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

0:04 Mark: I want to remind you, if you're thinking about gifts, that Partially Examined Life put out a book, newly retitled the Partially Examined Life Fresh takes on the World's Greatest Philosophers. It's a great way to introduce someone to the podcast who share some of our most important discussions and biggest interviews with people who don't listen to podcasts or maybe who are even new to philosophy. So go look it up on Amazon. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 381, part 2. We've been talking about Thomas Aquinas on virtue, and we are going to get he got toward the end of part one to moral action.

So how does virtue fit into this overall moral picture? And we have I will, I will break the suspense that we're this we're not going to do more Aquinas next time. We decided maybe we'll if we don't get through enough, maybe we'll have a part three to this. Nobody's committed to that. But we are going to move on in our lives to something else. So let's make the most the most of what we've got here. We'd only gotten through two questions in the virtue section. The third one we want to treat very quickly before we get to the fourth one, which is the the actual definition of virtue.

So is human virtue, we said, is it a disposition? Is it disposition to act? Yes. Is it a good disposition? And you might smack yourself in the head and say, haven't we established this? Has this what's been said? But if virtue were just a power, I mean, isn't there a power, a power to sin? Powers can be good or bad. Doesn't seem like it has to be toward the good.

1:38 Wes: Right? So I could be a very skilled assassin. For instance, this, this also gets us at the difference between prudence and the ethical. So if I'm if virtue involves perfecting abilities, then do I need to put some guardrails on what the abilities are? I mean, he'll say the perfection of an ability is, is Always good. It's actually not clear to me in this section how he would handle the. The skilled assassin problem. But he wants to build in this idea that virtue as he's defining it implies and what he calls a quote unquote orderedness towards good so that it rules out. It's not just any old perfection of an ability. It's only certain types of perfections of certain abilities.

2:23 Dylan: Yeah. Isn't the. Hence number two the reply regarding the assassin? You just replace drunkenness with assassin.

2:33 Wes: I wanted it more so I could perfect the art of drunkenness. For instance. I could be really good at being a drunk is the idea. But that's not what we mean by virtue. It is in a general sense. Like I could write a book called the Virtue of Drunkenness. I guess that's what Bukowski is. Bukowski is doing.

2:50 Mark: There's a Jackie Chan movie called Drunken Master. There's actually a specific kung fu style that you really drunk. Yeah.

2:57 Seth: You look.

2:57 Dylan: You look like you're falling around drunk. That's why it's called. Yep. Drunken kung Fu.

3:02 Wes: So I think. And then his response is, drunkenness is bad because it lacks quote unquote reasons, order. So you can perfect drunkenness in its within its own realm, but you can learn the art of the drunk, but it'll be in conflict with reason.

3:17 Dylan: But this is where your example of the assassin, I think, makes it more complicated because there are certain. And you could pick other things that are decidedly intellectual or decidedly exercise reason and a reason at a very, very high level where it's really the direction of the action that seems to be.

3:41 Wes: That's so corrupt.

3:42 Dylan: Right. I mean, there's all kinds of things about the activity of being an assassin. In fact, if the assassin was killing. Killing people that in a different way, you wouldn't even say that it was necessarily. You wouldn't say it was bad. But pick things like science and activity of research or that activity of mind and reason is directed towards. There's something about drunkenness that feels. It doesn't quite get all the way there because it still feels like it's rooted in our bodies in a kind of incontinence with respect to our appetites.

4:16 Wes: Yeah. It's the lack of skill there.

4:17 Dylan: Yeah.

4:18 Wes: Assassin is a better. I mean, partly the reason I chose Assassin is because I'm fascinated with those movies and shows. I don't know if you guys have seen Day of the Jackal with Eddie Redmayne on Peacock, but it's amazing. And he plays an assassin. I mean, it's Based on a book and an old classic movie. But it's really well done. But also we kind of get fascinated with his expertise and it's almost like we admire it as a virtue. It's like, and he's killing mostly bad people, he does end up killing innocent people. And then our reaction to him becomes more complicated.

But you can have this kind of admiration for villains because you're admiring their expertise. So the line between expertise and virtue is actually a complicated one. St. Augustine is one of. And also reason. Right. As Dylan is pointing out, plays this big role. Like he's prudential. As far as prudential reason goes. He's a master.

5:05 Dylan: Yeah.

5:05 Wes: Like he can get out of the building before anyone finds him. And that's. There's a delight to watching that. Then he puts on disguises and he can just take an account of every eventuality. But for Aquinas, reason is also about orientation towards the good. Reason is an orderedness towards the good. So that's the part of reason that he doesn't have, this non-prudential part of reason.

5:25 Mark: Yeah, so this goes with the metaphysical point that we, we talked about at the end of last time, that evil is always a falling short, definitionally. And so if you want to say that even this hyper competent prudential person is still falling short. Well, I mean, we could ask, is there a principled way, Right. Is it just because we know what good is and we're just going to rule out this person's behavior? The quote from Aquinas, virtue in everything implies an orderedness toward good.

5:52 Wes: Right.

5:53 Mark: You are focused toward an aim. And human virtue, which is a disposition to act, is a good disposition to act. Well. And some of the later questions we're going to consider in this virtue section is, does the aim always have to be the good? Does it have to be a good aim? Or could it just be a perceived good? Right. The assassin thinks that even if what he's doing is faulty on some Christian morality or by some judgment, it is the thing that he is positing as that which is to be achieved. It is my good.

6:22 Wes: And it is. It's as good in the sense that it's the fulfillment of its character, his character. It's what he does really well. Right. In the Nietzsche sense, it's the jackal's virtue to be to kill. So well.

