▶︎ 0:00 We've seen that each of the philosophers that we study have a different analysis of the nature of action. Each of them thinks that ethics should be focused on a different aspect of what our actions are. Our actions are very complex phenomena, and each one singles out a different aspect for the focus of ethics.
▶︎ 0:23 For Mill, it's the consequences, what follows from the action. The greatest happiness that is produced by it is what ethics should be examining. For Kant, it's the motivation. Why are you doing it? Are you doing it because it's the right thing to do, or are you doing it because there's some selfish gain for it, for you?
▶︎ 0:45 Now, Aristotle looks at, could, look at both of these, and he would say that they're both based on a faulty moral psychology. They both misunderstand the nature of human action, the nature of human behavior, and they both misunderstand the nature of ethics. You see, anyone can do a good action here or a bad action there. Anyone can stop and decide, "Okay, I'm gonna behave well when I do this act. I'm gonna behave. I'm not gonna let myself slide with that one." That's not very interesting or very important, Aristotle's arguing. Aristotle says that Kant and Mill are looking at the wrong scale. They're way too zoomed in looking at single individual actions.
▶︎ 1:44 The proper scale to examine human life is a lifetime. The proper scale to look at whether someone is living the right kind of life is to look at their life, not one action here, one action there. The way to examine whether someone's a good person is to look at what kind of person they are. So we must, for Aristotle, zoom way, way out from just a tight focus on a single act here, a single act there.
▶︎ 2:19 The question is, what kind of person is this? What kind of life are they leading? And to examine a life, to have a particular kind of life takes a lifetime. So it's a much, much broader, more encompassing kind of ethics, and this is one of the reasons why it's called character ethics is you're looking at your character. That's the aspect that really matters for Aristotle. What kind of character do you have? What kind of person are you?
▶︎ 2:52 And this is based to some degree on how actions take place. This is his analysis of activity. What Mill and Kant do is they give us a tool, and this is a tool to help us make decisions. What Aristotle says, he makes the very perplexing suggestion
▶︎ 3:16 That in fact we don't make decisions very often. You see, to make a decision is to stop your behavior and to consciously weigh up different options, and Aristotle says that that's what we think of when we think of decisions, when we think of action. If you think of what is to make an action, that's the model that we use, but in fact, it's incredibly rare. It's very, very infrequent that you actually think about your options and weigh them up and consciously make a decision.
▶︎ 3:50 The vast majority of the time, you just do what you do. You do what you're used to doing. You do what you usually do. Yes, at times, you can, if you go through the food line at a cafeteria, you can think to yourself, should I get the fried chicken? I really like it, but it's unhealthy. Should I get the kale? It's disgusting, but it's really good for me. Let me think. There's taste versus health and I. And you can work your way through this and add up the pros and cons, and meanwhile, the line is getting long and getting annoyed at you.
▶︎ 4:23 But that happens very, very rarely. Most of the time, you're walking through and you're looking at your phone, you're talking to your friend, you just grab the thing that you get. You get fried chicken and you go on. You never even give it a second thought. The vast majority of decisions we make, we don't make. We ride along a wave of inertia. We do what we do. We do what we usually do. We do what we always do. We do what we always have done. You see, for Aristotle, we have
▶︎ 4:59 Built up a character, a personality. Through repeated actions, what we have done is we have created habits. Every time you go through that lunch line and you grab the fried chicken because of flavor and you ignore the kale because of health or vice versa, every time you do that, you are accumulating this habit. The habit is eating the unhealthy good-tasting food as opposed to eating the healthy, bad-tasting food. And every time you do that, you are reinforcing that choice.
▶︎ 5:43 Now, in one sense, obviously, it is a choice. No one's making you do it. No one's grabbing your hand and doing that, but it's not a choice the way we think of choice. It's not a conscious, deliberate, intentional thought through activity. It's automatic. It's closer to your heartbeat than to the sitting down and weighing up and making pro and cons list. It just happens because that's who you are. You are the kind of person who picks the unhealthy good tasting over the healthy bad tasting, or vice versa. This is me I'm talking about.
