The Art of Manliness - Philosophical Tools for Living the Good Life

00:00:00.000 Hey, Merry Christmas. We're taking a break today from new episodes, but we're going to rebroadcast

00:00:03.860 episode number 770, Philosophical Tools for Living the Good Life. Hope you enjoy it. We'll

00:00:09.020 see you on Monday with a brand new episode. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition

00:00:20.140 of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, most everyone wants to live a good and meaningful

00:00:23.660 life, but we don't always know what that means and how to do it. Plenty of modern self-improvement

00:00:27.680 programs claim to point people in the right direction, but many of the best answers were

00:00:31.100 already offered more than 2,000 years ago. My guests have gleaned the cream of this orienting,

00:00:35.260 ancient yet evergreen advice from history's philosophers and shared it in their new book,

00:00:38.660 The Good Life Method, reasoning through the big questions of happiness, faith, and meaning.

00:00:42.100 Their names are Megan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko and the professors of philosophy at the University

00:00:45.220 of Notre Dame. Today on the show, Megan and Paul introduce us to the world of virtue ethics,

00:00:49.000 an approach to philosophy that examines the nature of the good life, the values and habits that lead

00:00:52.460 to excellence, and how to find and fulfill your purpose as a human being. We discuss how to seek

00:00:56.180 truth with other people by asking them three levels of what they call strong questions and

00:00:59.840 engaging in civil and fruitful dialogue. We then delve into why your intentions matter and why you

00:01:03.860 should use morally thick language. We also examine the role that work and love has to play in pursuing

00:01:07.880 the good life and how the latter is very much about attention. We end our conversation with how a life

00:01:12.020 of eudaimonia, full human flourishing, requires balancing action with contemplation. After the show's

00:01:17.400 over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash good life. All right, Megan Sullivan, Paul Blaschko,

00:01:29.880 welcome to the show. We're so happy to be here. So you two are philosophy professors at the University

00:01:36.500 of Notre Dame, go Irish, and you got a book out, The Good Life Method, reasoning through the big

00:01:42.080 questions of happiness, faith, and meaning. And in this book, you use virtue ethics to help people

00:01:48.260 think about big life issues like love, work, meaning, purpose. But before we get to those

00:01:55.260 topics today, can you give us a big picture idea of what virtue ethics is for those who aren't familiar

00:01:59.540 with it? So I think a lot of people, when they first hear about virtue ethics, what comes to mind are

00:02:04.960 like the Victorian British people who had this very rigid set of rules for developing and protecting

00:02:12.620 virtue, especially maybe the virtue of vulnerable women. And you think about it as this kind of prim and

00:02:18.580 outdated philosophy. But in fact, what virtue ethics is, is this 2,500-year-old philosophical

00:02:27.640 self-improvement system that a lot of people have thought are at the core of why we care about

00:02:33.520 philosophy and why we care about ethics. And the way I like to explain it to students or to people

00:02:39.360 who I'm just trying to get excited about these ideas to is first understanding what the two terms

00:02:46.020 mean. So when we talk about the ethics and virtue ethics, we're not talking about a system of rules

00:02:51.400 like, you know, always raise your pinky when you drink coffee or always drive on the left-hand side of

00:02:56.680 the road. Instead, we're using ethics more like a work ethic, like a set of goals and principles

00:03:02.860 and values that drive you. And the ethics part of that is trying to identify what those goals are

00:03:08.960 that you have in your sights that you find really motivating and also explain your action in the

00:03:13.860 world. And virtue doesn't necessarily mean a system of social mores and customs. Really, the virtues are

00:03:21.520 meant to be the traits and drives and dimensions of your personality that are helping you fulfill your

00:03:27.700 function as a human being, that are helping you be the kind of person that you are aspiring to be or

00:03:32.700 an excellent example of a person. And these will oftentimes be pretty demanding, but really

00:03:38.660 interesting virtues that people can have in many different kinds of lives. Virtues like courage and

00:03:43.980 generosity, a deep concern for the truth, a deep concern for love and justice and the ability to see

00:03:50.920 and notice it in situations where it might be hard to find what the just or loving action is.

00:03:55.220 And so one of the big things that we try to do in our class and in the book is remind people that

00:04:00.440 they already think of like a virtue ethicist. Like we all, you know, we all, we all struggle with

00:04:05.160 these kinds of questions about what sort of person we want to be and whether we're living a good life

00:04:09.300 every day. We just don't know that there's a name for this kind of philosophy and that there might be

00:04:14.220 a more systematic way to approach it.

00:04:16.920 Just to add really briefly onto Megan's answer, which I totally agree with, the way I explain it to my

00:04:22.520 students is, you know, virtue ethics, at least as Aristotle presents it, and he's sort of the,

00:04:27.940 like the spirit animal of our course and the book, he shows up all over the place.

00:04:32.680 So, so virtue ethics on the sort of Aristotelian model takes the function or the purpose of human

00:04:39.680 life. And it makes it central in asking these questions about how we should live and, you know,

00:04:45.380 what makes a good life and what kind of goals that we should have. And so, you know, an easy analogy

00:04:49.560 and one that I think, you know, a lot of intro philosophy classes will use is think about a

00:04:53.740 knife. You know, what, what's the purpose of a knife? Well, it's to cut things, you know, to,

00:04:57.680 you know, chop up carrots and I don't know, whatever knives do. Okay. And so what makes a

00:05:02.720 knife excellent? We'll think about that function and think about what it would take for it to do

00:05:06.620 that. Well, I mean, it's got to be sharp. It's got to sort of be solid. It's got to be built

00:05:10.920 out of a certain kind of material. So we take that kind of structure and then we apply it

00:05:15.720 to human life. We ask, what's the purpose of human life? What's our function? And then given

00:05:20.240 that purpose, given that function, what would make us excellent beings of the sort that we

00:05:24.840 actually are excellent human beings? And I think that's a good description that there's not any

00:05:29.000 hard or fast rules with virtue ethics. I think a lot of people want that with a philosophy,

00:05:33.780 but I think, as you said, Megan, people are doing virtue ethics all the time. Life is sort of messy

00:05:39.180 and they don't know like, well, what's the right thing to do here? And when you're thinking like

00:05:43.180 that, you are being a virtue ethicist. Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the

00:05:48.320 really exciting things about coming to study virtue ethics is realizing in a really empowering way,

00:05:54.960 how many ethical questions permeate your life. Like this idea of what's the most generous or kind way

00:06:02.040 to craft this email that I'm about to send at work. What is a really just way of running a meeting?

00:06:08.520 Ethics isn't just this domain of, should I launch the nuclear missiles or only concerning issues of

00:06:15.600 life and death or things that are in the headlines of the New York times. But in fact, this realizing

00:06:20.480 the day-to-day habits and activities that we spend time thinking about how we want to do them and what

00:06:25.660 our style is going to be. These can be questions that also are influencing the kind of person that

00:06:30.140 we're becoming in ways that are really the heart of, of all of ethics. Okay. So for Aristotle,

00:06:35.880 living the good life for humans meant living a life, what do you call it? Eudaimonia or flourishing.

00:06:42.160 So it's like figuring out what the purpose of humans are and then, you know, try and achieve

00:06:46.400 that. So for Aristotle, what did human flourishing look like? Yeah. So one of the really important

00:06:52.480 places to start for Aristotle is this question that, that, you know, you've identified what,

00:06:56.080 what is our function? What is our purpose? And one way that the Greeks and the ancient philosophers

00:07:00.560 like to approach this question is to ask, you know, what sets us apart from every other kind of

00:07:04.920 creature, every other kind of being. And even just sort of, you know, reflecting on this question,

00:07:09.720 I think one property that comes to mind immediately is, well, we can reason, we can reflect on things.

00:07:14.780 We can use that to guide our lives and to shape the decisions that we're making. So for Aristotle,

00:07:20.820 really crucially, a life of flourishing, a life where you're achieving what he calls eudaimonia,

00:07:26.780 which is, you know, sometimes just translated happiness, sometimes translated flourishing,

00:07:30.500 but a life that looks like that is going to be one where you're using that distinctively human

00:07:36.100 capacity to reflect on and make decisions about what you think constitutes a good life.

