An Inappropriate Confidence

This week my favorite local bar was raided by state police. I don't go there all that often, but it's an axe-throwing joint where I sometimes like to go and throw axes with my son. Armed stage agents of North Carolina's Alcohol Law Enforcement (yes, "ALE") raided the bar to check IDs, give breathalyzer tests to the staff and search staff's persons and belongings for contraband. Apparently working at a bar in North Carolina allows the police to do that to you.

It's been nearly twenty years ago now that the police shot and killed my eye-doctor in a similar raid for a local-bar-oriented offense, in his case alleged gambling at Applebees on sporting events with friends (and a fake friend who was a police detective). He never hurt nor even threatened anyone, and the 'crime' was both nonviolent and mutually consensual. Prosecuting such a crime -- even legislating such a crime -- is already morally dubious; but arresting such a person violently at gunpoint is immoral even if you don't negligently shoot and kill them. Their overconfidence with their weapons killed a good man. He was a husband and father, and kind to my son when my son was a boisterous child in his office.

The bar raided in this week's instance is not (in spite of the axes) a violent or dangerous establishment. This was not a biker bar where the patrons might be expected to be armed, not that police should be raiding those either. Mostly this joint is a local college bar. That apparently was the source of concern as ALE also raided another college bar in town and did the same things there. Both bars also employ mostly college students. None of the students needed to be raided by armed agents of the state in body armor, putting the students' lives at risk for... what? Not checking IDs with sufficient fervor? Possibly being drunk on duty -- at a bar?

The presence of these agents came to my attention before the raid because they were acting so suspiciously. They arrived in town in unmarked cars with civilian plates rather than government ones, but concealed police lights in their undercarriage. In this way they were acting exactly like the ICE agents, backed by other Federal agents and local police, that I saw in DC running raids on communities with large immigrant populations. They too were raiding parties to stop people from having fun at gunpoint. The jackbootery is spreading, apparently, even to state police with Democratic governors; it is a bad trend. The only purpose of such a raid on a bar full of college students is to teach them that the government is allowed to treat them that way, and that submission to such agents is expected of them as American citizens. 

I dissent. I deeply resent not merely the actions but the existence of agencies like this. They endanger us all for no good reason. All such agencies should be abolished outright, as should the laws that support their existence and function.

Nicomachean Ethics IX.8

On whether one ought to love one's self. In the Christian tradition it is assumed that you will, and that this love can serve as a standard for how you ought to love others (passim in the Gospels, but e.g. Lk. 10:27). Aristotle is not of that tradition. He treats the matter as a serious question, and comes to an alternative and somewhat surprising result. 

The question is also debated, whether a man should love himself most, or some one else. People criticize those who love themselves most, and call them self-lovers, using this as an epithet of disgrace, and a bad man seems to do everything for his own sake, and the more so the more wicked he is-and so men reproach him, for instance, with doing nothing of his own accord-while the good man acts for honour's sake, and the more so the better he is, and acts for his friend's sake, and sacrifices his own interest.

The centrality of honor to Aristotle's ethics almost cannot be overstated, at least in the sense we have often now discussed: doing what is worthy of honor rather than what receives honor, and focusing on doing what is worthy whether than worrying over whether one receives honors (or even dishonors) for doing it. This will also prove to be the core of whether one deserves to love one's self. 

First, however, some objections to consider.

But the facts clash with these arguments, and this is not surprising. For men say that one ought to love best one's best friend, and man's best friend is one who wishes well to the object of his wish for his sake, even if no one is to know of it; and these attributes are found most of all in a man's attitude towards himself, and so are all the other attributes by which a friend is defined; for, as we have said, it is from this relation that all the characteristics of friendship have extended to our neighbours. All the proverbs, too, agree with this, e.g. 'a single soul', and 'what friends have is common property', and 'friendship is equality', and 'charity begins at home'; for all these marks will be found most in a man's relation to himself; he is his own best friend and therefore ought to love himself best. It is therefore a reasonable question, which of the two views we should follow; for both are plausible.

The attentive reader will notice that this return to "the friend is another self" has, here, the quality of making your love of your friend a species of self-love. If one is 'a single soul' then to love your friend is to love yourself. 

Perhaps we ought to mark off such arguments from each other and determine how far and in what respects each view is right. Now if we grasp the sense in which each school uses the phrase 'lover of self', the truth may become evident. Those who use the term as one of reproach ascribe self-love to people who assign to themselves the greater share of wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures; for these are what most people desire, and busy themselves about as though they were the best of all things, which is the reason, too, why they become objects of competition. So those who are grasping with regard to these things gratify their appetites and in general their feelings and the irrational element of the soul; and most men are of this nature (which is the reason why the epithet has come to be used as it is-it takes its meaning from the prevailing type of self-love, which is a bad one); it is just, therefore, that men who are lovers of self in this way are reproached for being so.

I mentioned Immanuel Kant when discussing IX.5; Kant describes this sort of self-love as "radical evil." For him it is the alternative to obeying the moral law (as he conceives it). Of course, he is operating in the tradition in which the question is not the one Aristotle opened with -- 'ought one love one's self more, or others more?' -- but 'whether one ought to love one's self more, or others equally?'. It is curious, give how many different forms of "equality" that Aristotle has floated in the EN -- several of them pointed at friendship specifically -- that he didn't start there. Even if it required specifying yet another sort-of equality, who would notice one more given how many we've seen?

That it is those who give themselves the preference in regard to objects of this sort that most people usually call lovers of self is plain; for if a man were always anxious that he himself, above all things, should act justly, temperately, or in accordance with any other of the virtues, and in general were always to try to secure for himself the honourable course, no one will call such a man a lover of self or blame him.

But such a man would seem more than the other a lover of self; at all events he assigns to himself the things that are noblest and best, and gratifies the most authoritative element in and in all things obeys this...

 "The most authoritative element" here in himself is reason. However, note that Aristotle goes on immediately to commit the fallacy of composition -- exactly as Plato does throughout his political philosophy -- by assuming that what is true for one person ruling himself within a polity should hold for 'rational' ruler(s) governing the whole polity.

...and just as a city or any other systematic whole is most properly identified with the most authoritative element in it, so is a man; and therefore the man who loves this and gratifies it is most of all a lover of self. Besides, a man is said to have or not to have self-control according as his reason has or has not the control, on the assumption that this is the man himself; and the things men have done on a rational principle are thought most properly their own acts and voluntary acts. That this is the man himself, then, or is so more than anything else, is plain, and also that the good man loves most this part of him. Whence it follows that he is most truly a lover of self, of another type than that which is a matter of reproach, and as different from that as living according to a rational principle is from living as passion dictates, and desiring what is noble from desiring what seems advantageous. Those, then, who busy themselves in an exceptional degree with noble actions all men approve and praise; and if all were to strive towards what is noble and strain every nerve to do the noblest deeds, everything would be as it should be for the common weal, and every one would secure for himself the goods that are greatest, since virtue is the greatest of goods.

With that furniture, we can answer the question: the man of honor should love himself, in this second and higher sense. Those who fail in that charge should find someone else to love, because they are not worthy. 

Therefore the good man should be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows), but the wicked man should not; for he will hurt both himself and his neighbours, following as he does evil passions. For the wicked man, what he does clashes with what he ought to do, but what the good man ought to do he does; for reason in each of its possessors chooses what is best for itself, and the good man obeys his reason. It is true of the good man too that he does many acts for the sake of his friends and his country, and if necessary dies for them; for he will throw away both wealth and honours and in general the goods that are objects of competition, gaining for himself nobility; since he would prefer a short period of intense pleasure to a long one of mild enjoyment, a twelvemonth of noble life to many years of humdrum existence, and one great and noble action to many trivial ones. Now those who die for others doubtless attain this result; it is therefore a great prize that they choose for themselves. They will throw away wealth too on condition that their friends will gain more; for while a man's friend gains wealth he himself achieves nobility; he is therefore assigning the greater good to himself.

