Ep. 381: Aquinas on Ethical Psychology (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Hey all, I again am teaching my big books in Continental Philosophy online class, but only if I get enough people now telling me that they want to do it. Please see details@PartiallyExaminedLife.com class, You're listening to Partially Examined Life, a podcast by Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 381 is what is virtue? And we are returning to selections from Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologica written around 1268, as selected from the Oxford's Thomas Aquinas Selected Philosophical Writings, compiled by Timothy McDermott in 1993. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partialexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer with affections ruled democratically by my reason.

0:52 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, a reasoning creature sharing in the eternal law.

0:58 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

1:02 Dylan: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey reflecting on the notion of purity implied by things and actions being good if they exist fully and bad if they are incomplete. In Madison, Wisconsin.

1:15 Mark: All right, so the long awaited return of Dylan and the return to Thomas Aquinas. Are you so grateful that we waited for your return to keep going on this?

1:24 Dylan: I am truly blessed to to have had this hold off for me.

1:31 Mark: Per our last Aquinas episodes, he doesn't just say what his philosophy is, he considers specific questions. So our main focus today, the thing that we know that we're going to get through, is this section on virtue, which was only about 20 pages and. Right. He could have just said, here's my definition of virtue. And he gets around that, actually around the fourth question. How can we define virtue? They are good qualities of mind which dispose us to live rightly, which we cannot misuse, and which God works in us without our help. But he works up to that.

Is it a disposition? Aristotle says it's a disposition. What does that mean? Is it a disposition to act? Is it a good disposition? And there are ways of disputing each of these questions, you know, to say, well, dispositions could be for good, for evil. And then after he gets through the definition, then we get back to psychology. So we're just picking right up where we were with our Aquinas on mind and Aquinas on emotions sections. What part of us do virtues affect? Are there virtues of the intellect? So, yeah, we talked about a whole chapter in the Nicomachean Ethics where he talked about different kinds of excellences.

And some of them were excellences of the mind. Of course, we know for Aristotle, reason has everything to do with morality, so you'd think those would be morally relevant. And then are there virtues disposing our capacities for affection and aggression, so wording exactly out of our emotions episode. Are there virtues of sense perception? Right. If there are intellectual virtues, are there virtues just like seeing, well, is that a virtue? Are there virtues of will? How does the will fit into this? So between all those, we get a little better picture of what his.

The psychology is for him. And then we also read a little bit from the law chapter, and we started on the moral action chapter, which is more of what you would think ethics is about. And I guess one of the things we need to decide in the course of the this is whether we're going to read more than that 10 pages that we read for today for our next full episode. I guess that depends on how well you guys enjoyed this.

3:31 Seth: I did not like the section on the law in particular was tedious to me, but the moral action, the little bit we read of that, I was like, okay, I could stomach this if I had to, but I don't enjoy reading Aquinas at all. Which is not to say he's not a crisp thinker and a good writer. It's just the structure of the text and the questions that he's addressing are just. They're rough for me.

3:58 Dylan: So it's like you like the nutrition, but it's just like a bland, unstomachable cracker that you know is good for you, but you just don't want to eat it.

4:10 Seth: Yeah, that's one way you could put it. I'm trying to think of another analogy that's something like. It's like if you were a grandmaster chess champion and you went to see another grandmaster chess champion give a talk, and you knew there was something you could get out of the talk, but they were addressing a lay audience, so that there was like, blah, blah, blah. You know, you had to list. You had to wade through and listen to all this stuff that wasn't relevant to you or that you would want them to get to the point faster.

4:38 Dylan: You don't like the disputation format?

4:40 Seth: I do not like the disputation format at all.

4:43 Dylan: Got it.

4:44 Mark: It was much. Went down much easier now that I knew what to expect. Especially when we got to the. The moral action part. I actually just sailed through those 20 pages, but the virtue ones were a little rough and actually just going. Reading through those questions As I just did. Makes it make. I probably should have done that beforehand to see where. Where is this going? I know he. I know he even says at the beginning, like, here's a bunch of questions about virtue. And then we're gonna. We're gonna go through them one by one. But it's just. Yeah, losing the forest for the trees, very easy to do here, but I would like to have it.

It's actually really like law is really interesting here because that's one of the weirdest things when you read Hobbes, when you read these early modern thinkers, is they have this strange idea of law that's not quite descriptive, but it's not quite normative. Natural law, specifically. And so what is it to. It's a little foreign to Aristotle. Aristotle's all about virtue. But, you know, Kant dismisses Aristotle because, oh, it's just. If it's about virtue and it really just comes down to being prudent. Right. You don't want to be too courageous.

