EDUCATING ETHICAL BEHAVIOR:
ARISTOTLE’S VIEWS ON AKRASIA
“Can the teaching of ethics really help cleanse the business world of shady dealings?” Asked by Newsweek magazine during the height of the recent Wall-Street scandals,1 this query resonates with perennial concerns about whether or not virtue can be taught and how such instruction might best be effected. The problem, Newsweek declares, is not that students lack ethical standards or are incapable of distinguishing wrong from right. The challenge for educators rather lies in helping students act on the virtues they espouse. “Even in today’s complex world, knowing what’s right is comparatively easy,” Newsweek concludes. “It’s doing what’s right that’s hard.”
Why do people act wrongly, when they know full well what right conduct demands? This phenomenon, known to philosophers as incontinence or akrasia, receives extensive treatment in Book Seven of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.2 Like Newsweek, Aristotle holds that akrasia presents a special challenge for moral education. How does Aristotle conceive this challenge, and what might contemporary educators learn from Aristotle’s analysis? To appreciate Aristotle’s insights into akrasia and moral instruction, it is helpful to begin by looking at popular views of the akratic’s dilemma.
Popular beliefs about incontinence are varied and often contradictory, Aristotle contends.3 Two, however, bear scrutiny. Aristotle summarizes them as follows:
(1) The continent person seems to be the same as one who abides by his rational calculation; and the incontinent person seems to be the same as one who abandons it.
(2) The incontinent person knows that his actions are base, but does them because of his feelings, while the continent person knows that his appetites are base, but because of reason does not follow them.4
In short, popular opinion concludes that with respect to akrasia, feeling overpowers reason; the individual, as a consequence, is seduced into acting irrationally. This conclusion, in turn, is marked by two deeper suppositions: a) feeling (or appetite) is distinct from reason; b) reason can be disciplined, but feelings cannot.
Although voiced in ancient Greece, these common beliefs about akrasia are held no less widely today. Like Aristotle’s compatriots, we tend to divorce reason from desires and appetites. The latter we regard as urges we cannot help but feel; reason, by contrast, bespeaks a capacity for considered control. When we act against our better judgment, it is because we cannot hold our feelings at bay. We lose control and behave irrationally.
There are two types of glomerulonephritis—acute renal failure (ARF) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). The ACF form generally develops suddenly as a result of an infection or illness, such as, group A streptococci bacteria, hepatitis, or in diseases such as lupus or HIV (Mathias, 2013). This type may require dialysis to replace renal function while it lasts, however, kidney function usually returns after the primary illness is treated. Many acute patients will not have any other complications as no permanent damage is done. Whereas CKD is found in a person that has had glomerulonephritis for months to years in some cases and may be asymptomatic until the kidney has become irreversibly damaged. ARF can evolve to become chronic if the glomeruli do not respond to
... a year. To cater to increased demand, the company can consider acquiring other breweries that are going out of business and that will see substantial savings on capital investments.
The traditional European Society was both similar and different to that of the West African society. Except certain factors determined how they would vary in opinions, this also affected how they handled situations when they faced an obstacle. The Europeans, Africans, and the Native Americans were diverse in their own ways , they had many similarities , but they took different approaches to situations.(Chapter 1,Page 6)
It is apparent that both authors provide insights into aiding the reader in making a conclusive determination, however, as mentioned; the reader may be misled by the author’s personal perceptive. Although much factual “doctrines” are exclusively used to provide a certain perceptive, both authors give their account as best as possible, however, neither side can conclusively claim their perceptive as ligament claims.
parallel for their reasoning from that of the political and moral culture held by the
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Rpt. in Ethical Theories: A Book of Readings second edition. Ed. A. I. Melden. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967. 106-109.
The War of 1812 was fought between the United States and Great Britain from June 1812 to the spring of 1815 (Findling, 15). When the war began, it was being fought by the Americans to address their grievances toward the British, though toward the end, the issues eventually were unjustified and reasons manipulated. There is no single cause for the War of 1812 but instead, several related causes, such the influence of the War Hawks, the impressments as well as the Embargo and Non-Intercourse acts, and the British's possible interference with the Indian Nations, and land ownership disputes between the Natives and Americans, ultimately leading to the Battle of Tippecanoe.
