"Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."
...
I ban myself.
So you are saying anything like courage, determination or industry which can be applied to bad ends is not a virtue?
3: No, no. It's just not a formal virtue. It doesn't wear a cummerbund.
I often make some feeble attempt to turn these things around, try to figure out if I'd be doing a fist pump if I were a conservative but...it's pretty tiring on this one.
5: YES. More and more, I'm finding the existence of such profound assholery to just be exhausting. So...they're winning?
Let's see if we can't talk James into affirming the unity of the virtues.
Cough Susan Sontag in the New Yorker after 9/11 cough.
5: "Fuck yeah! We took away their rights! To advocate for their interests!" [high five]
Soc. But that is what we must do if we are to answer the question. And yet I cannot say that every kind of endurance is, in my opinion, to be deemed courage. Hear my reason: I am sure, Laches, that you would consider courage to be a very noble quality.
La. Most noble, certainly.
Soc. And you would say that a wise endurance is also good and noble?
La. Very noble.
Soc. But what would you say of a foolish endurance? Is not that, on the other hand, to be regarded as evil and hurtful?
La. True.
Soc. And is anything noble which is evil and hurtful?
La. I ought not to say that, Socrates.
Soc. Then you would not admit that sort of endurance to be courage-for it is not noble, but courage is noble?
La. You are right.
I believe Harlan County is available on Hulu, for those of you who want...I don't even know if that's encouragement. Are those coal miners still alive? Can we send them e-cards? "Thanks for all the hard work! Sorry we fucked it up, we'll get right on that!"
I don't think you'd particularly care if you were a conservative. The only priority here is to help the Wisconsin Republican Party.
The thing is, they should have just passed their stupid union-busting bill this way from the beginning, but they figured they'd try to be clever and avoid some of the PR hit by couching it as a budgetary issue. Having already lost the PR battle decisively, they went ahead and passed it in the proper manner.
I don't really see that as an example of gritty determination.
10: I was just flipping through the Laches!
3: His years of diligent training paid off as he strode through the swarming five-year-olds striking down one after another. "More children next time!" he roared at the promoter as he finished off the last one.
Soc. Then you would not admit that sort of endurance to be courage-for it is not noble, but courage is noble?
Socrates: the world's most annoying high school principal.
In fairness to the virtuous ancients, though, one must acknowledge Jesus Christ, Fox News anchor:
The young man is trapped once more. He had hoped to avoid committing himself to any definite moral obligations by forcing Jesus to discuss his spiritual problems. He had hoped Jesus would offer him a solution of his moral difficulties. But instead he finds Jesus attacking not his question but himself.
13 gets it right.
I can't help but notice, by the by, that any number of Republicans, or conservatives, feel that the passing of the health care reform law was equally an instance of gritty determination toward evil ends. It's hard to know what to say about that, except that our governmental process doesn't, er, govern ends, only means.
2: is this a H/i/tler ban or a Le/bow/ski ban?
Hitler rarely googles himself, you know.
I suspect there's a clip from Downfall somewhere on the internet claiming otherwise.
21: That's just what Hitler would say, he typed, leafing through the "False Heroic" section of John Keegan's The Mask of Command.
Or from a different era, and arguably more nuanced, we have Kant:
There is nothing in the world--indeed nothing possible to conceive even outside it--that can be taken to be good without reservation except for a good will. Understanding, quickness of wit, judgment, and whatever other talents of mind one might name, or again courage, determination, [and] perserverance in one's resolutions are, as qualities of temperament, without doubt in some resepcts good and worthy of desire; by they can also become quite evil and destructive when the will that is to make use of these natural gifts (whose particular constitution is therefore called character) is not good. (Grundlegung 393)
I disagree with the OT. Their resolve to accomplish their aim without regard to their political fortunes or some kind of political gentility beyond the law as written is admirable. I would want legislators to follow that model in pursuing ends I shared.
They are assholes, but they are unbowed assholes, and the unbowing is a page we could take from their book.