You don't want to be too foolhardy because you want to hit the mark. Because as a person, it sort of works out best for you. You are more effective as a person if you are the right amount of courageous. Well, that doesn't sound like ethics. That doesn't sound like it has anything to do with other people necessarily. It just has to do with sort of the balance of your own constitution. And when we get to the idea of a moral law, thou shalt not right, that seems something entirely foreign to Aristotle. So to read something that's about the transition between those two or somebody who's trying to bring those together is actually really interesting to me.

But we only got a glimpse of that partly because we only just did the first couple of questions in there. But I don't even know, looking forward, if it would have gotten more on point for me. Anything else before we just dive in here?

6:30 Dylan: I guess this is just a general observation and you make me think of it. Mark, when commenting about the law section is, at least for the selections we read. And maybe this is in general, Aquinas is the lens of reason as being the arbiter because he's constantly sorting out things between. About human characteristics, human behavior, human requirements, in the relationship with God. It all goes through the understanding of what reason is. And yeah, he clearly is taking a big cue from Aristotle. Some others, too. The times I read Aquinas, I'm reminded about how much of it is all from his perspective about reason and the connection of reason and his figuring out how to understand all of these questions often turns on where and how you understand the rule of reason with respect to will, with respect to law, with respect to or psychology.

It's where does reason show up? And that also ends up being the connection we have to the divine and like.

7:38 Wes: Likewise for today, I mean, I think the big question is about the role of our affective life in morality, which is to say, right, we get a contradiction, not a contradiction in Aristotle, but a tension. And it's a tension between the role of habituation, the role of habit, the role of emotions, the role of desire, and then the role of reason. Because it seems. And that tension plays out in the history of philosophy between more therapeutic modes in ethics, right, Going on to Stoicism, which is an heir of virtue ethics. It's a type of virtue ethics, and arguably modern psychodynamic therapy in many ways is a descendant of this type of ethics, this application of the therapeutic, which tries to get at the emotional life and one's character and personality versus the idea that ethics is the use of free will and rationality.

And so Aristotle says, well, both things are relevant, but I think for someone like Aquinas, it's a real problem because we talk about freedom on the one hand, but on the other hand, it seems like most of our ethical life is a product of emotions that sometimes feel like they are beyond our control. And also the interface between the rational and the affective is not clear. So he does try to address some of that in this. So it's a topic that I find very interesting. And to the extent that this becomes a launching point for thinking about that, I find it interesting.

9:11 Mark: Of course, Aquinas is also drawing on a tradition, so he mentions Augustine a couple times and Augustine's comments about virtue's connection to love. So that it is not just rationality that gives you virtue, it somehow has to. Virtue is supposed to order. It's ordered love, according to Augustine. So what does that actually mean? I know we've thought before about, you know, when you have a virtue ethics, you want to be the kind of person that does the right thing. Well, so a perky puppy or a little child is really pleasant to be around like they do.

I don't know if the right thing is the right way to put it, but they exhibit a lot of virtues, but we want to say, oh, well, that's not rational, that's not chosen, that's not. That might be animal virtue, but it's not human virtue. But, you know, they might have more love than, you know, a Cold, rational Kantian agent. So what does that mean? What is virtue actually talking about? Especially given the semi deterministic view that, you know, it's a compatibilist view, but that Aristotle and Aquinas have, that you have to be set up really by God ultimately to be the kind of person who chooses to will.

Right. You can't just will from nothing, as we were saying in our free will section. So you almost kind of want to be a. Not a fatalist. What the Calvinist, a predestined, you know, to believe in predestination or something like that. Like some people are just. They have the grace, they're blessed by God. It seems like they're just good people. But no, we want to. We. That goes against our moral intuition that we really have to say that there's something about the will. So what is it exactly? How does the will situate itself with respect to virtue is what we're exploring here.

10:43 Wes: You know, I think we would be inclined to say instead of God, we would talk about early childhood circumstances and the character resulting from that which is kind of has the significance of a kind of fate. So what do you.

10:56 Mark: Right.

