This is KZSU, Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison,
and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[MUSIC]
>> Come, Rad-era-stoddle,
claimed that there are three kinds of friendship in this world.
One is based on utility, where friends derive some practical benefit
from one another.
The second is based on pleasure.
The pleasure of being together and like-minded company.
Sharing things, exchanging ideas, enjoying each other's humor,
conversation, looks, and so forth.
And then there is friendship based on mutual respect and admiration.
And a desire to assist your friends because you recognize the excellence
of their character.
Well, if you listen to this show, if you seek it out on a regular basis,
if you crave it, if you miss it desperately when it goes on hiatus,
if you are a much fuller, more realized human being as a result of following this show,
then you are a friend of entitled opinions.
Not in the first, second, or third sense only, but in all three at once.
The friends of entitled opinions, they get it all.
They get utility, pleasure, virtue, and a lot more besides.
[Music]
I'll take as many utility friends as I can get.
Just don't give me any Facebook friends.
I can do without the self-delight.
[Music]
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.
Before him, I may think aloud.
A quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
That's one way of describing what we do on entitled opinions.
We think aloud before friends.
And you, the friends, think along with us.
And please, don't call it virtual friendship.
It says, "Real as it gets, as those of you who are friends of this show can attest."
I'm particularly pleased to be joined in the studio by my colleague Ruth Starkman,
who will have plenty to say about friendship and other related matters today.
Ruth Starkman teaches biomedical and computer ethics here at Stanford,
and is also an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco,
where she teaches political philosophy and ethics.
Now, those of you who listen to our recent shows with Professor Hans Sluga
will be interested to know that Ruth is a former student of Sluga at Berkeley.
Welcome to the show, by the way.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Now, you've also told me that in addition to being a loyal former student of Sluga,
you're also loyal to Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher,
because you believe that Aristotle's virtual ethics are practical and adaptable
to contemporary everyday ethical practice.
So, let's begin by me asking you exactly what virtual ethics is
and how it differs from other kinds of ethics.
Virtual ethics is normally described as one of the three types of normative ethics.
There's virtual ethics that begin with Plato and Aristotle in the West,
and then usually in a beginning philosophy or beginning ethics course,
you go right over to the next category, which is Deontological Ethics,
which is usually represented by Kant.
And after Kant, you will have utilitarian or consequentialist ethics.
And then all these normative frameworks, the dominant frameworks of ethics, pedagogy,
at least as we know it in the States, and in many other places,
those are the three parts.
Kant, in his groundwork of the metaphysics of morals,
was terribly upset about virtual ethics.
He wanted to have a revolution against it,
because for him, character was utterly unstable and not normative enough.
But most people nowadays don't like virtual ethics because it is normative.
So let's, for a listen, let's put it laid out.
So the virtual ethics emphasizes the role of character.
A person's character, in fact, the Greek word ethos means character,
therefore character ethic.
So the Deontology, as you said, inspired where Kant is with principle figure,
puts the emphasis more on the kind of duty that we have to rules
and to follow imperatives, more moral imperatives.
And then you refer to pragmatism or what consequentialism, which presumes to derive the rightness or wrongness of an action
from the consequences or outcomes that it leads to.
And here, virtual ethics seems to be the least, at least,
the one that is least in vogue, since Kant, and certainly in our day,
when I hear just the word virtual ethics, I'm just typical in the sense that it doesn't sound
sexy enough to me.
Maybe persuasive.
And maybe if it goes by the other term that it's sometimes used by wishes,
add a tayek ethics from the Greek word, add it to which means excellence.
And then that would maybe dispel the suspicion that one has.
But why don't you make a case for virtual ethics now that we know that it's primarily character-based?
Okay, so let me tell you what people don't like about virtual ethics.
There's a whole lot not to like about virtual ethics because it's a weighted tradition from Plato and Aristotle.
It's a masculineist tradition.
The word virtue is actually the Latin word for, as you say, arette, which means actually excellent.
But most times when you talk about virtue, thinking of Machiavelli's viola tool,
or the meaning of via the root for masculine, it's a manliness.
So there's that element that people think it comes from a patriarchal tradition,
a patriarchal normative tradition.
There's a lot of reasons not to like this concept, who decided the norms of virtue?
What do these norms do to various communities?
There's a lot of reasons why people don't like virtual ethics.
But what I like about virtual ethics, and I try not to sell one type of ethics when I teach the spectrum,
when I teach the traditions east and west, and invariably students ask me,
"Well, where do you see yourself?"
And I say, "Well, I'm a virtue ethicist."
And they say, "How, why?"