6:33 Mark: Seth, introduce the fourth one. You were excited for us to get to this.

6:37 Seth: So article four, fourth question. It's basically, how do you define virtue? And in a bit of a twist Aquinas does something. He says, instead of saying here's the for, here's the against. He says, it seems there's something wrong with the usual definition of virtue. Namely, virtues 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 that's really. It turns out to just be a setup for the various sections which actually. Is it six or seven? Six. So here are some arguments in favor. It's kind of unclear exactly what the thesis is in favor, but this is

7:14 Wes: the objector saying what's wrong with each component of the definition. And then Aquinas is going to defend the definition, right?

7:21 Seth: So there's virtuous human goodness. It renders its possessor good. Then there's something. We can worry about this later, but about using the term good to apply to virtue, because that's a broader term and it's hard to differentiate it from other things if you just say good. There's the it has to do with something that separates us from the beasts. Namely, it's a quality of mind. He brings in the notion of justice, but then he complicates that. He brings in the notion of pride. They'd be proud of something. People can be proud of their virtues. And the third point of that is to say the idea is that virtue is something that we can't misuse. And he's like, well, it seems like we could potentially. Or at least there's an argument that you could potentially misuse by virtue of being proud of your virtues when you shouldn't be.

8:12 Mark: I guess another Augustine.

8:14 Seth: Yeah, yeah. And then I'm not section yeah.

8:18 Mark: 6.

8:19 Seth: I don't even know what to do

8:20 Mark: with that one because that sounds the weirdest to us. That is the work of God alone. And so that's the idea of, well, virtue is only possible because of grace or something, which seems. Is not part of Aristotle's definition.

8:32 Wes: Yeah. About these objections, I want to say, for one, right, It's a very abstract metaphysical objection saying, well, goodness makes its possessor good, so it can itself be good, because goodness can't be good any more than whiteness can be white. And he's going to respond, well, when we say it's good, it means it makes something good. So you can just. Right. You don't have to buy into this flawed metaphysical picture. And then the second one, goodness is basically the idea that goodness is too broad an idea to differentiate between different things because every.

Everything is good in the weak sense. Right. Just by Existing and then he'll say well no, this is a particular type of good of according with reason. The third one, virtues are concern the mind. But animals can have certain virtues. And then he's the objection to that is that in human beings, right. And we'll get to this later. But it's their virtue can exist in the unreasoning parts, right. And what I would call the affective or the instinctual be emotional. But they only did the extent that they share in reason. And that, that really is one of the cruxes of our reading this idea.

Where is virtue virtue? Is it in the rational mind or is it somehow in the. Have we trained when we habituate ourselves? Haven't we trained the emotions? Haven't in some sense haven't we trained the body? And then that becomes a very complicated question.

9:50 Mark: It fits in with what we were saying before. So if you've trained yourself such that you are the person who automatically runs into danger, what does that have to do with reason? Like is it maybe somebody convinced you in the first place that this is the mean or something and they figure but probably it was much more brutish, you know, just like you would train a dog. And so why would we say this is what virtue is?

10:11 Wes: I think this captures the central concern about, for Aquinas, about morality is how we account for this non rational part of us in describing virtue. Because it does seem to play a big role. And then it complicates all these ideas about, well, you know, free will and rationality and blah blah, blah. And he's going to want to say that there's a special way in which the affective component of our nature can be molded to be responsive to reason. So it's not just about being habituated to automatically do things as if we're automatons. It's about being habituated to be receptive to the neocortex, so to speak, to soften the limbic system up appropriately so that it's.

It has a good relationship with the neocortex, with the rational system. Anyway, in this case he's going to defend the definition in the reply by breaking it down into an Aristotelian causal definition. He's going to say hey look, each of these components is actually a different component of an Aristotelian causal definition. So he'll give the formal cause and material and the final cause and the efficient, which is the God instilling part. So he'll go one by one through these four different causes which will give

11:22 Seth: us a definition of Virtue.

11:24 Mark: Yep. What Seth mentioned about the pride thing, right. That's a part of the definition, is something that cannot be misused. So it gets us to thinking about what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic to the moral act. So is it actually the same act? Seems like obviously you can do the right thing for the wrong reason. So you could give to charity just because to puff up your own vanity or assuage your guilt or something like that. But then do we really want to say that that is doing the right act for the wrong reason? Or is the description of the act include something about the motive, something about its cause?

If you want to give a full description of the act and the moral action section expands on this kind of reasoning and thinking, like, do the circumstances in which you do the act matter? Because it seems like the act is this fundamental. It has its intrinsic nature. This is an act of stealing or something. And then that could be placed in different circumstances, but that's just sort of incidental. It was a daytime or nighttime while it was going. And he wants to say, just like you have to take into account the person's motive in describing the act, you have to take into account the objects at which it was, you know, who am I stealing from?

What was the circumstances? If my motive in stealing was to provide for starving orphans, well, then maybe that's not even stealing in the sense of the thing that should be. You know, it is still taking something that is not mine. In that sense, it is stealing, but it is not. If you want to say thou shalt not steal, what was the sense. And that was meant, you know, that was actually picking out something that is not fully described by merely describing what the hand is doing and what thing you are pilfering.

13:05 Wes: And properly speaking, it's not even an action unless it's connected to an agent. So if you sever that connection between what's happening and an agent, then it's not, not an action. So you really do have to talk about the psyche, the soul of the actor, in order to characterize the action and to say what it is.

