
■ Lived during the Enlightenment
■ Authority and religion had to be justified
■ Only reason had authority
■ Rejected the idea that happiness is the result of doing good
■ Believed that people are good because it is their duty to do so
■ Deontological ethics
■ Good will is the most valuable possession
■ Doing our duty for no reason other than that it is our duty
■ Avoiding wrong things because they are wrong, not out of fear of
punishment
■ Theoretical vs. practical reason
■ Theoretical is about understanding what people do
■ Laws of nature
■ Cause and effect
■ Practical is about understanding what we ought to do, using reason
■ Concerned with morals and conscious choice
■ About freedom
■ Ethics is based on laws of freedom, not on laws of nature
■ Ethical principles are based on reason (a priori), not experience (a posteriori)
■ Moral maxims
■ To be a principle it must apply to everyone
■ Based on how every rational person would act if reason controlled their
actions
■ Act in a way that you would be willing for it to become a universal law
■ The person as an end… not as a means
■ People should always be treated as valuable should not just be used in
order to achieve something else.
■ Autonomy of good will: “to be a law unto oneself”
■ Immortality
■ You cannot achieve the supreme good in this life
■ Therefore, there must be a life beyond
Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995)
■ The good comes as a call/vocation
■ The good is found in one’s responsibility to other human beings
■ When you are called to respond to another, you are called to be good without
reward
■ No self-interest
■ The other
■ Awakens you to the highest good
■ Reveals a certain poverty
■ Levinas was against makeup as it masks nudity and defencelessness
■ The other becomes your superior
■ Focuses on the singularity of things
■ The uniqueness in each person is called “traces” of the good
St. Thomas Aquinas
■ The ethical comes from the end that is inscribed in the nature of all creatures
■ He made extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s ethics
■ At a person’s core is a desire for the good - following this desire is the basis of
ethics
■ Equated God with the highest good - this God is the trinitarian God of Christianity
- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
■ Aquinas’s faith in the resurrection of Jesus and in the immortality of the soul
allowed him a vision of life with a much more refined notion of the end of humans
■ Human happiness in not exhausted with the good life on earth
■ There is a fuller happiness - called blessedness - that is to be found only in a
loving vision of God
■ The good life is not to be found on earth; it comes in the resurrection as God’s
pure gift
■ His ethics operated on two levels:
■ People live the good life by using their intelligence and also their other
capabilities such as their senses, desires and physical abilities
■ One must follow the natural law
Cardinal Virtues
■ Prudence: The moral virtue that helps our reason to discern what is best for us to
and to choose the best way of achieving it.
■ Justice: The moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give to God
and our neighbour what is due to them.
■ Fortitude: The moral virtue that firmness in difficulties and constancy in pursuit of
good.
■ Temperance: The moral virtue that moderates the attraction to pleasures and
provides balance in the use of created goods.
Theological Virtues
■ Faith: The virtue that enables us to believe in god and all that he said and
revealed to us, and all that his Church proposes for our belief, because God is
truth itself
■ Hope: The virtue that enables us to desire the Kingdom of Heaven and eternal
life as our true happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on
our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit
■ Charity: The virtue that enables us to love God above all things for his own sake,
and our neighbour as ourselves for the love of God
Natural Law
■ “Natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God;
through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid.” CCC #1995
■ Natural law affirms that we have the capacity to figure out what is good. It is
available to anyone who is willing to think about living together in the human
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community. Anyone who seeks to know what it means to be human is engaged in
understanding natural law.
The first principle of natural law is “Do good and avoid evil.”
Chasity :
■ “Chastity means the integration of sexuality within the person. It includes an
apprenticeship in self-mastery.”
CCC #2395
■ “Christ is the model of chastity. Every baptized person is called to lead a chaste
life, each according to his particular state of life.”
CCC #2394
■ Chastity, means living in such a way that our own needs, desires and agendas
do not get in the way of letting the gift be gift , the God be God and the other be
the other. This depends upon the respect and the waiting.
■ Chasity has its emphasis on sex, because it deeply affects the soul.
■ The key for chastity is patience (waiting after marriage).
Chasity as self giving:
■ Chastity is someone who knows how to live ,free from any form of self-centered
slavery.
■ The person learns how to accept other people, to relate with them, while
respecting their dignity in diversity.
■ The chaste person is not self centered, not involved in selfish relationships with
other people.
■ Chasity makes the personality mature, and it and fills it with inner peace.
■ This purity of mind and body helps develop true-self respect and at the same time
makes one capable of respecting others, because it makes one see in them
persons to reverence, insofar as they are created in the image of God and
through grace are children of God.
Institutions:
■ We are surrounded by institutions (Family, school, parish, supermarket, bank)
■ In institutions we find engraved our values, beliefs and practices, most of these
we have inherit.
■ Justice and equality play a central role in institutions.
■ Institutions are the spaces in society where people act together ,therefore
Institutions are as strong as the people who support them.
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We are responsible for making them just and change them when they become
destructive
■ Institutions must have values and beliefs that people follow, otherwise they will
die for lack of commitment.
Robert Putnam: Decline of institutions
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Younger people are less likely to be involved in institutional frameworks.
As a result institutions are dying.
Tenagers put technology over family, less teenager have meal with their families.
People are becoming Isolated individuals.
In a way social media is not a countable institution.
As a result of these lack of communication, teenages now are uncapable of
reading body languaje.
Reynald Bibby: A new generation of community shapers and institution builders
■ Reynald Bibby’s research shows that “ a fairly high 65% of teens expect to be
involve in their communities in the future”
■ Research in the United states by Williams Strauss and Neil Howe found that
teens are “gravitating” towards group activities
■ These researches believe Teenagers are going to be “community shapers and
institution builders.”
Solicitude:
■ Solicitude is an anxious concern for others.
■ To live well I need the others, but the “other” has many faces and might not be
my friend.
■ As Levinas present us (the face of the other), the beggar forces himself or herself
into my consciousness, raising the question of generosity.
■ We become responsible for him or her.
■ This experience of others, is important for living the good life.
■ We have two types of experience of the “other”: Friendship and the appeal of the
needy other.
■ One cannot live ethically without “solicitude”- without a regard for the others
Reyna