Ethics
Lecture 2: Good as Cause of Desire: Resolving the Objections

Transcript
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When you have temporarily lost your appetite, as we say, meaning your hunger, right? And your mother said, you know, we'll try to eat something, maintain your strength, right? Well, then you see she's recognizing the food is being good for you, even though temporarily, due to your illness, you've lost your what? Appetite, right, huh? She doesn't say, oh, you don't have any appetite for food, well, that's not even good for you. Forget about eating. She doesn't say, no, no, no. In the same way, you know, sometimes, you know, they urge you to drink water, you know, and you've got a cold or something, right? Okay. When my son was at West Point there, you know, and you go on these marches, you know, and they tell you to keep on drinking this amount of water, and some guys, you know, don't feel like drinking the water, it's all along the way, right? You've got to be consistent upon drinking the proper amount of water. So even if a man doesn't have the desire to drink this amount of water, and this very grueling thing, right, you'll find out that it is good for him. They should have drunk some, right, because he falls, by the way. And maybe, you know, your mother was sending you down to sleep, because, you know, you'd be a little cranky kid and be able to do your work at school tomorrow, right? So even though you don't want to go to sleep, you see sleep as being good for you, right? Not the most best, right? Okay. How about health, right? Is health good for you? Because you want health? It's the reverse. How about reproduction, not only in man, but in the other animals? And even in the plants? Can you see any good in reproduction apart from the desire to reproduce? Well, I can see an enormous good reproduction, because this is the only way that this kind of animal, or this kind of plant for that matter, right, can continue in existence, right? Without reproduction, a whole kind of animal or plant would disappear, right? So that's a tremendous good reproduction, right? So, does the desire to reproduce that you find in animals, and even this inclination to reproduce that you find in plants to produce seeds and so on, is that the reproduction of good for them? No. You can see a tremendous good in reproduction apart from that desire to reproduce. So nature has made that desire to reproduce strong, so that animals will pursue so great a good for their species, their type of animal, plant, okay? Even here, maybe the synagogue would agree, right, huh? Is pleasure good because you want pleasure? And pain is bad because you don't want it? Or if you've experienced pleasure and pain, you know why you want one and why you want to avoid the other? Yeah. I was with someone the other day, when he's being cramped in their leg, you know, the muscle contract, I guess that's... I had a little bit, but never really very great, but it's really very painful, I guess, and every day it gets going, you know. So is it bad because they suddenly didn't want it? Or because they felt this? The contraction and the pain and they wanted to avoid that, right? So it's not the desire for pleasure that makes pleasure something good, right? If you know the difference between pleasure and pain, you know why you want one and why you want to avoid the other, right? Now, can you see any good in knowing apart from our desire to know? It's good to know the way home, as they say. You hear the old song, show me the way home? It's good to know where my house is, right? It's good to know where my car keys are and so on, right? Not taking any terribly profound examples, right? So is it my desire to know where my car keys are? Or where my house is? It makes it good for me to know that? No, that'd be stupid, right? Say that, right? But because it's good to know where your car keys are, I shouldn't have. It's good to know where your car is and it's good to know where your house is and so on, right? That's why you want to know these things, right? Okay? So you want to know them because it's good to know these things. How about money now, right? Everybody wants money, right? All these cynical students I have in class, you know? Yeah. They all agree that money is good, right? Everybody wants money, too. Okay? But is money useful in our society because everybody wants it, or do they want it because it is so useful for so many things? It's not even related to anything valuable anymore. It's just a piece of ugly paper. I mean, you have to want it because it's good. Yeah, you want money because it's so useful, right? To buy all these things, right? So my wanting money is not what makes money useful, right? But because I say it's useful for me to buy a meal, or it's useful for me to buy some gifts, or it's useful for me to buy a pair of shoes, right? That's why I want the money, right? Now, do you see any good in having a friend? Well, you have a tweet, isn't that right? Yeah, okay? So your desire for a friend is not what makes having a friend good, doesn't it? I can see all kinds of advantages, huh? Even if it's only a useful friend, right? Okay. And does the philosopher think that wisdom is the best thing around because he wants it? No. Because he recognizes that's the most divine