With this in mind, I have decided that you could teach an excerpted form of the EN fairly quickly. This would be the necessary introductory materials from Book I, and then the virtues of courage, justice, and magnanimity.
The reason to approach it this way is as follows.
1) The introductory materials are necessary, so included.
2) Courage is the easiest virtue to teach and serves as a model for all the rest. It's easy to grasp what it is, and why it is a virtue/strength/excellence. Once students grasp the model, you can just hand-wave indicate how self-control is obviously a virtue in the same way.
3) Justice serves as a _substitute_ for virtue, because the lawfulness component requires laws that compel people to act the way that a virtuous person would (or face punishment). In that way, it 'can be said to be complete virtue,' but really isn't. Courage comes up again here too: the laws should compel you to go fight or face death, so that you'll go fight like a courageous person (but because you're afraid of being put to death, not because you have the virtue).
4) Magnanimity is actually complete virtue, and in fact a crowning quality that one can only obtain once one already really does have all the virtues. It's an alternative model for complete virtue from justice, but the one that actually entails virtue. The contrast will help them see how the system is really supposed to be completed; but justice has to do for most people, because most people aren't actually virtuous.
This would only be the briefest of introductions, but students would leave with a functional mental model of how the system works: what ethics is, what a virtue is, why justice (which we hear so much about these days) is only a substitute for virtue, and what true and complete virtue really looks like. You could teach this in a long afternoon or one week in a semester, and it should stick with them ever after.
Those who develop the taste for it can read the whole book. For the rest, as Tolkien says, it's enough to go along with.
3 comments:
This seems a very worthwhile project. We need more of this kind of thing.
I suppose one should use the justice lesson to teach that other great lesson about Aristotle: always things with him are 'in one way' and 'in another way.' In one way, justice really is a virtue: it is a quality that allows correct action towards others, and that is an excellence of capacity (i.e., a virtue proper).
But in another way, justice is merely a substitute for virtue, because it is (at least in its lawfulness component) merely a set of external rules applied to restrain one into doing what virtue would require, were one virtuous.
Yes, that way you get both lessons about justice.
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