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CANDACE VOGLER: Hello, everyone, and welcome.
Thank you very much for coming out this gorgeous afternoon.
My name is Candace Vogler.
I'm in the Department of Philosophy
here at the University of Chicago.
I need to say some thank yous before anything else occurs.
I want to thank the Neubauer Family
Collegium for Culture and Society
for hosting us this afternoon.
I want to thank Dean Martha Roth and the Division
of the Humanities here at the University of Chicago
for helping to support the talk today.
The talk today is mostly made possible by the John Templeton
Foundation grant called Virtue, Happiness,
and the Meaning of Life.
Professor Anselm Mueller is here as our first visiting scholar
this term as part of this grant where
in addition to talking to us this afternoon,
he's teaching a course called Final Ends for a mixed graduate
and undergraduate audience and leading
a faculty and doctoral reading group on teleology.
His visit is being partly sponsored also by something
called the Chicago Moral Philosophy Project,
which is a slight development from the Chicago Moral
Philosophy Seminar.
It is an honor and a pleasure to introduce Professor Mueller.
He has taught at Oxford.
He was a professor of philosophy at the University
of Trier for a very long time.
He's published extensively on Aristotle, on Kant,
on philosophy of education, more generally just in philosophy
of mind, ethics, theory of rationality.
He's an extraordinary scholar, a tremendous human being,
and when it comes to philosophy, he
is what my friend Jonathan Leer happily calls "the real deal."
So he's going to talk to us this afternoon
about what we live for.
Join me in welcoming Professor Mueller.
ANSELM MUELLER: Thank you very much, Candace,
for the very kind words of introduction.
In order not to lose time, I won't repeat the thank yous
that you have already performed.
Let me say that I'm very glad to be a visiting scholar today--
Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life project.
And perhaps I should add thanks to Valerie Wallace, who
seems to have a great talent for doing things in such a way
that they actually come to pass.
Thank you very much for arranging things.
Sorry.
Yes.
OK.
And so what do we live for?
In the history of ethics, you find a sort
of divide between conceptions that
tie the norms of conduct to the standard
of individual well-being or happiness
and others that tie them to a standard of ethical perfection
that relates primarily to individuals' dealings
with those around them.
In the European philosophical tradition,
the former kind of conception is generally
found among ancient and medieval thinkers,
the latter in later centuries.
Among Asian traditions, it seems that Buddhism belongs,
roughly speaking, in the happiness camp,
whereas, for example, Confucianism
would be classified rather as perfectionist in the sense
that I've indicated.
The situation is complicated by the fact that in the West,
both ancient and medieval philosophers--
though for somewhat different reasons--
tend to believe that individual well-being is somehow
reducible to the perfection the individual may achieve que man.
For these philosophers, human nature determines a telos,
a natural purpose of human existence and operation,
that cannot be achieved without a good ethos, a good character.
But in their conception of character,
the distinction between self-regarding
and so-called other-regarding virtues
plays no important role.
The corresponding ethical norms are not
restricted to what nowadays counts as moral.
I think that a lot is to be said for this point of view
represented by medieval and ancient philosophers.
On the other hand, as Plato's own Socratic dialogues already
show, it has, of course, always been recognized
that an understanding of personal well-being in terms
of perfection, moral perfection, is a substantial claim and not
just a matter of coincident word meaning.
One of my aims in this lecture is
to situate the old apparent tension
between the claims of well-being and the claims of perfection
in a broader framework in which a more general tension
in the teleology of life-- not only human life--
becomes apparent.
Anticipating a little and speaking roughly,
there are two kinds of goal to tele
that any individual organism is or may be directed
at-- its own individual well-being and the perfection
that enters the definition of its nature or species
or form of life.
To the extent that either of these two goals
is not achieved, we speak of failure, defect, shortcoming,
or, with Aristotle, privation.
I'm going to call "detriment" whatever
is privation relative to the standards of well-being
and "imperfection" the kind of privation
by which an organism fails to meet
the requirements of perfection.
My hope is that inspection of these two kinds of privation
will help us to get a clearer idea of the two kinds of telos
that I have ascribed to living creatures and, in particular,
to man.
I further have to throw some light
on the ways in which these two tele or standards
of a good human life, well-being and perfection,
compete for our recognition and compliance.
On the face of it, the possession and practice
of virtue is, in man, a component--
indeed, essential component-- of perfection
rather than well-being.
Your moral conduct seems to work for others more than yourself.
Hence effect of tension in particular
between the demands of morality and the call of self-interest.
Simultaneous orientation towards both well-being
and moral perfection seems to be an attempt
to serve two laws at once.
So do we have to treat well-being as an illusory
or at best subordinate and [INAUDIBLE] telos
if we accept the demands of virtue?
