by Mark Silcox
One of the most difficult tricks to pull off when you’re teaching the Nicomachean Ethics is trying to sell Aristotle’s list of virtues. “But…why are there exactly twenty-two of them?” whines the enthusiast at the front of the room with three pens in his front pocket. “What the hell is magnificence, anyway, and why should I care about it?” snarls the ruddy-faced proletarian a few seats back who takes all her notes in pencil. “Why did he leave out Faith, Hope, and Charity?” intones the suspiciously bearded figure in the back row who asked you last week why there wasn’t more Augustine on the syllabus.
All perfectly fair questions. And for devout Hellenists like myself the topic is especially uncomfortable, since even though Aristotle clearly didn’t mean for his list to be exhaustive, his ethical theory would be manifestly incomplete by its own standards if he hadn’t provided some such enumeration. Furthermore, the standard quickie responses to these sorts of student objections are startlingly unsatisfying. “Every culture will have its own, distinctive list” opens a door to the sloppiest form of relativism, which is the last thing most students need to hear endorsed as they struggle for conversational strategies to avoid arguing with their fundamentalist parents or their Trump-supporting roommates. And “the virtues are One,” for all that it has been energetically defended by certain other, let us say, highly unempirical moral philosophers (*cough* Aquinas *cough* McDowell) doesn’t leave much space for serious discussion of why student X’s Uncle Zebulon at least seems to be simultaneously both courageous and illiberal.
I was thinking about this problem last week around the same time that I was pondering the curious way in which my gradually increasing administrative responsibilities have caused me to admire a whole new batch of character traits in colleagues with whom I have remarkably little else in common. Low-level administrative work at a contemporary American university is mostly pretty grueling and thankless labor, but I’ve been grateful at least for the way it has expanded my (otherwise infamously modest) repertoire of reasons to admire other human beings. And it occurred to me that, while there probably isn’t a definitive list of virtues that are equally apt ideals of moral achievement for every human society, perhaps there are a few that are broadly characterizable enough that they work for pretty much any large-scale, reasonably durable human institution.
Some tentative examples:
Υποκατάστασης (“substitutability”) – The capacity to piddle away hours of time filling out utterly useless surveys, sitting through non-desiderative meetings, or editing documents nobody will read, bolstered only by the thought that if you don’t do it, some other poor sucker will have to.
Ετοιμότητα (“preparedness’) – A purely negative virtue: the inability to convince yourself that you can stand in front of a group 0f people and spew undiluted and highly contentful rhetorical brilliance without making notes beforehand, or at least giving a few moments’ thought in advance to the topic your audience expects you to address.
Διαφάνεια (“transparency”) – Ability to resist the temptation to talk in managerial gibberish (about vital synergies, transformative experiences, proactive initiatives, etc.), even when semiliterate higher-ups are standing in the room waiting to be impressed.
Προθυμία (“promptness”) – A professor of mine in grad school who had a habit of showing up for his own lectures half an hour late once informed a class he had thus tortured that “punctuality is the symptom of a slave mentality.” This one’s for you, bro.
The obvious complaint to make about all of these is that, while they might be just as noticeable amongst members of a guild of medieval shoemakers or a bronze-age hunting party as they would be in a megachurch, an MMORPG, or a modern university, they wouldn’t be anywhere near as creditable, relative to the sorts of skills required for crop irrigation, property dispute resolution, or hiding from roving bandits or mountain lions. But to that I say, hooray for modernity! Philosophy itself may have been in ghastly decline since around the fourth century BC, but that shouldn’t make one immune to the compensatory charms of the present epoch.
