AGS Seminar 15 June 2003  

 

“Some Ethical Systems”

 

A little role-playing to explore some of this history of “ethical” thought, and pose some challenges.

 

The players wear hats with names.

 

M= The Moral Philosopher

S= The Socratist

P= The Platonic ethicist

A= The Aristotelian

 

M: Ethics, as a branch of philosophy, is considered a normative science, because it is concerned with norms of human conduct, as distinguished from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, and the empirical sciences, such as chemistry and physics. My learn-ed colleagues here come from a number of important ethics schools -

 

S:  In the 5th century BC the Greek philosophers known as Sophists, who taught rhetoric, logic, and civil affairs, were sceptical of moral absolutes. The Sophist Protagoras taught that human judgement is subjective, and that one's perception is valid only for oneself.

 

     The Sophist Gorgias went to the extreme of arguing that nothing exists; that if anything does exist, human beings could not know it; and that if they did know it, they could not communicate that knowledge. Other Sophists, such as Thrasymachus, believed that might makes right.

 

     (Today we use the word "sophist", meaning "a reasoner who will avail himself of fallacies that will help his cause" And "sophisticated" meaning "spoiling purity and naturalism")

 

     Socrates opposed the Sophists. His philosophical position, as represented in the dialogues of his pupil Plato, may be summarised as follows: virtue is knowledge; people will be virtuous if they know what virtue is; and vice, or evil, is the result of ignorance. Thus, according to Socrates, education can make people ethical.

 

P:  Yep, Plato is the best!

 

     He built upon a long tradition of Greek philosophy and ethics, based on Pythagoras, the Sophists, the Cynics and many others.  These traditions generally emphasised that there are no moral absolutes, and that good behaviour related to mental discipline.

 

     According to Plato, good is an essential element of reality. Evil does not exist in itself but is, rather, an imperfect reflection of the real, which is good. In his Dialogues (first half of the 4th century BC) he maintains that human virtue lies in the fitness of a person to perform that person's proper function in the world.


 

     The human soul has three elements- Intellect, Will, and Emotion - each of which possesses a specific virtue in the good person and performs a specific role.

 

The virtue of intellect is wisdom, or knowledge of the ends of life;

 

The virtue of the will is courage, the capacity to act;

 

The virtue of the emotions is temperance, or self-control.

 

     The ultimate virtue, justice, is the harmonious relation of all the others, each part of the soul doing its appropriate task and keeping its proper place.

 

     Plato maintained that the intellect should be sovereign,

     the will second,

     and the emotions subject to intellect and will.

 

     The just person, whose life is ordered in this way, is therefore the good person.

 

S:  I don't think you can be so sure that things like these three "virtues" are so absolute.  I mean, who's to say that "justice" should prevail over "compassion".  That's one of the standard questions in the Myers-Briggs personality-typing questionnaire "Do you favour compassion or justice?").  Socrates emphasises that it is mostly a matter of culture-specific education.

 

     If a generation of children are brought-up to believe that "instant gratification" is their right, who's to say that it's not? 

 

     If people in Singapore are brought up to believe that a disciplined and harmonious society is more important than individual rights, then who are we to say that they are wrong?  It's all a matter of education.

A: Aristotle was the pupil of Plato, and built upon his work (so we have here, three generations of ethics teachers).  We regard happiness, rather than virtue, as the aim of life. Aristotle defined happiness as activity that accords with the specific nature of humanity; pleasure accompanies such activity but is not its chief aim. Happiness results from the unique human attribute of reason, functioning harmoniously with human faculties.

 

     Aristotle held that virtues are essentially good habits.  To attain happiness a person must develop two kinds of habits: those of mental activity, such as knowledge, which lead to the highest human activity, contemplation; and those of practical action and emotion, such as courage. Moral virtues are habits of action that conform to the golden mean, the principle of moderation, and they must be flexible because of differences among people and conditioning factors.

 

     For example, the amount one should eat depends on one's size, age, and occupation. In general, Aristotle defines the mean as being between the two extremes of excess and insufficiency; thus, generosity is the mean between prodigality and stinginess.

 

     For Aristotle, the intellectual and the moral virtues are merely means toward the attainment of happiness, which results from the full realisation of human potential.

 

     How does that differ from Korzybski's concept of happiness - Does he ever explain a concept of happiness?

 

S:  Our worthy Platonic friend here is using some very high-order terms.  He says that "good is an essential element of reality".  We still dunno what he means by "good", "essential" or "reality".  He refers to " ... a person's proper function in the world."  What in the world do we mean by "proper function"?

 

A: That's where Aristotle has a distinct advantage.  By referring to "happiness" rather than "virtues", he's keeping at a much lower order of abstraction.  Everyone can guage their own "happiness", but who can quantify "virtue"?

 

     A classic statement that I like, very relevant to today's society, comes from Benjamin Franklin:

"They that can give up essential liberty for temporary security,

 deserve neither liberty nor security."

High-order terms indeed: "liberty", "security", and "deserve".  But the assertion still carries quite a punch, even 230 years after it was made.  Certainly relevant to our current debate on whether ASIO should be given greater powers (eg to detain people without charge for up to a week for questioning), in the interests of security for the wider society.


 

M: Indeed.  And so it goes on.  There were and are, hundreds of schools of ethical thought since Aristotle.  The Stoics, the Epicurians and the Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and the many eastern traditions all have something to offer.  The Australian Aborigines and other indigenous cultures have a rich tradition of their relationship to the land, and acceptable ethical behaviour in their communal societies.

 

     I think that Alfred Korzybski avoids trying to define "happiness".  He does say a lot about "proper evaluation", including "ethical evaluation" as a particular case (S&S P.xxxi):

 

"Theory and practice show that healthy, well-balanced people are naturally 'moral' and 'ethical' unless their educations have twisted their types of evaluations. In general semantics we do not 'preach' 'morality' or ethics as such, but we train students in consciousness of abstracting, consciousness of the multiordinal mechanisms of evaluation, relational orientations etc, which bring about cortico-thalamic integration, and then as a result 'morality', 'ethics', awareness of social responsibilities, etc. follow automatically."

 

     Well, learned friends - What about AK and his followers?

    

 

  * Can we become "happy" by following the teaching of that great man?

       * Will "consciousness of abstracting" lead inevitably to "ethical" behaviour?

       * Can a "relational orientation" lead to cortico-thalamic integration?

       * What can our generation or we as gs practitioners pass-on to our successors?

 

     What you tink?

ooo000ooo

<-Home