10:56 Wes: You can say be a good person. But if your life, someone whose life has started in trauma and is struggling with that, being a good person is a very tall order. And it's not just a matter of, hey, I'm not going to, you know, go out and steal. It's much more granular and interesting than that. I just wanted to add one more thing about this interface between the emoted, the affective and the rational. He's very in tune to something that Right. Hume thought about, which is the idea that motivation itself can't just be rational. There must be something affective about it. So we'll see a little bit of that theme. It's a real foreshadowing of the kind of thing that the early moderns were thinking about, especially him.

11:34 Mark: Did you have something, Dylan?

11:35 Dylan: No, I guess I was just going to chime in about the question of will. The way this gets interesting for me is, and the way I end up thinking about it is what part of our life and our actions do we have effect on and what does it mean to say we have effect on it? And I think the question of being good is one obvious and important way to look to that question, to formulate that question. But I think it does in important ways just get to what do we actually have the power to affect and in what ways and how much? And I think that to me is at the center of what Aquinas is trying is mulling over in the stuff that we read.

12:17 Mark: So the very first thing we ran into here was what is this term virtue? Well, it's virtus in Latin. And I was just looking up what is the difference between arete, the Greek that Aristotle would have used, and virtus. They both mean excellence, according to the Google AI. Arete is a broader term, right. Fulfilling one's potential in any area. Virtus is more moral strength, especially masculine courage, duty, military valor, derived from vir, which just means man. So the. The manly virtues. So, you know, the first things we get here is, well, is. Is human virtue a disposition? Maybe it's not a disposition. Maybe it is a. A power.

12:59 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think the question here. So it's power at its utmost. And I think the. The Latin word, you know, just getting into the language is potentia for power. So it's the Latin version of dunamis, which I think, you know, in the ancient Greek, we're used to thinking about this in terms of potentiality and actuality. So really, what objection one is saying here is, well, virtue is about actualization. It's about energeia. That's what power at most, would be for human beings, right? It's about being at work, being ourselves and our particularly human rational way.

So when human beings are functioning well, we should remind ourselves of this. When a rabbit is functioning well, it's doing rabbit things. When we're functioning well, we're being good people. So that's the nature of. Of humanity. So there's a real paradox here, because we do want to talk about virtue as dispositional, right? So to go back to Aristotle, we are thinking about character traits. We are thinking about what Aristotle calls a hexis. It's a state of the soul that disposes us to act in certain ways. And we should very much think of Ellis.

Right. And disposition in terms of science, where we have these fundamental dispositional properties, like what is an electron? An electron is fundamentally dispositional. It behaves in certain ways under certain circumstances, and that its behavior may be actualized or it may not be. So what does it mean to say that virtue is this kind of silent, unactivated thing in the character until the circumstance comes along, a disposition that. But also to say, well, it is this very active thing. It's actualization. So in objection one, the idea. Well, it's actualization.

Objection two. But isn't it free use of the will? And isn't that something very active? And then. Objection three, well, what about desert? Right? Can I be deserving? Right. We think actions are deserving. If I do a bad thing, if I murder someone, I might be deserve to be punished. But if I'm just a grumpy person who maybe thinks about murder a lot but never does it, is that a deserving thing? So I think these are the types of questions that are being asked in this section, which just seem to be

15:08 Mark: a problem whenever we're talking about dispositions, that we only recognize dispositions because they're sometimes actualized. So there's always a little bit of an epistemic problem. How do we know that this object, this person has this disposition? And perhaps a metaphysical problem such that you could have somebody like Sartre just saying there are no dispositions, you are only what your actions are, that is the sum of your life. You know, there's a psychological reason for saying that to a person like, you know, whatever you have locked inside you, could you please just get it out and actually share it with the rest of us and not just sit there all self satisfied and what an impressive person you are, even though you never got the chance to write that novel or do that great work.

15:50 Dylan: Can we articulate a little bit about the difference between disposition and powers and. Or capabilities? Because dispositions, when I hear that, when I think about dispositions, I think about it comes with an inclination, not merely a capability. And so it ends up having a force of pointing, even if it's unactualized. But powers also get actualized. Powers are exercised, so their actualization is in their activity. We can't have any actions that aren't also part of our powers, our suite of powers. Right. So we have this superset of potential actions that we can engage in that end up being a kind of constraint.

Those are within our powers. And we can talk about how having of those powers is part of the defining of a thing. And then there are dispositions, it seems like where dispositions are semi active inclinations that we have that are part of our powers but are not always realized, but they are some sort of a manifestation of how we're acting. And then of course there's the actual actions themselves. Is that the way I should be thinking about dispositions?