What I'm thinking about is what Hans Lugo calls a diagnostic, kind of thinking that Aristotle has.
There's a proto-diagnostic.
He's an early diagnostic thinker according to Hans Lugo, and I think that's right.
He's normative.
He says lots of things that will make your skin crawl.
He talks about slaves enjoying their positions.
It's naturally where they belong.
He talks about women naturally being silent.
There's lots not to like about Aristotle.
But what I like is this diagnostic thinking about developing habits of excellence.
And when I teach ethics to an international group of students, this cohort is coming from traditions where people talk about habits of excellence.
The people talk about character.
And maybe the problem is in 20th century, we're not really sure what character is.
Immanuel Kant thought it was something that could be tricky and go bad at a wink of an eye.
But at the end of the day, we're not really sure what character is.
And yet, the students that arrive and the students who are coming through these universities and going out into the world,
it's believed when they arrive that they know what character is and that their characters will be judged.
And I'm interested in showing them what the longstanding discussions of character are, where they come,
east and west from Confucius and Aristotle, and how they've transmuted and transformed in our era.
But we very much talk about this.
When I read college applications, there was a long time college application reader for a number of institutions.
We're reading for their quote-unquote character.
And that poor 17-year-old is trying to write his or her character in a way that's accessible and 500-word stuffs.
As if that could be transmitted that easily.
So everyone believes they know what character is.
I say, "Okay, let's put this on the table. Let's look what the ancient thought it was.
Let's look east and west what character was."
And why it was that the ancient thought we needed character.
So do you think character can be the foundation of an ethics, or is it just one element among others that has to be taken into consideration?
And if it's the former, how do we define character?
Is it the moral character of the individual?
Is it the temperament of an individual?
Is it certain habits that he or she acquires growing up through parents?
Or is it an innate endowment that comes from nature or the gods?
What is an ethos? What is the ethos?
Where a hair-clite has said, a man's destiny is his character.
Or the diamond is the...
How do we understand character in this context?
Well, thank you for bringing up Heraclitus.
Because actually when I'm thinking of Aristotle, I'm not thinking of a Heracliteian character.
Where the character, one's self is the man who steps into the river is never the same man.
And the river is never the same river.
And that kind of flexible character that you have in a lot of traditions like Taoism,
and you have Buddhism, and Hinduism.
The Greeks were all about a stable character.
They're so stable that it's a wonder that Kant was disappointed it wasn't stable enough.
Well, excuse me, just a thing on Heraclitus. It's true that Heraclitus, as you can never step in the same river twice.
But he also said, when he said that a man's destiny is his character,
I'm taking him to say that there's something stable over a lifetime,
and that what you're going to become or what's going to happen to you is going to depend on this intrinsic,
invariant character that you're born with. But I could be wrong about that.
And character for the ancients, East and West, was in part in born, but virtue was not.
And so virtue, whether you're talking about Confucius or whether you're talking about Aristotle, had to be learned.
And Erso has two types of virtue. He has intellectual virtue, which is your capacity for reason.
And that capacity for reason is your ability to discern, to take the right actions, to take excellent actions.
But you really don't can't do much with this until you've developed moral virtue, which is the product of practice and habits.
And I think that's what's teachable, and I think that's what's usable for this generation of students.
Is this his character alone? Enough? No, absolutely not.
But it's one, it's a very important conversation to have, because everybody, when they arrive, thinks they,
at least they think in their college applications that they know what it is.
Right. So the idea that virtue needs to be learned, do you believe that it's learned at an earlier age than the students were starting to apply to college?
Or is there something that you as a university teacher, teaching biomedical ethics or computer ethics, can actually intervene in a
vital, active way in the learning of virtue among students between 18 and 25 years old?
I think students have a very developed character by the time when they arrive here.
My job, and I'm sure a lot of other people see it this way too, our job is to have them look at all the values that they arrive here at the university,
and know where they come from, put them in the larger philosophical conversation that they are already, largely unwittingly participating in, show them where they fit, ask them where they want to fit, and ask them how they want to live.
And when you teach Aristotle and virtue ethics based on Aristotle, do you find that it reaches them, that it strikes a chord with them, that it does something to get them to actually rethink what their ethical bases are?
It depends on the student. I had maybe 10 years ago, I had a, maybe he was already 15 years ago, I had a student who was a vet returning from Iraq.
And for him, Aristotle was just simply lacking insufficient norms. He understood Kant, but he had Kant's problem with Aristotle, and for him, Aristotle was a joke.
Why was that?
For him, Aristotle was just too wishy-washy. There were just too many possibilities to avoid norms, to develop in the wrong direction, to act outside your cohort.
