Ruth Starkman on Virtue Ethics—Entitled Opinions 10/21/2015

10/21/2015

Ruth Starkman on Virtue Ethics

Dr. Ruth Starkman has been teaching writing and ethics since 1986. She is the writing specialist for Stanford's Dept of Computer Science and teaches courses like “The Rhetoric of Biomedical Ethics” and “Science, Democracy and Social Media.” In addition to teaching and tutoring students, she writes on ethics, political theory, medicine, science, and higher education. […]

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00:00:00.000	This is KZSU, Stanford.
00:00:02.400	Welcome to entitled opinions.
00:00:05.840	My name is Robert Harrison,
00:00:07.840	and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
00:00:10.800	[MUSIC]
00:00:16.800	[MUSIC]
00:00:26.800	>> Come, Rad-era-stoddle,
00:00:37.800	claimed that there are three kinds of friendship in this world.
00:00:41.800	One is based on utility, where friends derive some practical benefit
00:00:45.800	from one another.
00:00:47.800	The second is based on pleasure.
00:00:49.800	The pleasure of being together and like-minded company.
00:00:53.800	Sharing things, exchanging ideas, enjoying each other's humor,
00:00:58.800	conversation, looks, and so forth.
00:01:02.800	And then there is friendship based on mutual respect and admiration.
00:01:06.800	And a desire to assist your friends because you recognize the excellence
00:01:11.800	of their character.
00:01:13.800	Well, if you listen to this show, if you seek it out on a regular basis,
00:01:18.800	if you crave it, if you miss it desperately when it goes on hiatus,
00:01:23.800	if you are a much fuller, more realized human being as a result of following this show,
00:01:29.800	then you are a friend of entitled opinions.
00:01:33.800	Not in the first, second, or third sense only, but in all three at once.
00:01:39.800	The friends of entitled opinions, they get it all.
00:01:43.800	They get utility, pleasure, virtue, and a lot more besides.
00:01:49.800	[Music]
00:02:00.800	I'll take as many utility friends as I can get.
00:02:04.800	Just don't give me any Facebook friends.
00:02:09.800	I can do without the self-delight.
00:02:13.800	[Music]
00:02:18.800	[Music]
00:02:23.800	[Music]
00:02:28.800	[Music]
00:02:34.800	A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.
00:02:38.800	Before him, I may think aloud.
00:02:41.800	A quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
00:02:44.800	That's one way of describing what we do on entitled opinions.
00:02:48.800	We think aloud before friends.
00:02:50.800	And you, the friends, think along with us.
00:02:54.800	And please, don't call it virtual friendship.
00:02:57.800	It says, "Real as it gets, as those of you who are friends of this show can attest."
00:03:03.800	I'm particularly pleased to be joined in the studio by my colleague Ruth Starkman,
00:03:07.800	who will have plenty to say about friendship and other related matters today.
00:03:12.800	Ruth Starkman teaches biomedical and computer ethics here at Stanford,
00:03:16.800	and is also an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco,
00:03:22.800	where she teaches political philosophy and ethics.
00:03:25.800	Now, those of you who listen to our recent shows with Professor Hans Sluga
00:03:30.800	will be interested to know that Ruth is a former student of Sluga at Berkeley.
00:03:34.800	Welcome to the show, by the way.
00:03:36.800	Thank you. Thank you for having me.
00:03:37.800	Now, you've also told me that in addition to being a loyal former student of Sluga,
00:03:41.800	you're also loyal to Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher,
00:03:46.800	because you believe that Aristotle's virtual ethics are practical and adaptable
00:03:52.800	to contemporary everyday ethical practice.
00:03:55.800	So, let's begin by me asking you exactly what virtual ethics is
00:04:01.800	and how it differs from other kinds of ethics.
00:04:05.800	Virtual ethics is normally described as one of the three types of normative ethics.
00:04:11.800	There's virtual ethics that begin with Plato and Aristotle in the West,
00:04:16.800	and then usually in a beginning philosophy or beginning ethics course,
00:04:20.800	you go right over to the next category, which is Deontological Ethics,
00:04:25.800	which is usually represented by Kant.
00:04:28.800	And after Kant, you will have utilitarian or consequentialist ethics.
00:04:34.800	And then all these normative frameworks, the dominant frameworks of ethics, pedagogy,
00:04:39.800	at least as we know it in the States, and in many other places,
00:04:44.800	those are the three parts.
00:04:47.800	Kant, in his groundwork of the metaphysics of morals,
00:04:52.800	was terribly upset about virtual ethics.
00:04:54.800	He wanted to have a revolution against it,
00:04:57.800	because for him, character was utterly unstable and not normative enough.
00:05:04.800	But most people nowadays don't like virtual ethics because it is normative.
00:05:11.800	So let's, for a listen, let's put it laid out.
00:05:14.800	So the virtual ethics emphasizes the role of character.
00:05:18.800	A person's character, in fact, the Greek word ethos means character,
00:05:21.800	therefore character ethic.
00:05:24.800	So the Deontology, as you said, inspired where Kant is with principle figure,
00:05:30.800	puts the emphasis more on the kind of duty that we have to rules
00:05:35.800	and to follow imperatives, more moral imperatives.
00:05:38.800	And then you refer to pragmatism or what consequentialism, which presumes to derive the rightness or wrongness of an action
00:05:48.800	from the consequences or outcomes that it leads to.
00:05:52.800	And here, virtual ethics seems to be the least, at least,
00:05:57.800	the one that is least in vogue, since Kant, and certainly in our day,
00:06:02.800	when I hear just the word virtual ethics, I'm just typical in the sense that it doesn't sound
00:06:07.800	sexy enough to me.
00:06:09.800	Maybe persuasive.
