Prima Secundae
Lecture 2: The Good as What All Desire: First Principles of Ethics

Transcript
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Here, here's a paragraph. Every art, he says, and every science, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good. As Thomas will explain in his commentary, Aristotle is giving a kind of induction, right, from the whole of human activity. Every art, right, like the art of carpentry, right, is that seeking some good? Is it good to have chairs? Or should we be sitting on the floor here, right? Or is it good to have a bed? Good to have a table sometimes, right? Or good to have a house? How about the art of cooking? Does that think it can be any good? Well, Aristotle says it aims at making the food tasty, not healthy. Yeah, but the medical art aims at health, right? Okay. So if you go through inductively different arts, doesn't every art seem to be aiming at some good? Why do they make these ballpoint pins, huh? Why do they make these computers? Why do they make this car, you know, huh? Could they have a car, huh? Thomas says, you know, you can travel without a horse, but for travel away, you've got to have a horse. Now you've got to have a car, right? You shouldn't have said that in a minute. Wasn't that required to go out for it? I think that was part of their rule. I think horse. So I always thought that was a strange example. I don't know. He's complaining he was not living well. He doesn't have to travel well. Okay. So you could break this down, right? He says the other art is you could, and maybe the class, you know, Aristotle would, right? You know, as far as you know, these are like almost, what, Aristotle's notes, right? So it's very condensed, right? And, you know, some people I know, when they give a public talk, they might have an index card with the points they want to touch upon, but they're going to expand upon those, right? And that's why it's a joke there, but this one professor wasn't too good. He's only been on my board, right? And I said, oh, you'll probably go back to the stuff we talked about the first semester. And so I said to my cousin, Donald, do you have any notes? Yeah, he said, I've got the whole person on an index card. So he's got his phrases and so on, you know, and you can, I guess, you know, I've heard all these cases of our, you know, students have reduced a guy's course to a index card and said, now, did you really say any more than this during the semester? He said, no, I guess not. Yeah. So you can expand upon this and go through each art, right? And, you know, the art of the, what, the painter or something, right? The art of the auto mechanic, right? There are all these arts, but they all seem to be, what, aiming at some good, right? In every science, right? In geometry, are you aiming at some good? Yeah. To know the truth about triangles and squares and other marvelous things like that? Okay. In natural philosophy, trying to know the truth about natural things, right? So every art or every science is aiming at some good, right? And then he touches upon foresight, Thomas says, because foresight directs what? Choice and action, right? And he touches upon the will, right, which chooses these things. And likewise, every action, every doing, what you're doing, you're doing it for some purpose, right? It may be nothing more than your amusement, right? Or to distract yourself or something, right? But in every choice is regard to some good, right? Why did you choose to have steak rather than chicken or chicken rather than fish or something, right? And anything rather than salmon, right? Some good, I was in, yeah, right? So they all seem to deem it some good, right? Whence, he says, it has been well said, that the good is what all, what? Desire, huh? Okay. Now, another way you could translate that, huh? Translate it into foolish, fully English. Not foolish English. It's saying it's what want, huh? The good is what all want. That's a nice alliteration. What and want. But you could also translate it with the Latin word desire, right? Now, this is kind of the beginning of thinking about the good, huh? This is really the first definition of good, huh? And it's very important to see that that is what we all, to some extent, see as the first definition of good, right? Aristotle's giving it here in the context of ethics here, right? So he takes this from man, huh? But, you know, if you go back to the famous dialogues of Plato and so on, you know, Socrates was talking to a boy like he talks to the slave boy of Mino, right? And the boy is going to give you kind of the first notion of the good, right? Now, if you read the dialogues of Plato, it's kind of marvelous that he represents men as they will in conversation usually proceed. And when Socrates asks them what is something, what they give is examples of this thing, right? And so when he asks Mino, say, what is virtue, Mino gives him examples of virtue, right? And when he asks Euthyphro what piety is, he gives him examples of piety, right? When he asks Theotelius what is science, he gets examples of science, right? But, you'll find that it's invariably what people do at first, huh? They give examples rather than a definition. And so sometimes Socrates will try to say, well, you've given me examples of this, but you really haven't told me what this thing is, huh? You've got to bring out what's common to all these things. Why do you call