 Welcome to another one of my Dr. Sadler Chalk and Talk videos. In this one I'm responding to a question that I got on VU. A really great question. It has to do with sort of nitty-gritty on one common ethical approach. I think this is a good question to ask for any moral theory that is worth it. How can I practice virtue ethics day-to-day? So, what concrete things, what sort of program can I put in place if I bought into this moral theory of virtue ethics? And there's a lot of different variants of this out there, but broadly speaking, if I've accepted that this is a good thing, what do I need to do to actually make it work? And I've come up with a bunch of different ideas under forming headings. These are not an exhaustive list of possible things you can do. They do reinforce each other or connect up with each other. If you read classic virtue ethicists like Plato or Aristotle or Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm, even Epictetus to a certain extent, could be considered a virtue ethicist, and you're going to see a lot of this kind of advice being talked about, maybe not quite so explicitly, but I think it's all good ideas. So I divided it into four different areas. There's practice, what do you actually do to build up virtues within you, material and vices? Self-examination, I abbreviated as self-exam, just to put it on the board. There's category of models, which is very important for virtue ethics. And then key ideas. Actually, I think I would like to add something to key ideas, which is be critical about prevailing ideas about these things. So let's actually start with key ideas. Virtue ethics is a more or less systematic way of approaching moral life and decision making, development, judging between right and wrong, good and bad, even to a certain extent, other values like the noble and the base. And there are certain key ideas, and I put the word dogma here. Epictetus actually uses that word, and I think it's a good thing to think about. Oftentimes we think dogmas is bad things. But in ancient philosophy, what a dogma was, this got used in religious context afterwards, is something that you need to believe, something that you need to accept, something that you need to buy into, if you want to make progress. So if, for example, you want to do certain schools of sociology, there's certain basic dogmas that you have to accept, like I'm going to say at the very beginning, I'm not going to accept those. Well, then you can't do that kind of thing. Or if you want to do a certain kind of literary criticism, let's say it's psychoanalytically based, then you have to buy into some things that are coming from psychoanalysis. If you don't buy into them, well, you're not going to do that sort of thing. So it works that way with virtue ethics as well. I would say one of the key ideas is you have to actually buy into the notion that you are to some degree responsible for your character. If you think that you're not, then you just can't do virtue ethics. You also can't be a relativist in any real sense of the virtue ethicist. You can't say it's all just a matter of opinion. Plato thought this, Nietzsche thinks this, and I think this, and Jerry Springer thinks that. That won't work. You actually have to be committed to the idea that some ways of life are better than others that are more fully human, are realizing what's within us better, are lead to flourishing more and more often, and some ways of life are less likely to do that. That's something you'd have to buy into. There's a lot of key ideas, even getting down to a level of what is temperance, or what is justice, that once you've got a hold of them, and once you understand them, understanding them is itself kind of an achievement, then you ought to hold on to them. So you want to reinforce those. You want to think about those day after day. You don't want to just learn it once, and then let it all slide, or imagine that it's going to stick with you all the time. And so I think that along with that goes, you have to study it yet each day. I'm not saying that you necessarily have to carry Aristotle's Nicomacan ethics around your back pocket and pop it open every so often, but I think that if you want to make progress in virtue ethics, you probably want to do some study every day. This doesn't necessarily have to be reading the primary texts. I mean, you could read a summary of Aristotle if it's a good summary, or read somebody else's commentary, but I think if you actually want to make progress with this, because virtue ethics is not like some other ethical theories where you just lay the whole theory out, now it's done, now we just apply it. A lot of virtue ethics makes sense gradually. As you progress, the different pieces start to make more sense. So I think it's really good to keep going back to the text over and over again. And I say it, study a bit. I mean, you don't have to be a full-time philosopher in order to live a virtue ethics kind of existence. I think along with that goes being critical about some of the prevailing ideas about good and bad, right and wrong. This doesn't mean that you have to be a cynic tearing everything down or a skeptic demanding proof for every single thing. To be critical means to be a good judge. And again, that takes some development over time as well. So if somebody, for example, says that, here's a classic position. Well, you know, this show has the highest ratings so it must be the best show in the sense of not just most popular but there must be something morally good about it. That's pretty questionable, right? That's something that you'd want to think about. You want to say, oh, wait a second there. That's a kind of questionable assumption. You don't necessarily have to argue with people about it but you should at least think about it. So those are ways in which we would gradually make key ideas of virtue ethics our own, our possession. Something that we hold onto in our heads or in our hearts or in our soul. Models are also very, very important for virtue ethics too. One of the things that I always found most attractive about virtue ethics is the focus on the character of the person rather than just their individual one-time act, you know, at this point to that point, looking at a person over time. What kind of a person are they and how do they display this and how do other people view them? So I think whenever you hear people throwing around terms that describe qualities or traits of character and saying that somebody is good or bad because of those, I think you want to think about that. I think you want to stop and see if you can compare it to some of these key ideas that you've gotten through study and I think you want to sort of start disentangling who's a good judge about this and who's kind of a sloppy judge about this or who has a clear conception of say what integrity consists in and who just likes throwing around the word. But also look to see when people are making judgments. If they judge the same way about similar cases, a lot of people like to use the language of good or bad traits as a kind of reward and punishment system. So people that they like, they'll find out sorts of good traits in them until those people cross them because they never actually had those traits to begin with and then suddenly they're bad guys and now they'll find out sorts of bad things to say about them. You know, if you find people like that, I'm only going to bet there's some people like that in your life or if you find yourself doing that sort of thing, that's not going to be very compatible with a virtue ethics way of thinking about things. On the other hand, if you find people that can tell you why they say that this person has integrity or why they say that that person is fundamentally dishonest and their explanations make good sense, you will hold on to those people. So think about the qualities that people mention. I think