00:07:42.280 So there's no, he doesn't have like a set thing like, well, you are, you are living a flourishing

00:07:46.520 life. If you do X, X, X, as long as you're just thinking and reasoning about your life,

00:07:50.700 is that for Aristotle a good life?

00:07:52.940 Yeah, I think this is tricky. And Megan, maybe you've got thoughts here. I mean,

00:07:56.260 it's tricky in the sense that Aristotle certainly thinks there are essential goods. There are

00:08:01.000 elements that every good life is going to share, right? He says in the McKean ethics, you know,

00:08:05.580 a man would not choose to live if he didn't have friends, even if he had every other good thing

00:08:11.000 in life, right? So friendship, companionship, this is essential to our flourishing, right? And it's

00:08:16.180 something that we can discover through reason. And he gives us arguments as to why this is the case.

00:08:20.960 And there are other things like this. So there are certain, you know, certain things that he thinks

00:08:24.020 every good life is going to have, but he's not really prescriptive about exactly what that'll

00:08:28.760 look like, right? It's not like, you know, a good life is going to follow a template or there's a

00:08:32.820 rule that you can use to just say like, okay, in this situation, you know, here are the considerations

00:08:37.120 and boom, like here's the output. I mean, is that fair, Megan?

00:08:40.800 Yeah, I think one of, this is one of the things that philosophers love and hate about Aristotle as the

00:08:46.580 founder of virtue ethics. On the love side, he spends a lot of time in his book about happiness in

00:08:53.840 human flourishing, the Nicomachean ethics, going through specific virtues like courage

00:08:58.260 or prudence and telling you like, here's how to determine whether or not you're acting courageously

00:09:03.740 when you get confused. Like courage is going to be the mean, for instance, between being a coward and

00:09:08.240 being reckless. And he tries to give you guidance, but he also keeps reiterating that how courage

00:09:14.000 manifests in your particular life and whether or not you're truly being courageous or being reckless

00:09:19.620 or being cowardly is going to depend on really specific features of your situation and who you

00:09:25.900 are. And this should make sense to us, right? Like courage for a Spartan Heal-It is going to look so

00:09:33.100 different than courage for a 2022 American philosophy professor. For the Heal-It, it might mean like

00:09:40.060 rushing into battle to save his brother. For a 2022 philosophy professor, courage might mean

00:09:46.860 going on a national podcast and trying to answer philosophy questions, right? Like it's just like

00:09:51.940 the kinds of situations that we're in are going to manifest what's really excellent about human

00:09:56.540 lives in really different ways. One of the really frustrating parts of Aristotle for a lot of

00:10:03.340 philosophers and philosophy students is he faces this question about how you can know whether you've got

00:10:11.280 the right kind of courage for your particular situation or the right kind of generosity for your

00:10:16.040 really particular situation if there's no hard and fast rule book. And the best he can tell us on

00:10:23.520 this is that in the course of trying to develop a good life, you develop this other virtue called

00:10:30.340 phrenesis or practical wisdom, which is basically the virtue of knowing what to do. And people find this

00:10:37.200 really frustrating because it just seems to not answer any of our questions anymore. Like what would a good

00:10:43.320 person do at this faculty meeting tomorrow? Or how would a good person parent their child when the

00:10:49.880 new iPhone comes online? And the best the Aristotelian can say is hopefully you've gotten to this point in

00:10:55.280 your life where you also have this virtue of discernment and judgment, which can tell you what all the other

00:11:00.720 virtues are going to look like in your own particular circumstances. And then, you know, the Aristotle and the

00:11:06.160 virtue ethicists tend to get this question of like, well, how do I know if I've got that virtue? And that's why

00:11:10.840 that's why this debate is raged on and on. No, we've had Barry Schwartz on the podcast talk about

00:11:15.600 his book, Practical Wisdom, where he talks about phrenesis. And yeah, it is frustrating because

00:11:20.060 it's like, well, how do you, how do you know what's you're doing? It's like, well, you just,

00:11:23.460 you know, Aristotle says, well, you develop it like a carpenter learns how to do carpenter. You have to do

00:11:27.760 it. And by doing it, you learn it and there's nothing, there's no rules. Well, this is, you follow

00:11:32.320 this and you are exercising phrenesis. Like, well, no, you just kind of, you kind of know.

00:11:36.960 I certainly find this, I found it very frustrating as an undergraduate, like learning Aristotle. I just

00:11:42.540 kept thinking, yeah, but what's, what's the answer? Like, just tell me like, you know, how do I figure

00:11:46.340 out what to do? I find as I sort of go through life and, and, you know, go through different changes,

00:11:51.820 like having kids or, you know, trying to figure out a job, I find that the picture actually makes a lot

00:11:57.540 more sense to me. So one thing that Aristotle cares a lot about is, is that we're comparing our theory

00:12:03.000 that we're, you know, reflecting and sort of coming up with theories about the world, but that we're

00:12:06.740 constantly comparing that with the experience of living and that we use that experience sometimes

00:12:11.940 to falsify the theory to say, you know what, I really thought, you know, I had a good grasp on

00:12:17.020 theoretically how to make these decisions, but it turns out I don't. In my case, you know, as a parent

00:12:22.160 having kids, I read all the books about like, you know, how do you raise your kids? And what are the,

00:12:27.940 you know, the one, two, three rule, all these things. And then the minute that you actually have kids and

00:12:31.500 you find yourself in that situation, it's a lot more like the kind of activities you were

00:12:35.980 referencing a second ago, like carpentry or, you know, some complex activity that you're just

00:12:40.980 kind of sorting through and figuring out as you go. And it doesn't mean that there's no sort of

00:12:45.440 better or worse way to do it. It just means that, you know, the activity itself is more complex than

00:12:51.600 we can sort of, you know, boil down into a simple kind of two or three part rule-based theory.

00:12:57.340 So I don't know. I find this as I get older, I mean, I'm not, I'm not that old, but as I get

00:13:02.940 older, this sort of picture makes more and more sense to me. One criticism I've seen levied at

00:13:10.060 virtue ethics is that it can be relativistic, right? Like you were saying, Megan, what's courage

00:13:14.680 for a Spartan? Well, it's going to be different for someone living in the philosophy professor in

00:13:19.200 2022. It's just, you know, it's going to change depending on the person. So what would be the

00:13:23.660 response to that? It depends a little bit on what you mean by relativism. This is definitely,

00:13:27.920 this is a live, like scholarly nerdy philosophy debate right now is how much Aristotle fits into

00:13:32.660 our current categories of relativism or absolutism. When I think of moral relativists or relativists

00:13:39.580 about the good life, I think about folks who think that whatever view you currently have about your

00:13:47.440 particular life right now has got to be like, it is, that's all there is to the truth about the

00:13:53.180 good life. So you asked me, Megan, do you think that you are a happy philosopher in the year 2022?

00:14:02.280 If I say, yes, I am, then that's the correct answer. If I say, no, I'm not, that's also the

00:14:08.040 correct answer. Like whatever kind of, however I judge my particular situation is all there is to

00:14:13.160 the truth of the matter. If that's how we understand relativism and likewise for Paul,

00:14:17.380 like it's just totally the truth about whether or not you are doing well or living the good life

00:14:21.940 just depends on your particular perspective. That's what I mean by relativism. Aristotle is

00:14:27.320 definitely not a relativist because Aristotle and most virtue ethicists think that you could be mistaken

00:14:33.920 about whether or not you are living the good life. It's not just a matter of how you feel or how

00:14:39.320 you judge your particular life at a particular moment. In fact, we know on reflection that there

00:14:43.920 are periods of our life when we thought things were going really well. And in fact, objectively

00:14:47.960 speaking, they weren't, we thought we were being courageous, but in fact, we were making a really

00:14:52.900 reckless decision. And so if you think that believing that there are some objective standards for happiness

00:14:58.440 or goals that we really have to be working intellectually to get in our sights and things,

00:15:03.320 questions we should be asking ourselves about whether or not we're doing it right.