In the next section we see again the distinction between 'doing what is worthy of honor' versus 'receiving honors.' The good man is willing to discard the receipt of honors -- in favor of his friend -- because that, too, is worthy of honor.  

The same too is true of honour and office; all these things he will sacrifice to his friend; for this is noble and laudable for himself. Rightly then is he thought to be good, since he chooses nobility before all else. But he may even give up actions to his friend; it may be nobler to become the cause of his friend's acting than to act himself. In all the actions, therefore, that men are praised for, the good man is seen to assign to himself the greater share in what is noble. In this sense, then, as has been said, a man should be a lover of self; but in the sense in which most men are so, he ought not.

We often see harmonies with the Christian position, but this is a genuine alternative. In spite of Aristotle's very frequent reference to equalities and proportions, here we get an actual preference for self-love -- but only in the specific sense of loving assigning to one's self the power to do noble and worthy actions. In this way, even if you don't love your neighbors equally -- nor in this special sense even your friends -- both the virtuous and their society will flourish more completely than if equality were pursued. 

Nicomachean Ethics IX.7

Today's topic is the friendship-like relation between benefactors and those they help. A lot of what Aristotle says here is likely to seem straightforward and need little comment. 

That said, there is a concept in this chapter that is crucial to understanding Aristotle more broadly, the concept of the 'active' and the 'passive.' We have seen very little of this in the EN, but it is hugely important elsewhere in his corpus. For example, it informs his theory of mind in De Anima, and how we come to understand the world. This is later important in medieval philosophy as they try to bring their theology in line with classical philosophy. Likewise it informs his biological theory, and very importantly his physics and metaphysics. 

Aristotle believed that the things we encounter in the world are made up of a combination of form and matter. You can think of a pile of wood on the ground (matter) versus a table (matter plus the right form). The material stuff is all the same, but whereas before it was only potentially a table, now it is actually a table and can be used for table activities like holding up your coffee cup. 

Form is active -- indeed, form is said by Aristotle to be an activity, and a pure activity is an Unmoved Mover because such a being has no material, only form. Since an Unmoved Mover has no material, it also cannot be acted upon: it is already pure activity. This is why it is Unmoved; it cannot be moved by anything else. (Why it is a Mover is a topic for another day.) The reason it cannot be moved is that only material, not form, is receptive -- i.e. passive. 

Thus when we get to the theory of mind, the Passive Intellect has the capability of taking on forms it encounters outside, such that you can receive the form into your mind and realize it in your Active Intellect. That is how you come to learn that the world involves things like tables: you meet a table, through interaction your Passive Intellect receives the form, and then the form of a table passes into your Active Intellect as a concept you now have drawn out of the world and can use (perhaps by building new tables where you want them).

Both of these things are necessary for the world to exist; without potential we couldn't make or do things, and thus passive things are necessary. Without the forms, there would be nothing to strive to create in the world. Yet Aristotle is often said to favor the active over the passive; to view the table as superior to the wood from which it was made. I'm not as sure that he does this to the same degree that other scholars attribute it to him; I think to some degree they are misunderstanding what he means by other qualities like priority, for example. That's an aside; for today, we'll see how it plays out here in the Ethics.

Benefactors are thought to love those they have benefited, more than those who have been well treated love those that have treated them well, and this is discussed as though it were paradoxical. Most people think it is because the latter are in the position of debtors and the former of creditors; and therefore as, in the case of loans, debtors wish their creditors did not exist, while creditors actually take care of the safety of their debtors, so it is thought that benefactors wish the objects of their action to exist since they will then get their gratitude, while the beneficiaries take no interest in making this return. Epicharmus would perhaps declare that they say this because they 'look at things on their bad side', but it is quite like human nature; for most people are forgetful, and are more anxious to be well treated than to treat others well.

That would seem to follow from Aristotle's own account, which was only in the prior chapter discussing how people are more eager to receive justice than to behave justly to others. Yet he has more to say: 

But the cause would seem to be more deeply rooted in the nature of things; the case of those who have lent money is not even analogous. For they have no friendly feeling to their debtors, but only a wish that they may kept safe with a view to what is to be got from them; while those who have done a service to others feel friendship and love for those they have served even if these are not of any use to them and never will be.

When you hear Aristotle say things like "the cause [is] rooted in the nature of things," you should pay attention. He's going to tell you something about how a practical observation ties into basic reality. 

First, however, some unreality (perhaps appropriate on Halloween!). 

This is what happens with craftsmen too; every man loves his own handiwork better than he would be loved by it if it came alive; and this happens perhaps most of all with poets; for they have an excessive love for their own poems, doting on them as if they were their children.

Every now and then in Aristotle you get one of these flights of fancy in which he assumes a practically impossible thing, and then proceeds to conclude something from the impossible that he thinks is plausible. A similar one occurs in Physics II.1 in which he concludes that, if you were to plant a bed of rotting wood, it would more likely grow a tree than that it would grow another bed. 

This is what the position of benefactors is like; for that which they have treated well is their handiwork, and therefore they love this more than the handiwork does its maker. The cause of this is that existence is to all men a thing to be chosen and loved, and that we exist by virtue of activity (i.e. by living and acting), and that the handiwork is in a sense, the producer in activity; he loves his handiwork, therefore, because he loves existence. And this is rooted in the nature of things; for what he is in potentiality, his handiwork manifests in activity.

At the same time to the benefactor that is noble which depends on his action, so that he delights in the object of his action, whereas to the patient there is nothing noble in the agent, but at most something advantageous, and this is less pleasant and lovable. What is pleasant is the activity of the present, the hope of the future, the memory of the past; but most pleasant is that which depends on activity, and similarly this is most lovable. Now for a man who has made something of his work remains (for the noble is lasting), but for the person acted on the utility passes away. And the memory of noble things is pleasant, but that of useful things is not likely to be pleasant, or is less so; though the reverse seems true of expectation.

Thus, the benefactor loves the person he has benefitted -- a beloved nephew whose education he has helped further -- because the benefactor regards it as part of his own noble work. He is proud of it like the poet is proud of his poems.  

Further, love is like activity, being loved like passivity; and loving and its concomitants are attributes of those who are the more active.

Again, all men love more what they have won by labour; e.g. those who have made their money love it more than those who have inherited it; and to be well treated seems to involve no labour, while to treat others well is a laborious task. These are the reasons, too, why mothers are fonder of their children than fathers; bringing them into the world costs them more pains, and they know better that the children are their own. This last point, too, would seem to apply to benefactors.

Mothers are another place where the active/passive distinction applies in Aristotle; he regards male sexuality as active (passing on the form of the father) and the female as receptive and passive (receiving the form and creating material in its shape). This isn't really how it works, of course; in fact mothers pass on more of their own form than of the father's, as we now know, because the X chromosome transfers more information than the Y. Nevertheless, among those who think that Aristotle considers the active to be superior to the passive, it's taken as evidence of him not thinking much of women. 

Against that, consider how he here considers the mother's love to be superior to that of the father's in the context of such love being akin to the love a poet has for his own poems. The mother, then, is here the craftsman to a greater degree than is the father, and perhaps less passive to that degree. Recall too how in VIII.8 a mother's love was used as a proof that loving was better than receiving love; and how in VIII.12 the friendship between husband and wife was thought to be more basic to human nature than even the formation of cities or polities. I suspect contemporary scholarship is overcorrecting a bit here, perhaps because Aristotle's positive regard of mothers' love and the friendship of husband and wife is less striking than his teacher Plato's robust embrace of female equality as citizens and soldiers (seen both in the Republic and the Laws). Aristotle may not go as far as Plato, but nevertheless he has some strongly positive things to say about women. 