13:23 Dylan: Now, that point right there is the most interesting point of all with regard to moral action, because it deeply and fully contextualizes the action into actor. And it means that a question like, well, isn't stealing intrinsically bad, taking what's not yours? It makes it a empty question. It's one that doesn't apply because you can't consider it. There's no such thing as stealing without talking about the actor and the context.

13:55 Wes: And the object.

13:56 Dylan: Yeah.

13:57 Wes: And the object, which is the circumstance, what Aquinas calls the circumstance. And here it's interesting because he'll say pride. Right. He wants to defend the idea that pride. He'll say that virtues can be the objects of misuse, which is by itself a very interesting idea. Right. So we can do virtuous things out of vanity or out of pride, for instance, but that doesn't mean that the virtue. Virtue itself includes the disposition to pride, to being proud of the virtue. That's an easily contested idea for Nietzsche. Right. All morality is just reducible to things like pride or will, to power. They're at bottom, misuses. There is no non. Misuse of morality. Morality, its very origin is in a kind of misuse. So, yeah, these are the things we should be thinking of when we see these topics come up.

14:42 Mark: We've talked before about the difference between killing and murder. That, that that murder has the judgment built into it. And I think we could likewise say that. Yeah, thou shalt not steal. That's sort of true by definition, just like thou shalt not murder. But thou shalt not kill seems a little like. Well, we have to understand what is meant. Oh, no, it's just the wrongful killing, Killing in self defense, killing in a war, a just war. All that stuff is. Okay, so it should be thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal. Whereas the neutral term is take what is not yours.

That sounds like it's just the definition of stealing. But no, take what is not yours for a purpose. Like there's something built into the wrongful taking of what is not yours. That's in stealing, that is not fully exhausted by just taking what is not yours. I'm taking what is not yours because I need to borrow your car to take these dying people to the hospital and you're not anywhere around. You know, there are circumstances in which something that would ordinarily be stealing is not stealing.

15:37 Wes: Or taxes, as a libertarian, like Nozick would point out.

15:40 Mark: There you go.

15:41 Wes: Go listen to our Nozick episode. Yeah, it's okay for the government to steal from us.

15:47 Mark: Yours only makes sense in the context of a state that designates property. Yeah. Or whatever.

15:52 Seth: Yeah.

15:52 Wes: So what do you. What do people think of this Aristotelian causal defense of the definition. So, for instance, like, the form of virtue is a good quality. Well, it's so abstract, it's not even worth getting into the details of it. But he's going to want to say the differentiating characteristic of virtue is its goodness and that that's Its form. And then the matter, it has a certain material cause, which is not the out of which, but the about which. And the about which turns out to be what virtue forms. Right. So the clay that's being formed here, it's not like bronze into a sphere, as for Aristotle, but it's about molding the mind into a certain type of good thing. And then so on and so forth. I don't know. Need to get into all of it. But also very abstract. I imagine not. Not so satisfying to you guys.

16:40 Dylan: Remind me what page, what's. What section we're in right now.

16:43 Wes: Around 397.

16:45 Dylan: Yeah. Okay.

16:46 Wes: And then for final cause, we'll want to say virtue has a goal. And it's, you know, dispositionally directed towards something good. And it's always that way. It's not like sometimes good, sometimes bad, like abilities. Right. Like my prudential abilities, which I could use to be an assassin or used to be a doctor, but it's always pushing us in the good direction. And then finally the efficient thing, this completes out the definition. I. And I think this may be the motive because it is weird, as you guys pointed out, this idea of God instilling it, but God instilling it is the efficient is the efficient cause of virtue.

Which I think we would want to say. Well, we would want to talk about developmental stuff. We would want to talk about someone's childhood or how they were habituated and trained in early childhood. Or even as an adult, if you can change things up as an adult, how does that would seem to be the efficient cause? I don't know why we need God here.

17:38 Mark: Yeah, I think we talked about this in our free will episode. Is that you need God to get the free willing started. Or our biology, as you were saying before, or your early upbringing, something to.

17:49 Seth: Just quick question. What is the actual definition?

17:52 Wes: It's the one that was articulate, that you read out at the beginning, that one.

17:56 Seth: All right.

17:57 Wes: Virtues are good qualities of mind which dispose us to live rightly, which we cannot misuse, and which God works in us without our help.

18:04 Mark: There you go. And of course, it does require our help when we're actually doing it.

18:10 Wes: But it's, he says our consent. So God still instills it without our help, but we. It requires our consent.

18:18 Mark: We need to let the spirit of God into us. Which is different than your upbringing or your biology giving it the first push to free will.

18:27 Dylan: Yeah. So this part to me is like this little wedge which I find. This is where I find aquinas kind of it just feels dissatisfying. It feels a kind of like the metaphysics of apologetics where it's the wedge that says if someone is not acting virtuously, it's because they have not opened their heart to God enough and therefore they are a heretic.

18:52 Mark: I was looking over our YouTube comments and somebody commented on our Karamazov live show saying, you guys sound like Christian apologists. I suppose this would be interesting to somebody. And just to reflect on that, anybody could even have that impression based on where we started this podcast and how we were just, just. At least I was so intolerant of these theological questions and influxes. And now we're just like, you know, what do you think he's doing? What is his profession? He's. He's in the clergy.

19:22 Wes: And now I would say of all of us, you're the most interested in theology, perhaps.

19:28 Mark: Well, are we interested in psychology? Because this we've been so far. What is virtue? Was question 55 in the book. Now question 56. What part of us do virtues affect? And I suggest that we try to go through these quickly just to see, because it's more. It's more psychology. And we've already been alluding to this a lot. You know, does it, does it affect our. We know that has something to do with our reason, but how does reason actually activate us? Are there virtues of the intellect? Is one of the questions. Are there virtues disposing our capacities for affection or an aggression, which is emotions? As we said in our part four of our last treatment of this. Are there virtues disposing our emotions? Are there virtues of sense perception? And the answer seem our virtue? How are there virtues of the will? So can we, can we just summarize?