00:15:06.620 Right. Then virtue ethicist says, absolutely. Aristotle uses this metaphor that I really

00:15:13.260 love in the Nicomachean ethics, where he says, we're like archers when it comes to happiness.

00:15:18.380 And we're always trying to get the goal in our sights. And it would be so much easier to make

00:15:22.500 all of these other decisions in our lives if we could finally just like nail down what the goal is

00:15:28.100 that we're shooting at. But in fact, we spend so much of our lives really just trying to figure out

00:15:33.300 what the goal is and wondering what it is. If you take that kind of goal, like shooting an arrow at

00:15:38.620 a target metaphor seriously, you got to believe that there's a target out there that you could,

00:15:43.520 that's outside of you that you could get your head around. And so for these reasons, I think that

00:15:48.140 at least the modern idea of relativism doesn't really capture what the kind of advice that somebody

00:15:53.180 like Aristotle is giving us.

00:15:54.940 Well, let's dig into how do you figure out what a flourishing life is for you? Because you have a whole

00:15:59.220 chapter to that. And you argue, you both argue that you need, in order to figure that out,

00:16:03.720 you have to start asking yourself and other people too, what you call strong questions.

00:16:09.160 What are strong questions?

00:16:11.020 Yeah. So I think, you know, one of the key features of strong questions is that they're

00:16:15.820 genuinely questions. So in the book, you know, one of the distinctions that we make is between what we

00:16:21.160 call prosecutor questions and dinner party questions. So I can certainly ask somebody what looks like a

00:16:26.900 question, but really in an attempt just to get them on the record. I mean, this, you know,

00:16:31.180 happens sometimes, unfortunately, like with my family at holidays. I'll say like, you know, mom,

00:16:36.740 you know, you sent me this article about vaccines. Like, you know, do you really think, you know,

00:16:41.520 and it sounds like I'm a prosecutor. It sounds like I'm, you know, putting on the stand and for

00:16:45.600 the record, I wanted to say something so that, you know, I can be outraged or so that other people

00:16:49.960 can kind of jump in and then, you know, argue. On the other hand, you know, there's a way of

00:16:54.460 questioning and inquiring where you're genuinely curious, where your motivation is a pursuit of

00:17:01.700 the truth and a pursuit of the truth with somebody else, right? Like we can, you know, think all day

00:17:06.900 and sort of bang our heads against the wall, but there's something really powerful about, you know,

00:17:11.300 drawing on the experience and expertise of someone else. So if, you know, you find yourself in this

00:17:17.800 scenario where you're tempted to ask one of these prosecutorial questions, one of the, you know,

00:17:23.240 bits of advice that we have in our book is, you know, see if you can back up and ask a question

00:17:27.860 that comes out of some genuine curiosity. And it's not always possible. Like you might just

00:17:32.340 find that the topic is too sort of psychologically hot. Like you just can't get yourself into that

00:17:37.940 mode, but oftentimes, you know, you can, you can ask questions like, look in your experience,

00:17:43.600 like what, what are the sort of things that have shaped your thinking on, you know, whatever the

00:17:47.920 topic is. And when you're, when you're motivated by that genuine sort of pursuit of the truth,

00:17:52.800 that genuine curiosity, we find, you know, the results are better, not just because

00:17:57.020 the relationships are preserved and are better. And, and, you know, this is a more virtuous way of

00:18:01.360 proceeding, but you're surprised you get answers that, you know, can unseat assumptions that you

00:18:06.860 held and that can actually push you in the direction of the truth about some issue that you,

00:18:11.760 you might genuinely care about might like change the way that you think about, you know,

00:18:15.280 some practical issue in your life. No, I like how you, you, you break down. There's three types

00:18:19.620 of questions, level of questions you can go through when you're trying to do this type of

00:18:23.500 strong questioning. The first one is a starting point question where you're having a discussion

00:18:26.940 with somebody or even with yourself, right? When you're trying to figure out what you believe

00:18:30.300 about something. Yes. Well, when did you first start thinking this way about that topic? Was there

00:18:34.980 a moment? And that's a conversation. It's like completely neutral. You're not, you're not

00:18:39.260 trying, you're not doing that process. You're just, you're just genuinely curious. The next one is a

00:18:43.660 philosophical goal question. What would that look like? What's a philosophical goal question after

00:18:47.880 you've done that starting point question? I think, you know, like picking a topic might be helpful

00:18:52.560 here. So, you know, with respect to work, say you can ask somebody, what role do you want work to play

00:19:00.800 in your life? Is work a source of meaning for you? Is it a source of ultimate meaning or is it good

00:19:06.780 because it gets you something else? Like, is your work something that you do because, you know,

00:19:12.380 you've got a family to feed and you really want your focus and attention to be on your family. So

00:19:17.500 like, what is it that you're really aiming at? What is it that sort of provides that more ultimate

00:19:23.480 meaning versus the sort of instrumental value in your life? So that's, I mean, that's the question

00:19:29.300 that leaps to my mind immediately. Okay. And so you're, you're trying to figure, you're trying

00:19:33.580 to figure out like why, what, what the goal you're trying to achieve with that. And then the next

00:19:36.600 question to ask is the means question. What's a means question? Yeah. So how are you going to get

00:19:41.380 from here to there? Right. So from your starting point, so suppose, you know, your starting point

00:19:46.720 is I feel like I work too much or I feel like I work too little. Right. And I'm not sure what to

00:19:51.660 do about that. Okay. Now, now given that my goal is, you know, to make sure that my, my work is not

00:19:58.440 becoming the source of ultimate meaning, rather it's, it's sort of serving this greater good in my life.

00:20:03.320 What's going to take me from that starting point to that goal? Does it mean, you know, shifting

00:20:08.980 like the kind of work that I'm doing or shifting the way that I think about the work that I'm doing?

00:20:13.560 Yeah. It's just sort of a, an intermediate, like what are the steps that I have to take to,

00:20:17.320 you know, make sure that my philosophical life is well aligned.

00:20:21.380 And how do you have these discussions, particularly with someone else without it

00:20:24.840 delving into emotive shouting? So this is something, uh, your colleague, Alistair McIntyre,

00:20:31.460 wrote about in after virtue. He talked about kind of makes this diagnosis. Why does,

00:20:37.000 why does moral debate seem so shrill in the modern age? And he makes this case, well,

00:20:42.400 people are on different pages. They see the world differently. And so the only thing they

00:20:47.100 turn to is just shouting. And I think everyone's experienced that particularly online. So how can

00:20:51.720 you have these really important discussions without it devolving to that?

00:20:56.440 Here's where I think that if you're concerned with living a philosophical life, and we, we argue in

00:21:01.960 the book that one of the first virtues you should develop a concern for in your pursuit of the good

00:21:06.560 life is concerned for the truth. Like just wanting to be somebody that actually cares about the truth,

00:21:11.420 including the truth about other people. It's really important when you decide you're going to have

00:21:16.680 a hard conversation about politics or religion, or about whether you should be a vegetarian or whether

00:21:23.140 somebody is making a mistake to quit their job. Before you get into this with somebody who you're

00:21:27.940 likely to disagree with, first, you have to check your own intentions. So are you intending,

00:21:34.400 do you have an argument with them? In which case you might be really effective at provoking the

00:21:38.840 argument. And I suspect a lot of quote unquote ethicists find themselves constantly in arguments

00:21:43.920 because they go looking for them. But if you really come into it with a spirit of humility and

00:21:48.720 thinking like, I really just want to know the truth about how we should be living together

00:21:54.940 in insert the office, our school system right now, our country. I want to know the truth about

00:22:01.300 this question. First, you've kind of checked your intentions. And then the next thing you need to do

00:22:05.400 is make sure you've got enough of the other virtues growing in your life and in this relationship

00:22:11.480 to be able to signal that you care about the truth. One of the things that's interesting about

00:22:17.100 the Greek virtue ethicists like Plato and Aristotle is they think you can't just have one virtue in

00:22:21.400 isolation. If I want to have a hard conversation with Paul or with my neighbor about a political

00:22:27.640 question, but I really want to demonstrate concern for the truth. I also have to show

00:22:32.980 care and concern for Paul. I have to show willingness to listen to him. I have to be able to register a

00:22:38.420 certain amount of humility and self-understanding about my own political views, but also courage to

00:22:43.280 defend things that might be very controversial. It requires a great deal of skill and sophistication

00:22:48.980 really fast. And I think just chalking this up to saying, well, the fact that we're having

00:22:54.940 debates on Facebook is the reason we can't talk to each other anymore. Or the fact that the political

00:22:59.940 parties have this really, really contingent way that they're set up right now means that we just

00:23:04.900 can't talk to each other anymore. I think that doesn't do justice to the fact that we know from

00:23:09.580 2,500 years of philosophy that folks have always had a somewhat difficult time having philosophical

00:23:15.260 conversations, have thought that they had to work on it a little bit. But if they were willing to put in

00:23:20.100 the effort and try to develop those antecedent virtues in themselves and in their relationships,

00:23:25.100 it results in magic. I mean, you get the enlightenment out of those kinds of relationships.