Nicomachean Ethics IX.6

Irwin translates today's central topic as "concord," which makes a lot more sense to me than "unanimity." One often sees broad agreement about how to proceed without it being perfect agreement; likewise, one often sees people who are willing to go along even with a plan even if they don't fully agree with its every aspect. For that reason, I shall follow Irwin's usage in my comments.

Unanimity also seems to be a friendly relation. For this reason it is not identity of opinion; for that might occur even with people who do not know each other....

In fact we won't know a lot of the people we do share concord with in Aristotle's sense; these days, far and away most of our fellow citizens that we are in concord with about central ideas will be people we haven't met. This was less true in Ancient Greece, where populations were much smaller in scale. 

The point he's making there isn't really about whether you've met, but about the fact that the agreement might be an accident. Now you might believe X, and some people in Africa might believe X as well, as might some people in Asia. You haven't all been part of a political discussion that brought you to those positions. You just arrived at them on your own, due to independent causal chains that led you each to separately adopt this opinion X. Thus, while it is true that you don't know those other people, the real issue here is that your agreement of opinion is not a concord that has somehow been produced between you; it is just an accident that you happen to share that opinion. 

...nor do we say that people who have the same views on any and every subject are unanimous, e.g. those who agree about the heavenly bodies (for unanimity about these is not a friendly relation)...

Presumably we agree with strangers about the basic facts of mathematics, not because we have established friendly relations but because those facts are just there in the world to be discovered. The sun is warm, the grass is green, etc. Agreement about that is not a concord.

...but we do say that a city is unanimous when men have the same opinion about what is to their interest, and choose the same actions, and do what they have resolved in common.

This is to say that concord is a species of political friendship. It is not necessarily that all people in a given polity share it, either: concord is often what holds factions together, not necessarily states. Aristotle goes on to explain this:

[Unanimity/concord] is about things to be done, therefore, that people are said to be unanimous, and, among these, about matters of consequence and in which it is possible for both or all parties to get what they want; e.g. a city is unanimous when all its citizens think that the offices in it should be elective, or that they should form an alliance with Sparta, or that Pittacus should be their ruler-at a time when he himself was also willing to rule. But when each of two people [or groups -- Grim] wishes himself to have the thing in question, like the captains in the Phoenissae, they are in a state of faction...

Is it possible to be in both a state of concord and a state of faction at once?  

...for it is not unanimity when each of two parties thinks of the same thing, whatever that may be, but only when they think of the same thing in the same hands, e.g. when both the common people and those of the better class wish the best men to rule; for thus and thus alone do all get what they aim at. Unanimity seems, then, to be political friendship, as indeed it is commonly said to be; for it is concerned with things that are to our interest and have an influence on our life.

The above is ambiguously phrased. It might seem to suggest that concord is maintained if both parties agree on a principle, i.e., that 'the best men should rule'; they just differ about which of the men are in fact the best ones. Irwin translates 'in the same hands' instead as 'the same person,' such that a difference about which of the people should lead is itself a change from concord into faction.

Yet I think it is often possible to be in both states at once: in the United States it is very common to disagree about which party should lead the government while still agreeing very broadly about some policies (e.g. that the National Parks should not be abolished; that there should be some form of public education; that there should be a continuation of popular programs like Social Security). It seems to me that there are often substantial elements of concord even in cases where factions exist and are striving quite loudly against one another for the leadership.

I do not mean to put that forward as Aristotle's position, however: given the ambiguity, it is difficult to say that he thinks that. I simply say that it is a plausible position that might be one Aristotle would agree to if you put it before him. He might intend a simpler distinction, however, as Irwin implies: either concord exists because people do agree, or faction exists because people differ.

Now such unanimity is found among good men; for they are unanimous both in themselves and with one another, being, so to say, of one mind (for the wishes of such men are constant and not at the mercy of opposing currents like a strait of the sea), and they wish for what is just and what is advantageous, and these are the objects of their common endeavour as well.

This is quite similar to the point from IX.4 about why only virtuous men can be true friends to each other, i.e., because they are internally already wishing the right things for themselves they therefore can also transfer those wishes to another. The virtuous here too already are in internal agreement about what is good and best, and desire those things for their society; and thus it is easy for them to agree with each other, since they will all be internally discerning wisely about what is best.

But bad men cannot be unanimous except to a small extent, any more than they can be friends, since they aim at getting more than their share of advantages, while in labour and public service they fall short of their share; and each man wishing for advantage to himself criticizes his neighbour and stands in his way; for if people do not watch it carefully the common weal is soon destroyed. The result is that they are in a state of faction, putting compulsion on each other but unwilling themselves to do what is just.

The compulsion described here is a compulsion for members of the other party 'to do what is just' without being willing to do it yourself. Since we are speaking of political friendship, 'what is just' refers to political justice rather than the justice that exists between true friends, i.e., Book V justice rather than the kinds we've seen discussed more recently. The compulsion to do what is just is exactly what Book V wanted justice to accomplish: to require citizens to behave as a virtuous person would, in this case a just person.

Book V's argued that this justice was 'fairness plus lawfulness.'  Even insofar as the law requires that one behave justly (i.e. virtuously towards others, since 'justice is another's good' as V.1 phrased it), because only one side is being forced and the other allowed to behave unjustly the fairness requirement is no longer achievable: "For my friends everything, for my enemies the Law." 

The the law itself then becomes a tool of faction, and thus breaks Book V's notion of justice because it creates a division between its elements of 'fairness' and 'lawfulness.' Justice is not achievable if the lawfulness is not applied fairly: it requires both elements on Aristotle's reading.

In addition to making justice impossible, the success of a faction of bad men in gaining political power also increases the amount of vice permitted in the society. The 'lawfulness' that is a compulsion to behave virtuously is now not being applied to all, so at least the victorious faction is able to behave in ways that are not virtuous. Thus, whereas justice properly applied is both fair and compels virtue from all, this sort of factional 'justice' is neither fair nor as successful at extracting virtue from the citizenry. 

Friends Like These...

I used to think of the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Weekly Standard as the least unfriendly of journalists. Well, the Weekly Standard turned into the Bulwark and then the Dispatch -- or maybe it was the other way around, I can't remember and don't care if they still exist -- National Review went softer than it already was, and the Wall Street Journal remains no real friend to gun rights at all.

The percentages look damning, until one recalls the famous adage popularized by Mark Twain: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. If those cases increased by 59% over five years, what's the scale involved? How many cases does a 59% increase entail?

Not many, as it turns out. The entire data set consists of 200 cases or fewer in each of the five years...

Hot Air then provides this chart to compare that 200 number to the whole:

If you were to chart this independently, 200 doesn't fit on the scale. In fact it's more than 12,000 short of rising to the level that would fit on the scale. That is to say, if it were to increase by a factor of 60 it still wouldn't fit on the scale -- not a "59% increase," which is a little more than half again more, but 60 times more and it still wouldn't make the chart.

It can't be a coincidence that journalists assigned to the gun beat are so bad at math so consistently across decades.

UPDATE: Another journalistic storyline, this time on guns to Mexican cartels because of 'lax gun laws' in the USA, that proves unreliable.

Nicomachean Ethics IX.5

On "goodwill," towards men.

Goodwill is a friendly sort of relation, but is not identical with friendship; for one may have goodwill both towards people whom one does not know, and without their knowing it, but not friendship. This has indeed been said already.