These demands, after all, present themselves
as being of absolute priority.
All our well-being and happiness inevitably are ultimate motives
so that morality has to give when there is a conflict.
Or, again, is the problem spurious
because virtue is not just in part and doubtfully
instrumental to well-being but in fact
an important, perhaps essential component of it?
Contemporary philosophers are, of course, aware of the tension
I have described, but although this tension seems
to give rise to obvious existential questions,
it is not much discussed.
Perhaps this is because modern moral philosophy
tends to take the very question, "How ought I to live?"
as asking for a standard or rule that restricts our freedom
to act so as to serve our well-being and happiness.
But it is surely the task of practical philosophy
to study both the tension and possibilities,
arbitrating between the claims of well-being and perfection.
In Aristotle's dictionary-- so-called dictionary,
Metaphysics Delta-- one finds privation explained as follows.
This is Number 2 on your handout.
"We speak of privation first if something has not
one of the attributes which a thing might naturally
have even if this thing itself would not naturally have it.
For example, a plant is said to be deprived of eyes.
Second"-- we speak again of privation--
"if though either the thing itself or its genus would
naturally have an attribute, it has it not.
For example, a blind man and a mole are, in different senses,
deprived of sight, the latter in contrast with its genus"--
mammals have eyes, it seems-- "the former in contrast with
its own normal nature."
Man has eyes.
"Now third, we stick of privation
if though it would naturally have the attribute
and when it would naturally have it,
it has it not, for blindness is a privation,
but one is not blind at any and every age
but only if one has not sight at the age at which one
would naturally have it."
My discussion is going to concern
the second kind of privation.
So it will be about privational defect in substances
whose essence or nature includes an ideal of perfection,
a telos that can fail to be completely
or perfectly realized, and hence in effect
about organisms failing to live up
to the standards inherent in the respective forms of life
that they instantiate.
Note that Aristotle himself does not make use of the distinction
I have drawn between detriment and imperfection.
This ties in with the fact that he does not
attend to the tension that I said exists
between the demands of well-being
on the one hand and perfection on the other except,
perhaps, implicitly in his account of happiness.
Given Aristotle's notion of privation,
we shall have to say that in those respects in which
in an organisms suffers privation,
it is not living in accordance with the form of life that
characterizes its species and that where its actual life
in no way fails to instantiate its form, there,
it cannot be said to show any defect.
Thus pretending for the sake of argument that "rabbit" names
a form of life or species, we may
say if a particular rabbit-- say,
Bunny, an adult rabbit-- is not able to run in the way
that it is in the nature of rabbits to run,
its life exhibits privation.
Likewise, a blind rabbit is a defective specimen
of its species.
And since the life characteristic
of a sunflower or a mole does not include sight,
such creatures are not to be criticized
for not seeing anything.
As I said, in Aristotle, we do not
find any conception of a standard of well-being
different from the standard of perfection
implicit in appropriate conception of organismic forms.
This suggests that an individual organism's well-being
is guaranteed as long as no imperfection affects it.
If, on the other hand, it is true
that well-being and perfection need not coincide,
one of the following two situations
might arise for any particular organism.
One, its life is affected by privation
in the sense of detriment without diverging
from the pattern inscribed in its species, and two, its life
does diverge from this pattern by privation
in the sense of imperfection without yet thereby exhibiting
any detriment.
This second possibility might be thought
to be realized by the lives of many animals
that live in zoos or plants living in flower pots,
for on the face of it, the way in which their sheltered lives
diverge from the lives they would typically
lead in the wild does not necessarily
amount to a detriment-- that is, privation or deficiency
by the standard of well-being.
Now what I'm going to say may well be relevant to this idea,
but I'm primarily concerned with the possibility of situation
one, namely that an organism suffers
some sort of detrimental privation
without thereby departing from the pattern
characteristic of its form.
We may now want to know a little more clearly
how the manifestations of an organism's life
are related teleologically to its life form.
Let us approach this question by taking a look at equipments
and operations of an organism that contribute
to its perfection by serving its species or conspecifics rather
than itself.
Here's an example.
One is-- reproductive equipment serves
the thriving of a given population of rabbits
rather than its own.
Why then should we nevertheless say,
if Bunny is disinclined to look after its young
or unable to reproduce, it is not healthy?
It shows a defect or privation.
Such privation does not, after all,
affect the life of Bunny in the same way as blindness
or inability to run.
The only satisfactory answer to that question
seems to be-- for an organism x to be healthy,
x has to satisfy standards of completeness and perfection
that are determined by x's form or nature
rather than standards of well-being
in the sense of standards that are determined
by what is required for x itself to comfortably survive.
And since a certain type of reproduction
and the corresponding organismic equipment
are characteristic of rabbit life,
Bunny does not live up to its proverbially prolific form
unless it is able and inclined to reproduce.