00:06:11.800	And maybe if it goes by the other term that it's sometimes used by wishes,
00:06:17.800	add a tayek ethics from the Greek word, add it to which means excellence.
00:06:23.800	And then that would maybe dispel the suspicion that one has.
00:06:28.800	But why don't you make a case for virtual ethics now that we know that it's primarily character-based?
00:06:34.800	Okay, so let me tell you what people don't like about virtual ethics.
00:06:45.800	There's a whole lot not to like about virtual ethics because it's a weighted tradition from Plato and Aristotle.
00:06:47.800	It's a masculineist tradition.
00:06:49.800	The word virtue is actually the Latin word for, as you say, arette, which means actually excellent.
00:06:56.800	But most times when you talk about virtue, thinking of Machiavelli's viola tool,
00:07:02.800	or the meaning of via the root for masculine, it's a manliness.
00:07:07.800	So there's that element that people think it comes from a patriarchal tradition,
00:07:12.800	a patriarchal normative tradition.
00:07:17.800	There's a lot of reasons not to like this concept, who decided the norms of virtue?
00:07:24.800	What do these norms do to various communities?
00:07:28.800	There's a lot of reasons why people don't like virtual ethics.
00:07:31.800	But what I like about virtual ethics, and I try not to sell one type of ethics when I teach the spectrum,
00:07:39.800	when I teach the traditions east and west, and invariably students ask me,
00:07:43.800	"Well, where do you see yourself?"
00:07:44.800	And I say, "Well, I'm a virtue ethicist."
00:07:46.800	And they say, "How, why?"
00:07:48.800	What I'm thinking about is what Hans Lugo calls a diagnostic, kind of thinking that Aristotle has.
00:07:55.800	There's a proto-diagnostic.
00:07:57.800	He's an early diagnostic thinker according to Hans Lugo, and I think that's right.
00:08:03.800	He's normative.
00:08:05.800	He says lots of things that will make your skin crawl.
00:08:08.800	He talks about slaves enjoying their positions.
00:08:10.800	It's naturally where they belong.
00:08:12.800	He talks about women naturally being silent.
00:08:15.800	There's lots not to like about Aristotle.
00:08:17.800	But what I like is this diagnostic thinking about developing habits of excellence.
00:08:24.800	And when I teach ethics to an international group of students, this cohort is coming from traditions where people talk about habits of excellence.
00:08:36.800	The people talk about character.
00:08:38.800	And maybe the problem is in 20th century, we're not really sure what character is.
00:08:44.800	Immanuel Kant thought it was something that could be tricky and go bad at a wink of an eye.
00:08:49.800	But at the end of the day, we're not really sure what character is.
00:08:53.800	And yet, the students that arrive and the students who are coming through these universities and going out into the world,
00:09:00.800	it's believed when they arrive that they know what character is and that their characters will be judged.
00:09:06.800	And I'm interested in showing them what the longstanding discussions of character are, where they come,
00:09:14.800	east and west from Confucius and Aristotle, and how they've transmuted and transformed in our era.
00:09:23.800	But we very much talk about this.
00:09:25.800	When I read college applications, there was a long time college application reader for a number of institutions.
00:09:32.800	We're reading for their quote-unquote character.
00:09:36.800	And that poor 17-year-old is trying to write his or her character in a way that's accessible and 500-word stuffs.
00:09:45.800	As if that could be transmitted that easily.
00:09:49.800	So everyone believes they know what character is.
00:09:52.800	I say, "Okay, let's put this on the table. Let's look what the ancient thought it was.
00:09:55.800	Let's look east and west what character was."
00:09:58.800	And why it was that the ancient thought we needed character.
00:10:01.800	So do you think character can be the foundation of an ethics, or is it just one element among others that has to be taken into consideration?
00:10:10.800	And if it's the former, how do we define character?
00:10:15.800	Is it the moral character of the individual?
00:10:18.800	Is it the temperament of an individual?
00:10:20.800	Is it certain habits that he or she acquires growing up through parents?
00:10:26.800	Or is it an innate endowment that comes from nature or the gods?
00:10:34.800	What is an ethos? What is the ethos?
00:10:37.800	Where a hair-clite has said, a man's destiny is his character.
00:10:41.800	Or the diamond is the...
00:10:44.800	How do we understand character in this context?
00:10:48.800	Well, thank you for bringing up Heraclitus.
00:10:50.800	Because actually when I'm thinking of Aristotle, I'm not thinking of a Heracliteian character.
00:10:54.800	Where the character, one's self is the man who steps into the river is never the same man.
00:11:01.800	And the river is never the same river.
00:11:02.800	And that kind of flexible character that you have in a lot of traditions like Taoism,
00:11:06.800	and you have Buddhism, and Hinduism.
00:11:08.800	The Greeks were all about a stable character.
00:11:12.800	They're so stable that it's a wonder that Kant was disappointed it wasn't stable enough.
00:11:18.800	Well, excuse me, just a thing on Heraclitus. It's true that Heraclitus, as you can never step in the same river twice.
00:11:26.800	But he also said, when he said that a man's destiny is his character,
00:11:29.800	I'm taking him to say that there's something stable over a lifetime,
00:11:33.800	and that what you're going to become or what's going to happen to you is going to depend on this intrinsic,
00:11:39.800	invariant character that you're born with. But I could be wrong about that.
00:11:43.800	And character for the ancients, East and West, was in part in born, but virtue was not.
00:11:51.800	And so virtue, whether you're talking about Confucius or whether you're talking about Aristotle, had to be learned.
00:11:57.800	And Erso has two types of virtue. He has intellectual virtue, which is your capacity for reason.
00:12:04.800	And that capacity for reason is your ability to discern, to take the right actions, to take excellent actions.
00:12:11.800	But you really don't can't do much with this until you've developed moral virtue, which is the product of practice and habits.