knowledge, right? That he wants it so much. So notice, as you go through in particular, each of these basic goods and the desire for it, it seems that the desire doesn't make the items here on the left, food, water, sleep, health, reproduction, and so on, make them good, right? But I can see a reason why each of these is good, and even necessary for a man or for the other animals, apart from the desire we have for them, right? So the desire is not given to us to make these things good for us or necessary for us, but because they are good and necessary, we are given a desire so we'll pursue what in fact is good and necessary for us, right? So by this inductive argument, right, we can draw the conclusion, right, that something is not good because we want it, but we want it because it is what? Good, right? Okay. But to be sure about that, we have to be able to give a reasonable answer to those objections against that side, right? Now, if you recall, we had, I guess, two objections to saying that something is wanted because it is good. Let's put down our conclusion here, at least provisional, and then see if we can answer those objections, because if we have the truth, we should be able to answer those objections, right? We want something because it is good. Or another way of putting our conclusion, that good is the cause of wanting. I can use the word desire here. But now we've given, in our dialectic before, we looked at those sides, and we had seen a very obvious difficulty of the side, right? Saying that, if you say wanting something makes it good for you, then my wanting one more drink would make one more drink good for me. And he and I, but that was not true. Okay? If watching something made it good for me, then my wanting to drive my car 100 miles an hour down the Salisbury Street, where assumption is the windy road, right? Would have made driving 100 miles an hour good for me from my car, right? But even I admit now, you know, all of a sudden, in the hospital there, my car has been told that this was not good for me, right? Okay? But then we had objections against this side, too, if you recall, right? We said, well, the good is not always what? Wanted, right? We don't always want what's good for us, huh? And every parent will say that about the children, right? That the children, at times, don't want what is, in fact, good for them, right? Good for them. Good for them. Good for them. Good for them. That seems to be a part of our experience. So, if good is the cause of wanting, how can something be good for me, as my mother and father know, and I don't want it? How can you have the cause and not the effect? That's one problem, right? See that? The other one goes back to the famous proposition, which you can state either way you want to. Contrary causes have contrary what? Effects, right? And vice versa. Contrary effects have contrary causes, right? So, if good is, as you're claiming, the cause of wanting, right? Then the contrary of good, which is the bad, should be a cause not of wanting, but of the opposite of wanting, of turning away, right? But isn't it also a part of our experience, and then the objection to the other side, indicate that too, right? Don't people, in fact, sometimes want what is bad for them, right? So, if good is the cause of wanting, the bad should be the cause of the opposite of wanting, turning away from a virgin. Yet, if you don't turn away from it, they go for it. Okay? How are you going to solve those objections? How are you going to even begin to solve those objections, right? If you can't solve those objections, you can't rest completely in this conclusion that we arrived at by induction, right? Because there's a couple of arguments here against the conclusion we have. So, can you separate the subject and the object? I mean, when there is desire in the subject, it's because of a good, but sometimes because of some problem in the subject, there's no wanting. Well, you gentlemen have just completed a treatise on love there, a treatise before we did friendship there, on Thomas Aquinas, right? And he had a whole question there with four articles on the causes of what? Love, right? Okay? And we could go back to our dear friend Bill Shakespeare, right? Who says, look before and after, right? Is there something that comes after the good, but before wanting, huh? Something that might be considered in some way a cause to, or an aspect of the cause of wanting. Oh, very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, let's take an example here of the good here. The beauty of Juliet, right? There's something that comes between the beauty of Juliet and Romeo's wanting here. Because in the game we play, Romeo wants who? Rosalind. Rosalind, yeah. That's Friar Lawrence, you know, our Franciscan pretty famous name. Oh, my God, he's talking about Rosalind. Who says Juliet? What came between? Did Juliet suddenly become beautiful? I'll be able to be beautiful one day, huh? And then he started to want her? She was beautiful before he even met her, right? What came between the beauty of Juliet and Romeo's wanting her? The party. Yeah, yeah. He saw her, right? We had that in some of those manudaxio, those passages from Shakespeare leading up to those, right? You know, how close he's tied with his seeing her and his wanting her, right? So, what comes