While this commentary is on Aristotle, an aside to a much later philosopher is helpful here. Kant, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, implies that this sort of "beneficence" towards all is a basic moral duty of all rational beings.  (Ak. 4:398, for any students of Kant here.) It's the sort of thing we think of at Christmastime, when the carol hopes for "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men." 

The problem with it is that it is a duty that doesn't imply any particular actions, just to feel a certain way and not to hold generalized hatred or bad-feeling for strangers. When he gets to it in the full Metaphysics of Morals (Ak. 6:402) he says that "Beneficence is a duty. If someone practices it often and succeeds in realizing his beneficent intention, he eventually comes to love the person he has helped. So the saying, 'you ought to love your neighbor as yourself' does not mean that you ought immediately (first) to love him and (afterwards) by means of this love do good to him. It means, rather, do good to your fellow human beings, and your beneficence will produce love of them in you[.]"* Even here, though, while Kant says there is a duty to do good to others, there's no way to discern which particular others we should do it for right now.

For Aristotle, there is no duty to generalized beneficence; that comes from the Christian heritage, which even a rational Modern like Kant felt very strongly to be the basis of morality. The idea is that we sometimes feel goodwill towards people one may not even know, or know very much about. They might even be people actively working against us. [Cf. Sympathy vs. Empathy for a discussion of the dangers of such feelings as motivational of action.]

But goodwill is not even friendly feeling. For it does not involve intensity or desire, whereas these accompany friendly feeling; and friendly feeling implies intimacy while goodwill may arise of a sudden, as it does towards competitors in a contest; we come to feel goodwill for them and to share in their wishes, but we would not do anything with them [Irwin: "would not cooperate with them" -Grim]; for, as we said, we feel goodwill suddenly and love them only superficially.

Indeed, they are strictly speaking your competitors; perhaps even your enemies. One can imagine watching a ship at sea bravely crewed in a storm, and wishing the sailors well in view of their obvious courage; but not so well that they should succeed at reaching your port, since they are carrying a crew of hostile raiders. Viewed as fellow men struggling valiantly, though, it is hard not to sympathize with them. Goodwill could arise in such a situation, though as Aristotle says "we would not do anything with them" as companions; we might not even, pace Kant, do any good to them that might save them. They are, after all, enemies.

Goodwill seems, then, to be a beginning of friendship, as the pleasure of the eye is [a] beginning of love. For no one loves if he has not first been delighted by the form of the beloved, but he who delights in the form of another does not, for all that, love him, but only does so when he also longs for him when absent and craves for his presence...

Here, by the way, is a useful heuristic for any young readers who want to know if another person loves you the way you feel love for them. If they do not long for you when you are absent and crave your presence, they do not in fact love you, however delightful they may be to your eyes. Accept this and move on.

...so too it is not possible for people to be friends if they have not come to feel goodwill for each other, but those who feel goodwill are not for all that friends; for they only wish well to those for whom they feel goodwill, and would not do anything with them nor take trouble for them.

Notice that this is a kind of passion as Aristotle is describing it, rather than anything like a "duty" as it is for Kant. It's a feeling that comes upon you, as if from outside; it can be something you suffer, which is what "passion" strictly speaking means. It does not imply any duty to do anything with or for the other person. 

And so one might by an extension of the term friendship say that goodwill is inactive friendship, though when it is prolonged and reaches the point of intimacy it becomes friendship-not the friendship based on utility nor that based on pleasure; for goodwill too does not arise on those terms. The man who has received a benefit bestows goodwill in return for what has been done to him, but in doing so is only doing what is just; while he who wishes some one to prosper because he hopes for enrichment through him seems to have goodwill not to him but rather to himself, just as a man is not a friend to another if he cherishes him for the sake of some use to be made of him. In general, goodwill arises on account of some excellence and worth, when one man seems to another beautiful or brave or something of the sort, as we pointed out in the case of competitors in a contest.

So the courage of the sailors in the storm may excite goodwill for them in us; but they alone thereby deserve no help from us, nor should we rush out and aid our enemies in landing on our shores.

* Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 

A Pointed Cartoon

That was meant by xkcd as a joke, but it's the whole game now: "Computer, forge a philosophy paper on Descartes."

Nicomachean Ethics IX.4

On neighbors, and loving them -- at least in the friendly way (philia, in the Greek, not eros or one of the several other 'love' words as we discussed in VIII.3). This is usually thought to be one of the most important chapters of the work.

Friendly relations with one's neighbours, and the marks by which friendships are defined, seem to have proceeded from a man's relations to himself.

This is the second hint of the definition of 'a friend' as 'another self,' which will become central to the concept. The first was in VIII.12. 

For (1) we define a friend as one who wishes and does what is good, or seems so, for the sake of his friend, or (2) as one who wishes his friend to exist and live, for his [i.e. the friend's own] sake; which mothers do to their children, and friends do who have come into conflict. And (3) others define him as one who lives with and (4) has the same tastes as another, or (5) one who grieves and rejoices with his friend; and this too is found in mothers most of all. It is by some one of these characteristics that friendship too is defined.

Now each of these is true of the good man's relation to himself (and of all other men in so far as they think themselves good; virtue and the good man seem, as has been said, to be the measure of every class of things).

This was also established in the pivotal I.3. I usually cite that to remind us 'to seek precision in different disciplines at the appropriate levels,' but also, "Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge[.]" Thus, the man who knows virtue and proves it by being virtuous is a good judge of virtue, or at least the particular virtue that he has (e.g. courage).   

For [the good man's] opinions are harmonious, and he desires the same things with all his soul; and therefore he wishes for himself what is good and what seems so, and does it (for it is characteristic of the good man to work out the good), and does so for his own sake (for he does it for the sake of the intellectual element in him, which is thought to be the man himself); and he wishes himself to live and be preserved, and especially the element by virtue of which he thinks. For existence is good to the virtuous man, and each man wishes himself what is good, while no one chooses to possess the whole world if he has first to become some one else (for that matter, even now God possesses the good); he wishes for this only on condition of being whatever he is; and the element that thinks would seem to be the individual man, or to be so more than any other element in him. And such a man wishes to live with himself; for he does so with pleasure, since the memories of his past acts are delightful and his hopes for the future are good, and therefore pleasant. His mind is well stored too with subjects of contemplation. And he grieves and rejoices, more than any other, with himself; for the same thing is always painful, and the same thing always pleasant, and not one thing at one time and another at another; he has, so to speak, nothing to repent of.

The argument above, simplified, is just that the goods one wishes for one's friend are the same as one pursues for one's self.  

Therefore, since each of these characteristics belongs to the good man in relation to himself, and he is related to his friend as to himself (for his friend is another self), friendship too is thought to be one of these attributes, and those who have these attributes to be friends. Whether there is or is not friendship between a man and himself is a question we may dismiss for the present; there would seem to be friendship in so far as he is two or more, to judge from the afore-mentioned attributes of friendship, and from the fact that the extreme of friendship is likened to one's love for oneself.

Very often the above in bold is cited as the conclusion of Aristotle's enquiry into friendship: that the friend is another self (as was just demonstrated by the argument about wanting the same things for one's self that one does for one's friend). 

In this way, Aristotle has independently arrived at the conclusion that one ought to 'love one's friend as one's self'; and, since he began this chapter with the example of the friendship between neighbors, 'to love one's neighbor as one's self.' 

But the attributes named seem to belong even to the majority of men, poor creatures though they may be. Are we to say then that in so far as they are satisfied with themselves and think they are good, they share in these attributes? Certainly no one who is thoroughly bad and impious has these attributes, or even seems to do so. They hardly belong even to inferior people; for they are at variance with themselves, and have appetites for some things and rational desires for others. This is true, for instance, of incontinent people; for they choose, instead of the things they themselves think good, things that are pleasant but hurtful; while others again, through cowardice and laziness, shrink from doing what they think best for themselves.

