Thursday, March 5, 2009

Morality and geometry

So, I'm getting tired of reading Aristotle's Ethics. His basic premise is that virtue and justice are always found in the median or average equidistant from two related extremes. As I said to Bonnie Jean earlier, when you average two things that are wrong in different ways you don't necessarily get something right afterwards. Its just as easy to get something that's wrong in a medium kind of way. So not that he doesn't make nice points here and there throughout the entire book, but for the most part I think he's just hopeless. He has no methodology for discovering what the extremes are but socially assumes them, which in turn places all of his equidistant moralities as socially anchored, not anchored in principle. For all these equidistant line segments, everyonce in a while I've been wondering what would happen if he'd bothered learning to do cartesian graphs or consider morality in say 3 or more dimentions. There's just a point where you just can't describe the world in line segments. And its not just the dimentionality of it, there's a point when moral systems only work when considered in harmony with eachother. Truth in righteous living has many principles interacting with eachother in complex subtle ways that can only be considered as systems. For instance, what is often considered to be an excess of a principle is often just one principle lived well with the love thy neighbor idea falling by the wayside. Nothing necissarily wrong with the original idea, but you can't say take one law of behaviour as an excuse to ignore another one. If you only take one principle or behaviour at a time and have on the one hand ignoring and on the other hand being a hate thy neighbor obsessive on the subject you'll never get to the point of realizing that there are two or more principles involved that only work in systems together to make virtuous people. But Aristotle never quite seems to get to these levels. It's just line segment after equidistant line segments of extremes that may not even exist, center points that are sometimes dubious in value, and other bizarre strangeness to top it off like comments about how the truly virtuous man must love virtue so much that following its dictates must never be a sacrifice... I guess he just never heard of the concept of a refining fire before...

1 comment:

sleepyhamster said...

I've never heard of such an idea before...I'm confuzzled by Mr. Aristotle...