20:18 Wes: Yeah, we could summarize some of this.

20:19 Mark: I mean, do we have a picture of the whole thing?

20:21 Wes: Right.

20:21 Mark: The first question. Do virtues dispose our abilities to act? Of course they do. Can a virtue dispose more than one ability? I hate that question. Just skip that question. Unless you found are there virtues of the intellect? Right. We read this whole thing in the Nicomachean Ethics. It says there are. But I think we talked about this earlier that, well, the intellect makes us able to act virtuously, but it doesn't actually cause us to act virtuously because you could have the smart assassin as opposed to. So at least the intellect having to do with reason is like virtue adjacent.

Whereas when he talks about the senses. Well, no, I mean, it's sort of presupposed that if you're going to Have a lot of the virtues that you have enough memory, for instance, to, like, actually bring the virtue. But they're not strictly part of the virtues. They're sort of just a precondition. Just like having a body. You have to have a body in order to be virtuous, but it's not the cause of virtue. Yeah.

21:11 Wes: I think this. This intellect section, I mean, this is where he starts to get into the relationship to the affective life. Because he'll essentially say in this. He'll say that. Right. So willing starts with sentiment to get at something very. It depends on love is the way he's gonna put it, because. And willing starts off with love, which I think is a way of saying that our will is intimately connected to our affective life. So that this is the beginning of something that complicates the picture considerably.

21:42 Mark: And I suppose nobody re. Listened to our Eva Brann Un-Willing episode. I thought you brought that up last time, Seth, when we talk about Aquinas and free will.

21:50 Seth: Because I honestly keep meaning to. I haven't yet, but I keep meaning to.

21:54 Mark: Let's do that for the nightcap. Just because Aquinas was one of the figures. Actually read a little bit of maybe some of these very same passages. I don't know. But, you know, it was one of the. Eva's topics in there. And so I don't even remember what, you know, I know her overall point was like, don't will. So, you know, don't emphasize will as just a way to overcome. We need to be seduced in a certain way. We need to. And it seems like this. Him starting this section with love. That maybe Aquinas is contributing her thesis rather than being the one of the people she was arguing against. But yes, continue as.

22:28 Wes: Yeah, along the way here, he's going to say, all right, so there's. So to just get into the reply section of this. There are straightforward virtues like courage, which just automatically make the agent good. But then there are these not straightforward virtues, quote, unquote. You know, virtue in the loose sense, like being a good assassin or. I mean, he gets at knowledge and being a good craftsperson. Right. So he could take Cobbling as an example of that. And so those are to be distinguished from virtues, though in some ways they're structurally the same.

Right. Because we get trained and habituated into doing something very well. And then the question becomes, well, aren't there intellectual virtues in the sense that. That have something to do with knowledge and perhaps something to do with craft? And I think he wants to Say only in a loose sense, because. Right. We can use those things for ill. And so finally he'll get to a point where he says virtues dispose the will or abilities controlled by the will in such a way as to make those acts good. And the will is important here because we don't get good acts unless we have a good will, something that Kant will ultimately pick up on.

Right. So we get this intimate relationship. So to give a quotation here. So virtues provide us with more than the facility to act. Well, they make quote, actual acts good. They must be dispositions either of will itself or of other abilities precisely as stimulated to act by willing. So these other abilities could include something to do with emotion.

23:56 Mark: 402 or 403.

23:58 Wes: 403 is where you read and then I think so meant as far as virtues of the intellect. I think they're really. Prudence is one of them and then faith is the other. And I think that's it. I think that's. He wants to say that those are the only two virtues of the intellect and he wants to argue that they exist. And for, for his definition of prudence, it automatically disposes to right action. So I think the way we've been using prudence in the more contemporary analytic sense is not consistent with the way he's using it because it requires us to have good goals.

24:30 Mark: Yeah. Is your assassin prudent? Well, he's, he's self interested. But is that, that's not really prudent to be shooting people? That's not prudent we get in a larger sense.

24:43 Wes: So unfortunately, yeah, modern analytic philosophy, the use of the word prudence is different because we want to be able to talk about the use of reason for non ethical purposes, the good use of reason for bad objectives. But here you have to have good goals, just like speculation requires us to have good premises. And this means being disposed by quote unquote, right will towards those goals and thus to right action.

25:07 Mark: I mean, yeah. The fact that we brought up Kant a couple times here I think makes a lot of sense because ultimately you are not being truly rational. You're leaving something out of your calculation when you choose an evil aim and pursue it diligently and clear headedly that you are not being rational in some larger, more fundamental sense.

25:28 Wes: And I think, you know, just to go back to the assassin movies, I do think that's part of the tension to get a little like maybe too clever by half. But when I think about like what is so engaging about this when you watch it, it's not Just because kill. It's fun to watch people kill people. It's because we are in intention about. Well, isn't rationality good? Isn't being skilled at things good in and of itself? So how do I square that with the bad objective and how do I count for my. Yeah. Feeling of admiration for this when he's doing something, using it for that.

26:00 Dylan: Well, but part of the admiration, right. And the other piece that's tied up is the attractiveness of self motivated rulemaking. Right. So you know the person who is breaking the rules, right. The reason that they're attractive often is because they're not following the strictures of somebody else or society. The outlaw is attractive because they're not being bound by what seem to be maybe arbitrary or constraints of society. They're not. And the person who's going against them is really activating their independence. They're activating themselves. They're acting as their own power. That's what's attractive about them.