So bad people aren't entirely capable of friendship, precisely because they don't even love themselves in the right way. How can you expect to wish the best for your 'other self' if you can't and don't do it for your own self? 

And those who have done many terrible deeds and are hated for their wickedness even shrink from life and destroy themselves. And wicked men seek for people with whom to spend their days, and shun themselves; for they remember many a grevious deed, and anticipate others like them, when they are by themselves, but when they are with others they forget. And having nothing lovable in them they have no feeling of love to themselves. Therefore also such men do not rejoice or grieve with themselves; for their soul is rent by faction, and one element in it by reason of its wickedness grieves when it abstains from certain acts, while the other part is pleased, and one draws them this way and the other that, as if they were pulling them in pieces. If a man cannot at the same time be pained and pleased, at all events after a short time he is pained because he was pleased, and he could have wished that these things had not been pleasant to him; for bad men are laden with repentance.

Is it true that bad men are laden with repentance, or that wicked men are? If one is thinking of drunkards as 'wicked men,' surely; they have hangovers, which feel like regret and sadness as well as pain. But it's not true of men like Blackbeard, who died defiantly rather than remorsefully; nor as far as we can tell of Aristotle's student Alexander, who put many men to the sword and thought it pleasant. Indeed, it isn't even true that Alexander would have thought himself wicked, although another pirate -- Blackbeard's ancient ancestor, perhaps -- once pointed Alexander's wickedness out to him.  Or so we are told on the authority of St. Augustine's City of God, in a chapter devoted to how alike kingdoms are to robbery!

Therefore the bad man does not seem to be amicably disposed even to himself, because there is nothing in him to love; so that if to be thus is the height of wretchedness, we should strain every nerve to avoid wickedness and should endeavour to be good; for so and only so can one be either friendly to oneself or a friend to another.

Leaving aside the question of whether all sorts of wickedness (or only some) produce repentance, the chapter closes with the proof that one ought to be good ourselves if only so we can be true friends to others -- or even ourselves. The proof is a reasonable one. If one ought to wish what is best for one's self, one ought to wish for virtue (since it is excellence in any category of human action, as established in Book I); and then, knowing how to properly wish it for one's self, one can properly wish it for one's friends. Thus one can be a true friend, as well as a good person.  

A Rare Political Post

Introduction

This is not an advocacy post for anything; it's purely an attempt to understand the current moment. I don't have any positive suggestions on policy, and only one on managing our own place in the context; otherwise just thoughts on the conflict that other people seem very upset about. Several other posts provoked these thoughts, which I will link below.

In his post on Sunday links, AVI posted an article by Rob Henderson called "The Rage of the Failing Elite." I think the piece captures the youth-ish part of the opposition: in other words, the part that isn't captured by the "Whiteness and Oldness" narrative that AVI was interrogating the other day. It's not really a new idea; I've seen versions of it for years. The notion is that we're overproducing 'elites' of various sorts among the young, who are striving for positions that really don't exist; and they are aggrieved about finding that all that effort and expense was based on an illusion.

Part I: The Oldness and Whiteness

However, I think the real rage is on the side of the white and old part of the opposition. Not because, curiously, they are either white or old (except incidentally in the latter part because it is related to the contexts of their lives). It's because they spent their whole lives as devotees of the Liberal concept that dominated politics from FDR's time (and thus was well-settled when they were growing up) through LBJ's time (when they were young and formulating their political identites). They aren't progressives or socialists or Marixsts, they're liberals who are watching this titanic order destroyed in front of their eyes. 

Heather Cox Richardson, on that side, frames the issue this way during a long discussion of how much she thinks that the collapse of that state will hurt poor and weak people: 

"Trump is trying to make the impasse between the parties about the shutdown, but that obscures the actual fight at hand. What is at stake is the theory behind the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act: the destruction of the modern American government that was put in place in the 1930s by Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and expanded from then until 1981 under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Today’s fight is about the cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk as head of the 'Department of Government Efficiency,' and cuts made after Musk left the administration by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. 

"Republicans have embraced the destruction of the modern government, slashing SNAP benefits, Medicaid, cancer research, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and so on. The Democrats are defending the government that has been in place since the 1930s, focused on leveling the playing field between the very wealthy and ordinary Americans.  Trump is determined to resurrect the pre–New Deal system in the United States and refuses to entertain any notion that his vision will not work."

There is some structural truth to that criticism, but such a change -- though titanic -- merely parallels the changes of Woodrow Wilson or FDR or LBJ. They're just in the other direction. Yet it's legally just as permissible to change the one way as the other; and it's not unreasonable to prefer a solution that is closer to what the Constitution actually says. These systems in many ways affront the Constitution's language, passing vast power and control out of the elected government and into the unelected bureaucracy. That's not obviously more legitimate than trying to restore a more strictly constitutional order.

Part II: Kindness, Unkindness, and the Stopping of Thought

In addition to watching the institutions destroyed that they believed in, and considered part of upholding a more just and better social order, they had a general ethic of being "nice" and, even more importantly, of being "kind." All this blatant destruction is being done by people who are willing to not be nice and not be kind. Trump's mockery of them isn't nice and it isn't kind, and it enrages them as much because of that as because they're the targets of it: indeed, they seem angrier when they aren't the targets of it. They were much madder about the Mariachi videos targeting Hispanic politicians than about anything pointed at old and white liberals.

Nor are they entirely wrong about that. I tend to find Trump's antics amusing and buffoonish, meant to mock rather than to harm; and since all of these politicians very much deserve to be mocked, I often even find the mockery healthy. Most of Trump's supporters, especially the red-hat wearing, dancing on truck MAGA crowd, seem to be having a lot of fun rather than being motivated by anger or hatred. Yet some of the most repellent people of the present moment really are those -- coincidentally also usually old and white -- on Trump's side who feel a deep hate for their political opponents. They are in their way just as repellent as the young Marxists who muse about how nice it would be if more Republicans and conservatives were killed. 

None of these genuinely repellent types have any real power, though. They're both of them raging away and making life less pleasant for the rest of us, but they don't actually control any levers for either side. The Democratic Party is motivated by the public sector unions and their big corporate and tech donors, to include Bezos' ex-wife who is flooding the zone with donations. They care about the donations, not really about any of the apparent things they are fighting over rhetorically.

The repellent ones on the Republican side are just angry old men whose bitterness instantly causes them to be rejected as serious by anyone at all. The Republicans will take their votes, and may performatively listen to them with social media posts, but won't actually be motivated to follow their ideas -- insofar as they have ideas, which is rare since they're too busy being angry to think. When they say something that sounds like an idea, it usually turns out to be just them applying an old heuristic from their youth to a current problem without further examination; but heuristics are shortcuts to thought, not actual thought; they're 'this usually works' ready-made solutions that can be applied without further thinking about it.

And, in fairness, those old and white liberals are also doing exactly the same thing from their side: they just have different heuristics. When you hear someone on that side saying that something is "apartheid," that's them stopping themselves from having to think further about the problem and applying a ready-made solution. There's no further examination of whether that language is appropriate, or actually a good analogy, or if there's a better analogy, or if there's even a more-generous way of considering the other side's view. Everything stops once the problem is labeled "apartheid" -- we don't need to think any further than that, we just need to oppose it resolutely and consider that side to be moral monsters. They deploy language like that all the time: genocide, apartheid, 'a kind of segregation,' 'MAGA is just like the KKK.'

Chesterton wrote a whole chapter called "The Suicide of Thought" which warns about 'thoughts that stop thoughts.' It only imperfectly applies here, but the general warning about allowing your thinking to be stopped cold with labels and heuristics carries over.

