PHIL1104 Notecards

PHIL1104 Notes

Matthew Olkoski

Lecture 1 – Introduction and happiness

• Philosophy has roots in ancient Greece.

• For the ancient Greek philosophers, the most important thing to have knowledge of was how to live well.

• Ethics is an inquiry into answering the question: how should I lead my life?

• At its best, ethics delivers knowledge of the good life for human beings, of what it is that makes us truly happy.

• Ethical knowledge could be obtained, to various degrees, through education, observation, and rational reflection.

In Part 1 of the course we observe of some of the main ancient Greek philosophers reflected upon these questions.

Lecture 2.1 – Epicurian Ethics

Greek Ethics and the Philosophical Life

To ask the question: “what is the good life” is itself part of the good life. The end (the good life) and the means (asking the question of the good life) are inseparable. The goal of a good life is to live well, but to live well, we have to understand what it means to live well. It truly matters if we put it into practice, not just a theory.

Two mottos of ancient Greek philosophy represent this self-reflection:

“Know thyself”

Human beings have a responsibility to understand oneself. If you don’t know yourself at the end of your life you are seen as having failed at knowing oneself.

Being self-aware is a modern virtue. It is a good feature to have. If we think of someone who lacks self-awareness, we see this as a fault.

“Be who you are”

Who you are is not just how things happen to be. Flourishing is a potential that exists, not just something that happens. At any given time, this potential may not just be realized. Being oneself is not a truism, it is more of a theory that under certain circumstances one can fulfill their own potential.

Implications for happiness

If posing the questions of the good life is part of the good life for humans, then:

• Is a good life or happiness something that can be acquired once and for all? Is it better understood as an always continuing process?

  • Happiness and a good life are recognized more as a journey rather than just a state of mind or elongated permanent state.

• Each individual must ask their own questions about the good life…

  • Is there generality to the good life?

    • Danger in over-generalization.

In-class activity

What would you say is the key to happiness?

I think, crudely, the key to happiness is the art of “not giving a shit”. You need to care about yourself, your priorities, what you think you are set out to do. Now, this does not mean be only the individual or bar yourself from joining groups, but there is a notion, or has been in my life, a set guideline of “what ought to be” and most people, from my hometown, here at UConn, and in other places in my life, tend to follow that. Understanding that life is more than “one size fits all” is my key to being happier.

What are the most significant obstacles to obtaining this happiness in today’s world?

As always, I will call upon the devious social platforms that we are all glued to in this modern day and age. Growing up, I saw people dating, drinking, playing sports, and basically doing all the things that I did not partake in as a high schooler. I wondered where I had gone wrong. I tried to fit in, but it ended in floating and rejection. Being myself, by senior year, and gaining confidence, led me to a group of likeminded people who are themselves and aren’t influenced easily by outside forces.

Background to Epicurus

Epicurus was one of the most influential philosophers. He studied the philosophies of Democritus and Plato and then founded his own philosophical school. We have very few documents regarding his existence. We do have a few Epicurean artifacts with inscriptions of Epicurean quotes and views. Lucretius’s The Nature of Things is also a classical Epicurean doctrine.

• Epicurean communes were once widespread in the Mediterranean region. While these are now rare, his philosophical ideals are still influential.

• An epicure was understood to be one with happiness, and in the modern day it has changed to more of a physical enjoyment definition (slight misconstrued attack on Epicureanism).

Epicurus’ Metaphysical Views

Epicurus’ metaphysics (theory of reality) is a version of materialist atomist. Reality consists of indivisible bits of matter moving through empty space.

All bodies are collections of atoms that cohere as well as collide. There are chance and determined events.

The mind is also made of matter; therefore, consciousness is thus destroyed once the body disintegrates at death.

There is no immoral, immaterial soul. Human existence is finite, death means non-existence. But this is not something we should fear.

Gods exist but are indifferent to human concerns. The common conception of the gods (divine providence, rewarding the good and punishing the evil) is false.

Epicurean Ethics: Ethical and Psychological Hedonism

Epicurius argued that happiness means obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain.

The good life is the life of tranquility (ataraxia) where we avoid the anxious fear of death.

The central idea of Epicurius ethics is that pleasure alone is intrinsically good, and pain alone is intrinsically bad.

Therefore, this is a form of ethical hedonism. Ethical because it is what we “ought to do”.

Psychological Hedonism

Ethical and psychological hedonism have a clear distinction. Psychological hedonism is the view that human beings do lead their lives to obtain pleasure and avoid pain.

Psychological hedonism is a theory of human motivation. The desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain explains human behavior at a deep level.

Although psychological hedonism is distinct from ethical hedonism, the two theories are combined.

Epicurius believed that virtues were a key part in the journey of the good life. They are a method of analysis for how we explain Ethical Hedonism.

