Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

BBC-podkast on suuri jälkeen. learn how to live well. It's no use talking about the good, the form of the good, or the idea of the good, this completely abstract object. We don't know whether it exists and we can't, even if we did find it, how would we apply that to everyday life? So Aristotle says, "What we need is actually to talk about how the good is said in many ways." The good is said in many ways because the good is an attribute of different things. What we really want to find out about in ethics is the human good, not the good in the abstract, and that is where he pushes forward in book one to discover the human good. Can I come back to you, Angie? The final goal in human design action is you, the manoeu- what is it? Yeah, literally you, the manoeu means living under the guardianship of a beneficent guardian spirit. In Aristotle he defines it in book one as an activity of the psyche, of the soul, in accordance with excellence. It's because he's particularly interested, as we've been hearing, in the rational part of the human psyche. He's particularly interested in our rational excellence, which are going to be varied. Why is he particularly interested in that? Does he say it once says, "We are the only species of plants don't have reason, animals don't have reason?" Exactly. Human beings have reason. That's the distinction. Exactly. Exactly. It's what distinguishes us in Aristotle's eyes from animals and plants that we can reason. It's going to become a bit more complicated in book ten, but that's the gist. Now, so what we can say immediately is that it's mainly an objective concept. It's not particularly about feeling happy, though Aristotle's keen that we do feel happy, but it's much more to do with the actualisation of our faculties, the fulfillment of our potential. You can flourish, you can possess you, Daimonier, even if you're feeling pretty miserable that day. So that's something. He's also grounding it in human psychology and human biology. Again, I think we see the influence of his father there. He's trying to work with the grain. He's trying to make this a human good fit for humans, though he does relent a little bit and he says that, yes, it is mainly about the fulfillment of our best faculties, particularly our rational faculties, which are going to be connected with our intellectual and ethical virtues, but we do also need some external goods. He's a bit more kindly than Plato in that respect. He allows us a few external goods because he says it's going to be very difficult to fulfil your potential if you're really poor or absolutely deprived of shelter or whatever. Thank you, Roger. Is he talking about improving the individual or improving society as a whole? The ethics is certainly concerned with the individual. He's explicit about that and as Angie said at the end of the ethics, he leads us into the politics, which is a separate set of lectures or for us another book. So the aim is to speak to individuals in the ethics, but because the emphasis he places on the virtues and because he thinks that the exercise of the virtues is carried out most effectively within politics, he is encouraging the individuals to whom he's speaking to further the well-being or you-diameter of their fellow citizens. Did he stand up and give these lectures? Did he attract people to come and listen to these lectures? What effect do we know anything about the effect they might have had at the time? Well, one possible clue is that we know that something like Plato's Republic, for instance, was copied quite a lot, pretty quickly and distributed around the Greek world. It ends up in the library in Alexandria, not that long after Plato's death. With Aristotle, it seems to be different. There are his papyrus roles in his library. When he dies, he leaves them to Theorfrustus, his friend and student, who then leaves them to somebody else and eventually they seem to end up in modern Turkey, but in a cellar for about 150 years because there's a threat of them being destroyed. And that's partly why Aristotle's texts are so corrupted because the original papyrus was sort of in a cellar in very adverse conditions. So it seems to me and then eventually they are rescued and sent back to Athens, but it looks as if people are not copying out Aristotle's election notes and distributing them around Athens and elsewhere and Greece in the way that we know Plato's works were. Is there any way left-field question, Roger, if we get no way, it does matter because I'm questioning intrigues me. How come that in that small space, in that limited time, so many of the greatest philosophers lived and had such an influence? What was going on? How did those fusions take place? Well, I'm sure the full story would be quite complicated, but I do think it had a lot to do with Socrates. I think there was something about Socrates which really was inspiration. The man going around asking people questions about that. Yeah, absolutely. So I think he really did get it going and if anybody hasn't read anything by Plato, I would recommend they look at the apology or the defense of Socrates. And that helps, I think, if you're trying to understand the Nikon-Makheon ethics, because as I see it, to some extent, Plato