Part III: A Very Limited Sort of Solution

I feel weirdly disconnected from this fight. All of those factions believe in much larger and more powerful government and government programs than I do. Trump might be trying to overturn some of the New Deal constitutional order -- which could be rephrased, 'to restore the actual constitutional function to the Federal government' -- but he wants to replace it with a presidency as powerful as Woodrow Wilson's was, with the support of a Supreme Court and a legislative branch that would pass genuinely unconstitutional laws against freedom of speech and of criticizing the government. Meanwhile, pace Heather Cox Richardson, I still feel like the poor and the weak would be better off without government assistance, which always comes along with government control of the intimate spaces of our lives that they are offering to 'assist' us with; the lives of the poor and weak might not immediately improve by the loss of transfer payments, but eventually they would figure out how to feed and house themselves and be freer for it.

They have a lot more they agree about than any of them agree with me. It's just unpleasant to watch them being so upset all the time, driving these cycles of rhetorical conflict that occasionally -- at the fringes -- result in real but pointless violence. Even the violence isn't really going to change anything because it doesn't touch the actual levers of power. 

So I've largely disconnected from politics, but I still have to deal with the older of my relatives (who are, of course, also white) who are very upset and given to explosions of rage about politics for the first time in their lives. I don't want them to win or to get their way, so I won't support their protests or striving; I'll just try to get them to talk about something besides politics while we're together.

Increasingly that's hard. The Big Show is occupying everyone's thoughts; even I'm writing about it this morning, when Aristotle would be a better use of my time. It's hard to let go of the drama thrust constantly before us, but I think it is the wisest course.

AI rules

I continue to be amazed at what Grok can do. I think I posted some months back about the neighbor's child custody case that I've been drawn into. I'm trying to keep costs down by helping the family lawyer with whatever parts I'm competent to do, not knowing any family law to speak of and having no experience at all in state court.

To my amazement, you can ask Grok what to do when the opposing party fails to respond timely to a motion to transfer the San Antonion case to the my county, where the child lives, then belatedly asks the San Antonion court to reconsider the uncontested order transferring the case after the transfer is complete, even if there really was something wrong with the original motion (filed after a statutory deadline by now-former counsel; I hired my neighbor a new one). That's not a easy issue to research from scratch on-line without any experience in family court, but it didn't bother Grok at all. It spit out a very serviceable motion to dismiss and brief after only a bit of back and forth. When the family court in San Antonio granted the motion to reconsider despite its clear loss of jurisdiction even to hear it, Grok can convert the brief to a petition for a writ of mandamus in a heartbeat. Now, I read all the statutes and cases and ran the whole thing by the family lawyer to be sure Grok wasn't taking me for a ride, but honestly, it was good work. I'd have been happy to get it from a talented young associate after a week of work.

Last night I asked what to do when I needed a business-record affidavit from a doctor, but his office didn't want to bother with notarizing the affidavit. Grok instantly laid out 3-4 things that get past the obstacle, including using an affidavit signed under penalty of perjury instead of one signed on oath and witnessed by a notary. (I'm terrible with business records, since in my practice we stipulated admissibility of documents 100% of the time, or the bankruptcy courts would have had our heads on spikes for wasting time and money.) Alternatively, there are subpoenas duces tecum or depositions on written questions that get around the roadblock and yield admissible documentary evidence without the need to bring a custodian of records into the courthouse for live testimony, but also without thoroughly irritating potentially helpful medical staff by making them show up for a deposition.

Then I asked, OK, how about the body-cam video that the county doesn't want to produce under the Public Information Act (a/k/a state version of FOIA), citing a privilege because the video relates to an ongoing criminal DUI case, and another privilege because the video might affect the privacy of a minor? Instantly Grok said, skip arguing with the county and the state AG's office, just go to the family judge and ask him to compel production, because he can override a privilege in the best interests of the child, and he's used to it as a routine matter.

It's like having a mentor who can set you off the right direction, and he doesn't even make you go look up the statutes, he has the citations right there, and will draft cover letters and motions to compel and whatever you need. Could I ever have made good use of this tool way back when! It beats Westlaw research by a mile. And it's scot-free. I'm probably helping bring the grid down, but hey. I just want this 13-year-old to live with her sane grandma.

Nicomachean Ethics IX.3

When should you end a friendship?

Another question that arises is whether friendships should or should not be broken off when the other party does not remain the same. Perhaps we may say that there is nothing strange in breaking off a friendship based on utility or pleasure, when our friends no longer have these attributes. For it was of these attributes that we were the friends; and when these have failed it is reasonable to love no longer. But one might complain of another if, when he loved us for our usefulness or pleasantness, he pretended to love us for our character. For, as we said at the outset, most differences arise between friends when they are not friends in the spirit in which they think they are.

Fair enough, is it not? If you chose a friend because he amused you, you'd quit spending time with him if he didn't keep doing that; if you chose a friend because he was rich and bought you nice dinners, his poverty might end your friendship. Yet if you had convinced him that you really admired and respected him, and that's why you came to his dinners, he might reasonably be annoyed.

So when a man has deceived himself and has thought he was being loved for his character, when the other person was doing nothing of the kind, he must blame himself; when he has been deceived by the pretenses of the other person, it is just that he should complain against his deceiver; he will complain with more justice than one does against people who counterfeit the currency, inasmuch as the wrongdoing is concerned with something more valuable.

But if one accepts another man as good, and he turns out badly and is seen to do so, must one still love him? Surely it is impossible, since not everything can be loved, but only what is good. What is evil neither can nor should be loved; for it is not one's duty to be a lover of evil, nor to become like what is bad; and we have said that like is dear like. Must the friendship, then, be forthwith broken off? Or is this not so in all cases, but only when one's friends are incurable in their wickedness?

This advice is a problem for Christians, who are advised to forgive everything and love their enemies. I don't have an answer to that problem. I'm just acknowledging it.

If they are capable of being reformed one should rather come to the assistance of their character or their property, inasmuch as this is better and more characteristic of friendship. But a man who breaks off such a friendship would seem to be doing nothing strange; for it was not to a man of this sort that he was a friend; when his friend has changed, therefore, and he is unable to save him, he gives him up.

In a way I find that comment to be a strange thing for Aristotle to say, even though it's a perfectly ordinary sentiment that I don't think is controversial. The point of the Ethics is that virtue is a habitual character that is formed by repetition of good habits into firm characters. Here we see an acknowledgement that characters can deform, too, presumably in the same way: by bad habits that are allowed to continue unchallenged for a long time.

But if one friend remained the same while the other became better and far outstripped him in virtue, should the latter treat the former as a friend? Surely he cannot. When the interval is great this becomes most plain, e.g. in the case of childish friendships; if one friend remained a child in intellect while the other became a fully developed man, how could they be friends when they neither approved of the same things nor delighted in and were pained by the same things? For not even with regard to each other will their tastes agree, and without this (as we saw) they cannot be friends; for they cannot live together. But we have discussed these matters.

Also a little surprising, this time because the emphasis is not on helping your friend -- here the friend doesn't even need to be 'saved,' as just a moment ago was the case in the paragraph before. It's about abandoning him for not becoming as virtuous as you did. And how virtuous is that, if you abandon your old friends because they stayed the same as they were when you were coming up together?

Also, how can you not be friends because they have childish intellects compared with your own? Children are often the most sincere of friends; except for their grandparents, perhaps, who befriend the children with a deep love and intensity. Aristotle has treated the family relationship as different from friendship, but in my experience it is of great value to pursue friendships with those much older, or much younger, than you are. Our habit of tending to keep to our own cohort is greatly limiting in terms of the experience we are exposed to (when younger) or that we convey (when older); and it is limiting in our perspectives as well. I already know what the world looked like to someone who grew up in the American South of the 1970s and early 80s; I can still learn what it looks like to someone who is coming up today.