▶︎ 6:20 And the habits, so the actions, repeated actions form habits, and the habits come together to form a character. And the character is who you are. And it's the character that is the inertia of your life. The character that you have is the actions you usually do. You don't have to. At any moment, you can pick the kale. Nothing, your character doesn't force you.
▶︎ 6:57 The thing is, what's going to happen, Aristotle says, is that you're gonna say, "Hold on a second. I wanna be healthy. I eat fried chicken every day. I wanna start eating kale. I made a New Year's resolution. I'm gonna start eating the kale," and you get the kale, and you're proud of yourself, and you're happy. And the next day, you're on your phone and you grab the fried chicken 'cause you relax and you fall back into your habits. You don't have to. You do have the freedom to choose, but you won't. It's not that you can't, it's that you won't, because our character is what it's, it's like every time people walk on a certain path, they ground in a path.
▶︎ 7:43 And the more the path is there, the more people will walk on it. The more people walk on it, the more it grounds in a path, and it reinforces itself over and over and over again. That's what our lives are like. We have these paths of choices that we make, and the more we make 'em, the more defined that path is. And the more defined that path is, the more we will make them. And it's a giant feedback loop. So what matters, according to
▶︎ 8:11 Aristotle is not having the right rule, because having the right rule, no matter how smart it is and how brilliant it is, doesn't matter how well it can guide your decision-making process, that's only going to happen one time out of 100. Maybe it'll get you the right one 1% of the time, but the other 99% is a lot more important. If you want to make the right kind of choices, what's important is not having the right thoughts, it's having the right character. It's not having the right rule, it's having the right habits, because that will determine what you do the vast, vast majority of the time.
▶︎ 8:57 And Mill and Kant don't help you at all with that. Having this really smart, clever rule is useless when you're going through the line, and you're looking at your phone, and you just grab. Doesn't matter how committed you are to Kantian deontology or Mill's utilitarianism. As soon as you relax, you're going to go back to what you usually do. So what matters is forming the right habits. What matters is having the right character.
▶︎ 9:33 And the time when that happens best is in your childhood. You see, when you're young, you don't have habits. You haven't done a lot. You haven't performed a lot of actions, so the actions haven't ground in the paths, and you're malleable. You're like a wet piece of clay. You can be shaped into all kinds of different shapes. You can be pushed down various different paths. You can have different habits formed in you. But as you do the actions, as you repeat them, the clay hardens in a certain shape. The path gets defined, and you follow it more and more. And the more acts you do, the older you get, the harder it gets to change.
▶︎ 10:28 As an adult, you can change your character. It's not irrevocable, but it gets harder and harder and harder, as you well know if you've ever tried to change a habit. The way to change one is to stop, and every time you're in that situation, force yourself to do the activity you want, the new activity that you're trying to form a habit of, and resist the thing that you want to do. It's really hard, both because you want to do the old one and because when you're not paying attention, you're just going to do the old one. What you have to do is you have to fight the current of yourself. You have a self that has a current moving in a certain direction, and you have to ford upstream against the current really hard. If you do it enough, then you can retrain yourself into a new habit, and you can force the river onto a new path. But the longer the river runs, the harder it gets because the deeper it runs and the wider it goes.
▶︎ 11:42 So the most important thing for Aristotle is childhood upbringing. He says in the book, "For most of you, I'm sorry, it's too late. You can be completely persuaded of all my arguments, and it won't make a difference because you can't act on them." Once in a while, yeah, but the vast majority of the time, no matter how much you agree with me, your character will keep you flowing in the old direction. And there's not much you can do. If you have enormously strong will, you might be able to redirect it, but it's really hard. And the longer you wait, the harder it gets.
▶︎ 12:26 He would point to a very interesting moment in the Euthyphro. It's our first lecture, the Socratic dialogue of the Euthyphro. Socrates is having a conversation with Euthyphro. Euthyphro is this arrogant person who thinks he knows everything about religion and that allows him to make outrageous, dangerous actions like bring his father up on charges of murder that could end up with his father dead.