And that's what appeals to you to a certain extent about Aristotle is that he is not a strictly normative thinker, and that he allows for an adaptation to circumstance situations and variability, what contingencies we would call it.
Yes. And whereas I suppose if you've been in a situation of extremity as war, there in Iraq, in the case of that student, and so forth, sometimes maybe some absolute norms might be something that you grasp onto because they are so stable and immutable, no?
That's right.
So can you tell us in what case do you make for virtue ethics over other forms of normative ethics?
Well, I don't pedal virtue ethics. I take the students to the ethical banquet, and I let them die, and I let them taste, and we walk through all of them.
And that just comes up eventually, they want to know where I stand. And I don't make a secret of it. They're invariably disappointed.
Where do you stand?
I stand with Aristotle. I stand with Sluga, even though Sluga didn't even stand with Aristotle.
Right. So Ruth, you were telling me off air before we came on air that our students here at Stanford, undergraduate, they come here with certain moral dispositions and beliefs and convictions.
And then they go and study something like computer science, and they're told by the powerhouses of Silicon Valley, how did you put it?
That if you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough, and that all of a sudden there's this complete upheaval in what it means to be successful, and that success in Silicon Valley is directly opposed to what standard moral
virtue would consist in.
I think that's right. And I think it's not any one particular boss who's saying this. I think it's out there in the ether of Silicon Valley. If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough. Everybody else is cheating. This is how you get ahead.
And I do think that students arrive here with all sorts of different moral frameworks, not some more coherent than others.
And yet when they go out there, most of their friendships, our friendships of utility, they're trying to get the better deal of something. They're trying to have someone do something for them, and they encounter this. They encounter this need to -- the pressure to
divide business from ethics. And one of the things that we're trying to do here is equip them in some way so that they don't make that divide, that they keep it together somehow despite the temptation.
Yeah, cynics might think that it's just a way of putting a band-aid on a war wound, or it's just dressing up the Stanford, which can offer all the courses in computer ethics that it wants, but the actual behavior of the power brokers and the agents in Silicon Valley is unlikely to be influenced by that.
That's a matter of speculation that we don't need to get into here. It's just reminding me, however, of a philosophy teacher I had as an undergraduate. I think his name was Bill Carr, William Kerr, and he would give us an exam and would then leave the room.
And he said, "Is your obligation to cheat on this exam if you can get away with it?" Because this whole purpose of this education is he was being deliberately cynical. He said it's to learn how to game the system and get the better of the system. Of course, if I catch you cheating, you're going to be severely punished.
But don't forget that the purpose of education is learning how to cheat.
That's right, and I think that's their dual education that comes in. That's the dark side of what we're trying to tell them with looking at different frameworks and looking at different practical examples of what does one do in a situation where one has an ethical dilemma.
And it's funny because the cynical, well, you can't get ahead without cheating, paints itself as realist. But I think that the real question is, what are you going to do when confronted with that? I think that's the real question.
And you don't say, "Well, this is too idealist." You say, "What ought to be done? What can I do?" There are a lot of philosophers that have different ways of coping.
There's the Judith Jarvis Thompson has the minimally decent Samaritan. Okay, you may not be the whistleblower. You may not be the person who could go the extra mile and be ideal. You may not be the good Samaritan.
But could you be minimally decent and prevent evil in some way? Could you? And I think that's worth getting students to ask.
Well, I began with a number of illusions to Aristotle's theory of friendship, and it was not by chance because I knew that we were going to raise this issue of how what Aristotle says in book eight,
and it's Nico McKee and ethics, which is the book largely devoted to friendship along with book nine, that you find that there is something central about Aristotle's thinking about friendship when it comes to virtue ethics as a whole, and also when it comes to his understanding of what it means to be a community and a society,
and that there's still a great deal of pertinent or relevance when Aristotle's thoughts about friendship. Shall we go through maybe a step at a time, what the theory of friendship is that we find in book eight of the ethics?
I always tell my students this is great and they're always disappointed when we get here. And they're disappointed because he seems to be just giving a taxonomy of what friendship is and it seems to be purely descriptive.
But there's a lot in book eight that I believe shows Aristotle's departure from his mentor Plato that he goes from believing in sort of absolute and eternal, external notions of truth to notions that that one could base and ethics on that are more contextual.
So, for example, for Plato there's love and there's friendship and this kind of friendship would be philia and it's a friendship of the public sphere, it's a friendship of citizenship, it's a friendship that humans as political animals enjoy with each other.