00:23:30.100 You get the platonic dialogues out of Socrates' friendships and pursuit of virtue.

00:23:36.100 And so, okay, so you check yourself. And then I guess you just have to, when you're chilling with

00:23:41.320 someone else, you're trying, you're kind of filling them out. And maybe if they're putting up,

00:23:44.920 they've got that, you know, they're just kind of putting up a fight. They put up that,

00:23:47.660 that shield. Do you just disengage or just keep trying to show through example? I'm not trying

00:23:53.420 to attack you. Like, how do, how do you deal with that? Like, again, like this is a virtue you have

00:23:57.580 to develop, a skill you have to develop. Well, your experience, how do you help other people,

00:24:02.040 you know, kind of play, play catch with you with this debate?

00:24:06.080 One thing I've been thinking about this a lot, because obviously we live in a time of many fraught

00:24:10.540 philosophical conversations. I was having one just yesterday with a colleague who really disagrees with

00:24:15.620 me politically. And I was reminded of another thing Aristotle says, one swallow does not make a

00:24:22.060 spring. Developing and showing virtue, showing that you really care about somebody else, kind of

00:24:28.300 wanting to pursue the truth on a question with somebody else, it's probably not going to happen

00:24:33.360 over a single coffee or a single well-executed social media encounter. It's the kind of thing that

00:24:40.880 if we're going to make a difference in each other's lives, if we're going to help guide each other out of

00:24:45.200 our various caves, it's going to happen over time, the way all virtues are built up and manifest over

00:24:51.260 time. It's going to be a repeated investment, though. It's probably going to be a little period

00:24:54.660 of frustration when we feel like we're not making any progress. And what a virtuous person will do is

00:25:00.360 play a long game in these kinds of discussions and modes of inquiry. Whereas somebody who's like a

00:25:05.980 sophist or somebody who only cares about immediate results might do whatever it takes to get somebody to

00:25:11.900 change their mind. I think probably virtuous people don't change their mind super quickly because a lot

00:25:17.340 of times their beliefs and philosophical attitudes are the sorts of things that have grown up along

00:25:22.620 with the kind of person that they've been trying to make themselves into. Okay, so I guess it's key

00:25:27.880 there. So the takeaway there, be open to the truth, be curious. And again, keep using your reasoning.

00:25:33.960 Aristotle says, as long as you're using your reasoning to figure that out, you're on the right track.

00:25:37.480 Yeah, I think that's right. I think there are also a lot of opportunities in dialogue with people to

00:25:43.240 demonstrate virtues. And some of the key virtues here, just manifesting a genuine concern for the

00:25:49.880 truth is going to lead you to sometimes admit that you don't know everything in a particular

00:25:54.980 conversation. I found that this is one of the most powerful tools in my conversations with my mom.

00:26:01.560 This is an example we use in the book, but it's just a real life example for me. My mom and I,

00:26:05.760 we agree about some things, we disagree about a ton of things, and we love debating. We love

00:26:10.400 dialoguing. We love talking about this stuff because it means a lot to us. And I notice a

00:26:17.940 difference in the conversations that involve each of us taking a step back and saying, I hadn't

00:26:24.000 actually thought about that. I'm not sure. Or you might be right about that. And when one person is

00:26:29.980 able to do that and just sort of demonstrate, look, I care more about the truth and I care more about

00:26:35.760 both of us getting to the truth than I do about defeating you or about protecting some part of

00:26:40.720 my identity. I find that's a really powerful thing. Now, like Megan mentions, this is something that

00:26:45.900 really is most likely to happen, most natural in the context of a personal relationship.

00:26:51.600 So I find I've become more selective over time in the kind of engagement that I'm willing to do on

00:26:58.320 the internet, just arguing with people on Facebook or comments or whatever. But I don't think it's

00:27:02.920 impossible. I think especially if you have some pre-existing relationship or if you're able to

00:27:06.860 build that up over time with friends online or whatever, just being willing to say, yeah,

00:27:12.940 I don't know about that. Or that's a really interesting perspective that you're bringing.

00:27:17.180 I've never heard anybody say something like that. Tell me where it comes from. Give me some

00:27:22.020 background here. Give me some context. I think those can really diffuse some of the tension and some of

00:27:26.520 the sort of defensiveness that we bring to a lot of these conversations.

00:27:29.940 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:27:34.500 And now back to the show. Okay. So one of the part of living a flourishing life is

00:27:39.880 doing the morally right thing. And that can be hard to figure out what the morally right thing

00:27:45.120 to do in certain situations is. And you look at other schools of philosophy to figure out,

00:27:49.980 well, how do they, how do other philosophies determine what's the morally right thing to do?

00:27:53.500 And you look at one school called consequentialism to figure out what the morally right thing to do.

00:27:59.120 So how does consequentialism determine morality and then why do you think it's lacking?

00:28:04.180 Yeah. So really broadly, consequentialists focus on the consequences of your action

00:28:09.200 in trying to figure out whether or not that action is good, right? It's a really simplistic way to put

00:28:14.280 it. But, you know, if you're, if you're making a decision about, you know, whether it's okay in war

00:28:18.660 to bomb a certain city, you're asking, well, okay, what are the consequences? Are they overall going to be

00:28:24.040 better or worse if we do this versus if we don't do it, or if we do it in a more targeted way or

00:28:28.760 something like that? So again, a real emphasis on the consequences versus paying a lot of attention

00:28:35.060 to the intentions and the motivation behind a particular action. Why is it that you're

00:28:41.140 performing an action? You know, now we have a couple of chapters where we take consequentialism

00:28:47.220 and compare it to virtue ethics and where we think, you know, virtue ethics really has an advantage,

00:28:51.420 kind of gives us thinking about our lives, our inner lives, our intentions that are really

00:28:56.920 important. So let me just give you one example in the chapter on responsibility. There's a really

00:29:02.100 famous case that you've probably come across if you've, you know, read about philosophy or if you've

00:29:07.080 seen the good place or any of these sort of things, it's called the trolley problem. And the idea is,

00:29:12.620 you know, you're standing next to a trolley track. The trolley is hurtling down the track and there are

00:29:19.560 several people who are on the track. You can flip a switch and change it so that it hits one person rather

00:29:24.300 than say five people. The question is, you know, should you flip this switch? And one thing that's

00:29:29.620 really interesting is that as you change the details in the trolley problem, people's moral

00:29:35.060 intuitions change, like whether or not they think you should flip the switch changes. So in the classic

00:29:39.800 example, a lot of people say, yeah, of course flip the switch, right? Like one person dead is a better

00:29:44.000 consequence than five people that of course you should flip the switch. But then, you know, researchers

00:29:48.480 will ask people, okay, well, what if, you know, you have to push a person onto the track

00:29:52.640 to stop the trolley in order to prevent five people from being killed? Now, you know, far fewer

00:29:58.560 people will say, yeah, you should definitely do that. And if you're a consequentialist, this is just

00:30:03.540 manifest bias and irrationality, right? You think like the consequences are exactly the same. It's just

00:30:09.180 that, you know, when you get into the messy details, people aren't always willing to do what they

00:30:14.140 reflectively know is the morally right thing to do. Virtue ethicists see things differently, right?