Now excellence makes the choice right, but the question of the things which should naturally be done to carry out our choice belongs not to excellence but to another faculty. We must devote our attention to these matters and give a clearer statement about them. There is a faculty which is called cleverness; and this is such as to be able to do the things that tend towards the mark we have set before ourselves, and to hit it. Now if the mark be noble, the cleverness is laudable, but if the mark be bad, the cleverness is mere villainy; hence we call clever both men of practical wisdom and villains. Practical wisdom is not the faculty, but it does not exist without this faculty. And this eye of the soul acquires its formed state not without the aid of excellence as has been said and is plain; for inferences which deal with acts to be done are things which involve a starting-point, viz. "since the end, i.e. what is best, is of such and such a nature", whatever it may be (let it for the sake of argument be what we please); and this is not evident except to the good man; for wickedness perverts us and causes us to be deceived about the starting points of action. Therefore it is evident that it is impossible to be practically wise without being good, doncha know.
I disagree with the OT.
Some Jew you are.
25.2: We did for passage of the HCR bill! One could quibble that we've folded a bit too often otherwise, and perhaps did even there, but we had and still have recalcitrant members who don't vote along pure party lines. I'm on the fence about whether we want that.
Let me enthusiastically recommend that no one read Ari Fleischer's twitter feed.
29- First you take masturbating to Broder away, now this?!
30: Sins of the Fleisch are probably still okay.
"So you are saying anything like courage, determination or industry which can be applied to bad ends is not a virtue?"
Yes. Perennial example: the Waffen-SS. Determined, tough, courageous, smart but still Jew murdering bastards.
I suspect there's a clip from Downfall somewhere on the internet claiming otherwise.
Now I've got a Downfall/Lebowski mash up going on in my head.
I just learned my country has just finished building a runway longer than Heathrow in the wilds of Helmand that we're going to evacuate in 2014. "Worthy of a greater cause" comes to mind.
Well obviously by 2014 the military actions in the region will have been so successful that Helmand will be transformed into a major tourist destination with 777s coming from all over the world every 20 minutes. Are you suggesting otherwise?
Alternatively, perhaps we're going to legalise smack.
a runway longer than Heathrow in the wilds of Helmand
Or, as Ryanair will describe it, "Manchester Bastion airport".
I disagee with Ben in the o.p., Socrates in the Laches, and Kant in the Groundwork.. There are clearcut cases where we can identify determination apart from the nobility of the ends. Hollywood action movie tropes--scenes of people climbing the outside of buildings, crawling through mud, and Rocky-style training montages*--are all meant to show us determination in a way that can be separated from its ends, and, indeed, invoked in completely different contexts.
*I'm particularly fond of the one in Gattaca where Ethan Hawke is hanging by his feet, doing sit ups holding a huge book to his head. When he drops the book, we see it is called "Interplanetary Navigation."
36: Yeah, maybe it will become the Memphis of the "old world" drug trade: central location, favorably situated to some key suppliers, ready group of aggressive pilots familiar with the facility. I'm seeing a Harvard B-School white paper.
@Aristotle in 26:
I agree that determination, regardless of ends, cannot be called a part of practical wisdom, but doesn't it fit your model of a virtue precisely. It is a mean between two extremes with regard to the control of an emotion.
39: Charlie Sheen plays the Tom Hanks role in the remake--only survivor of a crash in the Himalayas along with a few parcels.
Holy crap, you guys are smart! I'm jealous!
32
Yes. Perennial example: the Waffen-SS. Determined, tough, courageous, smart but still Jew murdering bastards.
So you are saying bad people can not have good qualities?
So you are saying bad people can not have good qualities?
Ogged, PBUH, disagreed. RTFA.
So you are saying bad people can not have good qualities?
But those aren't good qualities because having more of them wouldn't make a bad person better, it would make them worse. A lazy, unfocussed, undermotivated Waffen-SS trooper would do less evil than a hard-working one.
Taking a less extreme example: let us say that whether you have arranged your furniture neatly is neutral. A determined person would arrange his furniture very, very neatly indeed, but he'd be on exactly the same moral level as a person whose furniture was all over the place.
Footnote to 45: "Hans... are we the baddies?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEle_DLDg9Y
Taking a less extreme example: let us say that whether you have arranged your furniture neatly is neutral. A determined person would arrange his furniture very, very neatly indeed, but he'd be on exactly the same moral level as a person whose furniture was all over the place.
I think we can safely say that people whose furniture is not well arranged are all in a tie for history's second greatest monster.
So, I met a bloke who (kinda) ran the CiF website, not half an hour ago. Holy shit (a) the Guardian is the second largest newspaper website in the US and (b) CiF is so, so amateur hour I did not realise.
