 So for Aristotle, happiness is this intrinsic end. It's what's worth seeking for its own sake. But the question is, what is happiness? How do we find this happiness? Where do we look? Well, Aristotle's very clear here. The reason is the only part of the soul that can find this happiness. The appetite and the vegetative part of the soul are not enough. The appetites aren't going to be enough because, you know, the appetites have basically these two passions. They have, you know, this love and hate towards things out in the world. You know, whether you love or hate something is not enough to figure out whether or not this is actually good for you, right? You're going to have these reactions to things in the world and sometimes they're going to be conflicting, sometimes maybe they might even lead the same direction. But this isn't enough to know whether or not it's actually doing you any good. So, you know, for instance, you want to just talk about food, right? You can be very passionate. You can be very passionate about food, whether you love it or hate it. You can love espresso chocolate chip ice cream. And you can absolutely hate Brussels sprouts. But you know, espresso chocolate chip ice creams, you know, is not always good for you. And Brussels sprouts, you know, even though you hate them, you're probably good for you at least to a degree or you should have at least some of them. So the passions aren't going to be able to figure out what's good for you. The passions are going to lead you either to excess or deficiency, either too much of something or not enough. So that's where the passions will lead you are to the excesses, sorry, to these excesses or deficiencies. And Aristotle calls these the vices. The vices are the excesses are something or deficiency is something such that it's no longer good for you. Now the question is, well, how do we figure out what is good for us? Well, the vices are the excesses, the extremes, or sorry, the excesses and the deficiencies, these are the extremes. The virtue is what's going to be in between is going to be the golden mean, all right, the middle point between the excess and the deficiency. So when we're dealing with something like food, you know, a little bit of ice cream is not necessarily bad for you. So that's, you know, that's one, you know, avoiding one excess and kind of getting back to the midpoint and, you know, completely avoiding Brussels sprouts is not good for you. So you want to have some Brussels sprouts, right? So that's getting back to the midpoint there. This is kind of the idea of the golden mean, and this is applicable not only to food, but for everything regarding a human being, everything regarding the soul. So you just think about your emotions, right? Let's take, you know, absolute, you know, hatred and absolute, you know, you know, infatuation, right? And say it's about, I don't know, a music star, right? Well, the absolute infatuation with the music star, you know, is not good for you because you devote your entire life to, you know, you devote all your resources to buying tickets to see the movie star's movies and see this movie star or whatever premiere. You know, maybe you buy all the merchandise and you compare every other human relationship you have with the fictitious examples that this movie star portrays, right? That would be an absolute infatuation. You know, absolute hatred of a movie star kind of goes the other direction where you spend all your resources to defame the movie star and, you know, maybe even try to do some very, you know, real violence to the movie star. Well, that's two extremes, absolute infatuation, absolute hatred about a person. And the midpoint is going to be, you know, somewhere between the two, right? You could, you know, spend a few of your resources to watch the movie star acting and, you know, movie star acting in, say, various movies or even plays if it's a Broadway production, something like that, and then make a determination whether the acting skills are good or bad and that would be something of a midway point. So this is the golden mean, finding that midway point between the excesses of deficiency and, sorry, between the extremes of excess and deficiency. Now, the golden mean is this kind of midway point between the excesses of, say, the extremes of excess and deficiency. But no single act of the midway point is really enough. You need to practice this act or this kind of act. You need to develop the character traits that make this kind of act easy or habitual or natural or default, right? So, you know, so thinking about food again, the midway point is, you know, a little something sweet but, you know, something nutritious and, you know, something with vitamins and fiber as well as some protein with, you know, like a little bit of fat, a little bit of salt, things like this. And, you know, that would be the midway point. But you would need to practice with that midway point. So, you know, most of the time, or, you know, your default choice for a meal would be, you know, something with a lean protein or chicken breast without the skin, fish, something like this, with a serving of vegetables, a little bit of grains, and, you know, water, probably. And, you know, every once in a while, you have a little something sweet to, you know, to enjoy that for pleasure's sake. You know, like a single scoop of ice cream, you know, once or twice a week, something like this. But the idea is to develop those habits. Now, developing the habit of that golden mean, that's a virtue. And, you know, virtue is when you've gotten into the practice of pursuing the golden mean. And the more you pursue it, the easier it becomes, right? As you develop a habit of the golden mean, the easier it becomes to, to continue, to continue acting on the golden mean. You know, the vices, on the other hand, you know, you keep with the excesses, and, you know, they're always going to come with a really steep price. Whatever you, you know, the idea behind a vise is, you know, you