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Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and Aristotle Education for Wellbeing CASS 2017

Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and Aristotle Education for Wellbeing CASS 2017. Professor Chris Megone Professor of Inter-Disciplinary Applied Ethics Director, Inter-Disciplinary Applied Ethics CETL National Teaching Fellow University of Leeds.

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Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and Aristotle Education for Wellbeing CASS 2017

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  1. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and Aristotle Education for Wellbeing CASS 2017 Professor Chris Megone Professor of Inter-Disciplinary Applied Ethics Director, Inter-Disciplinary Applied Ethics CETL National Teaching Fellow University of Leeds

  2. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleIntroduction 1 • This brief introduction outlines some central features of the ethics of Plato (and Socrates) and Aristotle (the Greeks) which focus on the connections between ethical virtue and happiness. • It outlines a conceptual framework, and some of the challenges with that framework, which might cast some illumination on the empirically informed work which follows.

  3. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleIntroduction 2 • Socrates 470 to 399 BC; Plato 428 to 347BC; Aristotle 387 to 324BC. Socrates a tutor who wrote nothing but taught Plato who both reported and developed Socratic views. Aristotle building on and responding to both Socrates and Plato • The Greeks were systematic philosophers – so the study of ethics involves addressing some key themes: • In the philosophy of mind and action (moral psychology); • In metaphysics and epistemology (human nature); and • In philosophical methodology.

  4. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleEthics for the Greeks – some central questions (1) A Ethical Questions for Socrates and Plato • i) What is at stake is far from insignificant: “[our question] is how one should live one's life.” (Republic 352d, Protagoras 360e6-8, 361d3-5). • ii) What is in one’s interest? What is the relation between self-interest and the interests of others? (Republic 338c)

  5. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleEthics for the Greeks – some central questions (2) A Ethical Questions for Socrates and Plato • iii) What is the connection between virtue and the good life? Why is there a connection? Does it pay to be just? (Republic 335-344) • iv) What is virtue (and how do you answer the “What is it?” question with respect to specific virtues -- egJustice, Courage, Wisdom, Self-Control – the latter as contrasted with Self-Indulgence)? (Republic, Laches, Meno • v) How is virtue acquired? Moral development – (compare more recent discussions in Piaget, Kohlberg). (Meno, Protagoras, Republic)

  6. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleEthics for the Greeks – some central questions (3) A The Ethical Questions in Aristotle • vi) What kind of life should one live is reformulated as -- What is the good life for a human being (the human good)? • For Aristotle this becomes the question what is eudaimonia? (Nicomachean Ethics I, 1-4.)

  7. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleEthics for the Greeks – some central questions (4) A The Ethical Questions in Aristotle • vii) Aristotle remains interested in the question whether virtue pays, so for him this is the question of how it is linked to eudaimonia. • viii) So for him too how virtue is acquired, and what virtue is are central. • ix) But also how is virtuous action, e.g. courageous action, motivated? What about failures of virtue? What motivates vice, or evil action? What does acrasia or weakness of will involve? What view of moral psychology is required to account for different states of character?

  8. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleAristotle’s preliminary argument on Eudaimonia 1 • 1. All acts/choices/desires aim at some good (Socratic assumption?) 1094a 1-2. • 2. Two types of goods, means and ends, those 'for the sake of which' are more ultimate than those done for sake of others (subordinate and master arts) I,1. • 3. We do not choose everything for the sake of something else -- in each action there is always an ultimate good for sake of which act is done (else 'a for the sake of b' reasoning would go on to infinity) 1094a 22-24. (1,2) • 4. If there is some one end of all the things we do some single ultimate good, clearly this must be the good and the chief good 1094a 24-5. (3) • 5. So, if there is one chief good, then 'knowledge of it will have a great influence on life ....' 1094a 25 ff.. (4,5)

  9. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleAristotle’s preliminary argument on Eudaimonia 2 • 5. Verbally there is very general agreement that the highest of all goods achievable by action is eudaimonia(happiness/wellbeing)I,4 1095a 17. • 6. So eudaimonia (happiness/wellbeing) is the chief good, and 'knowledge of it will have a great influence on life ....' 1094a 25 ff.. (4,5) • But what is happiness/wellbeing?

  10. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleAristotle’s preliminary arguments on Eudaimonia 3 • eudaimonia(happiness/wellbeing) is not pleasure, honour/(celebrity) or wealth (I,5) • What is good for a thing depends on the kind of thing it is, in particular its function. • Human nature/human function – humans are rational animals • So eudaimonia (happiness/wellbeing), the chief good, is a life of rationality. (1,7) • And then virtue is a rational state of character (II-VII) ……

  11. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and Aristotle • Over to Leonie

  12. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleEthics for the Greeks –Developing Answers 1 In response to these questions we find developing lines of thought in the work of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Some views developed and defended are: • That the virtuous life is (instrumental to/partially constitutive of/wholly constitutive of) the good life; • That virtue is knowledge (S.)/or requires the rule of reason (P/A.) which is manifested in both the agent’s cognitive condition and the condition of his desires or emotions; • That virtue is a condition of the psyche (S/P), a state of character (A); • That vice and acrasia involve defects in the agent’s cognitive condition or desires/emotions or both.

  13. Virtues and Happiness/Well-being in Plato and AristotleEthics for the Greeks –Developing Answers 2 • That virtue can be acquired -- human beings are (in principle) perfectible; and that its acquisition depends both on training/upbringing and on rational reflection; • That the human good is a condition of one’s soul, i.e. of one’s psyche; • and consequent views about the relation between one person’s interest and another’s; • That there are objective components of the good human life; • That the acquisition of virtue, and of human happiness, is affected by the condition of the state/community.

  14. Professor Chris Megone +44 113 343 3278/7888c.b.megone@leeds.ac.uk

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