(d) I am v. v. btocked.
Gritty determination to lie and cheat:
It's not just the budget bill needs a quorum -- the big issue is that *any* bill with fiscal implications is supposed to have a quorum in the Wisconsin state Senate. So there are two choices here:
1. Collective bargaining has fiscal implications, and so the bill will be blocked in the courts and ruled unconstitutional.
2. Collective bargaining DOES NOT have direct fiscal implications, and Gov. Walker has been lying this entire time by making the case that it's fiscally necessary.
So either the state R's just passed an illegal bill, or Walker has been lying this entire time and really is just interested in union-busting.
via TPM
||
I'm proctoring an exam for a colleague, and there is a student named Cotton.
|>
I don't think you'd particularly care if you were a conservative. The only priority here is to help the Wisconsin Republican Party.
Entirely untrue. Destroying unions is a passionate goal for many, many conservatives.
CiF is so, so amateur hour I did not realise.
There are clues all over it if you look. the fact that The webmaster is drunk in New Zealand in the middle of the British working day merely stresses the point.
the Guardian is the second largest newspaper website in the US
Then what is the matter with American capitalists that they don't exploit the proven market for centre left news coverage? have they reached the point where they're so ideologically blinded that they'd pass up a business opportunity rather than sell to liberals?
53.2: I think that's it -- they decided to stop selling us the rope to hang them with.
No more masturbatin' to David "Higher" Broder!
It's not fair. McManus got to do Suze Rotolo's NMM...
Then what is the matter with American capitalists that they don't exploit the proven market for centre left news coverage?
Lots of hits, but it's not consistently profitable. And it must benefit a lot from being in the same company as the Guardian print version - an online-only version would have all the same expenses but fewer revenue streams.
I'm proctoring an exam for a colleague, and there is a student named Cotton.
Find a graduate student named "Increase"; pay same to act out climax of The Empire Strikes Back; profit.
here are clearcut cases where we can identify determination apart from the nobility of the ends.
Obviously determination can be identified apart from the nobility of the end, but it's not admirable in itself.
… which is why Socrates is able to get Laches to admit that courage, the virtue, isn't just endurance in a cause.
Then what is the matter with American capitalists that they don't exploit the proven market for centre left news coverage? have they reached the point where they're so ideologically blinded that they'd pass up a business opportunity rather than sell to liberals?
All American newspapers are only for denizens of a certain metropolitan area, except the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal [right-wing], and the USA Today [contains no opinions or strong statements of fact, and does it even have a website?].
You're the best, Ben. Seriously. THE BEST!
But, Ben, you can not only identify determination apart from its ends, you can develop a theory of it which shows things like how it can be developed independent of its ends. Further, we know that people how have developed this trait have done something difficult and unusual. At this point, we can just give Socrates the word "virtue" and make up our own word "Schmirtue" and use it to describe the difficult to obtain character trait of determination apart from ends.
Actually this is basically what some theorists have done with bravery. We can designate the word "bravery" to mean the willingness to accept personal risk for some outside end, and the word "courage" to only refer to those cases where the outside end is actually good.
When I say that Ben is the best, I certainly don't mean to denigrate the rest of the people who frequent this fine establishment. You're all exceptional in your own way. After all, I wouldn't have been here every day for years now if I wasn't being educated every single time I hit the link.
Thanks, everybody. I once was blind but now I see. I'm a better Pauly because of you all.
And we can ask, who cares about schmirtues? Lots of character traits are difficult to obtain and unusual to have. Many of them may be acquired in similar ways. I'm willing to grant you that, in turn. But Yglesias (for instance) didn't say, "you have to admit that the WI Republicans have a character trait that can be cultivated in such-and-such a fashion, which few people have"; he said that it was admirable. It's not, surely, admirable simply in virtue of being difficult to obtain.
But Yglesias (for instance) didn't say, "you have to admit that the WI Republicans have a character trait that can be cultivated in such-and-such a fashion, which few people have"; he said that it was admirable.
"Enviable" would have been better: "if only our side had such determination, what great things we could accomplish!"
McClatchy sort of kind of fits the bill. But I must say that I find that I almost never use it. And I don't think they (the overall McClatchy organization) really have their heart in it. The failure of Knight-Ridder to make it on their own was the real tell.