and Aristotle were continuing the Socratic project, in the apology, it looks as if Socrates seriously believe that the only thing that can make you happy is virtue. And that means you're secure because nobody can take your virtue away if you are virtuous. It also means there's no need to do anything wrong for the sake of getting money or power or anything like that because those things wouldn't be worth having. Can you develop what he means by virtue? And you use the word excellence before, which I think is quite appropriate, as a translation for the Greek word "arate". But often when these three philosophers are talking about excellence, they mean what we would call moral excellence. But there is a puzzle in the Nikon-Makheon ethics, which arises at the end of the book, because all the way along he seems to have been saying, well, if you want to be happy, you should live the life of virtue in the moral sense. But then towards the end of the book he says, oh, actually maybe what you should do is contemplate and think and retreat from society and construct arguments and so on. And some people have seen that as making the book the book broken back, but I suspect myself that what he's saying is here's another way in which you can exercise excellence, and you have to make a judgment on whether it's the practical life or the intellectual life that's for you. So, yeah, what is he see as the function of humans? In book two Aristotle seeks the function of a human being, which has struck people as rather an odd endeavor. The reason he's doing this is because he's trying to specify more clearly what Eudimania is, because at this point everyone he's found out that the many in the wise agree that the end of all our aims is Eudimania. This is what the human good is, but they disagree about what kind of life that would be like. Is it the life of pleasure? Is it the life of honor? Or is it the life of wisdom? To try and discover what Eudimania is, he has to look at what a human being is, and then he sets out a broader sketch of living beings, and very broadly there are certain capacities that three sets of living beings have, plants have a capacity to nourish themselves, animals add in this perceptual capacity, but only human beings have logos, reason. And he doesn't mean that animals don't think in their own ways to figure out what to do, but it's humans that have a very special way of thinking whereby they try to figure out what the best thing to do is, and this is part of what it is to be human. An animal doesn't have this capacity, an animal doesn't know right from wrong, an animal can't be virtuous, they can't be vicious either, but human beings have this space of reasons whereby they form their own values, and they act within those values thoughtfully, and so he locates what it is to be a human being, and just like if you locate the function of an instrument, a tool, you can find out if that tool functions, if that tool is excellent, if it's a good tool, if you locate the function of a human, then you can find out if it's functioning well, if it's a good human. Andrew, I'd like to know more about that particular subject, how to be human, it's quite a big question. Well, as we've been hearing from Roger and Sophia, there are different kinds of rational excellence in Aristotle's book, and if we want to develop the excellences of character, then we need what he calls practical wisdom for anesis, and then there's also this thing called failure, contemplation of immutable and invariable truths, which he doesn't really return to until book 10. What he concentrates on for most of the ethics is for anesis, and what's its role in achieving the virtues? The virtues are defined as mean points between excess and deficiency in respect of either feeling or action. So the idea is you use your practical wisdom to sort of moderate your responses to circumstances. And initially you have to build up your character by just simply repeating the correct actions through her bituation. You achieve virtue through her bituation. That's why I make progress. Exactly. That's how you make progress. You just keep on and on doing the correct thing. And eventually you'll come to understand why it's the correct thing. And that understanding, as Sophia was saying, is going to be what secures what grounds your virtue. How are you sure that you're doing the correct thing? Ah, well, this is where it can get a bit circular because the test is what the good man, the sound man would be doing. And you look to that person as your exemplar. In one sense it's quite an empowering theory because it makes our character up to us. It's not in the lap of whimsical gods. It's up to us to develop our character. On the other hand it's quite a tough doctrine because he's saying your character's up to you but beyond a certain point you can't alter your character. However, even when you've settled your character, even when you've got a settled disposition, you can't just put your feet up. You've still got to go on actualising your reason and your rational potential every day. You're diminishing and are a terrible excellence. They're lifelong projects. They don't stop. They're activities and they don't stop. Can we develop the idea of the mean? Please. Yes, I think the mean has a lot