I do get the point, of course. The young sometimes seem to not know anything at all, and teaching them the context they need to understand the problems can be tiresome. Yet it is worthy to do so, and far less laborious than trying to 'save' a fallen friend. As for the ones who never changed, well, managing consistency in an ever-changing world is not always to be despised.

Should he, then, behave no otherwise towards [the unchanged friend] than he would if he had never been his friend? Surely he should keep a remembrance of their former intimacy, and as we think we ought to oblige friends rather than strangers, so to those who have been our friends we ought to make some allowance for our former friendship, when the breach has not been due to excess of wickedness.

I met an old friend the other day that I hadn't seen in more than twenty years. It turned out we had nothing to say to each other. She seemed to be doing well, and to have a perfectly satisfactory life without me imposing upon it; and while I remember her very gladly, I didn't feel that it was necessary or appropriate to press a renewal of our friendship. Probably something like that is what he means here; we remain friendly, but allow each other to pass by. If she had needed something of me, it would have been different; but she clearly didn't, and had learned to make her way without me. It's ok that we change, and move on, and lose touch even with treasured companions; that's the way the world works. We were together for a time, and mattered to each other once; once, but long ago. 

Counting Costs

"What Happened in Gaza Might Even Be Worse than We Think," says the NY Times, perhaps not understanding how I would ordinarily use the word "worse." Whatever happened, I would regard it as a sad end to a lingering problem that was definitely going to end one way or the other. Hamas asked God to bring them into a reckoning with Israel through a titanic act of blood magic via human sacrifice; whatever happened to them was devoutly prayed for by them. I trust God's justice and mercy in such matters.

Indeed, even death in such circumstances can be a release from worse situations; if you do trust in divine mercy, as one might given that our entire heritage points at it as a thing we should believe in, thousands of years of men and women living and dying believing in it, you might hope for that.

But anyway, this piece is nonsense.

For many Americans, there might be a temptation to disbelieve the enormity of what has happened in Gaza. After all, it is a catastrophe funded by our money, made possible by our weapons, condoned by our government and carried out by one of our closest allies. It’s little wonder that some want to downplay the damage.

Their defense is to cast doubt on the numbers. It goes something like this: The death toll, counted by the Hamas-run health ministry, must be an exaggeration to court international outrage. If it isn’t, then most of those killed were Hamas fighters, surely, not civilians. Either way, it can’t be worse than other horrors elsewhere, in South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which we Americans are blameless. Taken together, it’s a potent repertoire of deflation and denial.

That's definitely not what I said; what I said was that Israel wasn't being any worse than we usually are at conducting intense urban warfare in the Middle East. And definitely not, indeed, than other Muslims do in wars that don't get called "genocide."

I don't think the current war in Israel is an example of genocide because the Israelis don't really seem to be trying to exterminate Palestinians as such, nor so far even to expel them from Gaza (as I frankly expected they would) in order to create a larger buffer zone given the October 7th demonstration that they were currently very vulnerable. The 50,000 figure killed is a tiny percentage of the total population of Palestinians, and 2.5% even of the population within Gaza -- a pretty restrained bit of killing given the intensity of the fighting and Israel's clear superiority in weapons.

Likewise, it doesn't extend to conflicts within a group: in the Syrian civil war, for example, fourteen million people were forced out of their homes and many killed or harmed, but nobody thought it was a genocide. There was even a religious difference here and there, Alawites and Muslims, Shi'ites and Sunnis, and even ethnic differences between Arabs and Kurds (who sometimes appeal to ancestral faiths as well). It wasn't thought a genocide all the same.

That was in May. So her account of the "unusually rigorous" count by the Hamas-run health ministry and her proposed supplements to it amounts to this: "If de Waal is anywhere close to right, this conflict will have killed 7.5 percent of the prewar population of Gaza in just two years."

So that's three times the estimate from May, which I agree was shockingly low. As someone who has participated at length in wars in the Middle East involving large urban populations in tight spaces, though, that 7.5% guess remains remarkable for its discriminate limits. I don't know how you'd fight for two years in such a densely populated urban area without depopulation of half the population. Assad definitely didn't do that. The current population of Syria is ~25 million; 14 million people were displaced in the war. 

Seven and a half percent, at the top of the estimate, giving them every inch of the wiggle room they're asking? 

If the Jews had done no better than us fighting in Mosul or than Assad did in and around Damascus, we'd still have nothing to say. But in fact the Israelis did better, and fought cleaner, even with people who hated them more than Iraqis ever hated us. I had lovely chicken dinners with Iraqis who'd been trying to kill us not that long before, including officers of the Special Republican Guard. We got along great; I really liked that one former general I met while doing that. (We called him a Sheikh, but he wasn't really; he was urban, not tribal. He had been really a general.) It was nothing like the hatred that the Israelis and the Palestinians have going on. Yet the Israelis took much better care of their enemies than we ever did.

Nicomachean Ethics IX.2

Today we turn to the problem of experts. It's a real problem: if you aren't an expert in a given field, you can't identify those who are. How would you? But we need experts.

Mostly Aristotle lays out the problem today, so I will just let him do that without comment.

A further problem is set by such questions as, whether one should in all things give the preference to one's father and obey him, or whether when one is ill one should trust a doctor, and when one has to elect a general should elect a man of military skill; and similarly whether one should render a service by preference to a friend or to a good man, and should show gratitude to a benefactor or oblige a friend, if one cannot do both.

All such questions are hard, are they not, to decide with precision? For they admit of many variations of all sorts in respect both of the magnitude of the service and of its nobility necessity. But that we should not give the preference in all things to the same person is plain enough; and we must for the most part return benefits rather than oblige friends, as we must pay back a loan to a creditor rather than make one to a friend. But perhaps even this is not always true; e.g. should a man who has been ransomed out of the hands of brigands ransom his ransomer in return, whoever he may be (or pay him if he has not been captured but demands payment) or should he ransom his father? It would seem that he should ransom his father in preference even to himself. As we have said, then, generally the debt should be paid, but if the gift is exceedingly noble or exceedingly necessary, one should defer to these considerations. For sometimes it is not even fair to return the equivalent of what one has received, when the one man has done a service to one whom he knows to be good, while the other makes a return to one whom he believes to be bad. For that matter, one should sometimes not lend in return to one who has lent to oneself; for the one person lent to a good man, expecting to recover his loan, while the other has no hope of recovering from one who is believed to be bad. Therefore if the facts really are so, the demand is not fair; and if they are not, but people think they are, they would be held to be doing nothing strange in refusing. As we have often pointed out, then, discussions about feelings and actions have just as much definiteness as their subject-matter.

That we should not make the same return to every one, nor give a father the preference in everything, as one does not sacrifice everything to Zeus, is plain enough; but since we ought to render different things to parents, brothers, comrades, and benefactors, we ought to render to each class what is appropriate and becoming. And this is what people seem in fact to do; to marriages they invite their kinsfolk; for these have a part in the family and therefore in the doings that affect the family; and at funerals also they think that kinsfolk, before all others, should meet, for the same reason. And it would be thought that in the matter of food we should help our parents before all others, since we owe our own nourishment to them, and it is more honourable to help in this respect the authors of our being even before ourselves; and honour too one should give to one's parents as one does to the gods, but not any and every honour; for that matter one should not give the same honour to one's father and one's mother, nor again should one give them the honour due to a philosopher or to a general, but the honour due to a father, or again to a mother. To all older persons, too, one should give honour appropriate to their age, by rising to receive them and finding seats for them and so on; while to comrades and brothers one should allow freedom of speech and common use of all things. To kinsmen, too, and fellow-tribesmen and fellow-citizens and to every other class one should always try to assign what is appropriate, and to compare the claims of each class with respect to nearness of relation and to virtue or usefulness. The comparison is easier when the persons belong to the same class, and more laborious when they are different. Yet we must not on that account shrink from the task, but decide the question as best we can.