I think 67 gets it almost exactly right.
53
Then what is the matter with American capitalists that they don't exploit the proven market for centre left news coverage? have they reached the point where they're so ideologically blinded that they'd pass up a business opportunity rather than sell to liberals?
Quite possibly. Alternately, they aren't, but the advertisers are (and left-leaning personally or not, the publishers need to make enough money to stay in business). Newspapers main business is attracting eyeballs to ad space, and people buying ad space very rarely lean left.
I think there are plenty of examples of determination that are morally neutral; climbing Everest doesn't change the world for the better, but who would complain? And one can still be competing with another in a morally neutral task, frex racing another climber to the top of Everest. In these situations we feel that cognitive dissonance of admiring our competitor's determination. It's, like, sportsmanship (which I might have thought to say right out if I ever watched sports).
But this has a limit. I don't admire the determination of LaRouche pamphleteers, much less Nazis. You don't admire determination in someone doing something stupid or misguided, if you're thinking of how stupid and misguided their aims are. I think Saiselgy's words just show a competitive, sports-fan mentality, with the goal of winning elections, as opposed to concern with the real world effects they entail. And you do have to win elections in most cases to get those real world effects, pace bob.
71. There are certainly people who raise moral objections to climbing Everest. They argue that to do it successfully requires conspicuous consumption of resources (money) that could be used to do something useful. They argue that insufficiently trained or competent climbers endanger the better ones who have to go and rescue them when they screw up. They argue that the climbers of Everest have turned the lower slopes into a garbage heap for no better reason than their own gratification.
You are entitled to dismiss such objections as sanctimonious claptrap, but you can't claim that the idea of climbing Everest is universally agreed to be morally neutral.
I think Saiselgy's words just show a competitive, sports-fan mentality, with the goal of winning elections, as opposed to concern with the real world effects they entail.
This seems right, and it's arguably a characteristic of those who have spent too much time inside the Beltway, as they say. You'd have to be fairly naive to think that politics is much more than maneuvering with the fairly tight confines of the rules, though; one just wishes that that fact were viewed with a bit more regret.
I just learned my country has just finished building a runway longer than Heathrow in the wilds of Helmand that we're going to evacuate in 2014. "Worthy of a greater cause" comes to mind.
Clicking through is too demanding for me, but my guess is that the runway is at high altitude?
Funny that you should mention it. I have a particular pique towards people who climb Everest. I hated the book Into Thin Air.
They argue that to do it successfully requires conspicuous consumption of resources (money) that could be used to do something useful.
Doesn't this apply to all recreation and entertainment ever?
Ajay, this bit here:
But those aren't good qualities because having more of them wouldn't make a bad person better, it would make them worse. A lazy, unfocussed, undermotivated Waffen-SS trooper would do less evil than a hard-working one. Taking a less extreme example: let us say that whether you have arranged your furniture neatly is neutral. A determined person would arrange his furniture very, very neatly indeed, but he'd be on exactly the same moral level as a person whose furniture was all over the place.
is interesting, but this:
But those aren't good qualities because having more of them wouldn't make a bad person better, it would make them worse.
strikes me as just false. If you've two equally malevolent people, X who has knowledge of what he ought to do and Y who doesn't, then X, the one who knows what he ought to do, is worse because more responsible for the wrong-doing. But if you're right, then, since knowledge of what he ought to do didn't make him better, if anything, it made him worse, it looks like knowledge of what one ought to do is not good. But this is obviously false.
I feel like a lot of arguments on this thread, if taken at face value, would lead you straight to the Socratic thesis of the unity of the virtues. Which, you know, is crazy.
the Guardian is the second largest newspaper website in the US
Which reminds me, I've been meaning to ask our British readers for advice. What is one to do when one has written to the Guardian about an egregious error of fact, provided a link to an external source to verify the correction you are suggesting, and received a resounding silence in response?
Granted, this is a politically fairly explosive topic, but again, the issue in question is a fact, not an opinion. And now the error lives on, on the web, forevermore. Am I really to expect that all I get back is a pro forma e-mail from the Readers Editor? Nothing has appeared on the Corrections and Clarifications page, and it's been two weeks.
(I'd be less oblique about the topic if I hadn't plastered my very own name quite prominently in my letter.)