26:40 Wes: Yeah. Especially vigilante justice, Right. If the system is failing, then the lone actor, the lone deliverer of vigilante justice has a special appeal. I think Article 4, in a way for me is like the meat of all this. Or are there virtues disposing our capacities for affection and aggression? So we have an objector come along, right? He wants to say, okay, look, courage disposes the capacity for aggressive feeling, moderation, our capacity for affective feeling. So virtues really do get down into our unreasoning parts. Virtues don't just order our rational soul, they get down into our emotions.

And the objector will start out here by saying, well look, we share virtues with animals. And you know, the objection wants to say that they don't dispose of capacities for affection and aggression. Because in that sense animals can have virtue or not have virtue. There's nothing special to human beings about it. Animals can have their effective and aggressive parts more or less, well habituated, right? The dog that's gonna scared of you, scared of people and prone to bite them versus one that's not, for instance. And there's a range of other objections here.

And then, I mean, ultimately what he's going to get us to is this idea that the affective and aggressive parts can kind of share in reason, which is to say they could be habituated to have a natural inclination to obey reason. Which is a really interesting idea, I think.

28:03 Dylan: Yeah. I mean the objection that they can't be subject to virtue, all four of them amount to. Well, virtue is associated with reason and affection. Aggression isn't associated with Reason at all. And therefore it can't be. And the rejoinder is no. Aggression and affection are connected to have a pathway of connection to reason. And therefore they're part of virtue.

28:28 Mark: And just to remind folks, these affections. So these are just two different ways of two different categories within emotions. So that it's not necessarily even aggression. Aggressive actions are all aggression. Like courage counts as an aggressive feeling because it has to do with getting out there and taking an action. In this case, getting past an obstacle or something.

28:48 Wes: Yeah, the affection. So this is really sentiment, broadly speaking, the affective feelings, or he uses the word feeling, the affective feelings are just the feeling of like desire for an object.

29:00 Dylan: It's sex.

29:02 Wes: Yeah, yeah. There's some other desires, but the sex

29:05 Seth: in a lawful marriage or sex under adultery.

29:07 Wes: The aggressive feelings, which include courage and anger, for instance, are about removing obstacles to the right. So we kind of vector out to the object with the affective feeling. Something gets in the way. We have an aggressive feeling that helps us remove the obstacles and work towards getting. Getting what we want. But he gives a proof here of this idea that the affective, an aggressive part of us can share in reason. And he gives us this comparison to a workman who. Right. So if we go back to the cobbler example, he's got to be habituated in the right way, but his tools have to be shaped in the right way.

And that's almost like a version of habituation. They have to be well disposed. So we're supposed to think here of our emotions as like our tools, tools for reason. And they can be shaped in a way that reason can use them. You know, if reason is like a good cobbler is really. Well, if we're really good at it, we can have tools that are well disposed and that reason can use to do its thing. Or they might not be well disposed. Our emotions might be out of whack in certain ways that make it harder to will ourselves to do the right thing.

30:16 Seth: So I mean, this. Does this build on, reiterate or recapitulate where we started with, you know, the notion of freedom, choice, which belongs to the faculty of reason, separation from the beast. I mean, is this just more nuanced in that same flavor, talking about basically feelings?

30:35 Wes: Yeah, I mean, to me it seems to be a big. A new thing. Because this, to me is the central problem for morality, really. Because to the extent that it's a matter of character and it's a matter of habituation. Can we even blame people for things? Can we even say you deserve to be punished we got into this with our Galen Strawson episode, but, yeah, but

30:54 Dylan: especially in the context of things that are. Have such a conduit and rootedness in our bodies. So it's putting virtue was connected to the intellect and reason all the way up. And now we're saying, well, is it connected to the body? The objection is, well, it's not. And so therefore, the things that connected with the body, aggression and affection, our loves and our anger, are not governed by virtue. And therefore there wouldn't be virtuous actions with respect to them, and we wouldn't be able to hold people accountable by reason for them and by making them connected to reason. It means that we have power of some sort over them. Now, there's still going to be the context question and all that stuff, but it means that we can hold ourselves and hold others accountable. It also means God provides us a mechanism by which to control our appetites.

31:49 Wes: Yeah, so like in our Galen Strawson episode, he used that example of a serial killer who had a really bad childhood. And he used that to say that, well, there is no such thing as free will because this guy is just determined by his childhood to do the right. He became the person he was because of all these external influences, and then he had no power. And then the other example he uses is the Texas shooter, University of Texas at Austin.

32:10 Seth: Hey, hey, hey.

32:11 Wes: The tower shooter, who it turned out had a tumor, like, compressing his amygdala and then went nuts and started killing all those people. So if it has something to do with the body and something to do with the emotions, that could turn out we're just like animals or like machines who have no control. And so the whole task here is to build this nuanced picture where, yes, we do have all that, but somehow there's got to be this interface with freedom and rationality.

32:38 Dylan: And this is. So this makes the interface rearticulates the interface between freedom and rationality. And the rejoinder to the Galen Strawson thing would be the moral action section about context. Because rejoinder would be that you can't extrapolate those particular circumstances with those particular actors to saying that a, there's not necessarily any accountability. And you can have an account that it might say, look, the level of that there was something much more, call it determined by context about the guy with the tumor in his brain that he's acting.

And the language we have for that ends up being things like being insane or other kinds of ways in which you have lost your control of your rational faculties over your Body. That's how we would talk about it. And so again, the rejoinder to Galen Strawson is that, well, you're just being stupid. You're falling into the same trap of somebody saying that, you know, there is no connection between our rationality, our reason and our bodies and our emotions. It's the same problem. You're saying that we can't hold people accountable because there is no connection.