And philia is beautiful, there's not much to not like about philiates, the ideal true friendship. So, at the beginning of the program when you're describing the three levels, the last level, the friendship between mutuals who wish each other well, that state of character, true friendship, perfect friendship is philia.
But that's all you get for Plato. It's philia or die. There's not different levels and what I like about Aristotle is that he's willing to talk about the lower forms of friendship that could go bad.
A friendship of utility could always go bad, Aristotle says, because in that bargain where you and a friend have a mutually beneficial situation, you might be always considering how to get the better bargain.
In a friendship of pleasure you could always go off the deep end and never do your homework and only have fun.
But what I like is that Aristotle takes these lower forms of friendship and says, we can make these ethical.
We can make these ethical through a kind of moral virtue habituation of keeping them moderate and temperate.
And you find that this has direct practical applications to our own contemporary situation, whether it comes to bioethics or computer ethics or any other situational context that arises where questions of ethics are in play.
Nobody is going to leave Stanford and be Socrates, walk around barefoot and then get put to death by the Athenians.
That's nobody's graduation dream.
And their graduation dreams are to graduate, pay back their debts to thrive and find themselves in the world somewhere.
And there are a lot of temptations for the pay back the debts and thrive.
They will have a lot of friendships of utility, a lot of friendships of pleasure.
Where do you draw the limits on them?
How do you, where do you say to your friend from whom you are getting some benefits?
Your friend is teaching you some new form of coding or something or some new app that you need to learn.
Where do you say, I want to know what this app is going to be used for and I want to know who's going to be affected by it and all those kinds of questions.
I think this is useful.
For sure. Do you think that the third form of friendship, the most perfect form of friendship in Aristotle's tripartite division of the friendship of the good that friends would be asking themselves that question?
Or is the friendship of based on the good, one in which you are actually loving the other person, who that person is rather than his or her utility value or pleasure value?
And that there is something deeply connected to the person who is the person.
If not the character, not necessarily the character, I would say.
Aristotle is not clear that you love the person's character.
You might just love the person despite flaws in the character.
That's a very compelling distinction between the other two kinds of friendship.
And I think here is the normative part. I think that's exactly right.
And in true friendship, which is also called perfect friendship, or you can think of it as the self-sufficient friendship and what Aristotle means by self-sufficiency is not,
"Oh, I can take care of myself and pay my bills," but the friendship that is good unto itself. It's good without self-interest.
And that is a normative good, so that's when you wish the person well without any self-interest.
And you care about that person's well-being and you trust that person.
That is the ideal kind of relationship to have.
And when students leave the university, they hope to have made these kinds of friendships, and they hope to find these friendships.
They understand, and Aristotle says, that these kinds of friendships are rare, but this is the norm by which they just believe that
by which they judge their most precious friendships.
This idea of friendship as a personal acknowledgement or recognition of the other person is also predicated on not an absolute requirement of equality,
but certainly a strong relative requirement of equality where perfect friends need to be equal in certain respects.
So for example, if I read Aristotle correctly, he says that when you find that friend of the good,
you are inspired to give or to love more than you are loved in return because it's in the loving.
And it's in the providing even benefits or doing something for your friend that the actual, you're fulfilling the potential of goodness for the friendship.
But if it's a true friendship, that will also be reciprocal because there will be this kind of reciprocity whereby it will go both ways.
So in that sense, this equality has to be taken into consideration, no?
Equality, reciprocity, attitude matters.
How you give to your friend, no matter.
So when you can't just be grudgingly giving your intentions, your expression of giving matters.
And all of that is kind of squishy and hard to, hard to relegate to a norm.
But that's what I like about it.
I have a question for you, Ruth Widget.
It intrigues me.
Is Aristotle saying that the condition for such friendship is that the two individuals be
really good in themselves or is a genuine friendship of the good possible between people who have deeply flawed characters?
And if not, then I think that it's really not that much of this world.
That's a good question.
Is he talking, is he talking about filia and some ultimate ideal form as some condition of possibility for being virtuous that has very little practical implications?
No, I don't think he is.
I mean, I think that's closer to Plato.
I think he's talking about the living a life of you, diamondia, of happiness, a life well lived, a life well practiced within a range, within a range with vicissitudes, and with effort, which we hope is consistent.
That constancy is one of his favorite virtues, the opposite of which would be weakness and softness, the Greek word, weakness of the will, a crasia.
There's something in book eight that I find a little bit underdeveloped in his thinking, which is the stages of life.
I'm interested in different stages of life.
And he does make reference to the fact that when you're young, and I don't know exactly what he means by young,
that there's no way, kind of years, it's assigned to it, but that friendships are going to be temporary, for the most part.