00:30:20.900 They think, look, a lot of times the personal details, the sort of the really particular

00:30:27.120 facts of a situation are going to make a huge difference as to whether or not your action is

00:30:32.120 right or wrong. But it's not that like consequences don't matter in virtue ethics, right? It's not just

00:30:36.880 intention because if it was that it could be like, well, people intend to do helpful things all the

00:30:41.680 time that ended up hurting people. I don't think Aristotle would be like, well, that was, he was

00:30:45.700 virtuous because he had right intentions. Am I correct on that? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. The

00:30:50.640 consequences have to come in both because, you know, a reasonable person is going to be able to

00:30:54.800 foresee characteristic consequences of certain kinds of actions. And so, yeah, you've certainly

00:30:59.720 got to take those into account. You know, you can't just say like, well, my intention's good. Like

00:31:03.700 I'm going to throw this baseball at somebody's face. My intention is just to like, you know, give them

00:31:08.000 a baseball. It's like, it doesn't work that way, right? So there's this kind of give and take

00:31:11.660 we're figuring out the accurate description of your action. It's actually a really complex process.

00:31:16.720 It involves this kind of phronesis or this practical wisdom that we were talking about

00:31:21.280 earlier. So absolutely the intention or the consequences are going to matter. It's just

00:31:25.760 that they're not the only thing that matters or they're not sort of the primary thing that matters

00:31:29.780 for the virtue ethicist. And there's a certain kind of consequence that the virtue ethicists are

00:31:34.420 aiming at that the consequentialists are not. So the consequentialists want to pump good

00:31:39.700 consequences out into the world, life saved or happiness maximized. The virtue ethicist has a

00:31:46.600 goal in mind, something that they're targeting with their decisions and intentions and actions,

00:31:52.020 namely caring for their soul and developing, finding eudaimonia. So we can absolutely criticize people

00:31:59.320 for not intending good enough things. If I'm talking to my youngest brother who's home from college

00:32:06.160 and I ask him what he plans to do with his degree next year and he says, eh, I'm really just like

00:32:10.660 intending to play video games for the next decade. It's, you know, it's not a malicious intention,

00:32:17.540 but it's not a good enough intention for him to be living a good life or fulfilling, to be like living

00:32:23.060 up to his moral potential. And it's totally the kind of intention that could come in for criticism for

00:32:28.760 just being unambitious. No, and this, this, uh, the section on responsibility and agency really got

00:32:34.960 me thinking about, you know, my own, how I think about myself as a moral agent, because it forces

00:32:41.100 you to think like, am I as good as I really think I am? And it could be, I do the things I do because

00:32:47.020 not because I intended it, but it just sort of like, it just happened that way. It's like moral luck.

00:32:50.880 You know, I haven't had to face any really big moral ethical dilemmas, but I say, well, you know,

00:32:56.600 I'm a good person, but I've never really had to do it. You know what I'm saying? Like,

00:33:00.800 I didn't have to like, there was like no decision on that, on my part to be a good person, if that

00:33:04.800 makes sense. Yeah. At least, at least two really important issues that you're raising here. One is,

00:33:09.440 you know, having the self-knowledge, like knowing, like whether you actually have the virtues,

00:33:14.240 that's really hard. Right. And a lot of times we don't know, or we can't know unless our virtues

00:33:19.680 have been tested in some significant way. And, and, uh, I don't know. I think there's a lot of

00:33:24.240 literature. There are a lot of great movies or novels written about this question. You know,

00:33:27.540 somebody's tested and their whole life is upended because they realize like, gosh, I thought I was

00:33:32.460 a courageous person. And when the moment came to act, I couldn't do it. And so how do I reconcile

00:33:37.040 my view of myself? Another really important issue that you bring up and that we talk a little bit

00:33:41.560 about in the book, in our class that the book is based on is this question of how our environment

00:33:46.980 and how our situation impacts our actions, the things that we do. There's, you know, a whole field now

00:33:53.260 in philosophy devoted to asking this question, you know, it's often called situationism and that,

00:33:59.940 you know, there's empirical evidence that our situation, the environment that we, you know,

00:34:05.260 partly create and help create around ourselves, but also that we just find ourselves in it has a

00:34:09.900 huge impact on what we end up doing. Now that's, I don't know, I think an interesting wrinkle for the

00:34:16.040 virtue ethicist and one that Aristotle cared a lot about. I mean, he, he thought a lot about the

00:34:20.960 importance of community, you know, making sure that you're not in a sort of morally corrupt

00:34:26.020 environment was, was really important, but, you know, also just creating the kind of community

00:34:31.040 that enables virtue and enables people to act virtuously was really important. But I think,

00:34:36.540 I think both those issues are super important. And, you know, if you're coming from the virtue

00:34:40.480 ethics point of view, there are things that, you know, merit a lot of reflection.

00:34:45.300 It reminded me of a quote from Nietzsche who I've heard, like, I think Robert Solomon,

00:34:50.660 it's like a Nietzsche expert described Nietzsche as sort of kind of a virtue ethicist in some ways.

00:34:55.000 Oh yeah.

00:34:55.440 And he said this, he said, verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves

00:34:59.180 good because they had no claws. And it's like,

00:35:03.360 You're so mean.

00:35:04.720 Yeah, it's mean, but it really, it's kind of, it can be convicting. It's like,

00:35:08.880 I think I'm a really good person, but like, is it just, is it because I just,

00:35:12.620 you know, I've just kind of go with the flow and I'm a real, you know, laid back guy. Is that why

00:35:17.140 I'm a good guy? So, and, and this gets to the point you make the argument you, you, you challenge

00:35:22.440 people to do is to come up, you know, develop some morally thick stories about yourself,

00:35:27.320 like ethically thick stories about yourself. What do you mean by that?

00:35:31.440 I'll share here. There there's been, we try really hard to show in this book, something that

00:35:36.480 Paul and I both believe, which is that this high level philosophical advice can also be deeply

00:35:41.120 practical and can affect our 21st century lives. And over the last year, I've thought a lot about

00:35:47.860 this responsibility chapter and what it means to try to share your moral intentions and your moral

00:35:53.020 stories with other people. And I've really tried to make it a practice when I think I screwed

00:35:58.540 something up or I've hurt somebody, which only happens in kind of small, clawless ways in my own

00:36:04.520 boring life, but, but tried to make a practice of being really explicit of saying like, um, here's

00:36:10.620 where I'm taking responsibility. This is where I think I did something cruel and like using the morally

00:36:15.300 thick terms, like this was cruel, or that was a bit cowardly, or that was rash in an apology, either

00:36:21.660 like verbally or, uh, or in an email. And I, one thing I've noticed is starting to talk about myself

00:36:28.820 using more morally rich vocabulary is disarming to other people. Like we're just not used to hearing

00:36:35.640 other people. We're used to people saying like, I'm sorry. And we're used to people saying like,

00:36:40.240 you know, they're good and I'm bad or I'm good at their bad is much more likely like really thin

00:36:45.940 moral concepts to just try to judge like thumbs up, thumbs down people I've, I've found, especially as

00:36:51.680 I've tried to build out this practice in my day-to-day life, get a little bit more freaked out when you send

00:36:56.220 them an email being like, I think it was, uh, unjust for me to not call on you when you had a

00:37:02.020 question at that meeting last week. Notice they don't quite know what to do with you. And I think

00:37:06.080 maybe that is, uh, is a good thing. Like learning how to talk about ourselves and our moral lives in

00:37:12.240 new ways opens up new kinds of conversations that might, you know, weird people out in our social

00:37:16.740 lives right now, but also open up new opportunities for us to talk about things that don't seem like

00:37:21.880 they're right or that we want to improve. That's a good point. I think one of the points that

00:37:25.200 Alistair McIntyre makes in after virtue is that, yeah, you're right. People, they don't know how to