00:12:19.800	And I think that's what's teachable, and I think that's what's usable for this generation of students.
00:12:27.800	Is this his character alone? Enough? No, absolutely not.
00:12:31.800	But it's one, it's a very important conversation to have, because everybody, when they arrive, thinks they,
00:12:40.800	at least they think in their college applications that they know what it is.
00:12:44.800	Right. So the idea that virtue needs to be learned, do you believe that it's learned at an earlier age than the students were starting to apply to college?
00:12:58.800	Or is there something that you as a university teacher, teaching biomedical ethics or computer ethics, can actually intervene in a
00:13:09.800	vital, active way in the learning of virtue among students between 18 and 25 years old?
00:13:18.800	I think students have a very developed character by the time when they arrive here.
00:13:24.800	My job, and I'm sure a lot of other people see it this way too, our job is to have them look at all the values that they arrive here at the university,
00:13:33.800	and know where they come from, put them in the larger philosophical conversation that they are already, largely unwittingly participating in, show them where they fit, ask them where they want to fit, and ask them how they want to live.
00:13:52.800	And when you teach Aristotle and virtue ethics based on Aristotle, do you find that it reaches them, that it strikes a chord with them, that it does something to get them to actually rethink what their ethical bases are?
00:14:10.800	It depends on the student. I had maybe 10 years ago, I had a, maybe he was already 15 years ago, I had a student who was a vet returning from Iraq.
00:14:26.800	And for him, Aristotle was just simply lacking insufficient norms. He understood Kant, but he had Kant's problem with Aristotle, and for him, Aristotle was a joke.
00:14:39.800	Why was that?
00:14:41.800	For him, Aristotle was just too wishy-washy. There were just too many possibilities to avoid norms, to develop in the wrong direction, to act outside your cohort.
00:14:57.800	And that's what appeals to you to a certain extent about Aristotle is that he is not a strictly normative thinker, and that he allows for an adaptation to circumstance situations and variability, what contingencies we would call it.
00:15:15.800	Yes. And whereas I suppose if you've been in a situation of extremity as war, there in Iraq, in the case of that student, and so forth, sometimes maybe some absolute norms might be something that you grasp onto because they are so stable and immutable, no?
00:15:38.800	That's right.
00:15:40.800	So can you tell us in what case do you make for virtue ethics over other forms of normative ethics?
00:15:55.800	Well, I don't pedal virtue ethics. I take the students to the ethical banquet, and I let them die, and I let them taste, and we walk through all of them.
00:16:09.800	And that just comes up eventually, they want to know where I stand. And I don't make a secret of it. They're invariably disappointed.
00:16:16.800	Where do you stand?
00:16:18.800	I stand with Aristotle. I stand with Sluga, even though Sluga didn't even stand with Aristotle.
00:16:24.800	Right. So Ruth, you were telling me off air before we came on air that our students here at Stanford, undergraduate, they come here with certain moral dispositions and beliefs and convictions.
00:16:38.800	And then they go and study something like computer science, and they're told by the powerhouses of Silicon Valley, how did you put it?
00:16:48.800	That if you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough, and that all of a sudden there's this complete upheaval in what it means to be successful, and that success in Silicon Valley is directly opposed to what standard moral
00:17:08.700	virtue would consist in.
00:17:10.700	I think that's right. And I think it's not any one particular boss who's saying this. I think it's out there in the ether of Silicon Valley. If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough. Everybody else is cheating. This is how you get ahead.
00:17:27.700	And I do think that students arrive here with all sorts of different moral frameworks, not some more coherent than others.
00:17:37.700	And yet when they go out there, most of their friendships, our friendships of utility, they're trying to get the better deal of something. They're trying to have someone do something for them, and they encounter this. They encounter this need to -- the pressure to
00:17:56.700	divide business from ethics. And one of the things that we're trying to do here is equip them in some way so that they don't make that divide, that they keep it together somehow despite the temptation.
00:18:10.700	Yeah, cynics might think that it's just a way of putting a band-aid on a war wound, or it's just dressing up the Stanford, which can offer all the courses in computer ethics that it wants, but the actual behavior of the power brokers and the agents in Silicon Valley is unlikely to be influenced by that.
00:18:34.700	That's a matter of speculation that we don't need to get into here. It's just reminding me, however, of a philosophy teacher I had as an undergraduate. I think his name was Bill Carr, William Kerr, and he would give us an exam and would then leave the room.
00:18:53.700	And he said, "Is your obligation to cheat on this exam if you can get away with it?" Because this whole purpose of this education is he was being deliberately cynical. He said it's to learn how to game the system and get the better of the system. Of course, if I catch you cheating, you're going to be severely punished.
00:19:11.700	But don't forget that the purpose of education is learning how to cheat.
00:19:14.700	That's right, and I think that's their dual education that comes in. That's the dark side of what we're trying to tell them with looking at different frameworks and looking at different practical examples of what does one do in a situation where one has an ethical dilemma.
00:19:34.700	And it's funny because the cynical, well, you can't get ahead without cheating, paints itself as realist. But I think that the real question is, what are you going to do when confronted with that? I think that's the real question.
00:19:51.700	And you don't say, "Well, this is too idealist." You say, "What ought to be done? What can I do?" There are a lot of philosophers that have different ways of coping.
00:20:06.700	There's the Judith Jarvis Thompson has the minimally decent Samaritan. Okay, you may not be the whistleblower. You may not be the person who could go the extra mile and be ideal. You may not be the good Samaritan.
00:20:20.700	But could you be minimally decent and prevent evil in some way? Could you? And I think that's worth getting students to ask.
