Being disappointed in people for not living up to the best versions of themselves is uncomfortable, for both you and for them, but is a necessary and healthy part of life.
If the hearsay about young Macintyre is true, then he might be an especially good person to learn from. If he had major personality flaws when young but improved over time, his philosophy may have had a lot to do with it. A naturally virtuous person might be harder to learn from since they might not be able to express how to become virtuous, whereas someone who improved can understand the challenges we face better and be a better guide. When studying the interplay between the philosophy and life of a philosopher both directions can be interesting, how did their personality affect their philosophy and how did their philosophy affect their life.
This is a fair point. I don't know much about how he is these days - most of the gossip I have on him his from how disagreeable he used to be, rather than how he is now, and if he's substantially improved since he wrote After Virtue then it is more interesting read in that light.
>“I did a bad thing. A good person would not have done a bad thing in these circumstances. Therefore I am a bad person.”
>Don’t do that. It’s dumb. Good people do bad things all the time.
If your interlocuter is defining 'Good People' as people who do not do bad things in these circumstances, how do you have a productive discussion with them when your definition of 'Good People' includes "people who do bad things all of the time?"
Related: How do you know that good people do bad things all the time?
I don't know, it would depend why they believed that, because it's obviously wrong so their reasons matter more than the belief? I'd be more interested in finding out what they actually believed than having a debate about the nature of morality, because the latter probably wouldn't go anywhere useful.
The reason good people do bad things all the time is that we are finite beings in an impossibly complex world. People make mistakes, there's too much complexity to manage, everything is a complex set of trade offs, and even if you somehow manage to do everything perfectly the intrinsic uncertainty of the world means that you can't get the chances of your actions having bad consequences down to zero no matter how hard you try. Life is about managing trade offs between good and bad, not attempting to achieve perfect purity.
Well, this is truly fascinating to me because MacIntyre is sort of a hero of mine (mostly due to undergraduate study) - and, I would naively have said, *precisely* because he seemed to me to be someone who took his own philosophy seriously and lived out his own beliefs and expressed them and went with them (in an intellectually honest way and at some personal cost) - just like another hero, Wittgenstein. By this I mean his personal journey of believe from Marxism to Aristotelian Thomism (though I don't claim these are necessarily completely opposite poles; indeed my terrible little thesis drew a parallel).
And the public addresses I've heard from him; this year and way back in ?98? in London - addressed precisely these issues of how to be, in a way aligned with but more personal than his published works. In fact, I would also say that I don't think his works *do* tell you how to behave; I see them as treatises on ethical metarationality.
However, I haven't had access to the hearsay! Is anything published on this scuttlebutt?
I do agree that being disappointed in people in this way (including oneself, and indeed one's parents) is an important part of personal and spiritual development.
>Eric Schwitzgebel has done a lot of interesting work on the limitations of of philosophy of ethics in terms of actually making people into better human beings. The short version is that it doesn’t.
Is it? This studies the influence on undergraduates and it's not especially hard to get undergraduates to make major changes to their life. I'm not sure much less than 7% of my undergraduate cohort had a major religious conversion.
I'm not really interested in the question of whether it was a good return or not. My point is not that you can't persuade people to go vegetarian, clearly you can (especially when you get Peter Singer involved in the project). My point is that its under near optimal conditions, arguing for a specific conclusion rather than actually an intervention in general philosophy of ethics it produces a modest impact (a reasonable but not vast drop in meat consumption over a several month period).
Indeed their control group is precisely people who attended a philosophy of ethics class and did not have an argument for the specific ethical conclusion of eating less meat, so if anything this paper is an argument that ethics classes do not improve ethical behaviour, activism does.
I'm always intrigued/dismayed by that gulf between people's professed philosophy and interpersonal practices. You see it a lot in progressive circles - the conspicuous, public ally who in their private life is treating their female/minority partner/s or close colleague/s like shit in exactly the way they profess is wrong, and leveraging that public profession of values as cover for their private behaviour. It's a common enough problem that there's even a book about dealing with abuse in progressive communities.