00:37:29.720 speak in a moral language. So it weirds them out when people do. And so I guess one way to counter

00:37:35.160 that is just start doing it with yourself and people like it'll like scratch an itch that people

00:37:40.900 didn't know they had. I think that's right. I think one other thing that I love on this point

00:37:46.440 from the McIntyre book is, uh, the importance of stories like, you know, Megan, Megan's talking about

00:37:51.840 and making sure that those stories are accurate. So we tell stories all the time that either excuse

00:37:59.180 or empower us. I use the simple example with my students, you know, I show up late at a meeting

00:38:04.080 and I say, ah, gosh, like the traffic was so terrible. And in doing that, I'm excusing myself,

00:38:09.120 right? Like I'm refusing to take responsibility, maybe rightly. So maybe the traffic was terrible

00:38:13.460 and it was unpredictable, but another way I could go is, you know, I could, I could say, look,

00:38:17.640 I didn't care enough to predict how bad the traffic was going to be. I didn't sort of get

00:38:23.900 up early enough or whatever it might be. And, you know, if that's the true story, it's really

00:38:28.560 important that we're able to tell it and that we're able to tell it about ourselves. And it requires all

00:38:33.880 kinds of virtues and, you know, self-knowledge and vulnerability. So I think that's, that's another

00:38:39.800 way in which, you know, the advice that we even get from, from after virtue, which is that, you know,

00:38:44.360 we've got to be able to tell these narratives about our lives and big picture narratives about

00:38:49.900 our life stories, but also these kind of small interpersonal stories that we tell to each other.

00:38:54.620 I mean, I think that's absolutely crucial for the moral life.

00:38:57.480 Yeah. So you take Richard Feynman's advice, don't fool yourself, but always be on the lookout,

00:39:01.560 always be aware that you're probably trying to fool yourself. So you always have to be on guard of

00:39:06.120 that. Okay. So I try to go for an accurate representation of your, of your moral life. Maybe in some instances

00:39:12.860 you have to take less credit for your vices. I think some people are just really hard on themselves,

00:39:17.320 but I think, I think the thing that's probably the hardest is taking less credit maybe for the good

00:39:23.380 you do. I think, I think a lot of people think they're better than they really are, but not always.

00:39:28.320 But I think just, it's always asking yourself those questions. You also devote a chapter to our

00:39:33.660 relationship with work. What can virtue ethics teach us about our work life or help us have a better

00:39:39.440 work life? Oh, this is a, this is a great question. And one that I'm thinking about a ton right now.

00:39:44.920 So let me just give one example in which I think philosophers can really help in a practical way

00:39:50.620 with the way that we think about work in our lives. So, so Aristotle, you know, he talks about how

00:39:58.080 action, just doing things in the world, producing things, how that is a source of meaning, right?

00:40:04.260 We go out and we sort of choose our ends and we act toward those ends. And so we can get really

00:40:09.700 caught up in, you know, this active life in making sure that we're busy and sort of investing a lot in

00:40:16.280 our achievements at work. But one thing that Aristotle really encourages us to do is to think

00:40:21.040 about the why behind any particular action that we're doing, because he thinks the more you think

00:40:26.960 about the reasoning, the more you're going to realize, you know, everything you do ultimately aims,

00:40:33.080 you know, this goes all the way back to the beginning of the conversation, it ultimately

00:40:36.420 aims at eudaimonia, aims at flourishing. And sometimes in the moment, you know, if you're

00:40:41.960 working really hard on, on, you know, a bunch of projects, you can lose sight of that. And so,

00:40:46.180 so here's, you know, a quick example that I ask my students, I say, look, you know, why are you in

00:40:50.100 college right now? And they say, well, because we want to get jobs. And you say, well, why do you want

00:40:54.140 to get a job? You say, well, because I want money. And you say, well, why do you want money? Right? You can go back

00:40:59.060 all the way with this chain of reasoning and Aristotle thinks, if you end up at a place where

00:41:05.180 you can sort of point out, well, this is the good thing that all of those efforts are going to serve,

00:41:09.940 then you're, you're in a good way. Right. But if you, you know, and this happens to me all the time,

00:41:14.400 if you, if you realize like, you know, gosh, I I'm really just doing all of these things because

00:41:18.900 it feels meaningful. It sort of fulfills this kind of desire, this need that I have,

00:41:23.580 but it's coming at the expense of, you know, these other good things in my life

00:41:27.480 that I really should be paying more attention to that he thinks, okay, that chain of reasoning,

00:41:32.220 it's sort of vain and empty. And you've got to make sure that, you know, you're not being distracted

00:41:37.460 by this life of action from what really matters from what really counts. So that's, that's, you

00:41:43.020 know, that's just one sort of way in which this distinction, I think can help us sort out what's

00:41:48.040 actually essential in the work that we're doing from what just feels essential or feels really

00:41:52.040 meaningful. But I think there's, yeah, I think there's a lot of, a lot of philosophers who help us

00:41:56.800 think about these exact kinds of issues. I think something we, we talk about this in the book and

00:42:02.140 I've thought about it a lot as we've read all these news stories recently about people changing jobs

00:42:07.100 and the great resignation. We live in a version of capitalism where a lot of really well-meaning

00:42:13.160 workplaces claim to satisfy our deepest philosophical needs. It's like the case study we use in the book

00:42:19.320 is Airbnb really selling their employees on this idea that they're a family. And it turns out that

00:42:26.680 when the first wave of the pandemic hit and Airbnb had to lay off a bunch of workers, they felt really

00:42:34.160 alienated as a result because family members usually don't fire other family members. And so they had

00:42:38.860 this like whiplash of the, they had this one goal and kind of identity in mind, but it didn't feel like

00:42:43.340 at the end of the day, it was real or sustainable. I think we, we all want to be part of wonderful

00:42:49.080 workplaces, but understanding the distinctive kinds of common goods that a workplace can promote or not,

00:42:56.520 which kinds of work maybe will never have a common good behind it, or which kinds of goods a workplace can

00:43:02.880 supply and which other goods we need to get elsewhere in our lives. Those are really live questions,

00:43:08.600 especially for folks who are just in the middle or at the beginnings of their careers right now.

00:43:14.920 So one of the things we try to do in the book is show how these questions about good work are at

00:43:21.140 their root questions about how we pursue the good life in common and what the limits of it are based

00:43:27.340 on the kind of organization that, that we're finding ourselves a part of. So it sounds like,

00:43:33.080 correct me if I'm wrong, like Aristotle would say work is a means. So don't confuse the means for

00:43:39.360 an end. And a lot of people do that. They think, well, work is the thing supposed to give me

00:43:42.600 meaning and Aristotle, well, it could be part of that, but it's not the thing.

00:43:46.080 I think that's part of it though. I don't know if we're, it depends probably on what you mean by

00:43:49.920 work. But if you think of your work as a place where you have some of your most important

00:43:55.020 relationships, like with your coworkers, if you're a teacher with some of your students,

00:43:58.660 and it's a place where you allocate a certain amount of your time, it might, it might be that

00:44:04.220 you do it in order to get money, like for, for totally instrumental ends to get money in order

00:44:08.660 to support other aspects of your good life. But for most people and Paul and I talk about this in

00:44:13.440 the book, it's more mixed up. There's a dimension of friendship and personal development. That's really

00:44:19.900 important at work alongside earning money. And some of those same virtues are going to be really

00:44:24.260 important in family life and spending money and consumerism might be a really important part of your

00:44:28.640 family life as well. The lines get blurred really quickly, which means that you've got to ask the

00:44:33.420 same questions about happiness and personal development and ethics in all of the different

00:44:40.060 worlds. There's never going to be this just clean break between your life life and your work life.

00:44:46.600 So how, how do you navigate? Let's say you're, someone is listening and they're like, man,

00:44:50.660 my job is burning me out. It's just grinding me down, but there's parts of it that I like. I like,

00:44:56.380 there's coworkers I like, and I like that allows me to live near my family. What is virtue? How do

00:45:03.140 you, how do you untangle all that? I think one question there, you know, there's going to be a

00:45:07.960 bunch of questions here. First is just empathizing with folks. Oftentimes, not just in our work

00:45:13.800 communities, but in our families and in our political communities, it's not always kumbaya.