The War of 1812 has often been called America’s forgotten war. Wedged between the Revolutionary and Civil War, its causes, battles, and consequences are unknown to most Americans. The major causes of the War of 1812 were a series of economic revisions passed by the British and French against the United States as unintended consequences of the Napoleonic Wars and American unhappiness at the British practice of impressment, especially after the Chesapeake incident of 1807. In response to the 1806 British Orders in Council, which hurt American trade, the US (under Thomas Jefferson) first tried various retaliatory embargoes against the British. However these embargoes hurt the US far more than they did Britain, angering American citizens and helping the cause of War Hawks (people who favored going to war) in Congress like Henry Clay. In 1812, after defeating DeWitt Clinton in the presidential election, James Madison asked Congress to declare war against Britain which they did. There were numerous battles fought in Canada, and the Northern United States, as well as naval battles, but neither side could gain a definitive advantage. By mid 1814, the War of 1812 was becoming more costly and had lasted longer than either side had anticipated. Britain, which had other issues to deal with, chief among them the Napoleonic Wars, began to look for a way to get out of the war. In the Belgian city of Ghent American negotiators met with British diplomats. After considerable argument the treaty of Ghent was signed, officially ending the war.
There were many causes of the War of 1812. The most generalized cause for the war was Britain being resentful after the American wanted to be independent. The British and the American colonists had been feuding since the beginning of the United States. The War of 1812 was also in response to a series of economic actions taken by the British and French against the United States as a part Napoleon’s rise to power, as well as the American people being angered at the British practice of impressments. Another cause was when the Nonintercourse Act allowed for trade with Europe except France or Britain (and their colonies). The American people tried to stay neutral because they need valuable goods from both the British and the French. This in fact would not become the case when the British stopped American trade ships, captured American merchants at sea and attempted to get them to enlist in the British Navy, as well as started using Native Americans to hinder the Americans from expanding, making the people ready to fight. However, a lot of the merchants (in the North) questioned the War. This did not influence President Madison having Congress declare war against the British in 1812 though.
Gakuran, Michael. "Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy | Gakuranman • Adventure First." Gakuranman Adventure First RSS. N.p., 21 May 2008. Web.
Freud formulated a theory of religion that he explains in Totem and Taboo, which was influenced by works such as Robertson-Smith’s Religion of the Semites, Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Frazer’s The Golden Bough. He highlights that guilt plays a fundamental role in the psyche. Guilt must have had an original cause. At one point in history, there must have been a violation of the law which created an ‘inherent’ sense of guilt. Freud continues to trace this back to when human were a group called a ‘primal horde’. In these groups of early humans, there was always a dominant male, for example, like in wolf packs. Moreover, he centres his theory on guilt that originates with the Oedipus complex, where the younger males became jealous of the alpha male having choice over the woman he has as his partner. This horde acts as an ideological state apparatus, forc...
The various concepts and theories of mind prevalent today have had their origin and development in the West. They can be classified as : Psycho-analytical (cf., Sigmund Freud, Karl Jung, A. Adler), Behavioural (cf., Gilbert Ryle), Gestalt (cf., Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler), Physiological (cf., J. J. C. Smart, U. T. Place, Feigl), Psycho-physical (cf., Karl Popper), Evolutionary (cf., Henry Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Whitehead), Functional (cf., R. Rorty, Peter Smith, O. R. Jones), and Mental or Homo Sapiens-oriented (cf., Roger Penrose). The outcome of all such discussions is that "mind" is mysterious and beyond all scientific explanation. According to the main contemporary view, in particular, `there is something essential in human understanding that is not possible to simulate by any computational means’. This indicates that the nature of mind continues to remain a source of acute discomfort to the Western thinkers. Even their new empirical findings regarding the highly complex mental acitivity is dubious. The object of this paper is to submit that in this context of the West’s indecisiveness and perplexity, Aurobindo’s approach to mind comes as a breath of fresh air.
anthropological practice as a whole, analogy is the reasoning based on the notion that if two
17, No. 3, p. 252-259. Urmson, J.O., (1988). Aristotle’s Ethics (Blackwell), ch.1. Wilkes, K.V., (1978). The Good Man and the Good for Man in Aristotle’s Ethics. Mind 87; repr.
Cystitis is the medical term for inflammation of the urinary bladder. Most of the time, the inflammation is caused by a bacterial infection, and it’s called a urinary tract infection. A bladder infection can be painful and annoying, and it can become a serious health problem if the infection spreads to your kidney.