Purpose from Rational Activity

Aristotle’s ethics start from the following prerequisite; Aristotle thought everything had a purpose. So what is the purpose of humans? Aristotle had the following thought process. Purpose is a differentiating factor. Purpose is a part of identity of things and it distinguishes between things. As the fourth and final cause, it does not really make sense if two things serve the same purpose.

If everything has a unique purpose, then they must have some defining characteristic that allows them to fulfill their unique purpose. A knife has the unique characteristic of a sharp edge that allows it to serve the purpose of cutting things. Trees have the unique characteristics of flowers, leaves, and branches that provide fruits, shade, and firewood respectively.

This is a functional perspective. You see a sheep and figure that its defining characteristic is its wool, hence its purpose is to give us warm clothing. You see oxen and figure that their defining characteristics is their strength to plough fields.

So what is the defining characteristics of humans that separates humans from sheep, oxen, trees, and rocks? Humans have rational soul. Our ability to think, reason, and judge is what separates us.

Whatever this unique characteristic allows us to do is going to be our unique purpose in the world. It is a very simple argument. However, it is completely subjective because it relies on the following question, "What happens when we use reason in the best way?” To Aristotle, when we use reason in the best way, we get prosperity, human flourishing, and happiness.

Hence, the purpose of human life is to achieve human flourishing or happiness. Aristotle called this Eudaimonia. Ergon is another word for function, work, or purpose.

How to Reach Eudaimonia

While Aristotle claimed the best use of reason for a person leads to their flourishment. Maybe this is because Aristotle used reason all his life and he eventually found happiness and flourishment, and this idea is not far from the capitalist idea that hard work will bring you prosperity.

How does Aristotle suggest you use reasoning to get happiness? Is there a framework so to speak? Yes.

Aristotle asked us to adopt virtue ethics. What are virtues? Virtues are behaviors exhibiting high moral standards. We can classify virtues in all sorts of ways, but here are eleven of the virtues mentioned by Aristotle; Courage, Temperance, Generosity / Liberality, Magnificence, Magnanimity, Proper Ambition, Patience, Truthfulness, Wittiness, Friendliness, and Justice.

This is how, according to Aristotle, we should live our lives, and this should feel familiar to you. All of our early education, especially in traditional settings of Western Civilization inculcate these lessons in children and adults alike. This is still one of the most practical ethical theory in the world. You are taught to be patient, temperate, generous, friendly, just, truthful, and so on.

What makes a virtue a virtue?

What is special about these behaviors, what makes a behavior a virtue? Why is courage a virtue instead of cowardice? How does reason explain why courage is better than cowardice? Aristotle thought of the problem in the following way. When faced with any situation, you can always take two opposite options on either extreme.

In a battlefield, you can run away out of fear, or rashly rush the enemy lines with complete disregard for your life.

When inviting guests over to your place, you can lavish them with all the luxuries that you can afford until you yourself have nothing left for your children or you can be stingy towards your guests and give them the bare necessities.

When dealing with delinquent children, you can be too strict or you can be too lenient.

In your career, you can be too chill at your loss, or you can be cutthroat and willing to do anything and everything for the next promotion.

This is not a dichotomy, but a spectrum. In all things in life, there are extremes. Aristotle points out that both those extremes are wrong. You should not flee from a battlefield out of fear but you should not needlessly throw away your life by rushing in, instead, you should be Courageous. You hold your line, you keep your wits about you, you make the best decision for your country, and you face it with dignity whatever that might be. With guests, you should be generous and liberal in treating them but not too much or too little. With your career goals, you should be ambitious but while keeping your honor intact, so do not do anything to debase yourself but also work towards progress without letting people walk all over you.

If a behavior or action lies between the two wrong extremes, it becomes a virtue. Aristotle called this the Golden Mean. Mean as in average of the two extreme positions, golden I do not know why.

This golden mean is iconic; it still lives on today; and it is found in Christian and Muslim ethical philosophy both. Both implore moderation. The original philosophy is clear for both religions that you should not aim to move into a forest to live all your life in prayer in solitude prostrating before God and neither should you live in a polity in a state of total godlessness. Be moderate, live your life, find work, get married, have children, and also worship and pray, be charitable but do not give everything away.

Practical Wisdom or Phronesis

It is one thing to say be moderate and virtuous, but how. The action of finding the golden mean requires Practical Wisdom or phronesis. It is the ability to act rightly, to be able to find the golden mean in every situation. Practical Wisdom requires experience and situational awareness.

For Aristotle, phronesis becomes a part of your character. By learning from your mistakes, you gain experience in practicing virtues. By being situationally aware, you gather the nuance and complexity of any given situation. Finally, you use reason to do the right thing based on the golden mean, setting virtues as your compass.

You cannot teach Phronesis through abstract principles; instead, it comes through practice, time, and experience. It is entirely concerned with particulars instead of universals, meaning it does not aim to make universal rules such as “you must never lie”. Instead, virtue ethics goes situation-by-situation asking you what the most virtuous path to take here is, maybe sometimes the more virtuous thing is to lie as to not be boastful, or hide the truth to be humble.

Virtue Ethics vs Utilitarianism

The ethical approach mentioned above is called Virtue Ethics. It calls upon you to adopt virtues. If you adopt these virtues, everything else should sort itself out. Not only that, but Good and Bad are defined by virtues. To follow virtues is to be good. To follow an extreme is to be bad.