more gain for it than people have thought over the centuries. It's been the bust of lots of jokes because people think it's just a doctrine of moderation. Moderation was a big thing for the inathans and just saying to somebody, "Oh, be moderate in everything," is slightly absurd. You wouldn't say that to a serial killer who's wondering how many people they should kill. You might be an extreme example. I think it's quantitative. The person who's courageous or brave will indeed feel the right amount of fear if it's required, maybe none at all, and somebody who's cowardly will tend to feel too much fear and so on. Then there's an insensitivity where you don't feel enough fear. But I think it's important to recognise it's not just quantities that are coming into this. I think Aristotle's description of the virtues as means actually constitutes the best account of the virtues that we have. What he'd seen is that human life can be separated into separate spheres. For example, to do with how much money you have and what you do with it. Certain emotions that you feel like fear or anger. There's a right way to act and to feel in these spheres. The generous person will be the person who gives away the right amount of money. They'll also give it to the right people at the right time for the right reasons and so on. Whereas the mean or stingy person won't do that. So your mean or stingy by not doing what the generous person would do. And you're wasteful or prodigal if you give away your money to the wrong people at the wrong times and so on. And he's quite clear actually in his discussion of generosity that very often you can have both vices. Because if you give all your money away, you're prodigal. Then somebody comes along who needs it. You haven't got any anymore. So you'll mean. Yes, I completely agree with what what you were saying. It's an objective mean but it's objective relatively to us, to us situation and to our context, isn't it? That's what makes it. It's relative to our situation. That's what you know. But it's not relative to us in terms of how far along the path to virtue we are. No. There's a right way to do that. Exactly. Exactly. Yes, it's not up to us to decide, you know, subjectively whether we've got it right or wrong. But the mean point will not necessarily be there arithmetically middle point. The mean point between two and ten is arithmetically six. But that might not be the right number for you in terms of what you need to eat if you're an athlete and you might need to go much near it at ten if you want to, you know, lose a bit of weight, you might want to go near it at two. So it's objective but it's relative to our individual circumstances. Yes. And it might be worth adding one thing which is that it doesn't seem to work with all the virtues, especially well, particularly justice. So some people think that Aristotle started as a botanist and he certainly seems to have liked categorising things and he'd like theories. The mean was, this idea of the mean was around in Athens at the time in Medeson and other spheres. So he wanted to get it into his theory and he did it very successfully. But then he seems to think, well, if it explains generosity and explains courage, it'll explain, for example, justice. And it seems not to do that because there is a sphere of life concerned with justice. You can't find a particular action or a particular feeling that's governed by that virtue. So there, the wisdom you acquire is it practical or theoretical or both can you tell us what the, as it were, almost end result of it is? Most of the ethics is occupied with explaining situations that require practical wisdom, for Nesus. And in book six, he gives us more explanation and detail about these practical wisdom for Nesus under the heading of intellectual virtues. There are character virtues on the one hand which we've been hearing about all up until now, like generosity and courage. And then there are intellectual virtues, like wisdom. But it turns out, even though we hadn't heard much detail about for Nesus yet, that it was required for us to be, for any of the virtues. So to be virtuous, you must act and feel the right things. But on top of that, you have to have practical wisdom. You have to have decided to do the right thing using this capacity, this intellectual virtue. Even in the original definition of virtue, he expresses it in terms of deciding to do the right thing based on reason and based on the type of reasoning that the practically wise person would undertake. The difference between that and theoretical wisdom is that in this process of deliberation, you have to understand the particulars very well. You have to have a sensitivity to particular situations, particular feelings, how this particular action will affect your well-being and the well-being of others. Every single situation will be different. And you're just for the sake of listeners, at one of whom is myself. Do you have any sympathy with people listening to this programme? No, I think it doesn't disapply to a different world. I think the basics actually are very user-friendly. He's saying that we all want to flourish to feel you down in the air. He has an argument which some of us are persuaded by, others may not be that are you down in the air is