00:20:31.700	Well, I began with a number of illusions to Aristotle's theory of friendship, and it was not by chance because I knew that we were going to raise this issue of how what Aristotle says in book eight,
00:20:46.700	and it's Nico McKee and ethics, which is the book largely devoted to friendship along with book nine, that you find that there is something central about Aristotle's thinking about friendship when it comes to virtue ethics as a whole, and also when it comes to his understanding of what it means to be a community and a society,
00:21:09.700	and that there's still a great deal of pertinent or relevance when Aristotle's thoughts about friendship. Shall we go through maybe a step at a time, what the theory of friendship is that we find in book eight of the ethics?
00:21:25.700	I always tell my students this is great and they're always disappointed when we get here. And they're disappointed because he seems to be just giving a taxonomy of what friendship is and it seems to be purely descriptive.
00:21:39.700	But there's a lot in book eight that I believe shows Aristotle's departure from his mentor Plato that he goes from believing in sort of absolute and eternal, external notions of truth to notions that that one could base and ethics on that are more contextual.
00:22:07.700	So, for example, for Plato there's love and there's friendship and this kind of friendship would be philia and it's a friendship of the public sphere, it's a friendship of citizenship, it's a friendship that humans as political animals enjoy with each other.
00:22:29.700	And philia is beautiful, there's not much to not like about philiates, the ideal true friendship. So, at the beginning of the program when you're describing the three levels, the last level, the friendship between mutuals who wish each other well, that state of character, true friendship, perfect friendship is philia.
00:22:50.700	But that's all you get for Plato. It's philia or die. There's not different levels and what I like about Aristotle is that he's willing to talk about the lower forms of friendship that could go bad.
00:23:05.700	A friendship of utility could always go bad, Aristotle says, because in that bargain where you and a friend have a mutually beneficial situation, you might be always considering how to get the better bargain.
00:23:19.700	In a friendship of pleasure you could always go off the deep end and never do your homework and only have fun.
00:23:29.700	But what I like is that Aristotle takes these lower forms of friendship and says, we can make these ethical.
00:23:38.700	We can make these ethical through a kind of moral virtue habituation of keeping them moderate and temperate.
00:23:50.700	And you find that this has direct practical applications to our own contemporary situation, whether it comes to bioethics or computer ethics or any other situational context that arises where questions of ethics are in play.
00:24:10.700	Nobody is going to leave Stanford and be Socrates, walk around barefoot and then get put to death by the Athenians.
00:24:20.700	That's nobody's graduation dream.
00:24:23.700	And their graduation dreams are to graduate, pay back their debts to thrive and find themselves in the world somewhere.
00:24:32.700	And there are a lot of temptations for the pay back the debts and thrive.
00:24:37.700	They will have a lot of friendships of utility, a lot of friendships of pleasure.
00:24:42.700	Where do you draw the limits on them?
00:24:44.700	How do you, where do you say to your friend from whom you are getting some benefits?
00:24:51.700	Your friend is teaching you some new form of coding or something or some new app that you need to learn.
00:24:58.700	Where do you say, I want to know what this app is going to be used for and I want to know who's going to be affected by it and all those kinds of questions.
00:25:09.700	I think this is useful.
00:25:12.700	For sure. Do you think that the third form of friendship, the most perfect form of friendship in Aristotle's tripartite division of the friendship of the good that friends would be asking themselves that question?
00:25:25.700	Or is the friendship of based on the good, one in which you are actually loving the other person, who that person is rather than his or her utility value or pleasure value?
00:25:41.700	And that there is something deeply connected to the person who is the person.
00:25:48.700	If not the character, not necessarily the character, I would say.
00:25:52.700	Aristotle is not clear that you love the person's character.
00:25:55.700	You might just love the person despite flaws in the character.
00:25:59.700	That's a very compelling distinction between the other two kinds of friendship.
00:26:05.700	And I think here is the normative part. I think that's exactly right.
00:26:11.700	And in true friendship, which is also called perfect friendship, or you can think of it as the self-sufficient friendship and what Aristotle means by self-sufficiency is not,
00:26:22.700	"Oh, I can take care of myself and pay my bills," but the friendship that is good unto itself. It's good without self-interest.
00:26:31.700	And that is a normative good, so that's when you wish the person well without any self-interest.
00:26:38.700	And you care about that person's well-being and you trust that person.
00:26:43.700	That is the ideal kind of relationship to have.
00:26:46.700	And when students leave the university, they hope to have made these kinds of friendships, and they hope to find these friendships.
00:26:53.700	They understand, and Aristotle says, that these kinds of friendships are rare, but this is the norm by which they just believe that
00:27:00.700	by which they judge their most precious friendships.
00:27:06.700	This idea of friendship as a personal acknowledgement or recognition of the other person is also predicated on not an absolute requirement of equality,
00:27:18.700	but certainly a strong relative requirement of equality where perfect friends need to be equal in certain respects.
00:27:27.700	So for example, if I read Aristotle correctly, he says that when you find that friend of the good,
00:27:39.700	you are inspired to give or to love more than you are loved in return because it's in the loving.
00:27:45.700	And it's in the providing even benefits or doing something for your friend that the actual, you're fulfilling the potential of goodness for the friendship.
00:27:56.700	But if it's a true friendship, that will also be reciprocal because there will be this kind of reciprocity whereby it will go both ways.
00:28:06.700	So in that sense, this equality has to be taken into consideration, no?
00:28:11.700	Equality, reciprocity, attitude matters.
00:28:16.700	How you give to your friend, no matter.
00:28:19.700	So when you can't just be grudgingly giving your intentions, your expression of giving matters.
00:28:27.700	And all of that is kind of squishy and hard to, hard to relegate to a norm.
00:28:33.700	But that's what I like about it.
00:28:36.700	I have a question for you, Ruth Widget.
00:28:38.700	It intrigues me.