them all virtue, right? Or why do you call them all sciences, right? What do they all have in common, right? But this is because of the natural way of knowing, right? Which is from the senses into reason. So the senses know examples, right, to some extent. And reason has to compare the examples and separate out what they have in common, huh? And that's the way you start to approach the, what, definition, right, huh? So if I asked a little boy, you know, what is water, he'd say, well, that's water, you know? That's water, you know? And if there's a stream out there, that's water, right? I think he'd point to examples of it, huh? So if Socrates asked the slave boy or little boy today, what is good, the boy would give examples of things he considers to be good, huh? So you might say candy's good, right? And pizza's good, maybe he'd say, right? Okay. And then you'd say, well, is there only things you eat that are good? How about baseball? Oh, yeah, baseball's good. Football, yeah, that's good, yeah. How about vacation? Yeah, that's good, you know? So he goes on giving examples of things that he considers to be good, right? And then Socrates would say, now, what do these all have in common? Are they all sweet? Well, the pizza isn't sweet. Are they all edible? Well, no, you can't eat the baseball. It's not going to taste good, anyway. So, what do they all have in common, see? Why do you call these things all good? And if the little boy reflects upon them a bit, and so on, makes a little help with Socrates, but he seems to call the things that he wants good, right? And the things he doesn't want, they're not good. So, in a sense, the little boy, the first notion he has of good is the good is what all want, right? Okay? So that's kind of the place to begin your thinking about the good, huh? You could also say the good is something that's wanted. Okay? That's another way of saying it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now, if you go now back to Socrates in the dialogue called the Euthyphro, right? He asks Euthyphro who's going to prosecute his father for impiety. This guy must know something about what piety is. Are you going to prosecute his own father for impiety? And Euthyphro says, oh yeah, I know what it is. But when Socrates asks him what it is, Euthyphro gives him examples, right? And so Socrates has to get him to try to bring out what they have in common. And Euthyphro comes up with something like this, that the pious is what the gods approve of, right? Now, this is a certain problem because the gods don't all agree as to the same things. But even if we admit, Euthyphro, that there's something that all the gods approve of, right? So he gives you a first definition of the pious. The pious is what all the gods approve of, right? Or we who don't think there are more than one God, we wouldn't have that problem, right? We say the pious is what God approves of, right? Or you might say sin is something that displeases God or something, right? Okay? And then Socrates asks another question, right? And as Heisenberg said, right? To ask the right question is often to go more than, what, halfway to the truth, right? I'm trying to emphasize the point that Heisenberg is making, is to say, let's represent by line the time and the effort it takes to get from ignorance to knowledge, right? Now, the average person might think, you know, where along this comes the question? So that comes at the beginning, doesn't it, right? And then the long thing is to, no, no, Heisenberg says, huh? If you just take, mathematically had the little point here, right? Asking the right question is to go more than halfway. That's an interesting point, huh? Now, it fits in very well with what Socrates is doing, too. Because Socrates, when he has a conversation with the slave boy, and Socrates, you know, has made this strange statement to Mino, that learning is just recalling what you already know. And Mino says, that's an interesting idea, but do you have any proof? And so, he takes the example of the slave boy, and he says, has he ever studied geometry? Well, the slave boy was born in the house of Mino, and had never been applied to geometry, right? Never studied it. And so Socrates asks him, you know, how do you double a square? What would be the side of a square twice as big? And he said, well, you double the side. And so, he doesn't know. But then Socrates starts to ask the slave boy questions, and he recognizes his mistake. And out of the answers of the slave boy, eventually comes the way to what? Double a square, if you read the dialogue, right? So Socrates says, I didn't teach him, right? The way double a square came out of his answers, came out of what he knows already. Therefore, learning is just what? Calling, yeah. Now, without going into all the difficulties during Socrates' position, right? What's interesting about that is that Socrates is only asking questions, right? And by asking questions, the slave boy seems to discover the way to double a square by himself. And therefore, it's all coming from the slave boy. But actually, the questions were from Socrates. And by asking the right questions, you're almost there at each step. And so you rise at the idea, right? Okay? So he'll do it at the slave boy. He'll say, let's see, this is the original square. And Socrates says, now, could you put another square here, exactly like the original one next to it? And he says, yeah. Another