in between here is an act. So, what do you think about her? So, what do you think about her? So, what do you think about her? So, what do you think about her? of the senses, right? In this case, it might be the eye, right? Suppose I'm eating something that looks kind of interesting and you, hey, you want to taste it? Yeah. Oh, can I have one of those too? What's come between the good food and your wanting it? Taste or smell or something of this sort, right? Okay? If you hadn't seen that or smelled it maybe or tasted it especially, right, you wouldn't have begun to, what? Want it, right? Okay? Now, take a little different example in Julia here. Let's take wisdom. Okay? I didn't always want wisdom, huh? I was a little boy. I wanted candy. I didn't want wisdom. Okay? What came between wisdom and Burkowitz wanting it? Understanding part of it? Yeah. So it'd be, in this case, an act not of the senses, but of the, what? Reason, yeah. Understanding. So an act of the senses or of reason, like in some cases or both, but an act of the senses or of reason comes between the good and our wanting it, right? Okay? So like Thomas was saying in the treatise on love, those first two causes kind of go together, right? He says that good is a cause of love, and in the second article, knowledge is a cause of love, right? But as he says, for the same reason, in a sense, right? That's the object in the way of love, right? But more precisely, you could say the good as known is the object of love, right? Okay? It's the good as known that is wanted, huh? Now, you see the before and after here, right? The beauty of Juliet comes before Romeo seeing her beauty, right? Okay? But his seeing her beauty comes before his wanting Juliet, right? The excellence of wisdom, the godlike character of wisdom, right? It's the most divine knowledge, right? Came before my reason, recognizing the godlike character of wisdom. It's the best knowledge. But that came before my wanting, Mr. Wright, more than can be. Okay? Now, can we make use of that added factor here now to begin to answer the objections, right? We say, if the good is the cause of wanting, one of the objections was, well, the good is not always wanting, right? If wisdom is so good, for example, right? Why is it then that there aren't people wanting it so much? It would be whether it's correct knowledge or not. In other words, to know something truly good or... You could say they could be ignorant of it, right? Okay? They don't know what wisdom is, right? Okay? There might be a food that I don't want because I've never what? Never tasted it, right? You see? That's one prospect to mention, right? I might not want something because I simply don't know it, right? Okay? So that's one way of explaining, right? Or answering reasonably, I think, that first objection. Now, a second thing about the senses or reason. Can the senses or reason be... Can the senses or reason be... Can the senses or reason be... Can the senses or reason be... be deceived by the likeness of things. Both the sense and reason can be deceived by the likeness of things. So, what about the other objection now, right? If good is the cause of wanting, then bad should be the cause not of wanting, but of reversion, turning away, right? But could the bad resemble the good in some way? And that the senses and reason are therefore deceived by the likeness of the bad to the good, right? So that the bad is not desired as such, but because it seems to be good, right? Now, if it's desired because it seems to be good, because it resembles what is truly good, the original cause of good is what is truly good. And the bad is desired because it resembles, right, what is truly good, huh? Let me take two examples here. My wife is Italian, right? So, she tells me of this occurrence in the family before I was in the family. One of the relatives over from Italy was a self-appointed expert in mushrooms. So, the relatives gathered mushrooms under the guidance of this self-proclaimed expert, right? They made big Italian feasts with a lot of these mushrooms, where after dinner they all had to go and have their stomach pumped. They were the, what? Bomb mushrooms, right? Now, a man who has some, made some study of mushrooms, but knows the mushroom experts, they say it's very difficult to tell apart the good mushrooms from the, what, poisonous ones. Even an expert, right, who studies mushrooms, has a hard time doing this. And he tells me this horrible story, you know, of these guys who had, in France, where they do gather mushrooms sometimes, probably, and they wanted to have them prepared in a restaurant. And the first two restaurants refused to touch them. The third one agreed, and they died for them. The guy died for eating these mushrooms. So, you can be deceived, right? Now, you say, did they want to eat these poisonous mushrooms? Well, the mushrooms that were put on the table, they apparently wanted to eat, right? They put them in their mouths, and nobody's holding their mouth open, forcing them in there, but they killed them. No, no, you see. But they wanted to eat these poisonous mushrooms because they seem to be the good mushrooms, huh? And this is the point we're making here, right? The mushrooms that are really good to eat are the original first cause here, right? The poisonous mushrooms are