achieved through the best possible fulfilment of our essentially human faculties, particularly our rational faculties, which as we've been hearing from Sophia, lead us to both the ethical and the intellectual virtues. So he's saying, we need to understand what a human being is like and how human biology and psychology works before we can know what the human good is. I find that quite appealing. Now, yes, when you get into the details of how does practical reasoning work, where I think many people today might take issue isn't so much of the technicality of it, but in the fact that in his notion of you, Diamania, he has the notion of one human ideal, which we find out from the politics is basically the ideal of an adult freeborn male. And there is therefore then a hierarchy of different levels, if you like, of flourishing and virtue, going down from that Diamania. And according to Aristotle, and again, he says this more clearly in the politics, women just can't actualize their reason well enough to get to the top, mentally disabled people he sadly does not think capable of much you Diamania. And then very unfortunately, he has a category of natural slaves, people he thinks who are born without the rational capacities to direct their own lives. Now, I imagine most of us, even if we're attracted to an ethics of flourishing and virtue as I am, would take issue with this notion of a single hierarchy. And we would want to say, no, hang on, it's not the good, it's a good, there are different kinds of a good life. Roger, I'm not trying to do with as a male. I'm not saying as much as one male to another, but away as we can. How far do you think the virtue that you end up with is something that you inherited more than something you could study? Studying and practicing, yeah. Yeah, well, it has, yeah, I mean, ideally you will attend Aristotle lectures and you'll believe his conclusions and then you will habituate yourself into doing the right actions and feeling the right things. Feelings you may get some help from teachers along the way. He's quite open about the fact that it's a matter of chance whether you'll be in a position to do that as and she said. For example, even if you are a male, but you're not very well off, that means there'll be certain virtues that you just won't be able to attain. You won't be able to be very magnificent going around fitting out ships for the Athenian navy and putting on plays and so on. But you will still be able to be generous, you'll be able to give away small amounts of money at the right time and in the right way and so on. Yes, so I think the role of fortune or luck in aerosol zethics is a tricky one. And I do think that certain recent scholars like Martha Nussbaum are on the right track when they say that we can understand ancient philosophy as among other things and an attempt to describe a way of life which is free from luck. And I think Socrates himself provides that and it's one of the reasons he's so cheerful at the end of the apology. You know, he's going to die but it doesn't matter because he'll still be, he'll still have lived the best life that was possible for him in those circumstances. You're immune from luck in that way but luck will come in in so far as you will be born into a certain gender perhaps or you'll be born into a certain family with a certain amount of wealth and that will determine whether you can flourish or not. It's just the way it is. Can I come back to you Sophia? We haven't done anything really and one of the things that struck me quite a lot was friendship and the importance of friendship, the crucial importance of friendship. Can you develop that? Aristotle says nobody would choose to live without friends even if they had every other good and it turns out that friendship is not just important to happiness, it's necessary for happiness. There's a background in the sense that humans are social animals. If you had a human being on her own, that wouldn't be a human. It would either be a beast or a god. Humans have to live together. They live together in political communities and political communities club together to think about what is good for the, what is the common good. But Aristotle also thinks that happiness is very intertwined with virtue and although I agree with Roger that the book seems to be written for individuals to read, I don't think friendship is left out even from the beginning. You are being virtuous towards other people and a lot of those people are people you have deep affectionate ties towards. When you are making decisions, you are discussing your values, you're discussing the particular situation with the people around you who you care about. Aristotle describes these friendships, these very important friendships, see terms, character friendships, as complete, these are complete friendships. And in these kinds of friendships, the friend is another self. So that sounds like it could be selfish. You're like your friend because it's a bit like you and you're like, quite like being somebody who's like you. Well, Aristotle is very clear that there's a distinction between being selfish and having self love. His theory is not a selfless one. It's not you give up yourself to do something for your friend. You hold on to yourself. You like and care