What are some other ways to define Good and Bad? we have to look at the other two main contenders, utilitarianism and deontological ethics. Utilitarianism is concerned with consequences. Instead of blindly following virtues and hoping for the best, you use reason to figure out what is the best course of action in any situation and you do what creates the most benefit for the most people. If a lie protects someone without hurting others, that lie is a good action.

Let us take the infamous trolley problem. Utilitarianism proposes the trolley problem as a dilemma with the following base setup. If you do nothing, an X amount of people will die. If you try to prevent that, a Y amount of people will die.

If you are not aware of it, let me setup the basic scene. You are at a railway junction with a lever to change track alignment. A train is barreling down the track without breaks towards five people tied down on the track.

If you pull the lever, the train will be diverted to a secondary track where only one person is tied down. Utilitarianism presents the following choice, would you be an innocent bystander, accept the situation as is, and let five people be killed? Alternatively, will you take action and save five while condemning the one to death?

Utilitarianism argues that you choose the path which minimizes pain and maximizes pleasure overall. In this case, that will be to choose one person to die instead of the five.

However, Aristotle would answer this in a different way. Aristotle’s thought process depends on one simple claim, use phronesis to find the golden mean between extremes. It does not matter if he chooses to pull the lever or not, but it matters how he thinks about the problem. For Aristotle, it is not going to be the comparison between saving one life versus five; instead, he will look towards virtues to guide his action.

Virtue demands you to be just and courageous. Allowing five deaths when you could do something to change the fact is unjust and cowardly. Therefore, Aristotle might pull the lever, but not because it saves five people, but because it would be cowardly to not do it, but then again further context would be needed.

Virtue Ethics vs Deontological Ethics

Opposite to utilitarianism is deontological ethics where you follow some rules for the sake of following rules. In virtue ethics, you must be virtuous based on reason and golden mean because that leads to Eudaimonia, the fulfillment of your purpose. Deontological ethics asks you to follow a list of rules, end of question. The right thing is to follow these rules; the wrong thing is to break those rules.

You can make secondary arguments that following the provided set of rules is beneficial to you or the broader society, but all such arguments and justifications are secondary. The claim being that even if following these rules makes no sense, you have to follow these rules regardless of whatever real world consequences they may have. Deontological ethics lives in religions and in Immanuel Kant's philosophy.

On a side note, it is difficult to ascertain whether Islam embraces deontological ethics or virtue ethics. On paper, Islam embraces deontological ethics. What God allows is right, what God disallows is bad. All other arguments are secondary. Theft is wrong because God has disallowed it. Theft is bad for society is not the deciding factor in any way. If tomorrow the sky parts and God allows thievery, it would make thieving good tomorrow even if it has the same consequences on society. However, no religion can list down all the rules; there are only so many things you can ban whereas human actions are potentially infinite. For all those items that are not directly disallowed, what should you do? Instead of pretending there are no rules, Islam asks Muslims to be virtuous and adopt the same principle of Golden mean of moderation in your behavior, but only if there is no insight present in the primary sources of Islamic law. Moreover, there are lenient interpretations of Islam that look at topics in which primary sources are silent as permission for you to relax, where silence presumes permission.

Aristotle would be thoroughly against deontological ethics. For Aristotle, ethics is inherently context-driven. (Aristotle’s ethics aligns more with utilitarianism over deontological ethics, but Aristotle focuses on the virtues instead of calculating outcomes.) As we have mentioned in phronesis, ethics is not something to be taught through abstract principles. Ethics is context dependent.

Aristotle and Character

Aristotle put weight on a person’s character as the pillar for his ethics. I consider myself good, or at least more good than bad. Why do I have a good character? I still make instinctive decisions without relying on deliberations and trying to find the golden mean. I choose moderation by default avoiding the extremes, not always, but a healthy percentage of time. My instinctive judgements hold up to the Aristotle’s standards.

On the other side, many people make bad decisions on a regular basis, always choosing one extreme or the other. Some people go overboard with exercise on week one of running of weight lifting and injure themselves, while some do nothing at all. Some people are too boastful pushing away others and others are too self-deprecating to a point that they are disrespected.

All of us make instinctive decisions without much thought; there is anecdotal evidence that moderation, as Aristotle presumes, is the better option. So how can some people be instinctively moderate while others are instinctively extreme?

Aristotle puts the blame and responsibility on character. Phronesis develops your character such that through practice you will instinctively be choosing right most of the time. You nurture your character to do the right. You are not stuck with it, but instead it is your purpose to develop the moral character so that by following these virtues, not only you, but also the overall society achieves their purpose, achieve Eudaimonia.

Here are the main virtues and the extremes surrounding these virtues.

Courage: Between cowardice (deficiency) and recklessness (excess). Temperance: Between insensibility and self-indulgence. Generosity: Between stinginess and wastefulness. Magnificence: Between pettiness and vulgarity (related to large-scale giving). Magnanimity: Between humility and vanity (greatness of soul). Ambition: Between lack of ambition and over-ambition. Patience: Between irascibility and passivity. Truthfulness: Between self-deprecation and boastfulness. Wittiness: Between boorishness and buffoonery. Friendliness: Between quarrelsomeness and obsequiousness. Justice: Between selfishness and unfairness (often considered overarching).

Next up, Aristotle's political philosophy.