secondary, right? If all mushrooms were poisonous, no one would want to eat any mushrooms, right? But because there's some mushrooms that are very tasty, and so on. And these other mushrooms, which are not, in fact, good, right? Because they resemble the ones that are good, right? Then they are, in some secondary way, said to be wanted, right? But not as such. Not ka-al-to, not per se, right? But in a sense, what you see in this example is that the bad, as bad, is not wanted, huh? The poisonous mushrooms, as poisonous, are not wanted, huh? But the bad, as resembling the good, right? Is brought you this. It's happening, right? Plenty, right? You see that? It's happening, right? You see that? It's happening, right? But originally, it's emotions that are good, that are behind even this apparent wanting of these poisonous ones. You see the example there? Now, let's take another example here. My cousin was in the Navy for four years, right? He tells me this horrible story that on board one of the ships, right, on a free afternoon or whatever it was, the sailors broke into some compartment on the boat that had, what, alcohol. And they mixed the alcohol with Coke and so on, had one hell of a bash one afternoon, see? The next morning, they woke up and they were blind. Now, do they want to drink this alcohol that was obviously, in retrospect, bad for them, right? In fact, it blinded them, right? Do they want to do this? No. But they're too dumb to know the difference between the kind of alcohol that is kept on the ship for, I don't know, cleaning purposes or something, from the kind of alcohol that, in moderation, is not bad for you. Huh? You see? See? Do they want that alcohol as such? Or did they want that alcohol insofar as it seemed to be like the alcohol that, when it gives you a hangover, it doesn't find you. Huh? See? They didn't want the bad as bad, right? Okay? Okay? Okay? So notice, huh? Not the distinction we're making here, right? Right? We're saying that the bad as bad is not what's wanted, right? Huh? Huh? It's the good as good that is wanted, huh? Okay? Okay? But the reason why the good, as such, is not always wanted, is because it's not always, what? Known, right? Okay? And the reason why the bad, in some sense, some qualified sense, seems to be wanted, right? Is only because it resembles what is truly good. So the original cause of wanting is something that is truly good. Now, let me add one more point, right? We brought in. He said that the senses and reason are sometimes ignorant of something, right? Sometimes they are deceived by the likeness, right? You could also say, too, that the senses and reason, their knowledge is often incomplete, right? And there might be something good in something, right? Which they know, but something bad they, what? Don't know, right? So if I give you a delicious poison, you say, hmm, I've got one of these. Do you want to drink it because it's poisonous? No. You want to drink it because it smells and tastes good, right? So you're attracted by the, in this case, by the real good in that drink, right? And the badness is accidental to your walking it, right? Because that which smells and tastes good is, in fact, what? Poisonous, right? Then it happens to be bad for you to drink that, right? Not in so far as it's good smelling and tasting, but it's that that attracts you, right? So, if you choose or you want the bad, it's either because it resembles the good in some way, right? Like the poisonous mushrooms resemble the good mushrooms, huh? And your senses or reason can't see the difference, right? Or you're attracted by the real good, not the current good, right? In them, which you know, right? But you're ignorant of the real bad that is in the same thing, right? Okay? So you see, in this way we can defend that the good, as such, is the cause of wanting, right? But we realize that... the good arouses wanting or desire for it through either the senses or the reason, right? And they can not only be ignorant, but their knowledge can be incomplete, and they can be deceived by the likeness of things. Okay? A guy who was a, what? A bank robber, you know, I can't be afraid to judge more than once, I guess, a famous bank robber. He said, why do you rob banks? Well, that's what the money is. Now, does he rob banks because it's unjust to rob a bank? Is that why he robs a bank? He robs the bank because that's what the money is. Okay? He's attracted by what's good in this whole thing, right? And if he's aware of the bad, that's not the reason why he chooses that son. Do you think? Okay? If the student cheats, is it because to cheat is good? No. He cheats to get a good grade, right? That's good. You see? So he's drawn by the good that is in it, right? Now, someone might, you know, bring up, how is it, the crime and punishment, huh? By the novelist, Dostoevsky, right? Where the student is going to, what? Commit a murder, right? Where he seems to be, not to get money from the person, right? He's an old lady or something. Okay? But just to show he's above the law, right? Right. Okay? Now, is he choosing the bad because it is bad? Okay. Well, if he's trying to choose to murder this old lady for no good reason at all, really, except to show that he's above the law, right? Of all the rest of you guys who are below the law, and I'm above the