Now the relevance of this point or topic
should be obvious, for with man, the practice of virtue
seems to be the paradigm case of a perfection that
serves the individual agents, fellow humans,
and human society more than him or herself
and is nevertheless required for the individual's being counted
as a good man.
The background to this altruistic teleology
of perfection is the peculiar kind of concept
that we use to identify and classify organisms.
We understand what it is for an individual living thing
to be this or that kind of plant or animal
by understanding not exactly what it is in fact like,
what features it actually exhibits,
but rather what it is like if it is a perfect instance
of that kind.
And what that perfection consists in
is determined in part by the fact
that there could be no specimens of species
x unless the specimens tended to promote
the preservation of species x rather than just and only
their own preservation.
This seems to be the reason why our concept of an organism
treats perfection, in this sense, as its telos,
as a standard it ought to meet and by which
we judge the goodness or badness of its organs,
internal and external conditions, dispositions,
operations, and, in the case of man, character and conduct.
What has so far been said explains, I think,
why organismic operations-- organs, et cetera--
are characterized as what they are in part by what
they are for with respect to the organism's form of life.
It implies that an organism can be declared
defective or non-defective in this or that respect
only in virtue of something like a criterion that
relates the respect in question to the species
to which the organism belongs.
And this is the criterion of perfection.
On the other hand, a suspicion remains
that the intuitive idea of individual well-being,
however vague, must be respected and that perfectionism does not
take sufficient account of it.
There are components and incidents
in the lives of individuals that must count
as defective by the standard of perfection
but not necessarily as instrumental
to what we should naturally view as the organism's well-being.
Equally and perhaps more importantly,
we shall be inclined to say that of certain things an organism
exhibits or does or undergoes-- that they are failures or evils
which do reduce its well-being even though they've conformed
to the pattern of life that characterizes
its form, its life form.
This last point means that there are
problematic kinds of detriment.
We come to Section 6 now.
Problematic kinds of detriments are just pain or sacrifice
on behalf of offspring, detriments
that detract from an organism's well-being while yet
not counting as compromising its perfection.
These detriments or evils are problematic in that they
challenge the assumption that the criteria by which
to probe an organism's well-being
do not reach beyond the criteria by which
to probe its perfection as a member of the species.
There are counter-instances to the inference,
"No lack of perfection."
Hence, no lessening of well-being.
To get a clearer view of the nature of problematic evils,
as I call them, let's contrast them
with their totally unproblematic cousins.
When I call these unproblematic, I mean, of course,
that they are minor evils but rather that they
don't undermine the Aristotelian assimilation of well-being
to perfection.
An evil is unproblematic if it is both an imperfection
and a detriment.
By this definition, it is what makes a plant or animal
defective from the point of view of both perfection
and individual well-being.
These unproblematic evils include all the ways
in which the constitution and the functioning of the organism
deviate from the pattern that defines the life
form of the organism as long as the deviation
affects the well-being of that very organism.
Such deviation may be congenital or rather due
to flawed development or accidents or external forces.
Cases in point are, for example, a disease
in the leaves of a tree, wounds or blindness in a rabbit,
and aphasia or cowardice in a man.
Now, I've just mentioned cowardice as a moral failing.
That means both imperfection and detriment.
It means imperfection because a population of humans
will not flourish and scarcely survive
if its members are disposed to run away
from every type of danger or discomfort.
They need courage-- not, however,
only on behalf of others but at least as much
on their own behalf.
Sometimes, the individual needs courage
in order to satisfy his or her own needs
and possibly to survive.
So here, lack of virtue is detriment as well as
imperfection.
This is not so obvious in the case
of justice and other so-called other-regarding virtues,
as we know from Plato's early dialogues, as I said.
Morality, it seems, can even be a threat to well-being.
Note, however, that this is not in the present context,
my reason for claiming that perfection does not
entail well-being.
The argument is rather, roughly speaking,
that morality does not guarantee well-being,
neither in an instrumental role nor by constituting happiness,
and that this is shown by the occurrence
of problematic evils, evils which, unlike cowardice, are
detrimental to well-being without being imperfections.
They are things that we cannot but view as harming
the individual, although their occurrence is either
constitutive of perfection or a typical consequence
of something constitutive of perfection.
These are the two possibilities that I'm
going to examine in the next two sections, 7 and 8.
My first category of cases is represented paradigmatically
by bodily pain.
Now, it is well-known that pain plays an important supportive
role in most animals' lives.
In virtue of its function as a warning of imminent injury,
the disposition to feel it belongs
to innumerable forms of life as a condition
of their perfection.
But this is no reason to deny that its occurrence is an evil.
