Instruments of Virtue and Vice, Part III

The question that occurred to me upon hearing Dr. Müller's defence of the Neautral-Product Thesis was whether, if virtuous exercise is never demanded of poietic products, the same held true of vicious exercise.  It seemed to me that it did not, for some poietic products (I used viciously racist propaganda as my example, so sorry if that offends any anti-PC sensibilities) appear to just by their very nature to exclude virtuous use.  Still, I was open to being proved wrong, which is why I posed the question to Dr. Müller.  His tentative answer was agreement with me that such products are intrinsically vicious in character, but some interesting counterexamples to that claim arose in our discussion between ourselves and a philosopher of law on whose name I am currently blanking (argh!).

The first, posed but rejected by Dr. Müller, was the Scholastic point that such propaganda could be used as an example of what not to engage in or be tempted by; the second, posed by the philosopher of law whose name I cannot remember, was that such propaganda might be used to excite the identification of unconsciously racist viewers with the propaganda presented, thus exposing their unexamined vice.  I shall deal with both of these objections in turn.

Instruments of Virtue and Vice, Part II

To the second objection, I reply that while many, if not all, poietic products are ultimately ordered to some variety of genuine human flourishing in accord with virtuous habit, this does not render evil use entirely repugnant to them.  There is nothing mysterious or unusual about such lack of repugnance: our hands and feet, after all, are on Aristoteleanism also ultimately ordered to virtue-enabled human flourishing, but we can quite obviously use them in ways contrary to such flourishing, such as theft.  Note also that in so using our hands and feet, we do not use them for the sake of any end opposed to their respective specific functions, viz. manipulation and locomotion, though we do use them in a manner opposed to their ultimate telos, which is eudaimonia.  This point will become important in our examination of the first objection, to which we now turn.

Instruments of Virtue and Vice, Part I

I have now returned from the second day of the Anscombe conference at the University of Chicago, and found it just as intellectually rewarding as the first.  In addition to the two* papers (which I'll get to shortly), I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Thompson, who is at once encyclopaedically knowledgeable, funny, and eminently approachable and overall enjoyable; further acquainting myself with Jennifer Frey, who is unfailingly polite, insightful, and moreover ably defends an identifiably Aristotelean/Catholic philosophical position; and briefly meeting with the other speakers at the conference (all mentioned in my previous post), as well as some of my fellow non-participants at the conference, who were likewise pleasant to meet.  I am particularly grateful for the condescending (in the good sense) conversation afforded me by Anselm Müller himself.  Many thanks to them all!

Spinoza's Ethica III

Part III of Spinoza's Ethica, ordine geomterico demonstrata (Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order) concerns the ‘nature and origin of the affects’ (roughly, emotions) and consists chiefly of a long series of arguments to the effect that, in thus-and-such circumstances, we will, ceteris paribus, be excited with this or that affect: when, for example, ‘anyone conceives that he is loved by another, and believes that he has given no cause for such love, he will love that other in return’ (Prop. XLI), and ‘love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other conditions being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity’ (Prop. XLIX).  In the process of defending these theses, Spinoza takes himself to be providing a scientific (cause-to-effect) account of the essences of our various affects, and thus ascertaining their real, as opposed to merely nominal, definitions.