▶︎ 12:55 And what does Socrates do? He shows him the error of his ways. He shows him that he doesn't know what he thinks he knows. "You think you know what piety is?" "Oh, yeah." "Okay. Define it. That's wrong. That's wrong. That's wrong. See? You don't know. And because you don't know," Socrates' argument goes, "you should not be taking this extreme action on the basis of your presupposed knowledge." And what does Euthyphro do? He runs away. He can't define piety. He fails miserably. The logical conclusion is what Socrates says, "Therefore, you shouldn't do this."
▶︎ 13:31 Now, I don't believe we know what happened to Euthyphro. He wasn't a famous person. There weren't records of it, but I doubt he changed. He might have been completely persuaded intellectually, but he wouldn't change his behavior because that's who he was. Aristotle would say that Socrates' project is wrong-headed because it's focused on the head. Euthyphro cannot be rationally persuaded because he wasn't brought up to listen to reason. His appetitive soul, his pride, his desire to be admired will overpower anything that his reason tells him to.
▶︎ 14:25 Even if he were persuaded, yes, Socrates is correct, he's gonna go on the next day and want people to admire him, want to be the big man. And that's gonna drown out the tiny, little voice of reason saying, "Hold on. You don't know what you're doing. You shouldn't do it." So Aristotle would say that Socrates' entire way of thinking about behavior, his entire approach is a misunderstanding of human nature.
▶︎ 14:58 And Kant and Mill have inherited that approach. They're focused too exclusively on intellectual persuasion, and that's not where behavior comes from. We need to go at the personality. We need to go at the character. That's what determines our behavior. That's the inertia that we act on rather than the conscious decisions which very rarely occur.
▶︎ 15:36 Aristotle says Kant... Excuse me, Socrates believes that knowledge is virtue. That means what you believe determines what you will do. And Aristotle says, "Socrates, have you ever met a person before? Do you know what humans are like? Maybe you, Socrates, as soon as you believe something, you do it. No one else does. Have you ever met someone trying to quit smoking? They know it's bad for them. They know it's gonna kill them. They know they're wasting huge amounts of money and it smells bad. They can't stop. You don't need to persuade them rationally, Socrates. They already know it. But their knowledge is not virtue."
▶︎ 16:28 Why? Because there's another part of the psuche, the appetitive part. And the appetitive part is addicted to the nicotine. And no matter how convinced the reason is, it cannot force the appetitive part to do what it wants.
▶︎ 16:48 And now we get to the answer of what does it mean for the appetitive part of the mind to reason with excellence? What it means for the rational part to reason with excellence, and that's eudaimonia, that's pretty obvious, to reason well and to think well. What does it mean for the appetitive part? Because the appetitive part is not rational. Your enjoyment of cigarettes, your enjoyment of fried chicken, your enjoyment of foot rubs, that's not rational or irrational. It has nothing to do with reason. It's just what you like.
▶︎ 17:27 So what does it mean for that to be rational with excellence? What it means is that the appetitive part of your soul, of the mind, listens to reason, is guided by reason to be habituated in a right way. That's excellent appetites. That's the excellent appetitive soul. When it has been habituated by reason into having the right habits, then reason doesn't have to control it in every second, because it can't. The appetitive part will overpower the rational part plenty of times. But if it has been habituated, then it is doing the rational thing automatically.
▶︎ 18:22 When I was a kid, every Sunday we would go out for fried chicken. This was the big happy thing that we would do. And so, I got trained into liking it. I got trained into having all of these emotional, family, warm, fuzzy feelings around it. And my character got formed and hardened into loving it. Now, I can resist eating it, but I can't resist loving it. That's set.
▶︎ 18:56 He says some of these actions are like dye into wool. When you first put dye into wool, you can wash it right out. It'll come right out. But if you leave it, it's stuck. I cannot stop liking fried chicken. I can stop eating it, but there's no way I can like it. So, in order for me to behave well, which means not eating fried chicken, because it's unhealthy and perhaps unethical, if you watch Mill, I have to fight myself. For me to eat the right thing, I have to stop my appetites. I have to say, "No, no, no. Stop. I know you want it, but you don't get it." And then I eat the kale and I'm miserable and I'm just shoving it down my throat and I'm crying and it's awful. And maybe I'll eat it, but I'm not gonna enjoy it.