one below it, just like that, right? And another one fell out the corner. And how many times bigger would this be? And he says, four times. And then he takes, what, the diagonals. And the slave boy can see that each one is divided into two. So this one right here is twice as big as this, right? So all these steps that he goes through are very simple, right? But eventually the slave boy sees, as Mars, really, that the diagonal of a square is going to be the side of a square twice as big. And that's kind of a marvelous thing to do. You start to think about it, you know? A little bit. But it comes out of what the slave boy can see right away when Socrates asks him these simple questions, right? You can see right away this four times as big. And this is half of that, right? Half of four is two, and therefore the diagonal must be the side of the square and twice as big, right? This square right here is half of these four, and therefore twice as big. Marvelous, marvelous. Well, the question then that Socrates teaches us to ask here, Heisenberg says that, and the Greeks taught us how to ask the right question. So Socrates says to Euthyphro, Is it pious because the gods approve of it? Or do they approve of it because it is pious? Is murder bad because God doesn't approve of it? Or doesn't God approve of it because it is bad? So what question could you ask? Socrates asked about this, huh? Is it good because we want it? We want it because it is good. Now, if you know the meanings of before and after, right? In the fifth, in the fifth chapter of the categories, one sense of before and after is the cause is before the effect, right? So this is the question about before and after. Is wanting the cause of something being good? Is its goodness and effect that it's being wanted? Or is the goodness of the thing the cause of our wanting in it? So wanting is an effect of the goodness of the thing, right? The key question about order here. You can state the question another way by saying, Is wanting the cause or the effect of the good, right? It's really the same question I'm asking there, right? Now there's a very simple dialectic you can go through to try to answer this question, right? In dialectic, you don't have to be altogether certain, right? But you have to have probability, right? Well, if wanting was the cause of something being good, then the fact that you want something would have made it good for you. But everybody has this experience in life, that something they wanted, right? you don't have to be able to answer this question, you don't have to be able to answer this question, you don't have to be able to answer this question, you don't have to be able to answer this question, was not, what, good for them, right? And it's not someone else simply saying it's not good for you, but they themselves came to recognize that this was not good for them, right? I should take this simple example of the man who's at the party, right? And someone says, do you want another drink? And yeah, yeah, no one? Yeah, sounds like a good idea, right? And then he feels nauseated after this other drink, right? And I wish he hadn't had that other drink now, you know? Yet he wanted it, right? Or let's take the example, you know, simple example of the kid who drives his car too fast, right? And ends up around a tree and so on. And his car's all smashed up and he's in traction or some kind of uncomfortable position in the hospital. And even to himself, he might admit it was not good for him to drive his car that fast. I remember one of these slippery winters where the road was icy and my wife was driving, you know, carefully, right? The guy behind me gets, you know, impatient when she's driving so slowly. So he speeds up and passes her and he goes off the road into a tree. My wife says, she's trying to make sure it wasn't hurt, you know. It was a good thing, but she wasn't going to stay around. Yeah. So people want to drive their car, right? And, you know, on the first day of ice, you know, people are having more accidents maybe than they have later on, right? And so they want to drive their car at the usual speed, but as my father used to say, when winter comes, you have to learn how to drive again, he'd say. That was his principle. So you can find all kinds of examples then, right? Of people who wanted something and they themselves now admit it was not good for them, right? So that's kind of the obvious argument against saying that something is good because you want to want it, right? Now what about the reverse? If you say that maybe because of this, it's the other way around, that we want it because it is what? Good, right, huh? Well, then you can use the same examples to say, well, if good is the cause of wanting, then how could it be that you wanted something that was what? That was bad, right? And furthermore, if good is the cause of wanting, then bad should be the cause of the opposite of wanting, which should be turning away from something, right? So if it is true what you say, that good is the cause of wanting, then people should always turn away from the bad because that's the opposite, right? And sometimes people don't want what's good for them, right? It takes a while, you know, for them, if at all, to realize it's good for them, right? So how can you be the cause and not be what? The effect, right? So these are the ways you can reason kind of simply, first on one side, then the