Connection/arguement between ethical and psychological hedonism

There is a big collision between ethical and psychological hedonism; the values and ideas we aspire towards and what are we encouraged to do naturally. If we follow pleasure and avoid the pain; do, we have a decision in the matter in what we do at all? This is an extreme example against Ethical Hedonism, which tries to prove it redundant.

We need a connection between our nature and our values. How do we make sense of that connection? How does Epicurius bridge this gap between the good life and what motivates us given our nature?

rational of the “gap”

Psychological Hedonism

Our impulse is to avoid pain and strive for pleasure. Human beings are different than other animals, however, as we can reflect upon past actions and predict long-run outcomes. We want pleasurable things, but not everything that gives us current pleasure is satisfactory in the long run and vice versa.

Ethical Hedonism

What is ethical? The ethical motivation is much more complicated as pleasures need to be differentiated as not all are positive or pleasures we should strive for.

Pleasure is “Our Primary Native Good”

Pleasure is the starting point and the goal of the “happy life” because we realize that it is a primary native good.

Lecture 2.2 – 1/30/2025

Distinction of pleasures

The paradoxial tyranny of pleasure

While the pursuit of pleasure is something we want, it can unfortunately dominate us and lead us to suffer. This is the paradox of pleasure, which is the idea Epicurius makes evident in his ethics.

• It seems natural to pursue pleasure. We seem naturally inclined to seek out pleasure and the more we can get of it, the better.

• We can also feel the need to escape from pleasure; so, we ask:

  • Is escape from pleasure itself the highest pleasure?

    • Alcoholism

Types of desire

We reduce pain and increase pleasures by rationally controlling our desires.

• We crave peace of mind – but peace of mind cannot be achieved if our body is constantly craving something more.

Desires, though not all the same; so we need to know which desires to satisfy and which to ignore.

1. Natural and Necessary Desires

   1. Innate and essential for human life; they give rise to pain if not satisfied. Ex. Food, drink, and shelter.

   2. These also include other items of friendship, freedom, and freedom of thought.

      1. Without friends, you are vulnerable and lack security.

2. Natural but Unnecessary Desires

   1. Innate but not essential for life; these do not give rise to pain if unsatisfied. Ex. Lavish food, wine, expensive goods, mansion.

3. Unnatural and Unnecessary Desires

   1. Artificially induced desires do not naturally cause pain if unsatisfied but can become craving due to our distorted sense of what we need. Ex. Fame, power, wealth. (For the sake of just being.)

   2. Such desires have no natural limit; they are not readily satisfied, tend to increase without limit, making us unhappy, and frustrated. (addictive; unlike natural and necessary desires).

If we want to be happy, we should:

Avoid the third kind of desire;

Minimize the second kind of desire;

Satisfy the first kind of desires.

Reflection and the good life

Epicurius warns against taking his philosophy as advocating for a life of indulgence; rather go through life with sober thoughts.

The need for reflection

Intellectual or rational reflection is thus essential to the good life; if we rely solely on bodily pleasure and pain, we are apt to miss certain pleasures and increase certain pains. The role of reason is crucial, which suggests that Epicurean hedonism requires a rationalist basis (the result of “sober thinking”).

Epicurius’ argument against fearing death

Rational reflection allows us to understand our desires. But also allows us to dispel the fear of death.

Epicurus’ argument is as follows:

• We commonly fear death as a future event (involving pain).

• But consciousness exists only so long as the body exists; when the body dies consciousness disintegrates.

• So, death cannot be an experience, since I will no longer be in existence when it occurs. Hence, I should not fear death.

Another argument:

• Prior to my existence, I did not experience pain.

• Similarly, after death I shall no longer exist, so I feel no pain.

• Hence, I should not fear death.

Objections

• What about the fear of death of others?

  • Friends and family are irreplaceable; is it irrational to grieve them? No, not at all.

  • Other animals grieve of the deaths of others.

Yet often virtue certainly appears to clash with pleasure.

• We might be living ‘sensibly, nobly, and justly’, yet encounter pain and suffering despite our best efforts to pursue pleasure and minimize pain.

• What if fate deals with us blows that we could not foresee or to which we cannot respond?

Pleasure, virture, and justice

Prudence means acting according to one’s rational self-interest, pursuing a course of action with a view towards both positive and negative consequences for oneself.

Justice is simply a convention or agreement to “not harm or be harmed”.

In Epicureanism, justice and injustice are evaluated by their consequences:

• Injustice is not evil within itself. It’s evil lies in the anxious fear that you will not escape the grasp of authority with permission to punish.

Lecture 6 – Stoic ethics

Introduction to stoicism

Stoicism is the other major school of ethics in the Hellenistic period. It was founded by Zeno of Citium.