From what I have seen of situations like that, I think that as with philosophers, it's not only straightforward hypocrisy that's going on. I don't think it's always someone going, "I want to abuse people in the following ways, so I'm going to graft myself onto a social setting where nobody will believe that sort of thing goes on."
I'm sure there are cynical predators out there, but I think in most cases something more complicated is going on, and that, like your philosophers, people are attracted to situations that challenge a problem they can't admit they have. They get to do a lot of work on themselves in a public way, and to witness to others about the importance of that work, which can confer social power and validation, and it's easy to explain away things that happen in private ("I just had a bad day," or "Campaigning has been stressing us all out."), but presumably they know, on some level, that they're not truly living their official values. And that's the bit where I wish I had a magnifying glass for people's emotions, because I really wonder what that feels like.
I suspect in a lot of these cases it looks something like the fundamental attribution error. "Your behaviour is a result of your intrinsic character and thus unacceptable, while my behaviour makes sense because of these situational reasons that excuse it even if yes technically it's not ideal"
In other cases perhaps an almost deliberate unseeing - it's easy to not notice things that challenge your world view. You're probably right that on some level they know, but people are really really good at ignoring things that they know on some level that are inconvenient to them.
In yet other cases, the view professed is an aspirational one - "this is how people *should* be, which I am currently failing to live up to, but I'm trying my best". This is the view that worries me the most because it creates aspirational worldviews designed for perfectly spherical human beings in a vacuum that nobody has actually lived, and then a culture of punishing people for not living up to those proliferates.
I think that makes a lot of sense. A lot of people have also experienced this within religious communities, e.g. in Christianity there's the idea that we're all sinners but the point is making the effort to transcend that via a personal relationship with God. And one of my big theories about society is that secular post-Christian societies are often still very influenced by Christianity in ways that people perhaps don't recognise or acknowledge, so it wouldn't surprise me if that sense of "imperfect but striving [+/- unhealthy expectations about that]" had permeated our culture in a dilute form, even for people who've never even been raised in an atmosphere of faith.
If the hearsay about young Macintyre is true, then he might be an especially good person to learn from. If he had major personality flaws when young but improved over time, his philosophy may have had a lot to do with it. A naturally virtuous person might be harder to learn from since they might not be able to express how to become virtuous, whereas someone who improved can understand the challenges we face better and be a better guide. When studying the interplay between the philosophy and life of a philosopher both directions can be interesting, how did their personality affect their philosophy and how did their philosophy affect their life.
This is a fair point. I don't know much about how he is these days - most of the gossip I have on him his from how disagreeable he used to be, rather than how he is now, and if he's substantially improved since he wrote After Virtue then it is more interesting read in that light.
>“I did a bad thing. A good person would not have done a bad thing in these circumstances. Therefore I am a bad person.”
>Don’t do that. It’s dumb. Good people do bad things all the time.
If your interlocuter is defining 'Good People' as people who do not do bad things in these circumstances, how do you have a productive discussion with them when your definition of 'Good People' includes "people who do bad things all of the time?"
Related: How do you know that good people do bad things all the time?
I don't know, it would depend why they believed that, because it's obviously wrong so their reasons matter more than the belief? I'd be more interested in finding out what they actually believed than having a debate about the nature of morality, because the latter probably wouldn't go anywhere useful.
The reason good people do bad things all the time is that we are finite beings in an impossibly complex world. People make mistakes, there's too much complexity to manage, everything is a complex set of trade offs, and even if you somehow manage to do everything perfectly the intrinsic uncertainty of the world means that you can't get the chances of your actions having bad consequences down to zero no matter how hard you try. Life is about managing trade offs between good and bad, not attempting to achieve perfect purity.
Well, this is truly fascinating to me because MacIntyre is sort of a hero of mine (mostly due to undergraduate study) - and, I would naively have said, *precisely* because he seemed to me to be someone who took his own philosophy seriously and lived out his own beliefs and expressed them and went with them (in an intellectually honest way and at some personal cost) - just like another hero, Wittgenstein. By this I mean his personal journey of believe from Marxism to Aristotelian Thomism (though I don't claim these are necessarily completely opposite poles; indeed my terrible little thesis drew a parallel).