▶︎ 19:53 Now, for Kant, that's irrelevant. Doing the right thing, whether your inclinations like it or not, doesn't matter. In fact, if your inclinations are against it, that's better, because then you know you're moving forward with the right reasons. If you're doing it for your inclinations, that's wrong. For Mill, what matters are the results. If you're eating the kale and it has the right results, great. But for Aristotle, if your mind is in conflict, if your reason knows you wanna eat the kale and you hate it, your appetites find it awful, even if you do the right thing, that's not a good life. Eating it while hating it is better than not eating it while hating it. But the best life is a person who eats it and loves it.
▶︎ 20:58 You see, if every Sunday, my family had a big kale festival, a big feast of a giant head of kale, I don't know if they come in heads, because I don't eat it, then I would've had all of my fuzzy feelings about kale. And I would've grown to love it. And I would walk into the supermarket and I would say, "Yes. Kale. Terrific." And I would sit down and I'd eat it, and I would enjoy it. And then my rational part of my mind would say, "Kale is healthy." And my appetite would say, "Hooray. I love kale. I love kale. Bring it on." And then I'd be in harmony.
▶︎ 21:34 For Kant, inner harmony is dangerous. If my inclinations and my reason agree, then I never know which one I'm acting on. If your inclinations like doing the right thing, that doesn't make it bad by itself, but it could make it bad if you're doing it because of that reason, for those inclinations. You can never be sure.
▶︎ 21:57 For Aristotle, if your likes and your enjoyment and your love coincide with your reason, if you know the right thing to do and you enjoy doing it, my God, that's wonderful. That's the best person. You like that person. You want to be around that person. Not the person who hates giving to charity but does it. Not the person who doesn't like eating the healthy food but forces it down. That's not a person I want to sit next to at dinner. That's not a person who looks back and says, "What a great life," the person who forced kale down their throat their whole lives.
▶︎ 22:33 The person who's had a flourishing, wonderful life is a person who knows the right thing to do and did it happily, joyfully, embracing it, who derived pleasure from that. That's the right kind of life. That's the person who is, appetitive mind is in sync with the rational mind in a way that the rational mind doesn't have to force it. You see? For Kant, the reason has to cut out the inclinations and ignore them and override them. For Aristotle, if you have been habituated well, if you have been brought up well, and a lot of this depends on our parents, because a lot of this happens before the rational part of your mind is even developed, then you're golden.
▶︎ 23:27 You're going to have a wonderful life. Because you're going to like doing the right thing. You're going to enjoy it. And people are going to want to be around you. They like that. And you're going to enjoy yourself. "You're going to be friends with yourself," he says. That's a flourishing life.
▶︎ 23:44 That's what it means for the appetitive part of the mind to reason with excellence, to fulfill your ergon with arete. It doesn't reason itself, but it can be habituated so that it's in harmony with your reason. And then it does what your reason would tell it to do, but it does it automatically. Easily, happily, frictionlessly. What a nice way to live.
▶︎ 24:15 There are people, I've heard, I can't imagine this, who exercise, who jog every day. Now, if I were to jog, I would have to really fight myself. And I would be miserable because I never do it. And within fifty feet, I'd be pouring sweat and panting, and I have to really force myself to keep going. But people who jog every day, when they don't jog, it feels bad. If they take a day off and sit on the couch, and eat Cheetos, and watch Gilligan's Island, that feels bad to them.
▶︎ 24:47 I can't imagine it, but apparently, that's true. That is a good life. That is a person who has the right character for exercise. And for Aristotle, prudence, what's good
▶︎ 25:03 For you, and ethics, what's good, harmonize. For Kant, "No, no, no, no, if it's about you, it doesn't matter. You can't think about that. Ignore that." Prudence and ethics have to be separate. It's oil and water. If you mix them, then you could be, even if you do the right thing, it'd be for the wrong reasons.