It is not, strictly speaking, a case of privation
simply because it's not the undue absence of anything,
but if things like ease, content, comfort
are part of an animal's well-being,
pain is constitutive or a formal cause
of the corresponding privation and, in any case,
an obvious evil every animal tries to avoid or escape from.
There are further vital functions
that, in similar ways, contribute positively
to many kinds of life and are nonetheless evils by affecting
comfort in comfortable ways.
I'm thinking of things like tiredness, hunger, or fear.
In other cases, the evil in question
has a place in a life form by contributing
to the well-being not of the organism
that suffers but to others.
For the human species, punishment
is an instance in that legal punishment deters.
It is an evil for the person who is punished,
though Socrates would teach us that it's
even worse not be punished.
But I don't think we can deny that's an evil.
Nevertheless, it has a positive function
in the life of a society.
Right.
So much for a reminder of one type of necessary evil of cases
in which some component of an organism's life is required by
or, at any rate, compatible with that organism's approaching
the perfection that defines its form of life and yet
has to be viewed as an evil when and where it is found,
where it actually occurs.
The problematic evils that we've just considered
have a common structure.
The affliction in question has itself
a function in the service of the kind of life
in which it occurs.
Pain and punishment could not play their beneficial roles
as risk detector or as deterrent unless they
were experienced as evils by those that suffer them.
Let us now consider a second category of cases.
Here, the evil or detriment is merely
a consequence of something that an organism
needs to have or do or undergo in order
to live the kind of life characteristic of its species.
This is the Section 8 on your handout.
The first example to consider is the unpleasant sort of toil
that inevitably goes into some of the activities and actions
that we and other animals typically
have to engage in in order to secure such vital goods as food
or health or knowledge.
Think, next, of animals that suffer exhaustion or pain
or similar kinds of hurt for the sake
of their young or other conspecifics or the population
they belong to at large.
The kind of behavior I have in mind
may even, with both human and other animals, result in death.
Think, for example, of the bee that dies by stinging
or the soldier that loses his or her life in legitimate defence
of their country.
The other case in point is the discomfort, pain, and risk
involved in pregnancy and childbirth.
Another example of evils consequent
upon things instrumental to perfection, as I called it,
is supplied by the kind of pain, discomfort, and damage that we
suffer at the hands of surgeons and other doctors.
Even where these helpers are highly skilled and extremely
conscientious, many of the means they
employ to make our lives less effective
do, inevitably, at the same time gives rise to evils.
The same pattern is instanced where morality or the law,
paradigmatic components of human perfection,
are bound to place unpleasant constraints on our freedom
or comfort.
And notoriously, virtue sometimes
requires behavior with consequences
detrimental to the agent's well-being.
As the Psalmist grumbles, many are the afflictions
of the righteous.
A virtuous life, a life to that important extent in accordance
with the human life form, seems to risk disadvantages
and evils, sometimes death.
Finally, I cannot refrain from reminding you of a notorious
instance of the self-sacrificing mindset often found in members
of my own sex.
Male spiders of several species, we are told,
don't have much of a chance of mating without subsequently
being eaten up by an ungrateful spouse in the very wedding
night.
Indeed, because of the *** cannibalism,
these species are called, somewhat cynically, widow
spiders or black widows.
The example shows that the evil in question,
which the male spider may, after all, be lucky enough to escape,
is not itself what contributes to the animal's perfection,
but that in no way prevents it from being an evil that,
on the one hand, is contracted in the perfect pursuit
of perfection and, on the other, constitutes loss
or failure by any plausible standard
of individual well-being.
Now as for Section 9, what you have on the handout
has to suffice for moment.
Perhaps you will want to raise the role of death
in life forms in the discussion.
So we come to Section 10.
If the considerations I have adduced so far are accepted,
the notion of an individual's life is characterized by two
tele that cannot be reduced to each other--
perfection and well-being.
Does this state of affairs point to an incoherence,
an incoherence in our understanding of what,
for example, a human life ought to be like?
Do we have to say that only one of the two teleologies
is the true one?
Here is one possible answer to this question.
There are indeed situations or respects
in which application of the two teleological standards
yields incompatible evaluations.
But this is merely because these two standards
measure different things, just as the standards of, say,
cleverness and honesty represent different tele
and, as applied to a single utterance, measure
different aspects of it and therefore
may yield different evaluations, sometimes divergent ones.
So there's nothing to be worried about in that duality
of results.
It is to be expected.
So there's one way of looking at the apparent conflict
between two teleologies.
Now it may be that a consistent account of life cannot
accommodate two distinct technologies,
not as opposed to the assumption expressed in this answer.
But even if the answer is accepted,
there seems to be something for you
to decide when you yourself are the organism whose teleology is
in question.