law, I'm above all of you. Right? Mm-hmm. So it's kind of a false appearance that he's, what? Creator. He's above everybody else, right? He's a false appearance of, what? Some good, right? Mm-hmm. Okay? Even the devil there, and voting from God, kind of in the name of liberty, right? And syria. There's an apparent good that the bad are pursuing, even when they seem to choose the bad, huh? It's not, huh? I think all of these tips we went through today are basic, right, huh? In other words, you should see that in the beginning, all of us would be like the little boy, right? When asked, what is good, we'd all give examples at first, right? But then when we tried to say, why do you call all these good? The candy, and the pizza, and the bicycle, and the location, and so on. It's not because they're all sweet, right? It's not because you can eat them all, right? Or you could probably come up with, or you call all these things good, but these are all the things that you, the little boy, want, right? And so you call all the things you want good, right? So this suggests a first definition of good, as the good is what all want, right? Once you've arrived at that first definition, then what's the next step, right? To ask the Socratic question, right? Is it good because you want it, or do you want it because it is good, right? Is the wanting, and the cause, or the effect of this being good? And then what's the next step, huh? To see that there's some difficulty on both sides, right? Perhaps greater difficulty in saying that it's good because you want it, because everybody has a number of clear examples in their own individual life, where something they wanted, and wanted to do, Very much at some time, they later recognized as being, what, bad for them, right? Not someone else said it was bad that you did that, but they themselves recognized that that last drink, say, was bad for them, right? Everybody has some examples of that in their life, right? But then there's also difficulties in saying you want it because it's good, right? Aiming that the good is not always wanted. That what is good for me is not always wanted, right? And what your parents might truly see as being good for you, you don't want. Or what your teacher sees as good for you, you don't want, right? Okay? And then the fact that people seem to be attracted to bad things, huh? There's all kinds of evidence for that. So how can you say, therefore, that good is the cause of wanting, right? Because then the contrary of good, which is the bad, it should not be the cause of wanting, it should not be attracting people, it should be driving them away, right? And then the next step was to try to answer the question, at least provisionally, right? But using, again, the most known kind of argument, the induction eye. And so we enumerated all those goods, about 10 or 15 of them, right? And the corresponding desires, and in each particular good and the desire corresponding to it, we saw that the desire didn't make that thing good for man, for that matter, for the other animals. And so we concluded from the induction, from those many particulars, that the good is not good because it's wanted, but it's wanted because it is good, huh? But before we could rest in that conclusion, we had to be able to come back, right? And answer the objections against that, right? And with the help of Thomas and the treatise on love and so on, right? We realized, looking before and after, which means using a reason, right? That after the beauty of Juliet, right? And before Romeo was wanting her, there came an act of the eyes, right? And before the excellence of wisdom and my wanting it, came some act of reason, recognizing what wisdom is. Once we saw that in between the good and desire, right? Then we began to think about this and realize that both the senses and the reason can be ignorant of something. And that would help to explain why something is not wanted, even though it's good or very good. It's not known. And then we saw that the senses and reason could also be, what? Deceived, huh? Or they could be partial in their knowledge of the thing, right? So they could be deceived by the likeness of the bad to the good, right? I took very simple examples here. The likeness of the poisonous mushrooms to the good ones, huh? I go for a walk sometimes in the wooded areas here with a friend, and he'll point out, now, that's good to eat. Not that, but there's a little bit of savvy there, right, huh? You know, you could poison yourself out there, right, huh? One place I go for a walk now is in Shrewsbury, and I get some of these little berries, and they're good to eat, you know, but other ones, maybe not good to eat. So, and we're out to grandchildren, they're gathering leaves, you know, but there's, you know, sometimes you have poison ivy in there, you know, and they have some nice colored leaves, too, you know, so you've got to be very careful with your little grandchildren and picking the wrong kind of leaf. Not because they want to get poison ivy, but because they resemble the good ones. Or you see some good in the leaf that is beautiful, but not as being poisonous or irritating the skin. So we can explain, right, with very well-known things, reasonable things, why people could seem to, what, want the bad, right, and not want the good. But...