17:00 Wes: Yeah, I think. And to take an example, so power, it does come from a thing's nature. So he will. Right. If you look at number five, he will say the person Aquinas is arguing against will say, want to say virtue and nature are powers, not dispositions. And as we read on, we'll find out that certain natural properties of things that are rooted in their essence are powers. So for instance, fire has the power to heat. It's in fire's nature, and it has that power. But a disposition which is also, I think it's sometimes habitus is the Latin. So we think of in terms of habit or dispositio he also uses.

So that is not necessarily in our nature, right. It's not in human nature to be courageous necessarily until we're habituated into that. So we have to have some kind of training, even if it's just an early childhood, to give ourselves an arrangement of the soul that is not necessarily there from the beginning that will then lead us to be disposed to behave a certain way under certain circumstances. And I think the same sort of contrast is there with an ability. We all have the ability to be courageous in the abstract, but that doesn't mean we have the virtue of being courageous, right?

In principle, I could be the one who runs into battle under the right circumstance. That's just. That's something I could do, right, if I willed myself to do it. But as a matter of disposition or habit, no, I'm not the guy who's going to run into danger in battle. I don't have that kind of courage as a disposition.

18:33 Mark: Dylan, you're also making me think about the later question about is intellect a virtue? And he talks about intellect being a power that it is, you know, it's like the power. He uses analogy himself. I'm using the analogy to this. He's using analogy in that to the power to speak. It doesn't mean you always speak. So you don't have a disposition to speak, but it is a necessary but not sufficient condition to getting to speaking. So intellect is a necessary but not sufficient condition to get you to act morally. But if you say virtue is a disposition that just means, like fire tends to burn, that you will tend to run into the danger or whatever.

The virtue that in question is not just, well, I have the fortitude to do so. It's just, you know, will I or not? Like, you could just be a very strong willed person, person who doesn't actually have much of a conscience. So you have that power in you, but you don't have the disposition.

19:27 Dylan: Well, when you bring up intellect, I think about the beginning of the Nicomachean ethics that where the character of reason that Aristotle talks about is every human being by their nature reaches out to know things. So that's talking about a disposition. It's a manifestation of our power of reason that is a disposition to want to know. And this distinction is really, really interesting. It's that we have these general sort of forces that are somewhat latent but undirected. But again, they're like. It's like the wind or the climate in our souls that are pushing us in different directions that we have some control over.

So there's a, you know, there's like a proto activity. I think that the same thing on the question of the goodness of action, you would have with like someone like Plato would say that, well, everything we do is good. We're always aimed towards the good because that's our disposition. When we're choosing to do actions, we're choosing to do good actions. And to the extent that we get that wrong, those actions aren't good. It's because we are not properly understanding what our actions ought to be, but that the source of the directionality comes from our disposition.

20:37 Wes: So I just want to emphasize here, dispositions are habituated. So there are things that we've been. That have been trained into us. So anything, you know, if we human beings have by nature desire to know, it's actually something that's universal. It's not the result of.

20:52 Mark: It's not a habitus. You're saying disposition is habitus.

20:55 Wes: It's not a habitus. It's not training. Now we might, you know, if we refine that and we develop a habit of studying and being philosophical and contemplative, which Aristotle would think is the highest thing, that's definitely habitus. That's definitely disposition in the sense that it's been trained into us. So that I take to be this fundamental difference between power and disposition. And power is about this more general thing. And it really does line up, I think, Dylan, as you suggested, with ability and disposition is more specifically about something that we might not have until it's been habituated into us. That's what virtues are. We're not just born with them.

21:32 Dylan: I guess I get what you're saying, Wes. It just seems that it can't be the case that dispositions are only habituated because then you have a kind of existence proof. It has to be that there is is some kind. I mean, and I've always understood at least the generation of habits is a refinement of and maybe even a sharpening and focusing and flourishing of dispositions. But just like powers, it can't be that they just come from nothing. The habits have to be habituating something. And I would argue that in what we're reading here is that they're habituating your dispositions.

22:09 Wes: Yeah. Well, no, the dispositions are habituations of abilities. Right. Later on, he'll reply to someone who says, well, you can't have properties of properties. Dispositions can't be properties of abilities. Aquinas's theory is that dispositions are properties of abilities. They habituate a broader ability.