00:45:19.000 And we know that working on the common good together in the different places we find ourselves is

00:45:23.100 sometimes going to be a real slog. And a lot of people I think are discovering that as they've

00:45:27.460 gone back to work. But I think one question to ask folks is if they can take a step back

00:45:33.180 and realize there's how they're feeling about their work right now, which is almost certainly

00:45:38.260 influenced by the very weird conditions in which a lot of us are working right now.

00:45:42.560 But that's the question of how you feel about happiness. What about the philosophical question?

00:45:46.680 What kind of person is this investment making you into? How are you developing virtues in your

00:45:55.320 workplace? Are you developing capacities or forms of agency that are enabling you in other parts of

00:46:02.220 your life to grow and to pursue eudaimonia? If the answer to those questions are no, probably you need

00:46:08.900 to really rethink how you're making this huge investment in your life. But if the answers to those

00:46:14.520 questions are yes, kind of, which I think for a lot of us it is. I'll take a concrete case study.

00:46:21.900 My mom, she's a receptionist in a dental office. Her job is super hard. She's yelling at people to

00:46:27.100 wear face masks all day. She's filling out healthcare billing reports. She does not have the kind of job

00:46:32.320 that causes her to feel happiness every single minute of the workday. But she loves her job and

00:46:38.600 finds it quite meaningful. And if you ask her why, it's because she has this morally thick story that's

00:46:45.260 true in her mind about how when she does her job really well, it helps people get dental care that

00:46:51.980 they really need. And that's meaningful for her. She really loves her coworkers and she likes

00:46:57.480 celebrating their birthdays and observing life with them. When they have babies, the whole family gets

00:47:02.800 together in the office and celebrates that life together. Work is a place where she develops these

00:47:07.640 really and expresses these really important social virtues. At the end of the day, does she think

00:47:13.460 that her particular work would be irreplaceable by really smart dental billing AI 20 years from now?

00:47:19.840 No, definitely not. But she also thinks that she doesn't need that kind of permanence or all-encompassing

00:47:26.780 nature of work for it to be meaningful. All she needs is those two true stories about helping people get

00:47:32.540 their cavities filled and the particular people in her office that she loves and gets to care for when

00:47:38.340 she's on her game at work. Okay. So another section you devote to is about love. And you all make the

00:47:45.380 case that you often think of love as a verb, right? It's action. And Aristotle would say, yeah, there is a

00:47:50.540 part of that where it's action-oriented. But you also say that love is about attention. What do you mean by that?

00:47:56.300 So one, another virtue ethicist, we haven't talked about this guy so much, but he's really important

00:48:01.700 to us both in our teaching and in the book is Plato, who thinks that there's a very important part of

00:48:08.120 the good life that involves just seeing things the right way. He thinks about it like, you know,

00:48:12.720 seeing the sunlight when you get out of the cave, seeing the form of the good and really understanding

00:48:18.060 it. It's very visual, perceptual bit of the human aspiration that we get from Plato. And in the love

00:48:26.080 book, we introduce readers to a Neoplatonist philosopher, Iris Murdoch, who thinks that

00:48:33.460 the essence of love in the good life is not what you think, what we oftentimes think it is. We

00:48:39.540 oftentimes think that loving other people is doing things to them or for them. So giving them hugs or

00:48:46.180 throwing them birthday parties or marrying them, building our entire lives around them. These are all

00:48:51.460 actions. Murdoch thinks that it's, you know, that's an important part of the ways that we care for other

00:48:56.800 people, but that's not all of it. A really important part and dimension of love is just how we see other

00:49:03.080 people in our mind's eye. And she gives some really interesting cases about the kind of work that we can do

00:49:09.700 in our inner lives to become more loving and to become more attentive to other people and their good

00:49:15.240 lives. And this is an ancient idea. So the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers talk about our friends

00:49:21.880 and the people that we love as our second selves, as people whose good lives and stories and intentions

00:49:28.500 are so important to us that we feel as though their lives are joined with our own, even if we can't make

00:49:34.840 decisions and direct their lives. One of the things we try to do in the book is, one, just introduce

00:49:40.560 these ideas, which can seem a little mystical at first. This is totally true of Plato's philosophy.

00:49:44.580 It can seem a little, a little mystic, but actually once you start to think about it in terms of

00:49:51.920 practices for how you think about people in your life, you realize that it's deepening how you

00:49:57.020 appreciate them and how you're able to access some of the goods of love and friendship in your life.

00:50:02.640 Okay. So how do you develop that attention, that sort of loving attention?

00:50:06.320 One thing I love about Iris Murdoch is she gives this really simple

00:50:09.520 habit that at least strikes me as being very effective. She talks about this example

00:50:16.540 of a mother whose son has just gotten married to this woman. And this mother doesn't like her

00:50:25.700 daughter-in-law. She doesn't know what it is. There's just something about this young woman that

00:50:29.780 her son married that she just doesn't find her attractive or compelling or interesting at all.

00:50:35.080 But this mother also really cares about her relationship with her son. So she's always

00:50:39.420 super polite to this daughter-in-law. She's very kind and tries very, very hard to welcome her into

00:50:45.340 family life. The mother-in-law realizes that this isn't enough. And so Iris Murdoch says she develops

00:50:52.460 this practice where she causes herself to keep looking again at this woman. Basically,

00:50:57.860 every time she starts to have this thought of like, oh, Sheila, Sheila's so awful. I can't believe

00:51:02.460 we have to have dinner with Sheila again. She hits pause and says, I see her that way. I know I see

00:51:08.980 her that way, but maybe the problem is with me. Maybe I'm petty and small-minded. And in fact,

00:51:13.000 I should look at her again and try again to see what's really beautiful about her and the way that

00:51:17.760 my son sees her. And Murdoch says over time, this woman, as a result of this practice, might come to see

00:51:24.620 her daughter-in-law in a new way, to pay attention to her and appreciate her in a new way. And Murdoch

00:51:29.980 thinks that's growing in love. Like she's done this really important thing in her mental life

00:51:36.180 to help her grow as a kind of person who's able to love this daughter-in-law, somebody that's going

00:51:40.980 to become an important relationship to her going forward. And so that simple, even that simple practice

00:51:46.660 of just being able to notice the maybe short-sighted or false stories that internally

00:51:53.920 we tell ourselves about other people, and then trying really hard to look and find the deeper

00:51:59.920 truth or find the deeper value in there. I think that that's a very important virtue for love.

00:52:05.440 And so this goes back to the idea that intentions matter in virtue ethics, right? You can't just,

00:52:09.220 you don't just treat your daughter-in-law well because you're duty-bound because you can do that and be

00:52:15.040 like, ah, geez, I hate this, you know, whatever. But virtue has to say, no, you also have to,

00:52:20.160 the intention behind that act also has to be loving as well.

00:52:24.240 Yeah. And it also is a way of seeing how the intentions of the other person, like the inner

00:52:29.360 life, the richness of that inner life can really impact how you relate to them, right? So another

00:52:35.400 practice that we recommend in that chapter for cultivating loving intention is reading literature,

00:52:41.120 like reading great novels and watching great films or reading great poems. And I think, you know,

00:52:47.560 one of the reasons why that's really powerful is because we're often trying to reconstruct the inner

00:52:53.020 lives of other people, but we do it in a very haphazard way. We think like they just did this thing and

00:52:57.580 this is how it impacts me. And, you know, this must be sort of the reason we have this very sort of

00:53:01.660 simplistic theory, but in literature, you're presented with the external actions of a person,

00:53:07.740 but also their entire inner life, the richness of their inner life often. And this can help you

00:53:13.520 get outside of, you know, the way that you see the world and really have access to other people's

00:53:18.960 experience in deep and important ways. One of the books, the novels that we talk about in that chapter

00:53:24.660 and that has had a huge impact on both Megan's life and my life, but in very different ways is

00:53:29.980 The Road by Cormac McCarthy. You know, in my case, I read The Road when I was in college and I was kind of,

00:53:36.860 you know, just trying to sort out life and think like, which direction do I want to sort of go in my

00:53:41.980 career, in my life and that sort of thing. And the depiction of fatherhood, the access to the sort of

00:53:49.100 characteristic feelings that a father has for, you know, his child, his son in this case, especially, you

00:53:54.180 know, in the extreme circumstances, the kind of apocalyptic end of the world circumstances that are

00:53:58.700 depicted in that novel, just struck something in me and really made it sort of an ideal. It sort of

00:54:06.420 was an exemplary kind of way of living and approaching the world that, you know, it was

00:54:11.580 that moment as I was reading this, I thought like, gosh, like that is the kind of inner life that I

00:54:15.860 would absolutely love to have with my own children. I would love to be a father. So I think, you know,

00:54:21.260 reading literature, just, you know, picking up novels, especially if the protagonists of the

00:54:25.600 characters are, are very different from you and have very different life experiences.