00:28:40.700	Is Aristotle saying that the condition for such friendship is that the two individuals be
00:28:48.700	really good in themselves or is a genuine friendship of the good possible between people who have deeply flawed characters?
00:28:57.700	And if not, then I think that it's really not that much of this world.
00:29:02.700	That's a good question.
00:29:03.700	Is he talking, is he talking about filia and some ultimate ideal form as some condition of possibility for being virtuous that has very little practical implications?
00:29:15.700	No, I don't think he is.
00:29:16.700	I mean, I think that's closer to Plato.
00:29:18.700	I think he's talking about the living a life of you, diamondia, of happiness, a life well lived, a life well practiced within a range, within a range with vicissitudes, and with effort, which we hope is consistent.
00:29:41.700	That constancy is one of his favorite virtues, the opposite of which would be weakness and softness, the Greek word, weakness of the will, a crasia.
00:29:53.700	There's something in book eight that I find a little bit underdeveloped in his thinking, which is the stages of life.
00:30:01.700	I'm interested in different stages of life.
00:30:03.700	And he does make reference to the fact that when you're young, and I don't know exactly what he means by young,
00:30:10.700	that there's no way, kind of years, it's assigned to it, but that friendships are going to be temporary, for the most part.
00:30:18.700	And you're not going to develop long lasting, serious friendships of the good.
00:30:23.700	Likewise, when you're old, you're very unlikely to form that third kind of friendship, because for one reason or another, you're looking more for utility.
00:30:36.700	And therefore, it seems like if you're going to have that ideal friend, I don't want to use a word ideal, let's say that friendship with the good, it really takes place more in a certain stage of life rather than others.
00:30:50.700	Yes, I find that friendships that are formed at a certain age that could be anywhere from adolescence to very early adulthood.
00:30:59.700	And we know this from our experience in America, where the friends people make in college in their undergraduate years, it has a lasting power, for some reason, that way out runs the kinds of friendships that are formed either earlier or later in life, in terms of long jevis.
00:31:19.700	I don't know why that is, but maybe it's because there's a certain intensity where you do have more open access to the person when you're at that stage of life.
00:31:36.700	But it's definitely the case that there are stages of life that influence the forms that friendships go on to take.
00:31:47.700	Well, I think you're absolutely right here, and I think the Aristotle's discussion of stages of life could possibly be yet another one of his unfortunate moments.
00:32:01.700	Young people are frivolous, old people are crotchety, horrible, horrible, ageism, and weird.
00:32:08.700	So this is put to chalk this up with his awful statements about slavery and women awful.
00:32:17.700	So whenever I teach this, I ask my students, "Well, what's going on here?"
00:32:21.700	And one of the things we come up with is that because the Greeks have such a stable motion of character and that character, that moral virtue is that ethos built up as habit, becomes increasing the
00:32:38.680	only stable, that Aristotle assumes in old age there's no mobility in that stability.
00:32:46.680	It's that fixity of character that makes it so unuseful in a 21st century context because nobody believes in that.
00:32:57.680	Recently there were neurological studies that said characters not fixed at all.
00:33:01.680	We're closer to that.
00:33:08.680	So Ruth, I'd like to ask you about that famous quote that's attributed to Aristotle, when he was teaching Plato's doctrine of ideas.
00:33:17.680	He told his students that Plato is my friend, but that truth is a greater friend to me than Plato.
00:33:24.680	I know the phrase in Latin actually because it's the one that Edmund Husserl wrote in the margins of being in time.
00:33:31.680	The treat is written by his one-time student and disciple Martin Heidegger.
00:33:36.680	It had taken Husserl a while actually to get around reading being in time.
00:33:42.680	And when he realized with a certain surprise and dismay that his disciple Heidegger had gone in an entirely different direction than Husserl had been expecting,
00:33:53.680	Husserl wrote in the margins, "Amikus Plato said, 'Magus amika veritas.'
00:34:01.680	Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater friend to me than Plato.
00:34:07.680	So what do you make of the fact that Aristotle would declare that truth, the holy abstract thing, is more of a friend to him than a particular person in this case Plato?
00:34:18.680	That's right, that's right. And Husserl's moment is heartbreaking for Husserl.
00:34:24.680	He's always wondered if he sees being in time as he took a long time to read it and sat around gathering dust for a while until he finally cracked it on vacation.
00:34:36.680	And which friend is being betrayed here?
00:34:43.680	He's being betrayed or is he also betraying Heidegger here saying, 'I'm sorry, I can't go here.'
00:34:49.680	So it's a very interesting, Aristotle says this quote about Plato, "Amikus Plato."
00:34:59.680	Back in book one, it's the opening of chapter six and book one.
00:35:06.680	And he says, you know, people want to talk about the forms and ideal notions of virtue.
00:35:13.680	And it's hard when your friends are those who talk about the forms, but we're not going to because I have something else to say here.
00:35:21.680	And that's his moment where he departs from the normative Plato's ultimately normative notion of virtue.
00:35:30.680	Yeah, would it require in an Aristotelian concept of friendship that the friend be loyal to the philosophical doctrines of the friend or would friendship require that the friend should actually applaud the other friends following his or her own path in the investigation of truth?
00:35:54.680	Do you have to fall into line to be a friend?
00:35:57.680	Well, I think that he's hoping that Plato will applaud him here for his loyalty to the truth.
00:36:04.680	Yeah.
00:36:05.680	And one would imagine that Plato would have.
00:36:08.680	I think he's trying to perform, look how good my filia is, dear teacher.
00:36:15.680	Of course, I'm loyal to you, but out of this particular true friendship, he will trust me here, even though even though what I'm doing is a little risky and different.
00:36:26.680	It's very different than Husserl, who's betrayed and and and shocked by Heidegger.
00:36:33.680	Right.