22:25 Dylan: It doesn't make any sense that a habituation of a power. The power has to be. The power is the thing that is the capability, the disposition. The habituation can be the refinement of an action, and that might be a latent one. There might be a general direction. Your powers that you have don't say anything about what you actually do. And your disposition would be some kind of intrinsic motion that you have to go do something. And the habituation would be the refinement of that into some kind of specific thing that's guided by your reason or guided by maybe even other components.

23:00 Mark: I feel like this disagreement is just about the Latin versus the English. I think you're making a. A point about Dylan, about the English, which is legitimate, and I like that. You know, a habit has to have some basis in powers. But just if we say that disposition is habitus, that disposition and habit are literally the same word in Latin, that's. I think it's the only thing we're running into.

23:21 Wes: Yeah, I think the main thing is.

23:22 Dylan: Right.

23:23 Wes: So we're going to think the dispositions we're concerned with in this reading today are virtues, and they are habituated into us, and they do represent a natural tendency. And this is very important. And maybe the Dylan is. This is what you're getting at, that in some circumstances that arises, I don't have to say, oh, I'm going to use my freedom of will now and go out and be courageous. It just naturally happens. And as Aristotle calls it, second nature, as Aquinas will point out in this reading, it becomes almost like a natural property, a second nature, except that it's been instilled into us.

It's built up on top of. Obviously, if there weren't a lot of things, cognitive capacities that we were born with, it would never even be possible. It doesn't make sense to talk about a rabbit being courageous, for instance. And maybe it doesn't even make sense to talk about a wolf being courageous, because they don't have human minds. And even though they might do things that look courageous to us, their mind isn't structured in such a way that the attribution of courage makes sense. So that fundamental Structure, that fundamental mental structure comes with lots of abilities that we are simply born with.

And I think those abilities line up with powers. But we can see if that distinction is borne out, if my interpretation is borne out as we continue to, to read here.

24:38 Mark: So. So there was a silly thing from later that made me roll my eyes. But then Google it was in the question, do virtues dispose our abilities to act? One of the objections says, well, abilities are type two qualities. And like, what kind of bullshit they're

24:51 Wes: secondary qualities are the types of thing the early moderns pick up on. It just means they're secondary qualities of color.

24:57 Mark: Secondary is type two. Yes. So I looked up type one is a natural capability. Type two is a habit or disposition. So I hadn't connected that to primary qualities being type one. And type two is, you know, obviously we're talking about something slightly different when we're talking about human abilities versus the secondary and primary qualities of things that we perceive. But it's an interesting connection.

25:22 Wes: All right, well, maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's, you know, now you're making me think I must have not understood that. But let's wait until we get there. All right, in this case, right, we have a bunch of objections set up to say, well, virtue is something very active. And then in the reply, he's going to give us a kind of response to that that tells us that virtue is perfection of a potential. So that virtue is expressed, is active. It is an actualization. But actualization is always in this dynamic with potentiality. So he's trying to explain why it's fine to say that virtue in one sense is dispositional. It could just be this character state that's, that's silent and not brough in behavior, but when it's actually activated, right, it is very active in the way that the objector brought up. And it does implicate will and so on.

26:11 Mark: I had in quotes. So a potential is called perfect when it is all set to be actualized. Which sounds really weird because the whole point of, oh, it's, it is actualized. That's what makes it perfect. But a virtue is an excellence or perfection of potential measured in relation to its goal, right? Realizing the potential. So you could say, okay, this has not achieved its perfection in terms of actually being actualized, but oh, it's perfectly primed, it's ready to be actualized. So we can just say that has its own kind of perfection, right?

26:43 Wes: I am potentially courageous right now, even though I don't have that as a virtue. If I perfected that potentiality, then it would be. I'd be all set to actualize it in the right circumstance. It wouldn't just be, oh, in principle, it's possible. It could be courageous. It would be, I have the disposition. It's all set to be actualized in the right circumstance.

27:02 Seth: So there's another element here. In that same section, he says that it's the realization of potential to an actuality where there are options. This ties back to the concept of the freedom to choose, because there's a way in which a natural potentiality, like you can imagine a thing. I don't want to use the acorn in the tree because there's too much variability. But essentially the idea of a potentiality for which there's. It's either it actualized or not, but it can only be actualized in one way. And in this case there needs to be the possibility that the potential could be actualized in different ways, because we need to have a tie back to the concept of freedom.

B, we need to be able to do an attribution of deservedness or not. So, you know, it sounds to me like this is something that could only be human. There's not a way in which we. Even though he mentions another place, he talks about natural virtues or virtues in nature. I don't understand how that's even possible.