it's very important to look at your media consumption and I'm not, you know, totally consistent with this myself. You know, I like Charlie Sheen and he's a reprobate. There's something strangely entertaining and attractive about him for me. But you know, from a virtue ethics perspective, he's not a good guy. As a matter of fact, he's clearly a vicious character. He even has some self-knowledge about his vicious character, which doesn't actually make it good. I think you want to look at your media consumption. So what sort of TV shows are you watching? What sort of things are you watching in, you know, web TV or internet or on YouTube? What are you focusing on? What kind of movies are you watching and talking about? What kind of magazines do you read? What kind of lifestyle do they push? Do they push a lifestyle which is essentially just hedonistic? Or are they very, you know, moralistic but not in a virtue ethics way? You know, are they things just to make you feel good about being moral but not really, you know, oriented towards that? Do they put you in the script where some people are the bad guys no matter what and other people are the good guys? That may not even be compatible with virtue ethics. So you want to look at your media consumption. Think about your family and your friends and your work in a couple different ways. If you come from or if you immerse yourself in environments where people are for the most part vicious or simply lack self-control, it will be harder for you to be virtuous. It will be harder for you in a variety of ways. You're not going to have somebody helping you out that probably actually be hostile to you, should you want to exercise certain virtues. That will wear on you. We're very prospective about what traits are good and what traits are bad and why they are good and why they're bad might get skewed as a result as well. So I think it's worth looking at, you know, what your family is and what kind of characters they have. Your friends, we have someone more control over. And what goes on in your workplace. If you're a student, that means you're your classmates. I don't just mean follow employees, too. If you have clients, maybe you need to think about your clients and how you interact with them and how they see you. Pick the people that you see actually have good qualities and try to spend more time with them. Try to interact with them. Try to figure out how you would emulate them. Those who have very bad qualities maybe spend less time criticizing them and more time figuring out whether you have anything in common with them that you need to look at. So that's a good segue into self-examination. And I think a lot more could be said about this. So I'm going to resist the temptation to blather on and on and on and only talk about three things. One great time to look at yourself is when you catch yourself facing a situation of temptation. And what is the situation of temptation? It's where you know that you ought to do this but you really want to do this instead. And you find yourself kind of wavering. You catch yourself. You see yourself as a kind of internal debate or conflict or wavering. Well, that's when you want to actually look at yourself. Why do you feel this way? What's going on in you? Why do you see these goods like this? If you know something that is a lesser good, why are you being attracted to it? Sometimes temptation can be a matter of two different evils and you pick one thing that is actually not the lesser evil because you really want to avoid this thing over here. So it doesn't have to always be positive things. Another thing I would say is you get in conflicts with other people and conflicts can cover wide range. It can be shouting matches, it can be text exchanges, it can be email flurries, it can be sort of less overt ones gossiping about people. That's a matter of conflict. We argue about all different things. There's a conflict of all different things. Personal, not quite as personal, bigger picture stuff. Some of the virtues you have to do with how we conduct ourselves when we're in a conflict, those that have to do with anger or temperance or Aristotle's virtue of friendliness actually means being able to set down limits and say to friends, I'm not going to do that bad thing that you want me to, being willing to give them the pain. Some people just like to give people pain that way. That's not a good thing, that's not a good advice. So some vices and virtues bear directly in how we act in conflicts. Some other vices and virtues have to do with why we get into the conflicts that we do. If you are an intemperate person, if you're at the prey of your bodily desires, you probably will get into more conflicts I'm willing to bet than somebody who's more self-controlled. So you might want to look at that. If you're an unjust person, you probably need to look at that too, because if you're unjust, you're not only going to get into conflicts with other people who are just, you're going to get into conflicts with other people who are unjust. Finally, to tie this together, I think when you're doing self-examination, it's not just enough to look at individual circumstances or occasions or incidents. You also want to reflect in a broader way, perhaps daily, on what it is that you really think is good, what it is that you really desire, what it is that you're attracted to, and think about what kind of person that shows you to be, and whether you're happy with being that kind of person. What would it take to change that sort of thing? So that leads us finally to practice. I just have two things here. One thing has to do with habits. Aristotle says, and most virtue ethics follows along this line, that we become virtuous through habituation. What does that mean? Well, first we're not originally temperate, or courageous, or just, or self-controlled with respect to anger, or anything like that. Somebody either makes us act that way, or we force ourselves to act that way, or we choose to act that way perhaps for an external reward, or to avoid a punishment, or something like that. And then over time, that becomes part of our character, that becomes our second nature. And then after a while, we want to behave that way. That's the natural way for us to behave. And this works that way for virtues, and it works that way for vices too. If you keep on acting unjustly, or boasting about yourself, you will become an unjust person, or you will become a boaster, or your character will be harder to root out. So, you know, actually practicing, doing the things you have to do, if you have problems with time management, the only way to fundamentally change that, you know, as far as your character is concerned, is to actually make yourself exercise good time management. I'm not sure if I have to think about which virtue I would fall on here, probably temperance to a certain extent. If you find yourself being stingy, and you want to quit being stingy, you've got to break yourself of that habit, and you have to replace it with a new habit. So you have to act in a generous way to other people. The other thing is, very often people think of this in terms of, well, I just got to build a habit so I can do it in kind of unconscious way. No, you have to actually know what you're doing, and you have to choose it. You have to, as they often say, take ownership, right? You have to decide this for yourself. And at a certain point, if you want to become virtuous, you don't want to just do what's in accordance with virtue, you actually want to become virtuous, you have to choose that as a good for you. You have to see that as a good thing for you. And then you have to pursue it. And choosing that would involve this entire matrix of things, because these are all different ways in which you can concretely choose in your day-to-day life to practice virtue ethics. So not a complete answer, but not bad for 20 minutes.