00:54:29.460 It's just another way that you can cultivate this attentiveness to the way that different

00:54:33.960 people approach the world. No, I love the road. I read it once a year, destroys me every time. I

00:54:39.140 sob like a baby and I'm like, you read it on Christmas Eve.

00:54:45.060 Gather around children. No, I start like hugging my kids and they're like, what's wrong with you, dad?

00:54:50.080 No, we just did an episode with the Cormac McCarthy scholar. We talked about the road and I broke

00:54:58.120 down. I started crying when the last scene about carrying the fire, oh geez, I'm getting choked up

00:55:02.860 now. So in this also have this cultivating, this loving attention, this goes back to how can you

00:55:08.680 have these, these really live debates, moral philosophical debates without them, you know,

00:55:14.000 descending to acrimony. Well, if you bring that loving attention to the conversation,

00:55:18.560 people can sense that and they're going to, it disarms them. Maybe not right away. I mean,

00:55:23.340 a lot of people think, well, if I just do this and like people, like Megan was saying,

00:55:27.420 it's something that happens over time. People can get that. You're really, you really care about them

00:55:31.920 and you, you care about the relationship. And because you care about the relationship,

00:55:36.020 you can have these really hard discussions without worrying about the relationship deteriorating.

00:55:42.140 Absolutely. I think that's right. If you want a good reputation for being, I think,

00:55:46.800 good at this form of philosophical attention. You want people to think you're a little bit weird.

00:55:51.300 Socrates is a great like mascot for this because every time people, people are always commenting

00:55:56.600 when they're in conversations with Socrates, like, man, this got weird or this is surprising. And I

00:56:01.540 think if you, if you care about this dimension of your philosophical life with your family members

00:56:05.440 or friends or coworkers, you want them to be thinking, huh, I didn't know exactly where that was

00:56:10.400 going to go. All right. So be weird. Like you want to throw people off. So the final part you

00:56:14.660 discuss in the book is how do you balance action and contemplation? And I, one of the things I'm

00:56:20.900 drawn to Nicomachean, you know, Aristotelian virtue ethics is it's very practical because it's just

00:56:26.060 like, it has, it can help you answer questions about what to do and just sort of a work a day.

00:56:31.100 Like the answers those, you know, Tuesday morning questions, right? It's like, what am I supposed to

00:56:35.460 do at work? And when the kids are, you know, getting kicked out of school, I mean, virtue ethics can help

00:56:40.160 help with that. But Aristotle also thought, okay, that's important, but he doesn't think

00:56:46.080 action is the most important. He thought contemplation was really important. So how do

00:56:51.640 you, how do you balance the two? What did Aristotle have to say about that?

00:56:56.200 Aristotle was really, he's really perplexed by this question. You get, you read the Nicomachean

00:57:01.220 ethics, like you said, Brad, and the first eight chapters of the book that we've got are pretty

00:57:06.760 practical. And he, and he builds it as a practical guide to happiness through philosophy, but he gets

00:57:11.940 to the end and he's like, I don't think I've captured what happiness is for humans. And he

00:57:16.100 thinks back to his teacher Plato, who thought that attention and contemplation and understanding the

00:57:21.500 world are really important dimensions of what it is for creatures like us to be who we are.

00:57:27.440 And, and Aristotle kind of is like, you know, he's thinking about how he can reconcile that with

00:57:30.920 everything he said about developing courage and generosity and friendships. The way we think about this,

00:57:36.240 really, you know, age old problem in virtue ethics is if you, if you think that action alone is going

00:57:44.880 to help you achieve eudaimonia, there are going to be three kinds of problems that are going to be very

00:57:49.840 hard for you to solve. First, if you only pursue a life of action, you face this problem of sometimes

00:57:56.160 your best laid, most intentional, well-reasoned projects are still going to fail. You're going to have

00:58:02.080 this really awesome idea for a project at work and then a global pandemic is going to come around and

00:58:08.920 you're never going to be able to complete that project. So if you, if you tie your happiness

00:58:13.820 entirely to the life of action, there's going to be parts of it that are extraordinarily vulnerable

00:58:18.440 to things outside of your control, which, you know, sucks if it's something as important as the meaning of

00:58:23.680 your life on the line. Second thing that the life of action is going to fall short on is if you

00:58:30.140 succeed in all of your projects. So you think that developing courage and generosity and friendships

00:58:35.300 are the crux of the good life. What happens when your friends die? What happens when you've invested

00:58:42.600 yourself thoroughly in raising children and family life, but then you've succeeded and your children

00:58:47.660 move away and start their own families, or you've invested yourself so thoroughly in finding the common

00:58:52.040 good at work, but then you retire. How, what's going to backstop or be your goal that you're searching

00:58:57.740 for after that, if you've only ever been pursuing the life of action. And then finally, and something

00:59:02.660 Aristotle spends a lot of time on at the end of the book is this idea that there's something special

00:59:08.040 about humans and the fact that we ask these philosophical questions to begin with. We wonder

00:59:13.020 about things, we analyze things, we notice metaphors or similarities in things. And a lot of that noticing

00:59:19.420 and thinking sometimes has nothing to do with what we're going to plan next. That part of us needs to be

00:59:25.300 fed and nurtured. And that that's our contemplative part. So the challenge, and there's a reason why

00:59:31.280 we save this till near the end of the book, the challenge for somebody who feels like they're

00:59:35.880 really starting to get eudaimonia, the good life in their sights is to try to figure out how they're

00:59:40.960 going to incorporate this continuous, strange, distinctively human thinking, attending activity

00:59:48.140 into all of the really goal and other people focused good life practices that they, that they've learned

00:59:57.620 to pursue.

00:59:58.640 And one of the ways you suggest adding some more contemplation into your day is doing the

01:00:03.720 examine of St. Ignatius. And there's a lot of different ways you can do it. It can work for

01:00:08.200 you if you're a theist or not a theist. And we actually have an article about that on our site

01:00:13.160 that we'll link to in the show notes. Well, Megan, Paul, this has been a great conversation.

01:00:18.220 There's so much more we could talk about. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your

01:00:22.340 work?

01:00:23.380 So our book comes out on January 4th and you can buy it on the Penguin website or Amazon or Barnes

01:00:28.940 and Noble, Target. There's also an audio book if you like to do your philosophy when you're in the car

01:00:33.980 and for your podcast listeners, they very well might like to listen to philosophy. And then of course,

01:00:39.180 you can Google us, look at God in a Good Life at the University of Notre Dame if you want to see

01:00:42.980 what we teach here. And we're just so excited to hear from people who are trying to build some more

01:00:49.620 intentional philosophical practices into their into their lives this year.

01:00:53.660 Well, Megan Sullivan, Paul Blaschko, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

01:00:57.100 Thank you so much, Brett.

01:00:59.120 My guests, they were Megan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko. They're the co-authors of the book,

01:01:02.180 The Good Life Method. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check our

01:01:05.720 show notes at aom.is slash goodlife where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

01:01:12.980 Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at

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01:01:50.260 but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - January 17, 2022

Philosophical Tools for Living the Good Life

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