might get some kind of good out of it, but the cost outweighs the good. So, you know, sweeten it, you know, really sweet desserts. You did get a good out of it. You get sweetness. You get that pleasure from the taste. But the cost is, is the excess of fat and sugar, which, you know, hurts your health, right? So with the, with the virtues you're developing that habit of pursuing the golden mean. So what are, does reason fit into all this? Well, these virtues, these habits, require two kinds of knowledge. One's called theoretical knowledge. The other one is practical knowledge. Theoretical knowledge, you can think of theoretical knowledge as knowledge of what is true and what's false. Real basic propositional knowledge. So, a basic understanding of what causes what. So, you know, what you might call common sense scientific knowledge, right? You have to know some conceptual knowledge as well. You know, what, you know, what, what the various kinds of argument are, right? You have to know some basics about math, things like this. This is a kind of theoretical knowledge that helps you understand what is true about the world, right? We would probably refer to this as book smarts. So that's one kind of knowledge. The other kind of knowledge is practical knowledge. This is knowledge of how things work, right? What is actually going to be effective, okay? So, you know, sometimes I think we might refer to this as street smarts. So you'd have to know how things actually work in the world, as opposed to, you know, just what the world is. Now, you really can't have one without the other. Theoretical knowledge without practical knowledge is, is kind of empty. First of all, you need at least some practical knowledge to be able to acquire theoretical knowledge. You have to know at least how to acquire all this conceptual knowledge of what's true and false. Similarly, you know, practical knowledge without any theoretical knowledge is kind of useless. It's useless because what you mean, you have to have at least some knowledge of what the world is in order to know how the world works. You need at least some of both. And, you know, we might even say, if you have too much of one, or you know, not enough knowledge of one really hurts your chances of using the other. Well, this is what reason does. Reason helps us have this scientific, this theoretical knowledge of the world, you know, what the world is, what's true and what's false about the world. And this practical knowledge is knowledge of what works. So, using these two together, we would be able to determine what the extremes are between the excess and the deficiency and then figure out what the golden mean is. And, you know, this golden mean, there's going to be some things that are true about everybody as far as this golden mean. But there's also, you know, people have their own individual talent. So, one person's golden mean may not necessarily be another's. You know, somebody, you know, somebody who has natural physical talent would be able to exercise more than somebody with less physical talents, right? So, for the person who can exercise more, have more, you know, inherent strength in constitution, they'd be able to exercise more hours during the day using certain kind of exercise than somebody with, you know, fewer physical talents. Well, that's going to co-op out by, you know, going out and trying, right? Trying to discover this golden mean. This doesn't mean we can't ever benefit from what people have done before. No, of course. You know, that's kind of a starting point. But there's also that point where you've got to go and try it yourself. And when you go out and try it yourself, that gains experience. You learn more about what the world is. That's the theoretical knowledge. You also learn more about what works for you, and that's the practical knowledge. Through that, you discover the golden mean. By practicing the golden mean, you develop these habits of what's good for you and then these are the virtues. This leads to another distinction for Aristotle regarding moral actions. For Aristotle, you know, lots of things out, you know, we're getting back to this idea of potentiality and actuality, so we're looking at these trees behind me. You know, these trees don't have a choice about whether they achieve their potential, whether they become fully what they are, right? That tree is going to grow straight up regardless of what it wants, if it makes any sense to say that it wants anything to begin with. And the tree does not have a choice about how many branches it sprouts, or even where it's planted, you know, even where the seed begins to start. So there's lots of things outside of that tree's control. It can't determine whether it achieves its potential. Human beings on the other hand are a lot different than trees and animals in this regard. Human beings, you know, for better or for worse, can achieve their potential or act as to not achieve their potential, right? We have many possibilities in front of us as opposed to that tree. That tree pretty much has one possibility. It's going to go straight up. It will reach the fullness of its life and then it will die. A human being is going to live and die, but whether a human being achieves the fullness of its existence, that's determined by the human being. So for Aristotle, then, this is the distinction between a voluntary and involuntary act. We are morally responsible only for what we have control over. It's kind of the idea. You know, there's lots of things that happen to the people around me for which I am not responsible. Somebody falls into a well, right? I'm not responsible. I'm not morally culpable or blameworthy for that damage that that person suffered. I didn't have any control over what that person did. So to distinguish between these voluntary and involuntary acts, Aristotle gives us conditions for what's involuntary. The first condition for an involuntary is that the person is ignorant of some particular circumstance. So I'm standing on this