▶︎ 25:30 But for Aristotle, prudence and ethics are inseparable. Doing things that are good for you, doing things that are good for your future that are beneficial to you, is essential to being a good person, to having a good life. Doing things that are good for others is too. But you cannot leave yourself out of it. Self-denial is just not part of Aristotle's ethical vocabulary. You are part of the picture.
▶︎ 26:06 Now, last question. What is a good habit?
▶︎ 26:15 How do we know what the thing to do is? How do we know what to habituate our appetites into? Well, Aristotle has an answer to that, sort of. He says, let's take some of these virtues of character. And again, here, virtues is the right translation. Some of these virtues, some of these positive qualities. Let's take courage. This is one of the things that Socrates would ask about, what is courage?
▶︎ 26:46 Courage would be something like, I doubt I could stand up to Socrates' questioning. But something like, in the face of danger, doing something that benefits someone, at some risk to myself. Something along those lines. Now, that's a general abstract definition of what courage is. But what's interesting, Aristotle says, is that not everything that matches that definition should be called courage.
▶︎ 27:19 Let's say there's a truck that's run away, that's driving, the driver's had a heart attack or something, and is driving really fast, and there's a child, and it's in its path. And the truck is way far away. And it'd be easy for me to go and grab the kid and pull him out of the way before the truck gets there. And I say, "I don't know. I could get hit. I might be too slow, I could trip or something. I better not," and I don't do anything. Well, that's not being courageous. That's being cowardly. That's not taking, it's a small risk. It's a very high reward, saving a child's life. I oughta do it. If I don't do it, then I don't have the courage.
▶︎ 28:04 But what if the truck is going really fast and is really close? So there's just no way I could get the kid. Very, very, very unlikely. Should I go and try it anyway? Should I stand in front of the truck and try to stop it when I have almost no chance of stopping it? Well, no, that's not courage either. It fits the definition. I'm risking something, in danger to help something. But that's not exactly courageous. We would say that's rash, that's reckless, that's silly, because that's the kind of thing that courage is, but it's too much. I'm going too far.
▶︎ 28:47 You see? The cowardliness is the same, all the same factors, but I'm not doing enough. I'm not risking enough. Reckless is I'm risking too much. It's too high a risk, too low a chance of success. Courage is in between those. It gets it right. It's when there's the right amount of risk, it's a reasonable chance, and the reward is important. And then I should do it. I have a chance of getting hurt, otherwise it wouldn't be courage, it wouldn't be courageous, but I have a reasonable chance of success. Otherwise, I'd be stupid.
▶︎ 29:22 So that's where courage is. Courage is in between having too little of it, where I won't do anything, won't run any risk, and having too much, where I'll run ridiculous, outrageous, silly risks. I'll be a soldier, and I'll take on a whole army by myself. That's not courageous. That's stupid. So what courage is, is the middle. It's what is commonly called the golden mean. The mean is a type of average, type of in-between number.
▶︎ 30:05 So every virtue, Aristotle argues, is a mean between deficiency and excess, between too little and too much. For everything that we do, you can do it in two ways that are bad and one way that's right. You can either do too little of it. That's bad. That's a vice, deficiency. You can do too much of it, that's a vice, that's bad, that's excess. Or you can do it the right amount. It's the Goldilocks Theory of Virtue. Not too hot, not too cold, just right. And that's what it is to have the right habits, is do things in the right proportion, which means in between excess and deficiency.
▶︎ 30:52 Now, there's a problem with that. The problem is it's not very helpful. Not too much, not too little, the right amount. Great, what's the right amount? And Aristotle says, "How do you expect me to answer that? I'm 2,500 years in the past, and you're asking me how to decide whether to get a child out of the way of a truck right now?" That's ridiculous.
▶︎ 31:21 One of the characteristics that Socrates demands for form is universality, and Aristotle's pushing back on that. Aristotle is saying there's a real limit to how much universality an ethics can have. Because any rule you give can be universal. Always do this, never do that. But no matter what, situations are particular. No matter what, you have to take this universal rule and apply it to the specific situation. Rules don't apply themselves, you have to apply them.