other side, right? As Aristotle explains in logic when he talks about dialectical reasoning, if you want to define it, you could say, it's reasoning from probable what? Opinions, right? Even to contradictory what? Yeah, even to contradictory, to opposed conclusions, huh? Now, now you've got to do two things here. One, you've got to reason out the truth here, and then secondly, you have to what? Answer the objection or the argument on the opposite side, right? Now, how would you reason out the truth in this matter, right? Well, probably, the most appropriate way would be, like Aristotle does, an inductive argument, right? Now, the way I used to do it, though, was to take what people recognize as kind of the natural good, right? So you take, let's say, water, or food, right? Or take air, right, huh? And pretty hard to deny that air is good for us, right? And water is good for us, right? And food is good for us, right? And production is good for us, right? Keeps us in existence, I'll take it out. I used to love the example of money, right, huh? So you go through these basic things, and you say, well, now, is it the desire to breathe that makes air good for us? Or can you see, apart from our wine to breathe, that air is good for us, right? And people would see that, right? Okay. And how about sleep, right? Can you see that sleep is good for you? And how the communists used to, you know, brainwash you, you know, by keeping you awake, you get actually crazy like this, huh? And eventually you die, I suppose, you know, crazy first. And so, sleep is good for you, apart from your wine to sleep, right? And everybody has experience, you know, of both children being sent to bed by their parents, you know? Because mommy and daddy know that they can't be awake at school tomorrow if they don't get to sleep, right? So even in the case where the child doesn't want to sleep, right? Mommy and daddy see that it is, what, good for him, right, huh? Okay. And, um, is mommy useful in our society for all kinds of things because you want it? Or do you want it because it's useful for getting all kinds of things? Because it's useful to buy all kinds of things, right? Okay. Is it good for reproduction? Yeah. It keeps this type of animal, right, in existence, right? So do you want it to reproduce or not, right? You can see a good in it, right? So if you go through and how about knowledge, right? Show me the way home, right? Yes. Good job. It's good to go your way home, right? Know where to park the car. Something like this, right? And, uh, it's good to know, you know, that, uh, some mushrooms are poisonous, right? How clean is it good to know, right? Um, so you can see something good in knowledge apart from your, what, wanting it, right? Huh? So that's what I would kind of show by induction from the natural goods, almost. I don't know, not money, but maybe for the natural goods like food and water and, uh, sleep and knowledge and so on. That we can see in the case of each one of these something that makes the thing good, right? For us. Apart from our wanting it, right? And therefore we want it because it's good for us, right? That's kind of why I would kind of approach the answer or defend the answer that something is wanted because it is good, right? Now, you've got the objections to this side, right? Then why don't people always want what is good for them? How can they be the cause without the effect in other words, right? And how is it possible that they could sometimes want the bad, right? Because if good is the cause of wanting, the contrary of good, the bad, should be the cause of the contrary of wanting, right? Contrary effects, huh? Cold makes ice and the warmth makes the ice, huh? Well, again, you have to look before and after, right? And something comes, what? After the good or the bad and before wanting it or not wanting it, right? And that is what? Yeah. And maybe you could be a little less precise to know why that's something true there. But some act of the senses or reason, right? And can the senses or reason be deceived? Yeah. So they can think that something good is bad or something bad is good, right? then. So delicious poison, right, huh? But do you drink delicious poison because it's poison? No, because it tastes what? Yeah, okay. So you can make a mistake, right? So because of what comes between the good and the bad and wanting or turning away from something, right? There has to be some act of the senses or reason or both. And both the senses and reason can be deceived, right? Especially by likeness, huh? So the good can resemble the bad and the bad can, what, resemble the, what, good, huh? So I think it's sometimes good to stop in this first paragraph of Aristotle, right? And here's a very good induction there to show this, right, huh? But also to recall in the Socratic fashion, right? If you go to the boy, huh, who's closer to the starting point, in our knowledge, right? And you ask the boy what is good, and he will give examples of things that he wants, right? But when he comes to saying, why are these all called good by him? He might come to recognize that he calls them all good because he wants all of them, right? And therefore you kind of see that the good is what all want, is the beginning of our knowledge of the good, right? Not the end, but it's the beginning, right? You can't despise that beginning or neglect that beginning because that's what's more known to