33:51 Mark: So the way that we optimize our bodily reactions with regard to morality is to neutralize them.

33:58 Dylan: Them.

33:58 Mark: We've made a couple jokes here about sex and things. And I was, oh, you know, sex properly is only within the context of marriage. And that's the. But really thinking more about that Kantian section that I was kind of referring to there, he says sex is inherently degrading. Sex is using someone's body. So even in the context of marriage, sex is not the central thing. It is sort of a necessary. Like we have these biological things and we'll use each other to, you know, discharge those. But we shouldn't become masters of the erotic and think that this is going to bring us a more fulfilling marriage or something.

It really, you know, he's. They're basically all Platonists. Plato like that. We're all just disembodied spirits. We're training for death. Insofar as anything is bodily at all. It's sort of filthy. It's sort of. And that's some of the things that are being referred to in this section are. Yeah, the quote from Romans in the Bible, the goodness of something virtuous is not bodily. So even though the body plays role, even the emotions play a role is mostly just to marginalize, to neutralize, to make them servants, to make them the chariots of the horse of.

You know, to bring in the Phaedrus example.

35:06 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I don't. That's not the impression that I get.

35:09 Dylan: I'm not sure.

35:10 Wes: Where are you reading the Romans? Thing from.

35:11 Mark: Human flesh cannot to be virtuous if it yields to reason, is a tool of righteous activity.

35:16 Wes: Where is that?

35:17 Mark: This is at least my quote on the second response page.

35:21 Dylan: 405. Yes, respond. Hence number two. Human flesh can't be virtuous, good in itself, but under the command of reason, it becomes a tool of virtuous activity. Quote. Yielding our bodies to the service of righteousness. Romans 6:19.

35:36 Mark: You need a body to do. To do virtuous things. But again, body, it's just like the senses, a good memory. Those are things that you need to do. Virtue but they are not themselves virtue virtuous.

35:46 Wes: Yeah, but it doesn't say to me body and flesh are inherently bad, but just that they have to be connected to. In the right way to. Yeah, to reason. And I think, you know, going back to Dylan, your example of saying, the legal example of someone being insane, we would say, did they know the difference between right and wrong? And that I think for Aquinas, in a way, is the primary role of reason to be reason responsive, but in the highest sense of responsive to what the good is. It's in a way, it's our conduit to the good.

36:17 Dylan: And so the nuance there that you'll get into to me is. And this becomes everything, you know, this is the judgment that becomes part of something like a legal insanity defense is what level of non recognition or incontinence with respect to that recognition is there? And how much of that incontinence is something that is really an incontinence born of their circumstance. So I mean, I could totally imagine that the guy who shot those people from that tower with the brain tumor, you would be able to have some kind of recognition of his actions being bad, but there being something else going on in him that makes it impossible for him to act sufficiently with respect to that.

And that's a much more nuanced notion. I mean, that doesn't go all the way to what we would normally call insanity where somebody somehow good and bad, become a categorical distinction that aren't available to them the way they aren't available to a mouse. And in these sections here, I agree with you, Wes, that this connection with the body and the interaction with reason, it lays the groundwork in these connections that can be much more subtle and sophisticated. I also happen to think that the point that Mark makes is often what ends up happening is there ends up being a kind of very, very, very sort of traditional disgust for the physical that ends up getting manifest and leveraged.

And maybe in particular the not under the lack of acknowledgment of the physical as being a actual positive part of the health of the soul and the health of the. As opposed to something that just merely needs to be controlled, neutralized, as Mark was saying.

38:04 Mark: Yeah, I need to temp. Let me just temper what I said before because I was brought to mind the close reads that Wes and I did on can the soul exist in isolation from the body? And. Well, it can, but it's not a full soul. The full soul, per Aristotle, is the form of the body. It's got to be in a body. So that's why, you know, the point is not for us all to exist without bodies in heaven. The point is that for us to all resurrect together at the end of time with our bodies.

38:31 Wes: That is a very weird part of this.

38:33 Mark: Yes. So Aquinas is much more bodily, following Aristotle than you would expect. You know, the Christian tradition that came out of him to be.

38:40 Wes: Yeah. And I will just say, I don't know, I haven't read enough Aquinas to like to give a definitive judgment on it. I'm just saying that based on what I've read, I didn't get that impression that he's just, oh, the body and the flesh are bad. It's just not the overall impression I've gotten. Especially because he's taking pains to argue against the people who want to say, oh, it can't have anything to do with the affective and the aggressive. And also because he wants to acknowledge that being overall is good. And like even something like the physical act of sex is at a baseline, good in this weak sense.

And then. And to become bad, it has to be connected up with contexts and circumstances that make it bad. And then the agent to be doing something bad also has to have lost their connection to the good in some sense. And so we might even admit that, yeah, if someone is being adulterous, they're doing something bad because they're betraying another person.

39:33 Mark: But it's telos reproduction. He says in here, and that's sort of what you hear that's been passed down to us, that the natural law of sex is it's for reproduction. So really, any context in which reproduction is not a possibility is some sort of deviation, is unnatural in some way.

39:51 Wes: Well, that argument. I thought he said the effect is reproduction generally. And the reason why he wants to say that is because he wants to make this distinction between the activity qua physical activity, any activity qua something that we judge morally. So the effect of adultery as just as a physical activity might be a child, but the effect in the moral domain is to have betrayed someone. So the moral judgment doesn't have anything to do with this physical, biological characterization. It's all about something else. So relative to physical activity, the effect as a child, relative to moral action, the effect is betrayal.