28:05 Wes: Well, he'll say it right here in this paragraph. Now, there are certain potentials, like natural agencies which are of their own nature, all set to act so that they themselves could be called forces or virtues. Virtue in this broader sense. So I'm holding a rock, I let go, it falls to the ground. Its capability and its virtue or disposition are all the same. In that case, I didn't have to train the rock to do that and say, hey, be a good rock, I'll give you a treat if you learn how to fall to the ground. It just has that in it naturally. And then he'll say, but peculiarly, human abilities connected with reason are not of their own nature, set on one act, but open to several, and must be further determined to act by dispositions, as we said earlier, which, in other words, we, unlike the rock and with gravity, do have to be trained.

Our capabilities, our abilities could go in many different directions. They could be habituated into many different directions. So this is the interesting thing about us, when we determine our human second nature, so to speak, right? It's almost like creating a psychological physics for ourselves. And everyone has different laws because they have different characters. They've been habituated in different ways. And some people's psychological physics is much worse than the next person's. Right. It might be vice ridden as opposed to being virtuous.

29:24 Seth: Yeah, I don't disagree. I think what I was just trying to say was that I don't think the categories of disposition and habituation. All that stuff even apply to rocks. Just doesn't even make sense.

29:35 Wes: Well, it's just the point of comparison.

29:37 Mark: Yeah.

29:37 Dylan: Just trying to clarify what you mean by dispositions and habituation and stuff like that.

29:42 Mark: Yeah, a lot of scenes he's pointing out different. But Aristotle sometimes uses the term this way. It sometimes uses virtue to talk about rocks. Well, it's just, you know, we can understand the various uses of the term. And he gives the comparison to the term faith. Sometimes it means what we believe. Sometimes the act of believing, Sometimes the disposition to believe. If you understand the phenomenon of faith. Then you don't get confused between those things.

30:06 Dylan: What I like about tying it back to those things is that like tying it back to a rock's disposition to fall. Is it does clarify what you mean by something in what it exists as both its powers and what it's sensitive to. And I do think it gets back to this question of dispositions. Even if it. Or the inclination that it has to act in a certain way. And putting aside the Greek versus the English versus the Latin for a second. Is saying that a rock has a disposition to fall towards the earth. Says something about what it is in itself. That is related to the notion of.

Well, part of what things have is they have and what they're defined by. And what it means to say they exist is the powers that they have and the powers that they exhibit. And the revealing of the powers that they have is seeing how they exhibit those powers. So to me, that all helps clarify the kinds of distinctions we're making. Between when we get into the muddier waters of human being. It's because the thing that gets thrown in there is the ability of our reason to affect the ways in which we work. Human beings or even higher animals. Are more complicated entities that have this other activity in them.

This mind activity that affects the way their physical being acts.

31:34 Wes: Yeah, I think if you were to give one word to this section. It's about. It's about plasticity and the ability. Right again. To create things which are almost like little microcosms. With their own natural laws. Which we would call our character. So at the end he'll say his response to Objection five Natural agencies are already determined to their activity. But not human powers. So there's a difference. Right. So we can be habituated one way or another. I think there's one very interesting response about desert in number three. So the objection was, well, it's actions that are deserving, not virtues or dispositions or character traits.

And he'll say, well, yes, the action itself is an important part of desert. But also. Well, he'll say motive power here, which seems to be a bit ambiguous between intention and having a certain character trait. Right. So we're used to thinking about intention as being an important part of whether a certain action deserves a certain response. So if I accidentally kill someone in a car accident, it's much different than I intentionally do it. So I'm much more deserving of severe punishment if I intentionally do it. But likewise, what about how does my character factor into that?

Character is almost like dormant intent or dispositional intent. And the law actually does take this sort of thing into account. So am I a person who's habitually angry, who's habitually getting into road rage incidents, who is careless and neglectful as a matter of character? Well, yeah, that does play a role in my desert as well.

33:08 Mark: I think motive powers uses intention just because I don't know that intention necessarily is among the causal possibilities for Aristotle. I'd have to think about this more. But if you want to just say there is something in. Yes. About us. It's our character. But our character would determine our intention. It would determine. So whatever it is, whether it's the mental thing or the physical thing that is causing the action. Let's just call it motive power. It seems like a nice neutral term.