And the public addresses I've heard from him; this year and way back in ?98? in London - addressed precisely these issues of how to be, in a way aligned with but more personal than his published works. In fact, I would also say that I don't think his works *do* tell you how to behave; I see them as treatises on ethical metarationality.
However, I haven't had access to the hearsay! Is anything published on this scuttlebutt?
I do agree that being disappointed in people in this way (including oneself, and indeed one's parents) is an important part of personal and spiritual development.
>Eric Schwitzgebel has done a lot of interesting work on the limitations of of philosophy of ethics in terms of actually making people into better human beings. The short version is that it doesn’t.
Reducing meat consumption by 7 percentage points is pretty good actually imo http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/MeatEthics.htm
Is it? This studies the influence on undergraduates and it's not especially hard to get undergraduates to make major changes to their life. I'm not sure much less than 7% of my undergraduate cohort had a major religious conversion.
maybe i'm misreading the pdf, but it seems like there was only a single week of discussion section devoted to the intervention, so a few readings + 50 minutes of discussion. seems like a pretty good return on so little class time http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/TeachingMeatEthics-200716.pdf
I'm not really interested in the question of whether it was a good return or not. My point is not that you can't persuade people to go vegetarian, clearly you can (especially when you get Peter Singer involved in the project). My point is that its under near optimal conditions, arguing for a specific conclusion rather than actually an intervention in general philosophy of ethics it produces a modest impact (a reasonable but not vast drop in meat consumption over a several month period).
Indeed their control group is precisely people who attended a philosophy of ethics class and did not have an argument for the specific ethical conclusion of eating less meat, so if anything this paper is an argument that ethics classes do not improve ethical behaviour, activism does.
I'm always intrigued/dismayed by that gulf between people's professed philosophy and interpersonal practices. You see it a lot in progressive circles - the conspicuous, public ally who in their private life is treating their female/minority partner/s or close colleague/s like shit in exactly the way they profess is wrong, and leveraging that public profession of values as cover for their private behaviour. It's a common enough problem that there's even a book about dealing with abuse in progressive communities.
From what I have seen of situations like that, I think that as with philosophers, it's not only straightforward hypocrisy that's going on. I don't think it's always someone going, "I want to abuse people in the following ways, so I'm going to graft myself onto a social setting where nobody will believe that sort of thing goes on."
I'm sure there are cynical predators out there, but I think in most cases something more complicated is going on, and that, like your philosophers, people are attracted to situations that challenge a problem they can't admit they have. They get to do a lot of work on themselves in a public way, and to witness to others about the importance of that work, which can confer social power and validation, and it's easy to explain away things that happen in private ("I just had a bad day," or "Campaigning has been stressing us all out."), but presumably they know, on some level, that they're not truly living their official values. And that's the bit where I wish I had a magnifying glass for people's emotions, because I really wonder what that feels like.
I suspect in a lot of these cases it looks something like the fundamental attribution error. "Your behaviour is a result of your intrinsic character and thus unacceptable, while my behaviour makes sense because of these situational reasons that excuse it even if yes technically it's not ideal"
In other cases perhaps an almost deliberate unseeing - it's easy to not notice things that challenge your world view. You're probably right that on some level they know, but people are really really good at ignoring things that they know on some level that are inconvenient to them.
In yet other cases, the view professed is an aspirational one - "this is how people *should* be, which I am currently failing to live up to, but I'm trying my best". This is the view that worries me the most because it creates aspirational worldviews designed for perfectly spherical human beings in a vacuum that nobody has actually lived, and then a culture of punishing people for not living up to those proliferates.
I think that makes a lot of sense. A lot of people have also experienced this within religious communities, e.g. in Christianity there's the idea that we're all sinners but the point is making the effort to transcend that via a personal relationship with God. And one of my big theories about society is that secular post-Christian societies are often still very influenced by Christianity in ways that people perhaps don't recognise or acknowledge, so it wouldn't surprise me if that sense of "imperfect but striving [+/- unhealthy expectations about that]" had permeated our culture in a dilute form, even for people who've never even been raised in an atmosphere of faith.