On the Roman Republic's Decline and U.S. Politics

While I was recently reading relatively new history of the Romans (B. Campbell, The Romans and Their World), I ran across a few passages that resonated as having more than superficial connection to the contemporary western, and especially American, political scene. What made them so vivid was that in the main these passages were quotations or paraphrases of ancient Roman historians themselves.  Let me briefly discuss three of them:  signs of a declining culture (Sallust), lust for personal political power (Florus), and moral descent and civic paralysis (Livy).

Justice as Intrinsic & Instrumental in Plato's Republic

I am interested in the relationship between justice as a means and as an end because those aspects separately and their standing with respect to one another are integrally—that is to say inseparably—involved in how we think about ethics generally and in specific cases.

For instance, recent, disturbing race-related violence by police officers toward certain citizens in the United States and then the assassination of 5 Dallas officers and the wounding of many other police and civilians raised complicated questions about what is right, fair, and valuable in itself, about the nature and extent of contemporary prejudices, and about the use of violence in service of conceptions of justice.  Similarly, the recent decision by the U.S. Justice Department and its Federal Bureau of Investigation not to indict Hillary Clinton despite the overwhelming evidence of her violations of standard federal security procedure strikes many observers as unjust. This is so not only because the decision seems to contravene obvious desert (the FBI does not doubt what she did), but also because, notwithstanding Director Comey’s (knowingly erroneous) denial that positive intention is required for a violation of the law, it raises questions about whether some supposedly greater purpose like social and political harmony in an election year outweighs the upholding of the law for its own sake or even as a deterrent to future security mismanagement.  Is justice, we might wonder, something good in itself and to be pursued for that reason, or because of the ranked purposes that it may serve?

United States citizens in 2016 are not the first persons or society to entertain these questions.  The ancient Greeks anticipated contemporary Anglophones in this as in many areas, particularly Plato.  It may be timely and to our profit then to ask this:  Is justice in his Republic an intrinsic and an instrumental good, as Socrates promises to prove to his interlocutors? Or does he only show that it is an instrumental good, in which case Glaucon's ventrilloquism for Thrasymachus (i.e., voicing the latter’s position for the sake of argument) is more on the mark?

In what follows I wish to explore this important question about justice as an instrumental and a final good through the lens of Plato’s Republic.  Socrates contends that justice is both intrinsic and instrumental.  How does he argue for that conclusion? How might this help contemporary societies understand both justice and the proper relation and pursuit of various ethical, social, and political goods?

The Flourishing of Alasdair MacIntyre

In Conversations on Ethics (2009), the discussion that Alex Voorhoeve has with Alasdair MacIntyre is perhaps as good an entry into the vast corpus of the latter's thinking as anything available in his own words of comparable length.

In the discussion, Prof. MacIntyre explains how and why he came to regard Aristotelian philosophy (supplemented by Thomas Aquinas) as essentially correct.  I am most interested in the Scottish philosopher's idea of human flourishing, or excellence -- what Aristotle called eudaimonia -- and its relation to practical intelligence, or phronēsis. This topic, the intersection of eudaimonia and phronēsis, of flourishing and practical wisdom, is particularly relevant to this blog.  Its title is, after all, Feeding Phronēsis.

My reading of MacIntyre has broadened and deepened (and I hope been more finely tuned) since I first began this post two years ago.  The draft has lain in abeyance for that long despite my intent to return to and polish it.  Rather than start afresh now in exploring Prof. MacIntyre on practical rationality, let me revisit what he has to say principally in his particularly thorough conversation with Voorhoeve.  In due course in the future I am sure that I will return to reflect more critically and constructively on other intersections of MacIntyre's thinking and my own, especially on practical rationality.

At present, what follows is in many respects my attempt to assemble critical elements of MacIntyre's account of flourishing and practical rationality.  It is largely descriptive because it is largely an exercise in mental organization.  I find compelling in MacIntyre's discussion the limits of moral rules, the necessity of wisdom, the embeddedness of human flourishing in practices of communities and traditions, the unavoidability of dependency on others (especially friends), and the storied nature of flourishing as a quest.

Bergson on Mechanism and Vitalism in WWI

Why is the tendency so strong for us to argue against our opponents by dehumanizing them?  This tendency finds expression as much in daily domestic life situations with family members or professional contexts with co-workers as it does on a wider, often political, stage.  The French philosopher Henri Bergson contrasts “vitalism” and “mechanism” in cultural and national terms.  His patriotic alignment with and encouragement of the French cause in World War I against Germany led him to characterize the ethos of those two countries in strikingly opposing ways. I am struck, among the features of Bergson's interpretation of the contrasting civilizational forces, by the way in which he vilifies his enemy by dehumanizing him.