00:36:34.680	So the other question has to do now not with friendship and truth, but with friendship and justice because in book eight Aristotle makes the declaration that friendship is a higher moral virtue than justice because you can have justice, but even when you have justice you need friends.
00:36:55.680	Whereas if you have friendship, you don't need justice.
00:36:59.680	How do you see the relationship between friendship and justice and the super fluidity of justice in a regime of friendship?
00:37:07.680	This is one of the most talked about quotes of the Nicomachean ethics.
00:37:12.680	I think it's probably with good reason.
00:37:15.680	I think it's the crown jewel.
00:37:18.680	And what he's saying about when men are friends, there is no need for justice is pretty self-evident.
00:37:27.680	If you have a if you have that self-sufficient friendship, you don't have to say, look, can I borrow two dollars?
00:37:35.680	I'll get my lawyer to sign a contract.
00:37:37.680	You don't need to say that.
00:37:42.680	And he says that the best kind of justice is friendly and has a friend in the quality.
00:37:48.680	He means something a little bit different.
00:37:50.680	And this is probably what makes Kant nervous.
00:37:53.680	He means that the letter of the law is cold, that justice itself, that if you just have the the maxims and the rules and the norms that you cannot account for contingencies.
00:38:09.680	And that to be virtuous and to be just, you have to account for contingencies.
00:38:15.680	Yeah.
00:38:17.680	There's also something in common between justice and friendship, which is that it they're predicated on equality somehow, or some kind of fair exchange.
00:38:27.680	And therefore, if a friend has normally gives as much as he receives and return by natural Felicia, justice also is something that we're you know, the giving and taking the balance of justice and so forth is is removed.
00:38:47.680	So friendship and justice are closely connected, obviously, as you said, if when you're in a regime of friendship, the cold letter of the law need not be invoked.
00:38:59.680	But at the same time in book eight, Aristotle sees it fit to raise the whole question of government and the and the pollutea or the you know, the community, the city state, the police.
00:39:13.680	And goes on talking about different forms of government and of friendship as the foundation of the community.
00:39:21.680	How does he go from this idea of a friendship where you're acknowledging, recognizing and accessing the personhood of another individual to seeing friendship as something that applies to the larger city state.
00:39:42.680	I think that it makes sense once he says that the the best kind of justice is has the friendly sort he's thinking of the three positive three positive manifestations of of politics monarchy aristocracy and a republic.
00:40:03.680	And he's also thinking that they have a mirror opposite the mirror opposite of the monarchy is the tyranny, the mirror opposite of aristocracy is the oligarchy and the mirror opposite of republic, I always ask my students to guess.
00:40:18.680	It's a, of course, these are corrupt forms. So, so when you have that when you have these others, what you have in the corrupt form starting at the bottom with democracy is you sort of have a mob rule where everybody votes for the lowest common denominator.
00:40:37.680	And this isn't friendship, this is this is this is maybe a lower kind of friendship of utility or pleasure gone bad.
00:40:47.680	And with the aristocracy this when you have when it goes over into an oligarchy, you have the bad kind of friendship of utility and pleasure at others expense.
00:41:02.680	And the monarch of course pleasure at his own that the expense of the universe.
00:41:07.680	So could you say that in these three different forms of government, these are also correspond to different kinds of friendship that the monarch is a friend of the people in the good form of it.
00:41:18.680	And the ruling aristocracy are the custodians of what have you and that in the democracy or republic that the citizens form a kind of friendship among themselves as equals.
00:41:34.680	And that would allow for a great deal of flexibility in the very concept of fee, I understand that.
00:41:42.680	And I know that you also when you teach virtue ethics it's not just Aristotle but you also appeal to notions of natural law as well as Christian moral doctrines.
00:41:58.680	Do you find that Christianity does something here in the introduction of a third term which would be neither Eros Felicia but his agape of charity of that now neighborly love is a new kind that it's not the old kind of friendship among citizens in a republic or aristocracy that the notion of loving once neighbors you love yourself in a kind of Christian cataclysm.
00:42:27.680	Does that do something to revolutionize the virtue ethics that you teach?
00:42:35.680	Well, the same thing about virtue ethics both east and west especially in the modes of virtue ethics that are that believe in a stable sense of character is they also believe in a stable natural social order.
00:42:50.680	And that people are born unequal and if you ask students for example where I was in Shanghai this summer are people born unequal.
00:42:59.680	They will say yes.
00:43:01.680	If you if you ask students here in the US are people born unequal everybody's nervous about that because we know that we have we have these constitutional and God given rights to equality.
00:43:15.680	And because of these different traditions I really feel it's important to bring in Christian natural law also because Christian natural law influences Islamic natural law and we have a global cohort of students.
00:43:32.680	But what I tell them which disappoints everyone as I say until we get to Christian natural law we don't have a notion of innate equality and so that we don't everybody gets upset they don't like this at all.
00:43:48.680	But I say when you want to argue for as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. does in the Birmingham letter from the Birmingham jail that we have waited 340 years for our constitutional God given rights to equality.
00:44:04.680	He's talking Christian natural law.
00:44:06.680	This is part of the American Constitution.
00:44:10.680	This is present in our everyday lives in our educational systems. Let's learn about where this ethical system comes from.
00:44:18.680	Well of course American Constitution all men are created equal it first thing is already gendered as I understand it the I agree that the the germ of equality in that absolute sense that we are all equals under some natural law.
00:44:35.680	It doesn't mean that we're all born with equal aptitudes or we're all born with equal economic status and that it allows for the same kinds of horrible diversities and hierarchies that we typically find in ancient and modern societies.