As soon as you reflect on your own life's orientation,
there does seem to be something to choose,
for we do not only study and describe and evaluate
our lives in the way that Martians and we ourselves
in the roles of, say, zoologists or therapists might.
We are members of a species that live by practical reason,
each applying its operation to him or herself.
So you determine at least some of what
to do by thinking it out for yourself
on the basis of a telos conception.
Hence, you can ask of the two tele, perfection
and well-being, which is it that I have adopted?
And perhaps, which ought I to adopt
as shaping the practical telos in light of which I
apply practical reason to my own performance as a human being?
Is it well-being or, rather, perfection
that inspires or should inspire the ultimate reasons on which I
act?
Obviously, the need to make up your mind
about what telos to respect is not a philosopher's invention.
Philosophers may point to and analyze
the nature and the mutual connection of the two
ideologies.
They may ask why we seem to be confronted with precisely two
alternatives, are they may help us to understand
the implications of the options, but the question
of your ultimate orientation is a genuinely practical one
that poses itself, sometimes obtusively,
in the context of human life.
But now we have to face a fatal question.
Can one really make up one's mind in this matter
except by blindly plumping for either telos?
How could there be a genuine choice?
Choice needs criteria of choice-worthiness.
The tele in question, however, are
themselves the only available sources of criteria
by which to choose anything.
One cannot decide by criteria that are to be adopted
as a result of the decision.
Furthermore, it is not easy to determine what exactly ought
to go into a reasonably well-defined notion
of individual well-being.
This makes it difficult to get a clear idea about what one would
or ought to be opting for or rejecting
if there was such a thing as choosing between those two
orientations.
Now these two problems-- how can you choose,
and what exactly are you to choose or reject?
These two problems are reflected in the fact
that in our philosophical tradition,
a number of different answers have been offered
to the question-- whether and how our ways of acting
should take account of an overall telos in human life.
So I end this lecture by commenting briefly
on some of the answers that have been predominant
in Western thinking about these matters.
I'll start with the Stoics.
It would be misunderstanding-- a frequent misunderstanding,
actually-- of their position to think that they restrict
the teleology of human action to the pull of perfection,
that that is their starting point and their assumption
or presupposition.
On the contrary, like all practical ancient philosophy,
Stoicism has its center in a doctrine about happiness,
but the Stoics claim that happiness consists
in the practice of ethical virtue and nothing
else so that there isn't really any difference
between an individual human being's
well-being and his or her accordance
with the telos of moral perfection.
Given our rational nature, this perfection
consists in nothing but the exercise of virtue
and, in particular, apathy-- that
is, indifference in attitude to what actually happens,
anything that happens.
Nor is there any other standard of well-being for us
than practical rationality-- except for virtue.
So perfection alone can be our happiness,
and to the extent that it is achieved,
no suffering can undermine real human well-being.
St. Augustine famously thought that to the extent
that they seriously defended this position,
the Stoics were deluding themselves,
and I daresay he was right.
Their considerations show neither
that perfection is nothing but the practice of virtue
or that perfection, as they conceive of it,
inevitably means well-being.
Next, Aristotle.
He seems to side with the Stoics in having happiness consist
in the practice of virtue, but he is somewhat more realistic.
He admits that a man may operate unwaveringly
in accordance with his rational nature and, in this respect,
suffer little privation and yet not achieve well-being
in the sense of or approaching happiness
because he undergoes torture or suffers the loss of family
and friends or similar misfortunes.
Note, however, that on his view, the goods of fortune
are required for happiness chiefly because they
are required for the unimpeded implementation
of theoretical or practical reason-- that
is, for the sake of perfection rather than whatever
we think of as well-being.
On Aristotle's view, then, virtue
makes happiness likely but not certain.
Shall we conclude from this that you
should choose the virtuous life only given
the prospect of fortunate circumstances?
And given that virtue itself may even
threaten to bring you great suffering,
should you give it the sack as soon as it does?
Well, as Philippa Foot, observes,
once you are in the tight corner or otherwise
threatened by bad consequences of good conduct,
it is too late to abandon virtue,
for if you are really virtuous, you
have acquired character, a habits that can't easily
be shed.
This fact, however, does not disprove the possibility
of alternatives.
I mean, alternatives to a life of virtue.
Another ancient doctrine that promises well-being
through virtue goes back to Epicurus.
He is aware that happiness, understood
as maximum contentment, is a delicate thing to aim at.
To avoid frustration and disappointment,
you have to keep your desires rather modest,
and for achieving happiness, virtue,
now in the role of a means, an instrument, is indispensable.
Friendship is the most enjoyable good, but to enjoy it,
you have to be a good friend yourself,
and Epicurus goes so far as to say
that you have to be prepared to sacrifice
your life for your friend.