about yourself because you are a good person. Your self is really your rational part. The part of you that makes decisions, this is expressive of your character. And you value your friend in exactly the same way. And actually you end up being somewhere intertwined with your friend because you imagine you spend your days together, he says, you spend your days together with your friend, you live together in some sense. And as you do that, you're talking about the things that you care about, the things that are important in your life, the difficult and complex decisions that you're making in a daily basis. And because of that, sometimes your friend makes a decision and acts in a certain way that reflects on you because you talked about those things you've made that decision together. So he says something like, in a way, your friends actions are your actions are part of your decision-making. You actually become better as well because your friends help you to deliberate. So your friends are a way in which you develop your virtues. It's fascinating. For me, books eight and nine on friendship are some of the most beautiful parts of the ethics. I find them really rich study of the different kinds of friendship. Real friendship when it's based between two good people who care for each other's good for their own sake because they appreciate each other's goodness and he can trust that with friendships based on utility or pleasure which we're not going to stand the test of time. One of the reasons it fascinates me is when we get to book ten and we've all three of us have been touching on this. We've had this really rich, complex, nuanced account for nine books of what it's like to be an ethically wise and good person in a community. And they're using fronimus, using our practical reason. And then in books in book ten chapter seven and eight he suddenly says, well actually, Theria contemplate of wisdom is superior to practical wisdom because contemplate of wisdom is directed at superior objects they are, eternal and they're the kind of objects that God thinks about and that the Theria our capacity for contemplation is the divine bit in us and that we should try to imitate God. And then you think, well he's saying when using the word God is he meaning God's? He sometimes talks of the God's and the Greek pantheon as does Plato but as far as in my opinion both Plato and Aristotle believe in a single God for Aristotle says elsewhere that God is pure active thought thinking itself so not very like the Greek pantheon. And you think where different friends come into this now he does say, well it's quite hard to contemplate by yourself for very long you can do it better with friends but it's still you know an interesting tension a lot has been written about whether the two can be combined in Plato the philosopher rulers do have to go back down in the to the cave whether they like it or not and rule it. Can you exercise Theria contemplate of wisdom while you're running the state that's an interesting question. For me it sets off a fascinating thread in the whole of western thought about whether it's better to try to imitate God and inevitably fail because of course we can't be God or to be the best human that we can be and succeed at that. And Aristotle himself quotes some lines from the lyric poet Pinder, mortals should think mortal thoughts. It's heubristic it's arrogant to try to be God just stick to your human realm. And that tension we see it right the way through you've got at it is it Thomas the Kempis I think in the Middle Ages who writes the imitation of Christ you've got that thread and then didn't Alexander Pope write no then myself presume not God to scan the proper study of mankind is man. So you've got this do you try to imitate God and transcend your normal human limits or do you stick within your human limits and be successful or a third option which interests me is it actually part of our humanity to try to transcend our human limits. And for me that's one of the most absorbing questions in the ethics. Thank you Roger. How important does his work been over the last two and a half thousand years just a such an easy one. Probably about eight. It's been hugely important because he himself has been such an important thinker. You probably know that Dante calls him the master of those who know. And roughly speaking if you did want to find something out or know something before the scientific revolution you went and looked it up in Aristotle. Now in science since that time his works have been less significant though it's worth remembering I think this is true that in William Harvest's Treaties on the Circulation of Blood Aristotle gets more mentions than anybody else but nevertheless I mean you won't find Aristotle on the reading list for most people studying science in university now. But the ethics are independent to some extent of his scientific view. So though as it were the philosophy is there in the background and explains why the ethics survived as well I mean the whole story was there I think the ethics can be looked at independently of the background philosophical theory and that's why people continue reading it till now. So fear which we're towards the end now which of these ideas resonate most with contemporary philosophers. In