▶︎ 32:09 And what could Aristotle do but give you more rules? There is no way that he could bridge the gap between the general rule and the specific situations that you apply it to. No matter what he says, there will always be a gap, and he would say that's true of utilitarianism, the greatest happiness principle. Well, you have to figure out how much happiness everything produces. If you're gonna apply the greatest happiness principle from utilitarianism, it's up to you to judge this is this much happiness, that's that much happiness, that's that much happiness. You have to judge how many factors are involved, which factors are relevant, where to stop the consequences.
▶︎ 32:52 You wanna do the categorical imperative? Okay, how do you treat someone as a means, as opposed to a means only? When are you doing one and when are you doing the other? How does something fail when it gets universalized? You have to decide that. You have to figure that out. How do you describe your action that you put into the universalization? You have to figure it out because different ways of phrasing it can have different effects.
▶︎ 33:20 So Aristotle would criticize both of our other ethicists on this grounds too, that they're over-promising. That to satisfy Socrates' demand to be action guiding, they've said, "Look, here's a rule. This will tell you what to do in every situation." And Aristotle said, "No, it won't." It can help. It can help us think about things, that's true. They're not useless. But there's a severe limit on how much guidance to our action any rule can give, because rules always, always require application, and the application has to take into account the specifics of every situation.
▶︎ 34:18 Therefore, what is the mean? What is the right amount? Well, that's gonna be different for different situations. How fast is the truck going? How far away is it? How fast am I? With every change in those factors, the answer whether I should go grab the kid or not changes. The mean will be relative to the situation, relative to the people acting, relative to the specifics of the circumstances always.
▶︎ 34:55 Here, Aristotle is closer to Mill than to Kant. There are no absolutes for Aristotle. Everything's a matter of the specific situation, the particular application. But he's pointing out something that Mill didn't really discuss, which is that application is hard and it requires judgment.
▶︎ 35:19 Now that judgment is phronesis, and this is our last Greek word. This is the only virtue of thought that we're going to talk about. There are other virtues of thought that are much more abstract and much more logic and thinking well. This is the virtue of thought that's directly applicable to ethics, because it's sometimes translated as practical wisdom, which doesn't mean anything to me. Sometimes it's practical judgment. I just think judgment. It's like a judgment call.
▶︎ 35:58 We have a judgment call, it's like, "Yeah, roughly that much. Yeah, that's it." That's what this is. That's when I look at the situation, I say, "I know I need to be moderately courageous. I know I need to decide if there's enough chance of saving the kid, if the risk isn't too much." But that enough and too much, that's the judgment call. I've got to figure that out for this situation for me here and now. And that requires judgment.
▶︎ 36:33 There's no rule that will help you. There's no mathematical formula. The kind of thing that Mill and Kant pretend to give us, "Here's a mathematical formula that will tell you what to do in every situation," Aristotle thinks that's a fairy tale, because nothing can do that. It's always up to us to figure out what rules should we apply, what factors are relevant, and how do they apply here. And this is a particular capacity of our mind which he calls phronesis, or judgment.
▶︎ 37:10 How do you achieve it? Experience. There's no reading a book about it. There's no formula. You've got to do it over and over and over and over again and see what works and see what doesn't. And some people are good at it, some people are bad at it. No matter how much experience they have, someone who's bad at it might never get good at it. But experience is the only thing that can possibly do it. That and seeing someone who's good at it apply it.
▶︎ 37:39 But it's a completely different kind of intellectual process than we're used to. Just like the decision-making he describes is different from the way we think of decision-making, this intellectual virtue is different from the way we think of thinking. Normally, when we think of thinking, we think of it the way that Socrates described it. Socrates said, "The way to know what to do is to have knowledge. The way to know how to be pious is to know what piety is." And what does it mean to know what piety is? To have a definition. For me to have a conscious thought that I can articulate into a defensible definition. That's the Socratic idea of wisdom. Of knowledge.
