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we can eventually come to understand what’s too little, what’s too much, and what’s “just right.”
The best thing about Aristotle’s “constant learning, constant trying, constant searching” is what results from it: a mature yet still pliable person, brimming with experiences both old and new, who doesn’t rely solely on familiar routines or dated information about how the world works.
Socrates, who was maybe a brilliant thinker but also annoyed everyone in Athens so much that his government threw him in jail and made him drink hemlock and die.
The great majority of human actions involve incomplete information,
“Should I tell the truth?” is one of the most common ethical dilemmas we face.
Deontology is the study of duties or obligations.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), primarily responsible for bringing deontology to prominence, believed that we should discern rules for moral behavior using only our ability for pure reasoning, and then act out of an unflinching duty to follow those rules.
Not a great beach read.
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
Clown Posse’s “Water, fire, air, and dirt / Fucking magnets, how do they work?”
So, should we lie to our friend? No. Because first we have to imagine a world where everyone lies—and
“happiness” is something subjective that we can only define for ourselves.
morality is something we arrive at free of our subjective feelings or judgments.
Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.
In other words: don’t use people to get what you want.
Aristotle, in contrast, allows us to seek virtue in a more experiential way—by trial and error, essentially—which
we both want to design a world where we accommodate each other’s needs,
“I Am, Because We Are” Explaining ubuntu will take a second, because there’s not really (as far as I’ve found) a perfect encapsulation, and since I don’t speak Zulu
A comprehensive ancient African world view based on the values of intense humanness, caring, sharing, respect, compassion, and associated values, ensuring a happy and qualitative human community life in the spirit of family.
“human interconnectedness,” there are parallels in Buddhism, or the Hindu concept of dharma. The difference, he says, is that in Africa “these values are practiced on a much deeper level. It is about a real passionate living of humanity, as if humanity is the primary reason for living above all other concerns.”
focus on a collective goal
A person is a person through other people.
It’s not just that we owe things to other people—ubuntu says we exist through them.
Their health is our health, their happiness is our happiness, their interests are our interests, when they are hurt or diminished we are hurt or diminished.
In 2006, Nelson Mandela was asked to define ubuntu and said this: In the old days, when we were young, a traveler to our country would stop in our
for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, and attend to him. That is one aspect of ubuntu, but it [has] various aspects.… Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question, therefore, is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?9
“I think, therefore I am”—which, again, is one of the very foundations of Western thought. When we place it next to this ubuntu formulation—“I am, because we are”—well, man oh man, that’s a pretty big difference. Descartes saw his own singular consciousness as proof of existence. Practitioners of ubuntu see our existence as conditional on others’ existence.
read about women who expose horrifying abuses while risking their careers and mental health in order to prevent the same awful things from happening to others.
The jokey title of this book aside, in order to be good we don’t have to be perfect, right? … Right?!
Edith Hall, a professor of classics at King’s College London, excellently explains this angle on Aristotelian means: I believe my own worst faults are: impatience, recklessness, excessive bluntness, emotional extremes and vindictiveness. But Aristotle’s idea of… “the golden mean” explains that all these are fine in moderation—people who are never impatient don’t get things done; people who never take risks live limited lives; people who evade the
truth and do not express pain or joy at all are psychologically and emotionally stunted or deprived; and people who have no desire whatsoever to get even with those who have damaged them are either deluding themselves or have too low an estimate of their own worth.
Aristotle had his problems—for instance, he was very into slavery. He 100 percent thought slavery was cool. I know it was 2,400 years ago, but still—don’t be so into slavery, Aristotle!)
Like anything else, it’s a calculation: brave is good, foolish is not.
Moral desert is the idea that if we do good deeds, we should be rewarded for them—sometimes in like a cool spiritual way,
But if you wash one dish in mindfulness, if you build one temple while dwelling deeply in the present moment—not wanting to be anywhere else, not caring about fame or recognition—the merit from that act will be boundless, and you will feel very happy.
the writings of William James.
James (1842–1910) was a sort of nineteenth-century Aristotle—he wrote about psychology, philosophy, education, religion, and a bunch of other stuff. He’s sometimes called the “Father of Modern Psychology,”
It should be noted that Thich Nhat Hanh would probably disagree with James (and me) here, because he cares more about the person doing the thing than what happened when he did it. The Buddhist view of happiness requires that it be the right happiness—the mindful happiness that comes from devotion to the Buddha’s teachings.
Confusingly, the “desert” here isn’t the dry, sandy place where camels roam around; nor is it dessert, like ice cream, though that’s how it’s pronounced. It’s etymologically linked to the concept of deserving something. I do X, so I deserve
the flexibility we need to absorb new truths, and not to reject them on the basis of a previous truth we believed in but that is no longer relevant or even accurate.
we looked at each other and instantly read on each other’s faces the same queasy feeling: there was something very wrong about what we were doing… though we couldn’t pinpoint what it was. The little voices in our heads were chirping at us, and we finally started listening to them. If
A person who’s deficient in guilt may never change his behavior, becoming callous to the effects of his actions. A person who feels excessive guilt might develop low self-esteem or become a recluse out of a fear of harming others. Somewhere in the middle would be the mean—let’s call it “self-awareness.”
research into a phenomenon called the “backfire effect,” which shows that when people are confronted with information that contradicts their core beliefs, even if the evidence is both demonstrably factual and overwhelming, they’re much more likely to double down on their original beliefs than they are to accept the new ones. The human instinct to avoid shame is very powerful.
This is essentially what therapy is, and it’s why I highly recommend therapy to anyone who can afford it.
Moral Exhaustion.2,3 Trying to do the right thing all the time
because, again, failure is the inevitable result of caring about morality and trying to be good people.
the work of making better choices is frequently annoying.
Until a friend of mine told me that the way the Prius’s hybrid batteries were manufactured was actually, in toto, more harmful to the environment than a regular gas-powered car, for reasons that now escape me.
the electricity on the California grid still mostly came from coal-burning power plants,11 so unless you had a solar grid powering your car, you were actually doing more harm by driving a fully electric
At the time, I was working on the show Parks and Recreation, and the writers’ room was up in arms.