Here, we see that enjoyment, happiness, and even well-being,
understood as ultimate ends or goals
for the sake of which you choose particular goods,
are different notions.
You don't attain happiness by pursuing contentment
through friendship but by pursuing friendship or, rather,
things demanded or suggestive of friendship.
And as Kierkegaard observes, the door to happiness
opens outward.
You can't go for it directly.
There's no time here to pursue this line of thought
any further.
In the present context, the important point is this.
Epicureans and, more recently, contract theorists
such as David Gauthier treat moral perfection
not as constitutive but rather as productive
of individual well-being.
They try to give perfection a place in one's
teleological scheme without sacrificing well-being,
but they view the demands of perfection
as merely conditional.
So they have to recommend morality
without moral motivation.
Well-being has the last word.
Next, there is the tragic view.
It shares Augustine's realism in impressing on us the likelihood
that the virtuous life is doomed to involve suffering, some
due to virtue itself, some not.
Nevertheless, we must not, on the tragic view,
pursue any kind of well-being that
diverges from the standards of perfection.
The demands of morality are absolute
and uniquely binding on us.
If obedience to them threatens a man's well-being,
this is just very unfortunate but no reason
to question perfection as the only overall orientation that
is rationally acceptable.
This is a heroic picture, but it seems to treat the human being
as a hopelessly ill-fated creature in whose nature
objection to the standard of perfection, on the one hand,
and spontaneous tendency towards well-being, on the other,
cannot in any way be harmonized.
This observation is not, as it stands,
an argument against the tragic view,
but it expresses a very deep-seated refusal, I think,
to be intellectually satisfied with that view.
Kant is a little more optimistic.
He does teach that in acting, we ought
to go for his version of perfection-- namely,
accordance with the categorical imperative--
as opposed to well-being or happiness.
But his position is complex, subtle, not quite unified,
and possibly inconsistent.
His notion of the highest good, summum bonum,
combines supreme happiness with modern perfection
as a condition of marriaging the former.
Since we do inevitably strive for happiness, he holds,
we cannot but believe that conditions under which we
achieve it as well as moral goodness are, in fact,
available.
Even if you think, as I do, that Kant's ethics of moral autonomy
is wrong, you may find, as I do, his postulate
of practical reason rather appealing,
namely the postulate that perfection and well-being may
and should be expected to go together
even though philosophy has no means of showing that
and how they can.
Finally, there is the immoralist,
who refuses to view our practical rationality
as disposition geared by nature to the reasoned pursuit
of perfection.
He treats it as no more than a capacity.
Reason is a capacity that allows each rational individual
to devise the ways and means by which they may achieve
a maximum of well-being in accordance
with their own choosing.
It may be right, the immoralist might even say,
that our concept of a human being
points to perfection as a natural telos,
but what is human nature to me?
I conclude that philosophy, though certainly called upon
and able to give a fuller and more accurate
account than presented here of the matters at issue,
may yet be unable to take the discussion of this topic
far beyond the point or points to which this lecture has taken
it.
What is the right telos on which to base one's practical
thinking and acting?
This question seems to be one of those
that can be meaningfully asked but not argumentatively
answered by philosophers.
In this situation, it seems proper to say
a few words about religious and theological responses
to the ostensible claims on us of the two competing
teleologies.
I feel competent, at best, to sketch
the relevant teaching of the Christian tradition, which
is my own, and a variant which we have already
encountered in Kant.
Judaism and possibly Islam may contain similar doctrines,
but I'm just going to restrict myself
to the Christian message.
It seems to imply the following.
In the situation in which we find ourselves,
perfection and, more specifically,
ethical perfection is indeed not only a natural telos
of human beings but also the standard by which we
ought to assess the rationality of our this-worldly operations.
At the same time, we do not go wrong in postulating
a point of view from which, first, attainment of that
telos merits to be accompanied by happiness
and, second, some standard of individual well-being
or happiness does have the last word regarding
the telos of human life.
This standard is supplied by a telos that does indeed
consist in perfection, but the center of this perfection
is not the virtuous life but union with God.
Although orientation towards this telos is, in some sense,
natural to man, its attainment, which
constitutes true and complete human well-being and happiness,
transcends the powers of unaided human nature.
Philosophy has no argumentative access
to this sort of doctrine, which promises
a final, non-accidental coincidence between perfection
and well-being.
Philosophy can, at best, testify to the consistency
and intelligibility of the doctrine
or to the opposite, as the case may be.
Philosophy has, in any case, to face the fact,
it seems to me, that in this area,
its own explorations lead to questions,
the answers to which, if there are any, are not its own.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: Thank you so much, Anselm.
I just have a question about the practical point of view
and this choice of telos and, in particular, about the Stoics,
because I think there's an interesting resource
in their view, and I wonder what you make of it.