00:44:54.680	But it's that it's the relation that God has to each soul is equal that God's friendship with the by I'm importing the word friendship here but God's recognition of each individual in his or her own spiritual core is undifferentiated and does not make distinctions between the king and you know the servant and the or the woman and the man and in that sense there is this
00:45:24.640	complete equality before God. Whether the founding fathers of America you know translated that into the Constitution is you know it's up for debate I've done a few shows on the Constitution we've talked about it a lot but certainly I think that they I think Martin Luther King is absolutely right when he when he invokes that as something that has yet to be realized constitutionally.
00:45:50.640	And you know I look at the founding fathers like I look at Aristotle these guys these guys are imperfect like Aristotle's imperfect.
00:45:59.640	Do I throw the baby out with a bathwater no I keep the idea and I see it reinvented in the Martin Luther King's and that's that's where I see it working and not that it's not volatile it's still Christian natural law and he's using it for.
00:46:16.640	To talk about emancipation and equality could be used in all kinds of it could be used against.
00:46:22.640	It could be used against gay marriage it could be used in all kinds of ways.
00:46:26.640	So do you believe that without the Christian natural law differential that we could never have arrived at a modern concept of a modern republic like the American one.
00:46:38.640	Based on all men are created equal and so forth. Sure I believe that it's it's a very problematic very volatile idea but I think it's central to our history and I think it shapes our ideals.
00:46:54.640	So it's it wouldn't be fair to say that every particular historical era has an ideal of friendship in the political sphere.
00:47:09.640	Whether explicit or non explicit and that there's always this work to be done in any given era of how to make the citizens of a polity friends of each other rather than enemies through civil.
00:47:23.640	War and civil factionalism and the challenges are always different giving given the size of the city state or the size of the nation or the empire.
00:47:35.640	And I know that you're you're finishing up a book on Hannah had it and added would have a lot to say in this conversation.
00:47:45.640	I know that when she was when she speaks about Socrates going around the agora of Athens interrogating people about their opinions and she claims that what he was trying to do is get them to be better friends with each other by share you know this sharing of opinions which is what this show entitled opinions through the.
00:48:04.640	It's kind of a crack in that sense where you form friendships where they did not exist before through an exchange of ideas of some sort, but that nowadays we live in a.
00:48:17.640	In a world that is largely transnational.
00:48:22.640	All are let's let's call it multi national the nations are trying to overcome ancient eminities at least in Europe with the larger federations and so forth, but trying to make.
00:48:37.640	Trying to introduce friendship among citizens communities states and you know larger conglomerates like the European Union so we live with this every day know where.
00:48:52.640	To the limits of friendship apply and where do the where does the the impotist and end kind of enter in when we're dealing with the refugee crisis and so forth.
00:49:05.640	Is this something that you ever.
00:49:09.640	You know, I'm going to discuss it when you're dealing with the questions of computer ethics or bio ethics or any other kinds of ethics that have contemporary relevance.
00:49:22.640	Well, thank you for mentioning honorent.
00:49:26.640	I think that her notion of her image of Socrates and she has a very sharp famously sharp division between Socrates and Plato her image of Socrates is is very instructive and.
00:49:38.640	Wanting to share his opinions his doc so with others and that doc so that opinion.
00:49:46.640	Is a description of as the world appears to me this is not subjective illusion this is this is who I am in the world let me share it with you and let us let us inhabit this world together and that notion of a.
00:50:03.640	Public sphere where you could be friends.
00:50:07.640	Felia and share your opinions and and and and the that the opinions are.
00:50:13.640	Are our fair game to to exchange and debate and they're contested and there's nothing ultimate about anybody's doc so that that's that beautiful.
00:50:22.640	Civic world that she imagined and that required a small civic world and I think.
00:50:30.640	When Hans Lugo is talking about his new book he's talking about also pop populations and that we're in and when you deal with larger and larger populations the civic sphere is harder and harder to see.
00:50:44.640	It is harder to see but at the same time there's a difference between not being able to dialogue at all with a group like ISIS.
00:50:53.640	Yes that refuses any kind of the mediation of reason to use a habermas in turn.
00:50:58.640	And let's say the potential for at least an exchange of radically different opinions with.
00:51:07.640	Iran for example or or Russia where there there are a lot of tensions there are a lot of differences but as long as one keeps.
00:51:15.640	Open the the language of reason where I can begin to understand how the world appears to you or it seems to me that this doc.
00:51:26.640	I'm a boy that I didn't speak about in in relation to Socrates that if I can begin not just as an individual but you know even as a culture or ethnic group to see how the world appears from the point of view of others.
00:51:41.640	Then perhaps this is the way in which new friendships in in larger scales of magnitude take place.
00:51:52.640	One would hope I I don't know that it maps so well from the unofficial.
00:51:58.640	Civic sphere from the public sphere which is outside of official politics that's always been tricky to whether that's we could map.
00:52:07.640	Map that kind of.
00:52:09.640	Friendly sharing of opinions or a marketplace of opinions where there could be an a gun that's that's not deadly.
00:52:17.640	Because when you're talking about states trying this it often does become deadly and there are often.
00:52:27.640	There's often the criticism that we cannot insist on everyone having the same sort of reasoning we do in the West or the North or however you want to call it.
00:52:40.640	Well that's true but diplomacy for example just to give a kind of example could diplomacy which doesn't always lead to deadly agonistic results but oftentimes has.
00:52:53.640	Been successful in avoiding getting to to that point is diplomacy also a way of forming potential friendships where they didn't exist before.
00:53:05.640	One would hope one would hope I don't know I mean I don't know that that any Aristotelian or even Arendi and recipe.
00:53:13.640	I'm I'm not sure how it would work.
00:53:16.640	I think the ideals of cooperation and communication that are and just talking about are terrific.
00:53:23.640	I'm not sure about implementation I don't know I mean one one would hope it's it's it would work one would hope that you talk to.
00:53:33.640	You talk to an adversary and you you hear their dogs.