▶︎ 38:22 That can't fit phronesis. There's nothing I can put into words. The only words I can use are vague and unhelpful, like not too much, not too little. There's nothing else I can put into words. What do I do? I eye the situation and say, "Yeah, that's right." I can't explain how I do it. I can't give a rule, I can't give numbers. I just do it.
▶︎ 38:45 This, for Socrates, knowledge is knowing that. I know that piety is this and this and this. For Aristotle, there's a know-how. I know how to ride a bike, but I couldn't explain it. You can't read a book and then get up and ride a bike. You need to do it. You learn it by doing. Here's a very important part of his explanation of education. Education was very, very important to Aristotle. He said, "Many, many things we only learn by doing. There's no abstract knowledge that we can gain of it." Well, the same is true of judging. You learn by doing it, over and over and over and over again.
▶︎ 39:32 Because on the one hand, it's relative, what Kant feared and recoiled from, because what's the mean for you is going to be different from the mean for me. Let's take the example of Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time. Won 28 medals for swimming. And when he was training, he ate a lot. The recommended daily caloric intake for a normal person is 2,500 calories a day. 2,500. His normal calories when he was training was 10,000 calories a day.
▶︎ 40:15 And so this was a typical day's menu while he was training. For breakfast, Michael Phelps had three fried egg sandwiches with cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, fried onions, and mayonnaise, followed by three chocolate chip pancakes. After the sandwich and pancakes, it was time for a five-egg omelet, three sugar-coated slices of French toast, a bowl of grits, and two cups of coffee. Then on the way to training, he would stop and get more food. For lunch, he would have half a kilogram of pasta, two large ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread smothered with mayonnaise, and a whole bunch of energy drinks. For dinner, a pound of pasta with carbonara sauce, a large pizza, and energy drinks. That was an average day's eating.
▶︎ 41:01 Now, what's interesting, that was perfectly healthy for him. That was the mean for him. For almost anyone else on the planet, that would be outrageously way, way, way too much. That would be a massive excess of food. For him, it was the right amount. For him to eat what a normal person ate would be a massive deficiency, and he wouldn't be able to train the way that he trained. He wouldn't have enough energy. He had no fat on his body. None, because he expended so much energy. He expended so much energy. He needed all this fuel. So that was the appropriate amount. And he had to use his phronesis to decide what was right for him.
▶︎ 41:41 So what the mean is, is always going to be relevant relative to the person and the situation. And it's going to vary. And therefore, there's an element of relativism here. But it's a very limited amount of relativism. Because it's not relative in the way that Kant specifically feared, which would mean that you could just make up whatever you want. It's up to you to decide. No. There are objective answers as to what the mean is. This was the right amount of food for Phelps. If he'd eaten less, it would've been the wrong amount. If he'd eaten more, it would've been the wrong amount. There's a right answer, it just differs for different people. There's a right answer for you. There's a right answer for me. They're just going to be different. And how do we know? You just got to use your judgment.
▶︎ 42:32 The golden mean is the closest thing that Aristotle gives us to a Socratic form. It's universal. You should always choose the mean. There are few things he says don't have a mean. There isn't the modern amount of adultery that you should commit, or the modern amount of murder you should commit. There are a few things that aren't. But most things, if you want to know what to do, you pick the mean between the excess and deficiency. This is action guiding, this is universal, and it tells us the essence of what is good. It's good because it's the right amount and it's the way to habituate your appetites to be harmonious to reason.
▶︎ 43:12 But all of these are heavily qualified for Aristotle. He has severe criticisms of Socrates' project. The golden mean is action guiding in that it helps some very rough, general, vague guidelines, but it's very limited. The amount of guidance it gives stops quickly, and then it's up to you to decide what is the mean, what is too much, what is too little. It is universal, but what the mean is will vary from person to person to person.
▶︎ 43:48 And is the essence, that one I think he would hold he did satisfy: he did that one correctly. He did satisfy Socrates' demand for the essence. But the essence, because he got the essence right, that is exactly why he could not fulfill the other two as much as Socrates demanded and as much as Mill and Kant thought they could.