the past six years so years people in contemporary analytic philosophy analytic ethics have been going back to Aristotle. There's been a movement towards contemporary virtue theory and virtue ethics and this was driven in part by the dissatisfaction with philosophical ethics during the last century when it seemed to get further and further away from people's feelings, agency, character, moral psychology and to centrimorian abstract duties and rules which kind of left character and personality out of the story and people like Elizabeth Anscombe, Philip Eiffert, Alistair McIntyre have been bringing back the virtues. In this movement it has movement has become neo-aristotelian so some of Aristotle's actual views are watered down. I mean some of the more demanding parts of his theory for example that in order to be virtuous you must have all of the virtues and practical wisdom. So you have to have that intellectual virtue as well as all of the character virtues in order to be happy and lead a good life. That seems so demanding that some neuro-resetelian thinkers have focused more on the virtues thinking about how we can make our lives go well by cultivating the virtues by training our feelings and we'll say things like, well, if you're trying to figure out the right thing to do, a good question might be, is it the virtuous thing to do or you might think, what would the virtuous person do in this particular situation? Finally, Andrew, do you think it's, that's making it much more relevant than most people would think it would be, his ideas. You think they are still relevant and work through these at the moment? Oh, absolutely. I mean, things, it's such a rich text. We, there's so many important things we've not even had time to discuss yet. So his account of voluntary and involuntary action and moral responsibilities, it is hugely important in legal studies as well as in ethics. Very, very rich account of pleasure. He has a distinction between justice and equity as far as I'm aware and please do correct me. He's the first person we know of in the West to distinguish justice from equity like that. So there it, there's just full of riches. A small addition to that would be that Aristotle's philosophy gives us a way to think about a young person growing up in his or her community and learning how to be good from other people and from following their example and from listening to their teaching. And so he gives us a way to think about moral development and to think about communities as incredibly important to moral development. I would go along with that. I think moral education has pretty much dropped out of modern moral philosophy and I think that's a great pity. It seems to be a serious and a born question how people become good. And another question that I think dropped out and which dominated ancient philosophy is what Henry Sidwick, the great Cambridge philosopher, called the profoundest problem of ethics, which is how does morality or virtue relate to happiness? Aristotle's answer is, they're the same. Philosophers now usually don't have an answer because they don't think about it. Well, thank you very much. Thank you Angie Hobbs, Roger Crisp, and Sophia Connell and to our studio, Agina Jacqui Marjum. Next week, the rays of the barbaric authors and how right up to the 19th century, they changed life from the Mediterranean to the English Channel and beyond. Thanks for listening. And the in-art time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material for Melvin and his guests. I ask the question, which is the only question I'm going to ask, is what did we leave out that you would like to have been included? Is that with your Roger? Well, we've mentioned pleasure but I think there might be a bit more to say about it because I find Aristotle's view on pleasure, Pachelia. I think he's he's trying to continue the Socratic project. He's trying to show that virtue is the only thing that's worth having. The only thing that will make you happy and vice in fact will make you unhappy. It's just that it's not just that it's not valuable, it's worth not having it and by being vicious and doing vicious things, you are making your life worse. Now one obvious thing that the vicious person might say is, oh well, I get a lot of pleasure out of being a sadist or being extremely powerful and getting people to do what I want them to do and so on. On my reading of Aristotle, he thinks that vicious people don't really experience pleasure. It's not true pleasure. So for him, Pleasantness is a bit like what philosophers have called a secondary quality. If somebody says a pillbox is green, you're going to say no, it's not. You're not able to detect that it's really red and you're kind of blind to that aspect a bit. I think he would also say to the vicious person, you think you're experiencing pleasure when you're being horrible to other people, that's not pleasure. That's like somebody who is in a fever saying that the glass of lemonade they've been given is bitter. They're just getting it wrong. I mean that he is picking up from Republic for nine, isn't he? You know that the pleasures are objective. You may think you're feeling pleasure but you've got it wrong and that seems to ask quite odd. We might say that's not a good source of