And you're not going to develop long lasting, serious friendships of the good.
Likewise, when you're old, you're very unlikely to form that third kind of friendship, because for one reason or another, you're looking more for utility.
And therefore, it seems like if you're going to have that ideal friend, I don't want to use a word ideal, let's say that friendship with the good, it really takes place more in a certain stage of life rather than others.
Yes, I find that friendships that are formed at a certain age that could be anywhere from adolescence to very early adulthood.
And we know this from our experience in America, where the friends people make in college in their undergraduate years, it has a lasting power, for some reason, that way out runs the kinds of friendships that are formed either earlier or later in life, in terms of long jevis.
I don't know why that is, but maybe it's because there's a certain intensity where you do have more open access to the person when you're at that stage of life.
But it's definitely the case that there are stages of life that influence the forms that friendships go on to take.
Well, I think you're absolutely right here, and I think the Aristotle's discussion of stages of life could possibly be yet another one of his unfortunate moments.
Young people are frivolous, old people are crotchety, horrible, horrible, ageism, and weird.
So this is put to chalk this up with his awful statements about slavery and women awful.
So whenever I teach this, I ask my students, "Well, what's going on here?"
And one of the things we come up with is that because the Greeks have such a stable motion of character and that character, that moral virtue is that ethos built up as habit, becomes increasing the
only stable, that Aristotle assumes in old age there's no mobility in that stability.
It's that fixity of character that makes it so unuseful in a 21st century context because nobody believes in that.
Recently there were neurological studies that said characters not fixed at all.
We're closer to that.
So Ruth, I'd like to ask you about that famous quote that's attributed to Aristotle, when he was teaching Plato's doctrine of ideas.
He told his students that Plato is my friend, but that truth is a greater friend to me than Plato.
I know the phrase in Latin actually because it's the one that Edmund Husserl wrote in the margins of being in time.
The treat is written by his one-time student and disciple Martin Heidegger.
It had taken Husserl a while actually to get around reading being in time.
And when he realized with a certain surprise and dismay that his disciple Heidegger had gone in an entirely different direction than Husserl had been expecting,
Husserl wrote in the margins, "Amikus Plato said, 'Magus amika veritas.'
Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater friend to me than Plato.
So what do you make of the fact that Aristotle would declare that truth, the holy abstract thing, is more of a friend to him than a particular person in this case Plato?
That's right, that's right. And Husserl's moment is heartbreaking for Husserl.
He's always wondered if he sees being in time as he took a long time to read it and sat around gathering dust for a while until he finally cracked it on vacation.
And which friend is being betrayed here?
He's being betrayed or is he also betraying Heidegger here saying, 'I'm sorry, I can't go here.'
So it's a very interesting, Aristotle says this quote about Plato, "Amikus Plato."
Back in book one, it's the opening of chapter six and book one.
And he says, you know, people want to talk about the forms and ideal notions of virtue.
And it's hard when your friends are those who talk about the forms, but we're not going to because I have something else to say here.
And that's his moment where he departs from the normative Plato's ultimately normative notion of virtue.
Yeah, would it require in an Aristotelian concept of friendship that the friend be loyal to the philosophical doctrines of the friend or would friendship require that the friend should actually applaud the other friends following his or her own path in the investigation of truth?
Do you have to fall into line to be a friend?
Well, I think that he's hoping that Plato will applaud him here for his loyalty to the truth.
Yeah.
And one would imagine that Plato would have.
I think he's trying to perform, look how good my filia is, dear teacher.
Of course, I'm loyal to you, but out of this particular true friendship, he will trust me here, even though even though what I'm doing is a little risky and different.
It's very different than Husserl, who's betrayed and and and shocked by Heidegger.
Right.
So the other question has to do now not with friendship and truth, but with friendship and justice because in book eight Aristotle makes the declaration that friendship is a higher moral virtue than justice because you can have justice, but even when you have justice you need friends.
Whereas if you have friendship, you don't need justice.
How do you see the relationship between friendship and justice and the super fluidity of justice in a regime of friendship?
This is one of the most talked about quotes of the Nicomachean ethics.
I think it's probably with good reason.
I think it's the crown jewel.
And what he's saying about when men are friends, there is no need for justice is pretty self-evident.
If you have a if you have that self-sufficient friendship, you don't have to say, look, can I borrow two dollars?
I'll get my lawyer to sign a contract.
You don't need to say that.
And he says that the best kind of justice is friendly and has a friend in the quality.
He means something a little bit different.
And this is probably what makes Kant nervous.
He means that the letter of the law is cold, that justice itself, that if you just have the the maxims and the rules and the norms that you cannot account for contingencies.