So they have a theory on which there's
a possibility of extending our motivations outward.
They assume that we begin from a concern
with our own well-being-- and they
ground that in the way that all organisms seem
to want to preserve themselves-- but that we uniquely,
as rational beings, can extend the boundaries
of identification outward from ourselves
and that this, at least, if we just look around,
is also a natural process.
We human beings tend to have friends.
They certainly live in social groups.
They have families.
And then they put a little bit of pressure
on amoralists or the immoralist, and they
say, how could you draw the line at any
of these points in a principled way?
It seems like you ought to identify with, actually,
the whole universe.
Maybe we don't want to go that far.
All rational beings or something like that.
And then suddenly you have a view on which it's true
that you start from a practical point of view,
but we get to the point-- the sort
of non-individualistic ethics.
ANSELM MUELLER: When you say practical point of view,
[INAUDIBLE], you mean a point of view
that concentrates on your own well-being,
and then you enlarge the circle.
Is that right?
SPEAKER 1: Something like that, although I can imagine maybe we
want to include things like friends and family,
actually, sort of as--
ANSELM MUELLER: At the beginning.
SPEAKER 1: At the beginning.
I'm not sure about that.
ANSELM MUELLER: Right.
Now there are two questions, I think,
that are raised by this perspective.
One is, to what extent are the Stoics right
about the expansion of the borders?
I mean, you can really ask the question, how far will
it actually go?
But my main question is the second one,
namely-- even if they are right in this,
what I find objectionable is the idea
that you can be so identified with this widened telos
that no suffering can actually impinge on your happiness.
I think this is just a bit much.
OK.
Thank you for the question.
SPEAKER 2: Hello.
Thank you, Anselm.
I really loved the talk.
I was wondering, once you already
establish that there are two different telos,
why not go further and think that there are more than two?
Human beings can be conceived in different perfections,
like parents-- I don't know-- professionals.
And different professionals might
entail different perfections.
And also, you might have different conceptions of how
to characterize well-being.
Why just stop in having just two, perfection and well-being?
ANSELM MUELLER: OK.
The first answer is that there is a historical reason.
I mean, the tension to which I've pointed is, of course, one
that philosophers and people have known about for centuries,
and it is a classic topic.
And you find explicit discussions of the question--
whether there can be other tele.
For example, in Aristotle, he talks about the possible tele
of production and says, oh, no.
They won't do as ultimate ends.
They must be subordinate to practices, good practices.
And I think that even when you look at something
like the ideal of a particular profession
or perhaps even the life of an artist, I find it very likely
that it's plausible to say we can't reduce
these tele to the ones I've discussed,
although I admit that I have not made any attempt to prove this.
I think that in particular, with regard
to the life of an artist, one may well
want to know more about this before one
settles on the dichotomy I have presupposed.
SPEAKER 3: Thank you very much for this.
I have a question.
I'm confused about the very definitions
that you gave for perfection versus the well-being,
because it seems at various different places in your talk
as if you were implying that perfection was a social good
and that well-being was an individual good so
that it's the individual against a community.
But then in other places, it seemed as though perfection
was a good of, say, the mind or the heart versus the body
so that you had the body, basically,
as well-being versus the well-being of the soul
or something like that.
And then there were other places where
it seemed as though there was the perfection
of a human being, body and soul, against the moral perfection
or something like that.
And it just seemed as though there was a conflation
of all those different things.
And even in the fact that we started out
talking about animals a great deal,
it seems as though several of those different dichotomies
wouldn't even apply to animals, for instance,
whereas a couple of them would.
So my question is-- it just seemed
to be a lot of different variables there,
and they weren't necessarily all playing well together, which
led to some confusion.
ANSELM MUELLER: I think the first dichotomy
that you mentioned is very much the one I
wanted to introduce or to remind you of.
It's not quite the contrast between individual well-being
and the well-being of society.
It's rather that the idea of perfection
is derived from a point of view that
looks at any individual organism as a representative
of a species, of a form of life.
Now the idea behind this is that we identify the individual.
We cannot identify the individual as what it is
without having an idea of what belongs to the form of life
that is characteristic of its species,
and the things that belong to the form of life have
the teleological nature.
That is, we can say what a sort of exemplary animal
or plant of that kind is like.
If you look, say, at a book of anatomy,
the pictures will represent not cases of deformation
but exemplary patterns.
Now what is exemplary represents the good of the individual
as well as what is good for the species.
So the individual is not left out in the ideal of perfection.
I mean, as the example of courage shows,
it is something that human beings need both collectively
and individually, and this is quite typical of features
of perfection, whereas by well-being and happiness,
which I take to be a rather ill-defined notion--
or ill-defined notions, anyway-- the ideals
hinted at by these concepts would
be ideals restricted to what the individual wants for himself.