bridge here, and I walk across this bridge. Now suppose some planks right in the middle there are weak and rotten, and I fall through the planks and I hurt myself. That would be an involuntary act because I would be ignorant of the state of those planks. So we often talk about this ignorant of a particular circumstance like we don't know exactly what's going on or it's an accident or we don't have all the facts. That's usually what we mean by something like that. A second condition for an involuntary act is compulsion. And we're most familiar with this these days when we talk about compulsive acts or compulsive behaviors. So somebody who has to touch a door handle five times before they leave, or you have to check the lock five times before they leave, that's a pretty extreme case of compulsion these days. You might even throw some of our emotional reactions to people in the category of compulsions. There's only so many times your little sister or brother can hit you in the shoulder before you get really mad. And sometimes that's not really in your control. These would be examples of compulsions. Hypnosis would also be an example of compulsion. Another act that would be involuntary is when we are choosing to avoid a greater evil. So we usually refer to this as choosing the lesser of the two evils. So some classic cases, choosing to save 10 people versus saving one. You save 10 people because one person dying is a lesser evil than 10 people dying. So those are three conditions for an involuntary act. One ignorance of a particular circumstance, two compulsion, and three avoiding a lesser evil. So avoiding a greater evil. If a particular act is neither one of those three, if you're neither ignorant of what's going on or compelled or choosing a lesser evil, then the act is voluntary and you're morally responsible for it. Now what this means is that human beings are the only creatures that are moral agents. We're the only creatures that have voluntary versus involuntary actions. This is because we're the only creatures with reason. We're the only ones that can be aware of the theoretical and the practical knowledge. We're the only ones that could suffer from practical ignorance of a situation, this sort of thing. So this is pretty significant for Aristotle. Human beings are the only moral agents because we're the only rational agents. This leads us to contemplation. So remember the whole business we're dealing with is trying to find this happiness, what is our intrinsic end. Now for Aristotle, remember we have the three parts of the soul, the vegetative, the appetitive, and the rational. And the rational is what sets us apart from everything else. These trees have the vegetative part of the soul, or we share a vegetative part of the soul with them, while we can't currently see any, I'm sure there are little critters running around who have the appetitive part of the soul. But we're different in that we have reason. Now reason, as we've seen through this, is what guides the appetite and the vegetative part of the soul. Without reason we wouldn't be able to make decisions, we kind of go all over the place. So reason is a higher faculty, a higher part of the soul than the other two because it's more important, it's responsible for more than the other two. The vegetative just produces life, which is a good thing, I mean that's important, but just sustains life, the appetites go after things and you'll go after some things and avoid other things and that's important. But without reason these two parts would be kind of chaotic in us. So reason is a higher faculty, Aristotle says since this is what makes us human, that's going to be our most important faculty. So our end, what we strive for for its own sake is contemplation, it's contemplation. And the idea is that again drawing upon the two parts, the two kinds of knowledge, theoretical and practical, we try to learn and discover and reflect on that kind of knowledge. So this is important not only so that it will help us achieve these other ends in the vegetative and the appetitive part of the soul, but in our own rational part. There are going to be excesses and deficiencies with reason as well. So remember we have that balance between the theoretical and the practical, somebody pursues just the theoretical, they'll be the absent minded professor and you can't laugh at that. Or if you just focus on the practical you might know how to do a few things but you won't be so wise, you'll only be maybe perhaps know how to do a few things in a specific area. You wouldn't know what that area is supposed to relate to the rest. So for instance somebody can very practically mind it about say grocery shopping. There are people very practically minded about grocery shopping, they have this innate sense about chasing after good deals on food. But somebody focuses just on that, won't have any practical knowledge about say automobiles because they won't know what these things are. Or practical knowledge even about fields of study. They won't know how all these various fields of study are related to each other, how it's supposed to be united under metaphysics. All that's getting back to metaphysics. So reason through contemplation is important for our happiness because it helps figure out the ends of the rest of the parts of the soul. But also on top of that Aristotle says there is a certain pleasure gained from knowledge. You would recognize this as sometimes it's referred to as mind expanding or blowing your mind. You learn something new, it's just wow that's really cool. Or even just discovering the secret of some kind of discipline. So not only knowing historical facts but how to produce good history. That would be a higher and elevated kind of knowledge that brings its own kind of pleasure. Same thing with math and philosophy. This is something that's uniquely human, other animals can't do this. Other animals don't have the rational part of the soul. So happiness for Aristotle, our intrinsic end is found in contemplation.