And that to be virtuous and to be just, you have to account for contingencies.
Yeah.
There's also something in common between justice and friendship, which is that it they're predicated on equality somehow, or some kind of fair exchange.
And therefore, if a friend has normally gives as much as he receives and return by natural Felicia, justice also is something that we're you know, the giving and taking the balance of justice and so forth is is removed.
So friendship and justice are closely connected, obviously, as you said, if when you're in a regime of friendship, the cold letter of the law need not be invoked.
But at the same time in book eight, Aristotle sees it fit to raise the whole question of government and the and the pollutea or the you know, the community, the city state, the police.
And goes on talking about different forms of government and of friendship as the foundation of the community.
How does he go from this idea of a friendship where you're acknowledging, recognizing and accessing the personhood of another individual to seeing friendship as something that applies to the larger city state.
I think that it makes sense once he says that the the best kind of justice is has the friendly sort he's thinking of the three positive three positive manifestations of of politics monarchy aristocracy and a republic.
And he's also thinking that they have a mirror opposite the mirror opposite of the monarchy is the tyranny, the mirror opposite of aristocracy is the oligarchy and the mirror opposite of republic, I always ask my students to guess.
It's a, of course, these are corrupt forms. So, so when you have that when you have these others, what you have in the corrupt form starting at the bottom with democracy is you sort of have a mob rule where everybody votes for the lowest common denominator.
And this isn't friendship, this is this is this is maybe a lower kind of friendship of utility or pleasure gone bad.
And with the aristocracy this when you have when it goes over into an oligarchy, you have the bad kind of friendship of utility and pleasure at others expense.
And the monarch of course pleasure at his own that the expense of the universe.
So could you say that in these three different forms of government, these are also correspond to different kinds of friendship that the monarch is a friend of the people in the good form of it.
And the ruling aristocracy are the custodians of what have you and that in the democracy or republic that the citizens form a kind of friendship among themselves as equals.
And that would allow for a great deal of flexibility in the very concept of fee, I understand that.
And I know that you also when you teach virtue ethics it's not just Aristotle but you also appeal to notions of natural law as well as Christian moral doctrines.
Do you find that Christianity does something here in the introduction of a third term which would be neither Eros Felicia but his agape of charity of that now neighborly love is a new kind that it's not the old kind of friendship among citizens in a republic or aristocracy that the notion of loving once neighbors you love yourself in a kind of Christian cataclysm.
Does that do something to revolutionize the virtue ethics that you teach?
Well, the same thing about virtue ethics both east and west especially in the modes of virtue ethics that are that believe in a stable sense of character is they also believe in a stable natural social order.
And that people are born unequal and if you ask students for example where I was in Shanghai this summer are people born unequal.
They will say yes.
If you if you ask students here in the US are people born unequal everybody's nervous about that because we know that we have we have these constitutional and God given rights to equality.
And because of these different traditions I really feel it's important to bring in Christian natural law also because Christian natural law influences Islamic natural law and we have a global cohort of students.
But what I tell them which disappoints everyone as I say until we get to Christian natural law we don't have a notion of innate equality and so that we don't everybody gets upset they don't like this at all.
But I say when you want to argue for as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. does in the Birmingham letter from the Birmingham jail that we have waited 340 years for our constitutional God given rights to equality.
He's talking Christian natural law.
This is part of the American Constitution.
This is present in our everyday lives in our educational systems. Let's learn about where this ethical system comes from.
Well of course American Constitution all men are created equal it first thing is already gendered as I understand it the I agree that the the germ of equality in that absolute sense that we are all equals under some natural law.
It doesn't mean that we're all born with equal aptitudes or we're all born with equal economic status and that it allows for the same kinds of horrible diversities and hierarchies that we typically find in ancient and modern societies.
But it's that it's the relation that God has to each soul is equal that God's friendship with the by I'm importing the word friendship here but God's recognition of each individual in his or her own spiritual core is undifferentiated and does not make distinctions between the king and you know the servant and the or the woman and the man and in that sense there is this
complete equality before God. Whether the founding fathers of America you know translated that into the Constitution is you know it's up for debate I've done a few shows on the Constitution we've talked about it a lot but certainly I think that they I think Martin Luther King is absolutely right when he when he invokes that as something that has yet to be realized constitutionally.
And you know I look at the founding fathers like I look at Aristotle these guys these guys are imperfect like Aristotle's imperfect.
Do I throw the baby out with a bathwater no I keep the idea and I see it reinvented in the Martin Luther King's and that's that's where I see it working and not that it's not volatile it's still Christian natural law and he's using it for.