33:37 Wes: Yeah. I think it kind of hedges the bets between intention and then what I've called a dormant intention, which is. Yeah, just these dispositional character traits which are relevant to intention.

33:47 Dylan: Yeah. So this, what you just said, Mark, is I just want to be a little careful because this is right where the sweet spot of it being interesting is right. And that's why we have all the language around actuality and potential. Or we talk about habituating virtues, and it goes back to the clarification of these things with respect to natural entities. We want to say that our virtuous activities are fully habituated, are part of our who we are as human beings. And so it's such that they are. They determine our character. Our character determines our actions.

Action, insofar as that has become part of who we are, we'll use that language. And what we mean is that there's something that's malleable that's not the way in which a rock falls to the ground, even though it has that disposition, but it will always fall to the ground. It's because some of our actions are molded by an interaction with something that's uniquely us, having to do with the way in which our, our reason and our souls and all of that work together. But we want to say we are determined by our character. Once we have that sort of be fully baked and you'll have characters, right, that aren't fully baked.

They'll be incontinent, they won't always act the same way.

35:01 Mark: And sort of as a parenthetical. That's what Hume called a free action. It is free if it comes from your character. And we might think, well, that means it's determined, you're determined by your character. And Aristotle wants to say, well, if it's the reasoning part of you that it is free, if it is merely the desire based the animal part of you, that it is determined. So it's a little more complicated, but.

35:24 Dylan: Well, and there's also that complication that the more habitual your actions are, the less they are a product of your virtuous action. Right. Basically, the more you're on autopilot and you know, sort of the more like if you are supremely virtuous such that it's of no act of your own will to where you don't feel pulled in a different direction, then the excellence isn't as high. Right?

35:48 Mark: I guess so. So for something we thought was this dry, we sure spent a lot of time and found a lot of interesting in it. But. Yes, introduce the next one, Wes.

35:57 Wes: Yeah, so we've answered the question, I think to everyone's satisfaction that

36:03 Seth: virtue is

36:04 Wes: in fact a disposition as well as an actualization. But it's starts out as a disposition, is now is it a disposition to act? As opposed to what? As opposed to a disposition to being, it turns out a disposition to existing in a certain way. And the objector wants to give all these arguments in favor of the idea that it is not a disposition to act is a disposition to being in certain way. So what's one of the better objections here?

36:32 Mark: Well, I like the Cicero thing that he starts with. Cicero says that virtue is to a soul what health and beauty are to a body. So I just wanted us to think about that sort of. Even apart from what Aquinas goes on to say about that. That, I mean, certainly you're not choosing. I mean, health is, is a disposition in the sense that. Okay. Have you Set your body up, are you eating right, are you exercising, are you, you know, doing the things. But of course it's not entirely under our control. There's a lot of things that are, there's a lot of complex systems going on. So it's certainly a state of the body. So could we say that virtue, you know, as Plato kind of puts it, if your faculties, if your reason and your thumos and your eros are in the right configuration, then you are virtuous. It is a way of being.

37:16 Wes: Yeah. And I think the complication here is that, you know, what we call health, which is very right, it's a sister concept to virtue. We should always keep in mind physical health and psychological health. Psychological health being perhaps synonymous with virtue. I mean, that's a debatable thing, but definitely related. So. And we know under the Aristotelian framework that being and activity are very interrelated. A thing to be itself must be very active, working to stay itself, otherwise it just disintegrates into the environment. So I think in a way this is another, this objection.

So to, to be healthy here is to be in this very active state of being a certain way as opposed to being disposed to do something else. And isn't virtue like that? Wouldn't we want to say that virtue like health is just the psyche functioning very well and being a certain way? And it's not necessarily about the actions it's disposed to take. It might not even ever take any of those actions which, the way you

38:18 Mark: put it makes it sound like. Well, this is just the same question. If we just said it can't be purely a potential, it's a potential that's actualized, but it is sort of, you know, it's actualized in a way that points to the potential. So yes, virtue is a disposition to act, but you act because you are a certain way. So it's just, I feel like this question is just putting, you know, adding a few more elements and pieces of literature that he's pointing to, to play off of. But it's basically the same issue.

38:46 Wes: I mean, in his reply he'll say virtue is a disposition to acting rather than being, because. And then he'll give three BAs, a kind of three step argument where they'll say it involves reason, it involves a part of the soul which implicates reason. And the soul is formal rather than material and the form makes things active. So in other words, if the form is what makes things active, then the soul is what makes things active. And then virtue has something to do with the soul because it has something to do with reason. So virtue must be involved dispositions to activity. So it's a very abstract argument here. It's about, I think, as abstract as it gets.