40:31 Mark: I think we should Talk about question 6. Are there virtues of will? Because this gets kind of strange. You would think that, you know, do we need. We already have virtues of character. If we have virtue as a disposition, it will make you do act in certain Ways it will make you run into the fire. Do you need will for that? Well, I mean, you need consent, as we said. But if we already define virtue as something that God does without our active help, then why would we need will? And his answer to this is, well, we don't need will to do most, you know, sort of prudential mora.

What we would call prudential moral actions that we are just sort of programmed. But if we want to attempt something that exceeds us in its proportion. In other words, we want to serve humanity as a whole, not just ourselves. We want to serve God. We want to love humanity, we want to love God. This actually does require a virtue of will to dispose us to love God and our fellow man. So this just brings us right into actual ethics here.

41:33 Wes: Yeah, so I would make that you. You said prudential and non. I would just. I would say the distinction is between altruistic and non. Altruistic.

41:40 Mark: Yeah, that's good.

41:41 Wes: Premoral Aristotelian virtues like courage, they're not necessarily altruistic, but they're virtues. But it's. When we get into this other. And right here, we saw the same sort of transition in Hume. So the two virtues at stake here are charity and justice. That's what we're talking about in Article 6. So the question is, how does other concern work into it? And what does that mean for the will? And what he's saying is, yeah, when we get to other concern, then we need actual virtues of the will. It's no longer just about sentiment. Although for him, will and sentiment are connected. Right. Because of the will starts with desire, with love. So let me, let me qualify what I just said there. It's like distinction between will as a rational faculty and will as something that incorporates sentiment in Aquinas is not clear to me.

42:30 Mark: So what is will like? One of the things he considers is, hey, you know what Aristotle says? Will just is rational desire. So to say we need rational desire to be rational or to pay attention or, you know, we need a virtuous will. No, no, we already have that. That's our. It's just redundant to say that it's

42:48 Wes: already tending towards the good of its own nature. Yeah, it's like desiring man by nature desires to know we have. We by nature have rational desires. Why would it ever need to be habituated?

42:57 Mark: An ability needs to be disposed to act well by disposition called a virtue. Here's a quote. An ability's nature is defined as its orderliness to its object. So the will's Object is what reason proposes as good. No virtues normally required for will to follow that. But the will needs. Needs virtues. If a good asks to be willed, that exceeds this proportion to us transcending the human species. I'm just repeating what I said before, but I don't know that I understand why a special act of will, we

43:28 Wes: need it if it's going to be altruistic. I think is what he's saying. The Charles transcendent thing is transcending our own self interest.

43:35 Mark: So he said that. But do you guys understand? Do you find this motivating? Does this make sense to you? Have you learned anything?

43:42 Dylan: The last sentence, right? There are virtues in the will, disposing it to love our God and fellow men, charity, justice and the like. So justice is a virtue of the will.

43:53 Mark: Yeah, I don't know if that completely makes sense to me. As opposed to, oh, I have an inclination for justice. I have reason tells me what justice is. And so I just don't see why this is special in a way that I'm figuring out. I want to get to the cafe and so I put into my phone this is the route you should go. I have to use my will to actually go that route. That's one of the things she's made

44:20 Dylan: before to me, the distinction, it gets back to the distinction between powers and dispositions and how you get to virtue. So in that respect, the will is something that is just a power. It's not actually having any direction at all. And having a virtue of it means that it's well disposed. So the distinction here is that things like charity and justice are well disposed activities of will.

44:51 Wes: So what Mark is emphasizing is right on 409 he says so like the whole point of will is so what's the object of will? It's what reason proposes to be good, right? Where to will something is to act on reasons even if they turn out to be bad reasons. So what reason proposes as good and also as proportionate to the agent, which is a qualification we don't need to get into. And we don't need. What he says there on 409 is we don't actually need virtues in that case. In general, we don't need virtues of the will. We need virtues, but we don't need virtues of the will.

The will just naturally does that. It's just this, it's responsive to the good. But then there's a special case which is the, what I've called the altruistic case where actually it's no longer enough for Will just to be following its whole natural course. It actually does need virtue, which. And the suggestion seems to be that it needs to be habituated, which we know is. I mean, if we're thinking about children, children, obviously we know it's true. Hey, you should share that. Hey, you shouldn't hit your sister, etc. Etc. It seems in our human, in our relationships, other human beings, it does need to be habituated.

But it seems the way for other virtues as well. And it's just that we would think that we're habituating the affective and aggressive parts of us. I don't know. Right. And why isn't that the case in altruism? Isn't that just what we're doing? Isn't it the same thing to make someone courageous and to make them just towards others? Why is one thing about the effect of life and one thing about the will? It's not clear to me.

46:24 Seth: Well, I'm trying to exercise my reason over my feelings of aggression right now. So he says here I want to take issue a little bit with the idea that this is about altruism because I think it's broader than that. But I don't understand exactly how. So I understand what he says, but I don't understand what it means that it says. Abilities, dispositions perfect our abilities to act. So an ability needs to be disposed to act well when the ability's own nature won't suffice. Now in this case, I'm assuming what we're talking about is will. The ability we're talking about is will.

47:01 Wes: But in this case its own nature does suffice. That's the whole point of the rest of this section in general, except in a very special circumstance.

47:11 Mark: Charity and justice, it's things that are greater than us. So the altruism is not necessarily just that it's turned outward, it even playing toward God.

47:20 Seth: Yeah, this is my point. He says that. I get it, okay? I read the text. It's right there. What does that mean? To say that the object, if the object of will is charity or justice and the like, then that object exceeds it, transcends the limit of the ability somehow.