us. And you say, you're defining it here, the good by its effect, right? And does that fit in with it being the way we first know it? Do we know causes or effects first, right? Now later on, especially in the second book of Wisdom, huh, but also in the Ethics, Aristotle will bring out the connection between the good and one of the four kinds of cause, which is the end or purpose, huh? And there you see more of what the good really is, huh? And although we do speak of the means as good and good, but it's in a kind of secondary sense, huh? Because the medicine is good because health is good, right? And the book is good because knowledge is good, right? Okay? And the printing press is good because the books are good, right? Books are good because knowledge is good, right? And so then you begin to see more of what the good is, right? And then when you look at Aristotle's drawing a line around the inner purpose of man, you'll see that there's a connection between what a thing is and its inner purpose, huh? And, of course, that's brought out in Shakespeare's education, too, right? Because it begins with the words, what is a man? If his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed. A beast no more, right? If his inner purpose was just to sleep and feed, then man wouldn't be what man is. He'd be just a beast, huh? Sure, he'd admit us with such large discourse looking before and after. Gave us not that capability and godlike reason. The fussed and the sun moved. So we'll see, you know, this connection between the good and the end, but also the connection between what a thing is and its inner purpose, huh? Between what a chair is and its inner purpose, huh? Even these things, huh? Or what a knife is and the inner purpose of a knife. Or what a ballpoint pen is, right? But it's composing parts are and so on, right? And its inner purpose, huh? My brother-in-law was over to the house there with all his carpenter's tools, and he can put a whole new thing there, huh? You see? But those, you know, it's good to have the right tools, right? You do things, huh? I don't even know a simple tool is like corkscrews. Domestic tools, they don't make it look well. But, you know, it's very frustrating. I remember one time my brother-in-law and I were going to have a little picnic out there in the thing, and we forgot the corkscrew. It's very frustrating to have a bottle of water. Not a tool, yeah. It's a story that the Benchmore in the region has this chateau somewhere where the retired guys go because a lot of them have a bad life, so they have no place to go. So, yeah, they have this custom where the way they drink wine, they open the wine bottles and the guy pulls out his saver and he pulls it off the top. You can drink that way, but you drink well because you might get a little glass in there, you know? I imagine it must be bad to get the glass inside your stomach and things like that. So it was knocking off the top, yeah. Well, you've got to clean the cup, I don't know, but I'm going to try it, yeah. So when Aristides says, Quincet has been well said, right? You know, I'm sure he's gone through something like I went through, you know, but he sees that this is the starting point, right? And it's kind of marvelous that he does this, right? Puts that first, huh? Then he points out a difference of ends, huh? But a difference of ends is seen. Notice he's already thinking of the good and the ends being the same thing, right? So he's almost going to use them interchangeably. But a difference of ends is seen, for some are acts, while others are products beyond these, huh? So I was listening to the Mozart Heiden quartets the other day, and does my ear, the activity of hearing, produce anything? No. There the end is simply to hear Mozart's Heiden quartets, huh? That was the occasion, you know, where Heiden said to Mozart's father, your son is the greatest composer known to me, right? You know? He has taste in the most. He's very impressed with Mozart. So he says, a difference of ends is seen. For some are acts, huh? Like hearing Mozart. While others are products beyond these, there's some product, huh? Where there are ends in addition to the acts, in these the products are better than the acts, huh? So making a chair, which is better? Making a chair or a chair? A chair, yeah. So in that case, the end is the chair itself. In the case of hearing the music of Mozart, the end is the hearing itself. That's it. I was reading Thomas there on the second book of the Summa Cantu Gentiles, in the chapters 39 there through 45, where he's talking about the distinction order of creatures, right? And what's the cause of this, huh? And his definition of the good is what all desire comes in there. He uses it as a premise, right? To reason out some things. To realize how that goes all the way through philosophy, this starting definition, right? A little beginning, but it's something what? Great in his power, right? Now he says, since there are many acts in arts and sciences, he's looking back upon that first paragraph again, right? He says, every art and every science and so on, every act is for the sake of some good, right? Okay. But now he's going to make another point, huh? Since there are many acts in arts and sciences, there come to be many ends, huh? Or many goods, right? For medicine, the end would be what? Health, right? Of the art of shipbuilding, the ship. Of the military art, what? Yeah.