Stoicism was then taken up in the Roman world, popularized by Cicero, and made famous by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Other important Stoics included Epictetus, and Seneca.

Influence

Stoicism was taken up again by Christian culture and combined with elements of Christian theology.
Stoic themes can also be found in modern philosophers, such as Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
The influence of Stoicism is evident in modern psychology e.g. cognitive therapy (we can treat psychological/emotional problems and alter our behavior via changing our beliefs.

Everyday stoicism

1. There is an affinity between the words ‘stoical’ and ‘philosophical’ are used in everyday life. Examples include:

   1. In the wake of tragic events, people act ‘stoical’ or ‘philosophical’.

2. Name some of the chief features of the stoical person:

   1. Distance, putting things in perspective, calmness, acceptance of things.

3. Is stoicism in itself an admirable quality?

   1. Positive: Dignity, calmness, resilience.

   2. Negative: Passive, coldness.

It is crucial in everyday stoicism to understand that the stoic person recognizes the spirit in which an outcome was decided, loss of a game, etc.

Epicureanism and stoicism

Epicureanism and stoicism are similar in both:

• Take the good life for human beings to be the life that best accords with human nature.

• Insist on the importance of understanding nature correctly and thus having the right set of metaphysical views.

• Take happiness to consists in a kind of being at peace. The good life is the self-attuned life, a life in which I am at one with myself and with nature as a whole.

Convergences

Take reason to be at the center of the good life. We can only attain happiness if we live our lives in the light of what reason enjoins. It is by the exercise of reason that we arrive at the self-attuned life.

Because it is only by having the right understanding that we can rationally master our passions and desires and thereby attain happiness.

Divergences

1. The stoics rejected the idea that happiness consists in pleasure. Pleasure is not our primary native good, because it expresses only our animal side; what we share with other living creatures. It is virtue, the exercise of reason, that defines the good life for human beings.

2. Pleasure is not good in itself; it is something we should be indifferent towards (enjoy it when it is available but be indifferent when it is not). It is a “desirable indifference”.

Stoicism against hedonism

Epicurius wrote that pleasure is the starting point and the goal of the happy life. Stoicism, by contrast, denies that pleasure is intrinsically good at all.

Pleasure seems goof because we pursue it; pain bad because we avoid it. Goodness and badness are really the result of the attitudes we have towards them.

The pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain are subject to continual frustration and disappointment. The attitude we take to our enjoyments and sufferings is up to us.

The human power of attitude and will-shaping provides a shield against the blows of fate and its cultivation is the key to human happiness.

The stoic view of Nature

Nature is monistic. Nature is a unified whole, in which everything is connected to everything else. There is nothing outside nature.

Nature is deterministic. Everything in nature is determined by fixed, eternal laws that we can grasp through reason. Nature must be understood as a law-governed order (kosmos) of which human beings are a part of.

Hence, “free will” is an illusion.

Nature is Pantheistic. Laws that determine how nature unfolds can be considered divine. This principle of necessity in nature, the reason that determines all things, is called the ‘logos’.

Living according to nature

The good life for human beings, therefore, is a rational life lived in accordance with our nature and nature as a whole.

A rational view of reality shows us that we must distinguish between what is within our power to change and what is not within our power. Some things we can control or predict, others are beyond our control. Anger is a failure to understand what is within our control and what is not. The latter should not bother us.

The good life then requires:

1. Taking the right attitude towards the world.

2. Being motivated in the right way in our actions, aiming at virtue.

If we act rationally, or virtuously, we will be happy.

lecture 7 – Week 5 – 2/18/2025

Aristotle on happiness

Introduction to aristotle’s ethics

Aristotle is one of the most influential philosophers in history, before Epicurius and the Stoics.

He was a student of Plato and when on to teach his own philosophy at the Lyceum, a school he established in Athens.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is based on lecture notes he used in his teachings (edited by Nicomachus).

Books 1-2 of Nicomachean Ethics is the main topics we will cover.

Conflicting views of happiness

Like the other Greek philosophers, Aristotle takes the primary object of ethics to be nature of the good life.

This will turn out to be what Aristotle calls happiness, or eudaimonia.

By eudaimonia, Aristotle means not just a state of mind, but ‘doing well’, ‘faring well’, ‘living well’ in a sense that connotes both prosperity and right conduct.

Aristotle observes that there is widespread agreement that happiness is the highest practical good, but opinion is divided over what constitutes happiness.

There are three common conceptions of the good life (or the highest good that is the aim of life):

1. Pleasure – starts a discussion over “unnecessary pleasures as the highest good”

   1. Worthy of consideration because those with a choice take it so seriously.

   2. Aristotle mentions Sardanapalus, the Assyrian king of “legendary sensuality”

2. Honor – off the table

   1. The “honor ethic” has been predominant in Greek Culture, Aristotle identifies two problems with it:

      1. Honor is fickle and erratic. It depends more on those who confer than receive. “We feel instinctively that the good is something proper to its possessor and not easily taken away from him”. Dependent on recognition, good should not be easily taken.