I admit that the notion-- and I've
indicated at various points that the notion is a difficult one,
but I don't think we can do quite without it
and talk as if the idea of well-being
were exhausted by what is contained anywhere
in the idea of perfection.
OK.
SPEAKER 4: At the end of the lecture,
you moved beyond philosophy, a little bit into religion.
I wonder if you could comment on the role of psychologists
in helping us sort this out.
I'm thinking, for example, that there's a lot of research--
and I'm not a psychologist.
I only read it in popular form.
But say somebody like Adam Grant, who in Give and Take
seems to say we human beings have a tendency
sometimes to misinterpret what will lead to our well-being.
So we might think that taking makes us happier,
but in fact, he demonstrates that giving ultimately
leads to happiness-- or people who say we pick the wrong thing
to make us happy.
Do you think that psychologists play a role in this discussion?
ANSELM MUELLER: I think so.
I mean, there are schools of psychology
that would say we bring no ideals of goodness
into the meeting with the client.
It's just the client's own ideals and wishes and strivings
that we take for granted.
But it's probably difficult for a psychologist
to stick to this program.
So the psychologist is faced with the same kind of question
as the client himself and any individual, the question
I mentioned, what I call the existential question
at the end of the paper.
Now the particular case I have in mind
is a good example of the complications
that we get into when we look more closely
at the concept of well-being.
As you say, there are psychologists
that stress the importance of attitudes of giving and being
generous, hospitality, and this kind of thing,
and then we face, also, conceptual questions about what
it is.
If I give something to somebody and it gives me satisfaction,
is my aim to help the other person
or support the other person, or is
my aim to be satisfied myself?
So there are many questions that I
have tried to avoid in the paper,
but you are quite right that one would have to study them.
SPEAKER 5: To a certain extent, you already
addressed my question, but I was just
interested-- I want to ask you to say a little bit more
about what counts as a detriment.
So I understand what counts as an imperfection.
If something is an organism, it has
to have an essence that it can fail
to approximate in various respects.
So I have a grasp on the concept of imperfection,
but I don't have as firm a grasp on the concept of a detriment,
I guess.
I mean, there are paradigm cases-- so, suffering, pain,
and things like that.
But could you say a little bit more
systematically, I guess, about the concept of a detriment?
So maybe--
ANSELM MUELLER: About the concept of--
SPEAKER 5: The concept of a detriment
or the concept of well-being so that in cases
that aren't such paradigm cases, we have some criteria to go on,
by which we can say, this counts as a detriment or this does not
count as a detriment.
ANSELM MUELLER: I don't think I have a criterion.
I think my discussion was largely
based on the indubitability of paradigm cases.
I don't really think that the notion of well-being,
in the sense I've used it, has been studied very much.
Maybe there are people who can suggest
to me a good read for that, but I really
don't think I can answer your question.
SPEAKER 6: So here's where I'm a little bit lost.
In October, when there was a presentation describing
the purpose of this endeavor-- Virtue, Happiness,
and Meaning of Life-- it was to arrive
at more universality of definitions
of each of these things, particularly virtue
and happiness.
So I'm understanding perfection and deficits and the things
that the woman over to the right brought up as a summary.
So far I'm with her, but where I got
lost is just at the very end.
You switched from talking about perfection
to talking about virtue, and now I'm left with a question--
well, did you say something about what
virtue is that I missed, or are you
implying that seeking perfection is the meaning of virtue?
Or, what is virtue?
ANSELM MUELLER: Right.
An important question.
My understanding of virtue is that it
is the central element of perfection in the human being.
The notion of perfection, I think, is more or less the same
whether we talk of plants or animals or human beings,
or it is perhaps an ontological concept
that is applied to these three realms.
It is remarkable that we don't talk about good animals.
We talk about their organs and functions
and so on as being good or well-ordered or something.
We don't normally talk about good animals.
We talk about good people.
And why is it that by this, we don't
mean people who are healthy but people with a good character?
And now this is only an appeal to what we say,
but perhaps it is significant that we have this usage.
And what is the significance?
I think the significance is that all the other goods that
belong to perfection in an animal of our sort--
all the other goods are, we seem to assume, replaceable or not
of unique importance, whereas we treat a man's character
as being of unique importance.
And now the question then arises, why is this so?
But it does seem to be a fact that we
treat the character of a person as the most important element
of the person's perfection.
You also asked what I mean by virtue.
Well, I would roughly say a virtue is a certain pattern
of motivation in acting, and it is that kind of pattern that
makes a character good or bad.
And the connection between virtue and perfection
is indeed that, as far as I can see, virtue is, in a man,
the central component of perfection.
CANDACE VOGLER: Please join me in thanking the professor.
[APPLAUSE]