I will defer to 72; It was the first thing that came to mind as an example of an arduous feat that I didn't really care one way or the other about. I actually expected any argument might come from the other direction— it ennobled humankind or built character or something, which I really would have considered claptrap.
Which, you know, is crazy.
Maybe you think so.
I have a particular pique towards people who climb Everest. I hated the book Into Thin Air.
Wait, what? Krakauer's a world class mountaineer and seemed pretty open with his opinion that it was insane for loads of those people to be trying to climb Everest.
78. How long ago did you write. IME the mills of the Graun grind exceeding slow. I think their readers editor is basically one guy with a mailbox. If it's been over a month, write again.
If you've two equally malevolent people, X who has knowledge of what he ought to do and Y who doesn't, then X, the one who knows what he ought to do, is worse because more responsible for the wrong-doing. But if you're right, then, since knowledge of what he ought to do didn't make him better, if anything, it made him worse, it looks like knowledge of what one ought to do is not good. But this is obviously false.
I am not sure I follow you here - I think that you may be conflating "knowledge of what he ought to do in order to achieve his malevolent goals" with "knowledge of what is morally right".
In the first case, we're talking about, if you like, technical ability - competence - which I think is definitely not a virtue for the same reason that determination, etc, aren't.
The second case is more interesting - I would argue that a person who has more knowledge about what is morally right will be a better person.
Here's a reason to care about schmirtue, in addition to virtue: You want it not only for yourself but for others, and will want to promote it in society.
Of course, by promoting determination, you will be encouraging determination in some deeply malevolent people. But the overwhelming majority of the time, you will be promoting determination in people who have the typical range of good and bad impulses, and those people typically wind up doing bad because it is the path of least resistance for them. It is habitual, or it provides immediate gratification while the right thing to do requires delayed gratification.
84 is smart. I think it mingles determination with other schmirtues like delayed gratification and self control, but the main thrust seems correct to me.
I need to read more of the cog sci, but I'm tempted by a localized unity-of-schmirtues-thesis for that particular family of character traits. They all come down to some form of delayed gratification, temperance, or something.
Hi ajay,
I am not sure I follow you here - I think that you may be conflating "knowledge of what he ought to do in order to achieve his malevolent goals" with "knowledge of what is morally right".
In the first case, we're talking about, if you like, technical ability - competence - which I think is definitely not a virtue for the same reason that determination, etc, aren't. The second case is more interesting - I would argue that a person who has more knowledge about what is morally right will be a better person.
Yes, you're right, it wasn't as clear as it could have been. The case I have in mind is one where X and Y both kill, and the only difference is that X knows he ought to refrain from killing because he knows that killing is morally bad, whereas Y doesn't.
All else equal, doing something morally wrong when you know it to be morally wrong is worse than doing it in ignorance of its wrongness. (Ignorance here = not knowing, so it's compatible with Y's possessing the relevant true belief.) So X, who kills in the knowledge that it's morally wrong to kill, is worse than Y who kills in ignorance.
If you're right, anything that fails to improve a bad person is not good. X's knowledge of what he ought to have done didn't make him better; indeed, it made him worse. If you're right, knowledge of what one ought to do is not good. But this, again, looks clearly false.
87: ah ha. I see.
I think you're wrong on that and I will try to explain why.
I don't think the correct comparison is between an amoral killer (with no moral knowledge) and an moral killer (ie, has moral knowledge and ignores it). I think the correct comparison is between an amoral and a moral man and one of the main differences here is that a moral man is less likely to kill.
You are choosing your sample retrospectively, in effect, by only selecting those moral men who nevertheless go ahead and kill. What you should be asking, to determine whether X is a virtue or not, is "If we take this man and somehow endow him with more X, will he become better?" And if you take a man who has already killed and endow him with moral knowledge, I think he will become better. Less likely to kill again, for one thing.
Yes, the action of a moral killer is worse than the action of an amoral killer, but that's a separate point, I think.
"I'm tempted by a localized unity-of-schmirtues-thesis for that particular family of character traits. They all come down to some form of delayed gratification, temperance, or something."
In the big 5 personality traits, this is Conscientiousness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Even though I am an introvert, I actually believe extroversion is a schmirtue too.
86,89: I can see a Grand Unified Theory of Schmirtues making some sense. Also, GUTS!