      2. Honor is sought as recognition for something (the good) that the person has already done, so it itself cannot be the source of goodness, as it presupposes a higher end which is recognized in honor.

         1. The athlete completes a worthwhile pursuit but seeks recognition or honor. The excellence that is involved in the activity itself is the good itself.

3. Wealth

   1. Aristotle dismisses money-making as a serious candidate for the good life because:

      1. It does not allow for freedom of action (one is constrained by what one has to do in order to increase wealth, e.g. meet customer demand).

      2. It serves only as a means, meaning as a means for attaining something more important than money (e.g. pleasure or honor)

Though Aristotle dismisses wealth as a candidate for the highest good, he does not deny that wealthy are better off (and generally happier) than the poor.

happiness as the highest good – eudaimonia

Having considered these various opinions, Aristotle presents his own account of what happiness means.

1. First, he claims that we always act with an aim in view, all of our (deliberate) actions aim at some good.

   1. We do things for a purpose, in order to realize something.

2. If the prior is true, there should be some good which is the aim of our lives taken as a whole.

   1. We should consider the sum of our actions, our lives as a whole, for being for the sake of some good, as having a goal which we each aim to realize in our lives.

   2. We can then think of a life “succeeding” or “failing” in view of this goal (or target).

3. The goal at which our lives as a whole aim is the highest or chief good, that for the sake of which we are ultimately acting throughout our lives.

The idea seems to be that life is always led. That implies that in leading a life, we aim at some good, however conscious we are of this.

The “complete goal”

Aristotle characterizes the highest good as the good that is complete and self-sufficient.

• As a complete goal, it is pursued solely for its own sake and not because of something else. It is not chosen as a means for something further, more desirable or fulfilling end.

The “Self-sufficient goal”

• As a self-sufficient goal, it makes a life good and desirable by itself. A life that reaches this goal is not deficient in the way that a pleasant or famous or wealthy life may be.

• The happy life, properly understood, is not made better by the addition of other goods. Nothing can be added to happiness to make it more valuable or worthy of choice.

the attainability of happiness + Happiness as perfection

Aristotle seems to be spelling out what it means to attain perfection in life. If we accept that actions can more or less perfectly realize their goals, we can enquire about the general shape of a perfectly realized life. However, this discussion is abstract and makes controversial assumptions.

Crucially, the point is that the things we aim at in life aren’t equally important. Some matter more than others. This truism shows that there is a hierarchy of aims.

What is at the top of the hierarchy is the thing of which it does not make sense to say that it was done for the sake of something else. It is the self-sufficient goal.

Aristotle concedes that happiness may be unattainable for some people in some circumstances because:

1. Happiness requires a certain kind of character. Having a character capable of happiness requires a certain kind of decent upbringing. Someone might be so ruined in their upbringing that happiness is beyond them.

   1. Characters are not given to us though. They are an ongoing process of formation and can be changes by habits of action.

2. Happiness is not completely under our control. We need a certain amount of luck or good fortune, such as:

   1. Being born into a decent family.

   2. Having a fair degree of intelligence.

   3. Being attractive.

   4. Having good friends.

Having such things helps us to be happy, which contrasts with the Stoic view.

1. Happiness might be wrongly understood.

   1. We do not choose between happiness and incomplete goods such as health, friendship, and material prosperity.

happiness and human nature

Aristotle maintains that in being the chief good for human beings, happiness fulfills our nature.

The “function” (Ergon) argument

A things nature is indicated by its distinctive “function” (ergon). The “goodness” of a thing depends on how well it is suited to its function. Examples:

• A good eye is one that sees well.

• A good knife is one that cuts well.

Activities are also defined by functions that allows us to describe them as “good” or not.

• The good musician is one who plays well.

• The good doctor is one who heals.

If this is what it means for something to be “good”, then the good life for human beings could also be specified in terms of the function that is distinctive of the human species. What is our function?

1. Is it being alive?

   1. We share this with plants and animals, so it is not distinctive to us.

2. The fact that we are sentient beings capable of perception.

   1. We also share this with animals, so it is also not distinctive to us.

3. Is it the life of rational activity?

   1. Activity that is subject to standards of evaluation that can be thought about and reflected upon.

   2. This is distinctive to human beings and so provides us with the definitive function we are seeking (human beings are rational animals).

Conclusion

The life of rational activity, i.e. activity that meets shared standards of evaluation, defines human function, or ergon.

So, the best life will be a life of activity that meets these standards of conduct.