Nicomachean Ethics IX.1

Aristotle begins the ninth book with a curious decision: he compares friendship to contractual relations in business. 

In all friendships between dissimilars it is, as we have said, proportion that equalizes the parties and preserves the friendship; e.g. in the political form of friendship the shoemaker gets a return for his shoes in proportion to his worth, and the weaver and all other craftsmen do the same. Now here a common measure has been provided in the form of money, and therefore everything is referred to this and measured by this...

Yes, that's what makes it a curious decision: we normally consider friendship to be entirely unlike the relationships we pay for, or take pay to have. 

...but in the friendship of lovers sometimes the lover complains that his excess of love is not met by love in return though perhaps there is nothing lovable about him), while often the beloved complains that the lover who formerly promised everything now performs nothing. Such incidents happen when the lover loves the beloved for the sake of pleasure while the beloved loves the lover for the sake of utility, and they do not both possess the qualities expected of them. If these be the objects of the friendship it is dissolved when they do not get the things that formed the motives of their love; for each did not love the other person himself but the qualities he had, and these were not enduring; that is why the friendships also are transient.

That paragraph again refers to the Greek homoerotic structures, which don't exist in our culture. There might be some general lessons for those who use love relationships as a way of getting practical goods ('utility,' Aristotle is calling that). 

But the love of characters, as has been said, endures because it is self-dependent. Differences arise when what they get is something different and not what they desire; for it is like getting nothing at all when we do not get what we aim at; compare the story of the person who made promises to a lyre-player, promising him the more, the better he sang, but in the morning, when the other demanded the fulfilment of his promises, said that he had given pleasure for pleasure. Now if this had been what each wanted, all would have been well; but if the one wanted enjoyment but the other gain, and the one has what he wants while the other has not, the terms of the association will not have been properly fulfilled; for what each in fact wants is what he attends to, and it is for the sake of that that that he will give what he has.

I'm guessing 'lyre players' were the guitar players of his day. But now we reach an important question:

But who is to fix the worth of the service; he who makes the sacrifice or he who has got the advantage? At any rate the other seems to leave it to him. This is what they say Protagoras used to do; whenever he taught anything whatsoever, he bade the learner assess the value of the knowledge, and accepted the amount so fixed. But in such matters some men approve of the saying 'let a man have his fixed reward'. Those who get the money first and then do none of the things they said they would, owing to the extravagance of their promises, naturally find themselves the objects of complaint; for they do not fulfil what they agreed to. The sophists are perhaps compelled to do this because no one would give money for the things they do know. These people then, if they do not do what they have been paid for, are naturally made the objects of complaint.

Protagoras gave his name to a Platonic dialogue, which turns on the question of whether virtue can be taught (if it is, as Socrates believed, a form of knowledge then it ought to be able to be taught, as Protagoras claimed to do). If you could teach virtue successfully you might well let your students set your rate of pay; after all, being now virtuous men, they would doubtless treat you equitably. 

Unfortunately, perhaps, we already know that Aristotle disproved Socrates' claim that virtue is a sort of knowledge. Can it be taught, then? Yes, because it is a sort of practice. It turns out not to be something that you can understand, but it is something that you can do. You can do it over and over until it becomes habitual for you, until it shapes your character.

But where there is no contract of service, those who give up something for the sake of the other party cannot (as we have said) be complained of (for that is the nature of the friendship of virtue), and the return to them must be made on the basis of their purpose (for it is purpose that is the characteristic thing in a friend and in virtue).

Yes, this is another reason why this is a curious comparison. We write contracts to govern relationships where friendship is absent, because the trust that you will be treated well is also consequently absent. We use the enforceable law as a substitute, as it were, for friendship.  

And so too, it seems, should one make a return to those with whom one has studied philosophy; for their worth cannot be measured against money, and they can get no honour which will balance their services, but still it is perhaps enough, as it is with the gods and with one's parents, to give them what one can.

I trust you will all reflect on the wisdom of that paragraph. 

If the gift was not of this sort, but was made with a view to a return, it is no doubt preferable that the return made should be one that seems fair to both parties, but if this cannot be achieved, it would seem not only necessary that the person who gets the first service should fix the reward, but also just; for if the other gets in return the equivalent of the advantage the beneficiary has received, or the price lie would have paid for the pleasure, he will have got what is fair as from the other.

I'm not sure how well that principle works. It seems to hang on an unstated assumption that the services will be of roughly equal value, which may not be the case. 

We see this happening too with things put up for sale, and in some places there are laws providing that no actions shall arise out of voluntary contracts, on the assumption that one should settle with a person to whom one has given credit, in the spirit in which one bargained with him. The law holds that it is more just that the person to whom credit was given should fix the terms than that the person who gave credit should do so. For most things are not assessed at the same value by those who have them and those who want them; each class values highly what is its own and what it is offering; yet the return is made on the terms fixed by the receiver. But no doubt the receiver should assess a thing not at what it seems worth when he has it, but at what he assessed it at before he had it.

That is definitely not how we operate today; but in spite of the fact that our cultural heritage contains strict limits on usury, in fact usury has become the norm.  

Strongman Day

One last time. 

UPDATE:

Easy day. Those things only weigh 175 pounds, it turns out. 

Another Day of Glory

It only lasts a few weeks, but it is something to see. 

The Devil’s Courthouse from NC 215. 

Balsam Lake, where bald eagles nest in the spring.

Mt. Pisgah to the left, part of the National Forest also named Pisgah below.

A Little Friday Night Art

I Came across this piece of art I'd never heard of before, and thought it was quite interesting!

Sort of a high end "Dogs Playing Poker"!

I give you "Alexander and Diogenes" by Sir Edwin Landseer (1848):

Apparently it has to do with the Greek term for cynic- "The name "Cynic" derives from the Greek word kynikos, meaning "dog-like," a term applied to the philosophers due to their unconventional behavior and perceived resemblance to dogs."

Civil War Watch

The San Francisco Chronicle, wondering if the war has begun or not, notices something I pointed out back during my trip to DC in August (which is also true of the elements of the Georgia brigade that later joined the deployment).

According to the popular myth, when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee handed U.S. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant his sword at Appomattox Court House in April 1865, little did both men realize that Lee’s guys might be flying Blackhawks into the Loop in Chicago in 2025. 

It is quite an irony to see former Confederate States Army units deployed to blue cities. I don't know what kind of sense of humor Robert E. Lee had though this historian suggests it was substantial; perhaps his ghost is laughing about it somewhere.

Were I someone who thought that there was a Civil War coming imminently, I probably wouldn't be playing games with military pay like some people are doing. I'm not suggesting that the military's loyalty is for sale, which presumably it is not. However, it's hard not to notice when one side is going to great lengths to find ways to pay you and the other side is considering law suits to stop you getting paid after all. It's hard to ignore your children going hungry, after all -- the troops will get fed even during a shut down, but their families need to buy groceries. 

Trump seems to be moving to pay ICE and DHS agents during the shutdown too, and he's been treating them as important elements in what amounts to a domestic army. I'd think about that if I thought I were facing an imminent war, too. There are some old Roman stories about the loyalty of the Legions that are relevant. 

"Just Another Snake Cult"

Revolution is sometimes just and proper, and the decision about when the terms of the Declaration have been met is necessarily made by individual people with their individual judgment about the particular facts of the current case. One therefore has to be careful about whose judgment one considers on the question.