00:53:41.640	Yeah and yeah and here's where it's different than being understanding friendship differently than we'd commonly understand it which is that you're my friend therefore you're my ally therefore I will do for you and you can be enemies and yet still understand how the world appears to you differently than it appears to me.
00:53:57.640	I'm always shocked at just how enclosed within our own perspective you know American foreign policy can be not understanding the first thing about how the world appears and how our behavior geopolitically behavior appears maybe in other parts of the world and that this what Hannah aren't called the enlarged mentality of plurality and of having that kind of imagined of capacity.
00:54:26.640	To step outside of my first person singular and engage in the plurality of.
00:54:35.640	That it seems to me that kind of first perspective is a very important.
00:54:43.640	Kind of mandate that we might that we might need to take seriously sure sure and this is this is goes to the heart of her pluralist politics she's not thinking of man she's thinking of men.
00:54:55.640	She could have said people but no she says men.
00:54:59.640	And that was that was the way she articulated it but she's thinking of human plurality where the where we could we could live and see ourselves in cooperation with each other.
00:55:14.640	Right.
00:55:15.640	And of course it's not this feel good cooperation that we were we're beyond competition beyond eminence that where he no it's that the.
00:55:27.640	Awareness that the way the world looks to me is just because I have David Foster Wallace as I'm hard wired to believe in doobleably that I am the center of the universe because my whole experience everything comes through me comes through my sense experience to come through.
00:55:44.640	My you know and there's hardly anything in my daily experience that contradicts the fact that I am the center of the universe it's only when you strive to get outside of your own head and realize that your your next door neighbor or your colleague also thinks that he or she is the center of the universe and things appear differently to you than they appear to me.
00:56:05.640	And whatever we call that language the Greeks called it logos or hairaclitus said when a man goes to sleep he enters into his own idiosyncratic world of his first person singular.
00:56:20.640	But when he awakes it's the world of the logo set takes over the logos could be the language of reason or whatever enables me.
00:56:28.640	To exchange viewpoints with you so that I can understand that my way of seeing the world is not the only way the world appears to others and that this is part of citizenship that where citizenship becomes a plurality.
00:56:43.640	And the.
00:56:47.640	And the enemies become friends in a kind of civic sense not in this psychological sense that certain comments of Aristotle could be taken.
00:56:57.640	No, absolutely not in this not in the sense of a private sphere of friendship in terms of fellow citizen.
00:57:04.640	But when you raise the question of logos.
00:57:07.640	And also you also remind us of the last time a person raised the question of logos and world peace in a public context which was the Pope Benedict Benedict Reagan's mortgage rest which was had a catastrophic result when he's talking about logos and the de Hellenization of the world having lost.
00:57:29.640	Our Greek influence and our Greek Greek ethical perspective and our logos this is what's unfortunate about the world and boy he he had he didn't have good results with that.
00:57:42.640	Well he didn't I think the controversial aspect of that address from what I remember is that he made some comments about Islamic culture that that.
00:57:51.640	We're we're perceived to be disparaging but otherwise the address of actually I found it quite interesting we we we did a mini colloquium on that address I hear a sample of years ago I didn't organize it but.
00:58:05.640	Yeah the yeah the logos perhaps it's.
00:58:09.640	Distinctly Western kind of heritage but it is.
00:58:15.640	Something that I feel committed to sure and which I think is deeply.
00:58:21.640	At the root of dialogue the possibility of dialogue and the possibility of conversation and of opening up plurality rather than arriving at consensus I don't think logos leads necessary to consensus but it is a kind of trans personal language that we can speak in order to.
00:58:41.640	At least get a glimmer of how different we are one from the other. Sure.
00:58:46.640	And so I don't want to throw the logos out by any means absolutely not I mean a beautiful example of logos and you're right the Reagan's book addresses.
00:58:54.640	Is is disastrous for some reasons but not not every reason in the moment that he when he arrives and he's he's nostalgic about the University as the ideal public sphere and he says.
00:59:06.640	You know there was something wonderful about a university that had no less than two separate faculties devoted to something they didn't believe existed.
00:59:16.640	Theology god study god and he loves that and the idea that you could have this you could have faculties devoted to something that you don't believe in is exactly that ideal of logos.
00:59:29.640	I found it interesting in the wake of the show we did with Hans Sluga that I did with Sluga on politics and the search for the common good that when Pope Francis came and addressed the UN as well as the US Congress.
00:59:49.640	He kept referring to this need to search for a common good and I think I'm going to have to call up our good friend Hans and ask asking what he what he thought of that.
01:00:03.640	Do you believe the common good is what this is ultimately all about namely friendship virtue ethics finding the right foundation for our behavior that it all does tie into the
01:00:19.600	this ultimate question of the common good.
01:00:22.600	Well if you were true student just like Aristotle being a true student to Plato you would want to not repeat your mentor and
01:00:32.600	Sluga whom I believe to be the treasure of Berkeley and having been the ethos of the the ideal mentor I'd have to say if he's talking about the common good I'm going to talk about the uncommon good.
01:00:43.600	And that that that uncommon good that is really hard to it's uncommon we'd like it to be common but it's uncommon and and finding it it's I mean I think it's uncommon right now we'd like it to be common.
01:00:58.600	How do we get there I don't know.
01:01:01.600	Well Ruth next time you come on the show I want to hear a lot more about the uncommon good because it's a very intriguing notion I'm not quite sure exactly what you have in mind but we have reached the end of our hour.
01:01:12.600	And so we're going to have to follow up on this let me remind our listeners we've been speaking with Professor Ruth Starkman who teaches both here at Stanford and also at the University of San Francisco where teaches philosophy pleasure to have you on Ruth and all of you listeners tune in next week another episode of entitled opinions bye bye.
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