To talk about emancipation and equality could be used in all kinds of it could be used against.
It could be used against gay marriage it could be used in all kinds of ways.
So do you believe that without the Christian natural law differential that we could never have arrived at a modern concept of a modern republic like the American one.
Based on all men are created equal and so forth. Sure I believe that it's it's a very problematic very volatile idea but I think it's central to our history and I think it shapes our ideals.
So it's it wouldn't be fair to say that every particular historical era has an ideal of friendship in the political sphere.
Whether explicit or non explicit and that there's always this work to be done in any given era of how to make the citizens of a polity friends of each other rather than enemies through civil.
War and civil factionalism and the challenges are always different giving given the size of the city state or the size of the nation or the empire.
And I know that you're you're finishing up a book on Hannah had it and added would have a lot to say in this conversation.
I know that when she was when she speaks about Socrates going around the agora of Athens interrogating people about their opinions and she claims that what he was trying to do is get them to be better friends with each other by share you know this sharing of opinions which is what this show entitled opinions through the.
It's kind of a crack in that sense where you form friendships where they did not exist before through an exchange of ideas of some sort, but that nowadays we live in a.
In a world that is largely transnational.
All are let's let's call it multi national the nations are trying to overcome ancient eminities at least in Europe with the larger federations and so forth, but trying to make.
Trying to introduce friendship among citizens communities states and you know larger conglomerates like the European Union so we live with this every day know where.
To the limits of friendship apply and where do the where does the the impotist and end kind of enter in when we're dealing with the refugee crisis and so forth.
Is this something that you ever.
You know, I'm going to discuss it when you're dealing with the questions of computer ethics or bio ethics or any other kinds of ethics that have contemporary relevance.
Well, thank you for mentioning honorent.
I think that her notion of her image of Socrates and she has a very sharp famously sharp division between Socrates and Plato her image of Socrates is is very instructive and.
Wanting to share his opinions his doc so with others and that doc so that opinion.
Is a description of as the world appears to me this is not subjective illusion this is this is who I am in the world let me share it with you and let us let us inhabit this world together and that notion of a.
Public sphere where you could be friends.
Felia and share your opinions and and and and the that the opinions are.
Are our fair game to to exchange and debate and they're contested and there's nothing ultimate about anybody's doc so that that's that beautiful.
Civic world that she imagined and that required a small civic world and I think.
When Hans Lugo is talking about his new book he's talking about also pop populations and that we're in and when you deal with larger and larger populations the civic sphere is harder and harder to see.
It is harder to see but at the same time there's a difference between not being able to dialogue at all with a group like ISIS.
Yes that refuses any kind of the mediation of reason to use a habermas in turn.
And let's say the potential for at least an exchange of radically different opinions with.
Iran for example or or Russia where there there are a lot of tensions there are a lot of differences but as long as one keeps.
Open the the language of reason where I can begin to understand how the world appears to you or it seems to me that this doc.
I'm a boy that I didn't speak about in in relation to Socrates that if I can begin not just as an individual but you know even as a culture or ethnic group to see how the world appears from the point of view of others.
Then perhaps this is the way in which new friendships in in larger scales of magnitude take place.
One would hope I I don't know that it maps so well from the unofficial.
Civic sphere from the public sphere which is outside of official politics that's always been tricky to whether that's we could map.
Map that kind of.
Friendly sharing of opinions or a marketplace of opinions where there could be an a gun that's that's not deadly.
Because when you're talking about states trying this it often does become deadly and there are often.
There's often the criticism that we cannot insist on everyone having the same sort of reasoning we do in the West or the North or however you want to call it.
Well that's true but diplomacy for example just to give a kind of example could diplomacy which doesn't always lead to deadly agonistic results but oftentimes has.
Been successful in avoiding getting to to that point is diplomacy also a way of forming potential friendships where they didn't exist before.
One would hope one would hope I don't know I mean I don't know that that any Aristotelian or even Arendi and recipe.
I'm I'm not sure how it would work.
I think the ideals of cooperation and communication that are and just talking about are terrific.
I'm not sure about implementation I don't know I mean one one would hope it's it's it would work one would hope that you talk to.
You talk to an adversary and you you hear their dogs.
Yeah and yeah and here's where it's different than being understanding friendship differently than we'd commonly understand it which is that you're my friend therefore you're my ally therefore I will do for you and you can be enemies and yet still understand how the world appears to you differently than it appears to me.