pleasure or you'd have a better more flourishing life if you didn't get your pleasure from those sources. But yeah, no, fascinating. I just had a small thing to add about pleasure which is I think that Aristotle is thinking on in suological ways about pleasure as well. So if you see an animal leading the kind of life that that animal characteristically leads then pleasure will a supervean on that. They there'll be a proper pleasure that's natural and he applies this to humans as well. So when we are reasoning correctly when we're acting virtuously that's the proper pleasure of being human. And there's a lot more we can say about voluntary and involuntary actions, isn't that? Because it's such a subtle discussion. I really recommend people read it. So he says, actions are involuntary if they're through force, an external force or if they're done through ignorance. But then he makes a lot of very subtle distinctions between which kinds of ignorance we can be excused and which kind of ignorance are our fault because we should have known that law because it was easy to find it out. That's something we should have known. And there's an interesting discussion of drunkenness and that the person who does something wrong when they're drunk, they may not be aware of what they're doing. But it's kind of doubly their fault because they chose to get drunk. So it's. No, I think what's so remarkable about it is that we tend to read these discussions as if they were written yesterday but they were written a very long time ago by somebody who doesn't have the conceptual distinctions we now have. He is inventing force, he goes along. He's taking inspiration from the legal system of the time. But he's inventing legal theory. He's inventing the theory of justice. It's remarkable. And economic theory. I mean there's an extraordinary chapter on money. And what is anything worth? Well, it's worth what people want to pay for it. It's worth demand. But demand as represented by money. So money is simply the representation of demand and it's demand that's the common purpose. People can get that wrong. People who think that money itself has value and they are going to go wrong. I wanted to bring up the topic of weakness of will. Aristotle is arguing against Socrates in some ways because Socrates says people never knowingly do wrong. So when you do something wrong that's just a case of ignorance. And Aristotle thinks that looking around you see a lot of people who make a judgment to do the right thing. They make the right decision in some sense. And then they do the wrong thing. And this is just such a widespread phenomena that he thinks is really important that we try to get to grips with it. But it is quite difficult for him because if you remember when you make a decision you have that deliberative process at the end of the deliberative process you discover the right thing and he says you kind of immediately want to do that thing. So what's stopping you? Why do you suddenly do the wrong thing? He explains it in terms of a different set of wrong reasons coming in because your judgment has been clouded by emotions and irrational feelings. He has quite a sophisticated view that's still pretty important in the literature on weakness of will. I think so. And he ends up in a way partly agreeing with Socrates doesn't he? Yes he does. He takes this with Socrates and the protagonist who says no one does wrong willingly and he says well of course that's nonsense. We see people doing wrong willingly all the time but then he ends up and says well actually these people they they're not actually going against their ultimate knowledge of first principles. What's happened is their desire has clouded their attention to their particular situation and they're not putting that knowledge into practice. And he even admits doesn't I think I remember he admits that actually deep down Socrates is right that full knowledge can't be overwritten that the problem is that we don't put that full knowledge into practice we're not attending to it. The other thing it makes us aware of is how important it is that your feelings and your attitudes are correct because you can have all made all the right decisions have all the right thoughts but you're going to keep tripping up if you have the wrong attitudes and feelings and so this sense of training your feelings repeating the right kinds of actions until you feel the right things because he says that the person with weakness of will is curable but he and he recommends that they just repeat the right things until they like them which I think works to a certain extent but once you reach a certain age it's very hard to backtrack and change your attitudes and feelings and he never experienced chocolate. Well I think one thing to his credit is that he unlike Socrates he addresses the rather obvious fact that people very often when they're doing something that they know is worse for themselves they're being weak world say I know this is worse for me but I'm going to do it anyway and he explains that by saying well that that's just like somebody who's acting they do Ilych chi'n ei wneud? Ilych chi'n ei wneud? Mae'n ymw'r ymwch chi'n ei, yn fwy sydd ymwch chi'n ei. Mae'n fwy sydd ymwch chi'n ei. Mae'n ymwch chi'n ei. Mae'n ymwch chi'n ei.