39:27 Seth: I'm inclined here to bring in something from the moral action section where he talks about existence being coextensive with goodness. The idea that basically existence is perfection. Because to be. I shouldn't say existence. I'm sorry. I should say being. Being is perfection.

39:47 Wes: That being is goodness.

39:48 Seth: Being is goodness. But it's. If something is good because it was meant to be. Right. Or some. In some sense that just the notion that you're talking here about is virtue. A disposition to be or to act. And it seems like the concept. There's a normative concept built into being. Which makes talking about virtue, virtue as a disposition, be superfluous, if that makes sense. Why would we need the term virtue if being is goodness? Why would we need to talk about the virtue as a disposition to be?

40:19 Wes: Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the topic of the moral action stuff.

40:23 Dylan: Yeah.

40:23 Mark: Yeah. Even though this is coming from much later in our reading, I think this is a great point to wrap up our part one on is to try to make this. How this virtue section fits in with its idea that it's very much a theodicy. It's very much everything that exists is good. Right. God would only create good stuff. So how do we explain evil? Well, it is something not existing all the way. And we understand that in terms of potentiality and actuality, that we have our. Insofar as we are actually human, then we are actually exerting our reason. The thing that makes it distinguishes us from the animals to act morally.

And so when we fall short, we're not being fully human. We're being an animal. We're being controlled by things that are unworthy of us. And so that's how we can describe anything that sort of falls short. This is a terrible painting. Well, what is a painting supposed to be? It's supposed to be this full expression of the artist's vision and whatever. And this painting just was not skillful enough to pull that off.

41:27 Wes: The other factor here is that there are many actions that we might want to say are bad, but they're not really bad in themselves, so to speak. So sex isn't right when we talk about adultery. It's not like the biological activity of sex can somehow be bad. It's just part of existence. And it's not even neutral. It's good as part of Existence, but it's within a certain context that implicates reason and human relations that it can become bad. So within the context of marriage, good. Right. In the context of adultery, bad. But in and of itself merely as human biology, good in this weak sense of good, where everything that exists is good.

42:05 Mark: Yeah. And this is where you get that. You know, I like the notion of teleology as it appears in Aristotle. I don't like the notion of teleology as it is turned to natural law. So then people in the modern age say homosexuality is unnatural or something like that, or sex outside of marriage in this case is unnatural because they're saying, oh, what is the telos of love, of union? It is, as we talked about in our Kant on marriage episode. It is the full flowering of this fully equal, completely exposed, lifelong connection with another person. And that is.

So anything that falls short of that, well, that's. You could even say evil. It's certainly bad because it is falling short. In fact, we don't even want to say it. It really exists all the way, if you want. So I think that's a good way of modernizing this language. It's like, you know, did I really have sex with people? With other people besides you? Well, you know, it sort of existed, but because it wasn't the full flowering of what sex is supposed to be, why don't we just say it barely even existed?

43:09 Wes: And as we know. Right. Yeah, he's just adapting an idea from St. Augustine. And with the being gradations of being right, which is also adapted from. From Aristotle, I'm pointing to the relational thing, right. Where we can. Things can be bad because of relational properties, like having a bad object. So it's not like taking something is inherently bad, but if it has the wrong relational property, if it has the wrong object, taking what is yours as opposed to what is mine, it could be stealing.

43:34 Dylan: So I think with the way you're talking about it, Wes makes it more of a gradation than it ends up being in Aquinas, at least, because Aquinas follows the Augustine. A drop of badness makes it bad and makes it so it doesn't exist. Just like what Mark was. This is, with my opening, there's just the single drop of badness makes everything, everything about it bad. It's this purity notion that underlies it. And I think that the relationship, relationalness and the kind of gradation that is otherwise implied, I think the metaphysics and the articulation of virtue would seem to actually be richer in the context of what we mean by gradation, what we mean by make our notion of goodness and badness a little richer, if more complicated.

44:24 Mark: Yes, you can hear more about this exciting stuff in our second half. Go to partialexaminelife.com support to do that. Or if you were a supporter, part two would probably already be in your feed right in front of you. Otherwise you gotta wait till next week. Or if you support us through Apple, we have to wait till next week because life's not fair. Thanks.

44:41 Wes: Thank you.

44:42 Seth: Thanks.