Sunday, July 16, 2023

Aristotle on Crib Virtue in Precise Language

If you raise a puppy well you get a well-behaved dog. If instead you, for example, encourage it when it nips at you because it's cute, when it becomes a dog you get a biter. Once a dog has developing a biting habit, you can't get rid of it. You can arduously discourage it, but it will never entirely forget the behaviour.

Likewise, although unlike a dog a man can use willpower to overcome how he was raised, it's much easier if he's raised to be virtuous in the first place. 

The design constraints of a prudent life are to cooperate with cooperators and to not sacrifice the long term for the short term. However, it isn't necessary that the man have a distant time horizon. As long as he was raised to habitually choose the long-term and cooperative choice, he in fact doesn't need to think at all. 

The difficulty is that humanity is inherently evil and nobody would willingly raise a boy to be more virtuous unless the alternative was certain death.

No comments:

Post a Comment

New failcomment system also fails to publish my comments, it's not limited to yours. Keep trying, it will usually work, eventually.
Blogger deliberately trying to kill itself, I expect.
Captchas should be off. If it gives you one anyway, it's against my explicit instructions.