I'm always shocked at just how enclosed within our own perspective you know American foreign policy can be not understanding the first thing about how the world appears and how our behavior geopolitically behavior appears maybe in other parts of the world and that this what Hannah aren't called the enlarged mentality of plurality and of having that kind of imagined of capacity.
To step outside of my first person singular and engage in the plurality of.
That it seems to me that kind of first perspective is a very important.
Kind of mandate that we might that we might need to take seriously sure sure and this is this is goes to the heart of her pluralist politics she's not thinking of man she's thinking of men.
She could have said people but no she says men.
And that was that was the way she articulated it but she's thinking of human plurality where the where we could we could live and see ourselves in cooperation with each other.
Right.
And of course it's not this feel good cooperation that we were we're beyond competition beyond eminence that where he no it's that the.
Awareness that the way the world looks to me is just because I have David Foster Wallace as I'm hard wired to believe in doobleably that I am the center of the universe because my whole experience everything comes through me comes through my sense experience to come through.
My you know and there's hardly anything in my daily experience that contradicts the fact that I am the center of the universe it's only when you strive to get outside of your own head and realize that your your next door neighbor or your colleague also thinks that he or she is the center of the universe and things appear differently to you than they appear to me.
And whatever we call that language the Greeks called it logos or hairaclitus said when a man goes to sleep he enters into his own idiosyncratic world of his first person singular.
But when he awakes it's the world of the logo set takes over the logos could be the language of reason or whatever enables me.
To exchange viewpoints with you so that I can understand that my way of seeing the world is not the only way the world appears to others and that this is part of citizenship that where citizenship becomes a plurality.
And the.
And the enemies become friends in a kind of civic sense not in this psychological sense that certain comments of Aristotle could be taken.
No, absolutely not in this not in the sense of a private sphere of friendship in terms of fellow citizen.
But when you raise the question of logos.
And also you also remind us of the last time a person raised the question of logos and world peace in a public context which was the Pope Benedict Benedict Reagan's mortgage rest which was had a catastrophic result when he's talking about logos and the de Hellenization of the world having lost.
Our Greek influence and our Greek Greek ethical perspective and our logos this is what's unfortunate about the world and boy he he had he didn't have good results with that.
Well he didn't I think the controversial aspect of that address from what I remember is that he made some comments about Islamic culture that that.
We're we're perceived to be disparaging but otherwise the address of actually I found it quite interesting we we we did a mini colloquium on that address I hear a sample of years ago I didn't organize it but.
Yeah the yeah the logos perhaps it's.
Distinctly Western kind of heritage but it is.
Something that I feel committed to sure and which I think is deeply.
At the root of dialogue the possibility of dialogue and the possibility of conversation and of opening up plurality rather than arriving at consensus I don't think logos leads necessary to consensus but it is a kind of trans personal language that we can speak in order to.
At least get a glimmer of how different we are one from the other. Sure.
And so I don't want to throw the logos out by any means absolutely not I mean a beautiful example of logos and you're right the Reagan's book addresses.
Is is disastrous for some reasons but not not every reason in the moment that he when he arrives and he's he's nostalgic about the University as the ideal public sphere and he says.
You know there was something wonderful about a university that had no less than two separate faculties devoted to something they didn't believe existed.
Theology god study god and he loves that and the idea that you could have this you could have faculties devoted to something that you don't believe in is exactly that ideal of logos.
I found it interesting in the wake of the show we did with Hans Sluga that I did with Sluga on politics and the search for the common good that when Pope Francis came and addressed the UN as well as the US Congress.
He kept referring to this need to search for a common good and I think I'm going to have to call up our good friend Hans and ask asking what he what he thought of that.
Do you believe the common good is what this is ultimately all about namely friendship virtue ethics finding the right foundation for our behavior that it all does tie into the
this ultimate question of the common good.
Well if you were true student just like Aristotle being a true student to Plato you would want to not repeat your mentor and
Sluga whom I believe to be the treasure of Berkeley and having been the ethos of the the ideal mentor I'd have to say if he's talking about the common good I'm going to talk about the uncommon good.
And that that that uncommon good that is really hard to it's uncommon we'd like it to be common but it's uncommon and and finding it it's I mean I think it's uncommon right now we'd like it to be common.
How do we get there I don't know.
Well Ruth next time you come on the show I want to hear a lot more about the uncommon good because it's a very intriguing notion I'm not quite sure exactly what you have in mind but we have reached the end of our hour.
And so we're going to have to follow up on this let me remind our listeners we've been speaking with Professor Ruth Starkman who teaches both here at Stanford and also at the University of San Francisco where teaches philosophy pleasure to have you on Ruth and all of you listeners tune in next week another episode of entitled opinions bye bye.
(music)