47:42 Wes: Well, he also uses transcends the limits of human nature, which suggests to me translimits transcends our selfishness. He says there are virtues in the will, disposing it to love our God and fellow men. Charity, justice and the like. That idea of loving our fellow men I would characterize as altruism.

47:59 Seth: Why would loving your fellow man exceed your ability?

48:04 Wes: The ability is human nature. Right.

48:06 Mark: It sounds like one of these Aristotelian causality problems, that you have to have at least as much reality and thickness in the cause as in the effect or the object. So if you're going to know something, you as a finite person can't know the infinite, as we talked about in our theology sections in this. And so even to love, to point toward something that is greater, the human race or God that is greater than your own individual little ego, somehow we need a boost. We need a special virtue of the will that is not required if we're just going on autopilot, sort of doing what non altruistic behavior because of the object. Yes.

48:49 Wes: Let me read more of the text here because it might. Might help. So now an ability's nature is defined as an orderedness to its object. And since will's object is what reason proposes, as good as, and proportion to the one willing, no virtue is required for the will to follow that. So in this case, the will is just like gravity with the rock. That example, the power, the ability are automatically executed. They don't need to be habituated, they don't need a disposition. So that's ordinary examples. And then. But the will needs virtues. If a good ask to be willed, that exceeds this proportion to us, transcending either the human species as, for example, the good of God.

The good of God transcends the limits of human nature as such, or transcending an individual as, for example, the good of his fellow man. So in that case, how is it, I mean, the question is. Which we've dealt with many times on the podcast, it's much more. It's easier to understand how we become oriented towards our own good than to the good of others. The question is, how do we do that? And in other words, these virtues of justice and charity, where do they come from? And he says these are virtues of the will as opposed to virtues of the intellect, more broadly speaking, or virtues of the affective and the aggressive parts of us.

Now we might. I think it's counterintuitive, we would want to say, like Hume, well, isn't this all about sentiment? Don't we just naturally have these altruistic sentiments towards other people?

50:18 Seth: People?

50:19 Wes: Isn't the ability already there and naturally going to execute itself? And he's saying no to that.

50:25 Mark: Which is, yeah, strange, given that we are social animals and so our, our affective stuff should be our human nature should be oriented toward elsewhere. Wise and I thought Aquinas acknowledged that in here, that this is our deep interest is to be social But I'm not finding the spot.

50:44 Wes: I mean. So, Seth, I think it is confusing, right? I just don't think we have enough here to understand why he's saying this.

50:50 Dylan: Exactly.

50:50 Seth: Yeah. I mean, if the will as an ability is incapable of setting for itself an object which is so abstract, like all human beings or God or nature or something like that, and so there needs to be a disposition like you have to overcome the will's sort of reticence to go after an object that it can't grasp. That I get. I understand like saying like, if you want to be charitable towards the whole world or you want to give yourself over to something that's much larger. But for the individual human being to say that the will can certainly take the well being of another individual human being, like your spouse or your child, as its object.

And what it sounds like he's saying is you wouldn't need a disposition that the will would just naturally act appropriately. But of course, that's not how human beings work. I mean, it feels like disposition is something that needs to be active all the time. And I understand we're talking specifically about willing here and not reason. And maybe that's. Maybe I'm getting caught up. Maybe everything that's meaningful to be said about moral action in between individuals and all that is to be said in the sphere of reason and emotion and not in the sphere of will.

But this is just extremely complicated to me.

52:19 Dylan: To me, the point being made is that there is an act of reason on our will that is enabling us to have, well, justice. Justice is our reason acting on our will. And that way there's a virtue associated with it.

52:35 Seth: That's interesting.

52:36 Wes: So let me just say one more thing that might, might help here, and this will be my closing. So even Hume would acknowledge that justice is a very different. Even though he wants to call it a sentiment, it's a very different type of sentiment because it's not just like me liking my spouse or my child, it's me being concerned about the well being of others. Not even from just the standpoint of my. Oh, that hurts when me. When it hurts you. It's from the standpoint of an external spectator, a general spectator. We inhabit a general point of view when we do that. So I think Aquinas is on to that same sort of problem. Justice is a very particular and interesting. Even if it is a sentiment, it's a very interesting and different kind of one.

53:19 Dylan: Yeah.

53:20 Mark: Responding to law. So obviously we just finished the virtue section. We brought in some of the stuff from the Moral Action section, I would like to participate in a part three, just for supporters, where some, at least. At least one of you joins me to go over these remaining. The little bit of law and the remaining 10 pages that we read. But we're going to wrap up our discussion of this and move on to work by Sigmund Freud from 1921 called Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. I think we left you with a good thought, something to give us feedback on what are we not understanding about this ethical point of view, why something special would be needed in the will to respond to the love of humanity in general, the love of God.

Go to the blog post associated with this at partiallyexaminedlife.com or on Patreon, wherever you're seeing this, and give us a comment. Email us@peltially examinedlife.com maybe. I would love to discuss more of your questions, your comments, your emails on our next pel Nightcap, which will be somewhere around the holidays. A holiday related sort of thing, perhaps. So, yeah, let us know what else you'd like us to cover. I think we'd also like to go into the New Year spell out. Here's sort of on our bucket list. If next year was the last year we're to do this podcast, period, one of us is gonna die after that.

But like, what do we really want to make sure we cover? So we welcome your contributions to that debate.

54:40 Wes: Mark, do you have something to tell us?

54:42 Mark: No, no, I just want an exciting nightcap. Maybe it'll be a public nightcap. We'll see. Thanks