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.
>“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?
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.
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.
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.
>“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?
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
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.