Some observations on evil, in life and in politics, from Aristotle

 I have been thinking a lot about the nature of evil lately.  You will encounter evil.  This is inevitable.  How and why does evil occur?  Let us turn to the founder of the Peripatetic school, for this morning.  The term, "peripatetic," comes from the fact that Aristotle began his teaching by walking around and giving his lectures while taking walks around the Lyceum.  He did not have the fixed school of the Academy, which was Plato's school, so instead, he wandered, his flock followed him, he lectured, they discussed, and from walking, the school of philosophy derives its name.  Aristotle was full of it, in many areas.  Physics, most obviously, but Nicomachean Ethics?  We still read that, and assign that because we still think it has value, and it is to Nicomachean Ethics I turn this morning.

Recall, of course, that Aristotle traces his lineage to Socrates, for whom the four cardinal virtues were wisdom, temperance, justice and courage.  That, at least, is the list provided by Plato.  Xenophon wrote that all four were really derived from wisdom, but we tend to go with Plato rather than Xenophon, with the irony being that Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoa, started his career as a philosopher when he got a book by Xenophon, but the Stoics went with more of Plato's version.  That's a tangent.  Anyway, notice something in particular about temperance and courage.  They can both be characterized as a kind of moderation between two extremes.  Courage can be described as a middle ground between cowardice and rashness.  Temperance can be described as a middle ground between self-indulgence and self-destructive asceticism.  Aristotle was a moderate by principle.  He believed that virtue could be found in the mean between the vicious extremes.

It is an interesting idea with some clear applications, as noted.  Of course, what is the moderate, and therefore virtuous amount of murder?  Well, Aristotle concedes the point, but that's the problem with Aristotle's method.  Once you start ceding the point, you cede the theory.  In fact, throughout a lot of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins with conceptions of virtue and then tries to construct extremes around that virtue to justify the claim, which is working backwards.  When he cannot do that, he cedes the point, and indeed, cedes the point that his model of virtue is not an always-and-forever model, and he acknowledges that he is building a kludge.

Yet as George E.P. Box said, "all models are wrong.  Some are useful."  Is this a useful model of virtue?  Useful enough in enough circumstances, and by providing a useful model of virtue, then by definition, if we treat vice and evil as indistinguishable, it is a useful model of evil.

Aristotle writes that it is hard to be good, because you are trying to steer a middle course between the extremes, and while there are many ways to go wrong, it is hard to hit the mark.  It is easy to lose courage, or fall prey to some temptation, that lack of virtue, that vice being what I will call evil.  Good, evil, two sides.  I'll talk shades of grey, as long as we acknowledge that grey comes from a particular blend of those two elementary components, hence two elements.  Good, and evil.

Anyway, you will observe evil.  What, then?  Aristotle writes a lot about how to interpret actions based on the extent to which the actor had agency, the nature of free will in the context of knowledge and ignorance, and such, but what are your obligations?  Part of the value of Nicomachean Ethics is that adopting Aristotle's view makes it easier to be sympathetic to those who do wrong.  There are plenty of philosophies that tell you to forgive, and such, but Aristotle actually codifies a construction of good and evil that makes it easier to feel some moral compassion for those who do wrong, even to you, by understanding why it is hard for them.  Epictetus, for all the value I find in his philosophy, does not make it easy to look at the world from the perspective of those who wrong you.  You need to be able to do that, particularly when, as Epictetus advises, you need to not care about that shit because it is not within your will.

In politics, though, Aristotle's principle of the golden mean can be problematic.  I tend to look at the world from spatial theory, and Aristotle, in many ways, presaged the median voter theorem.  There are some unique mathematical properties to the the preferences of the median voter, and if the goal is social cohesion, or even merely utilitarian wherein we are agnostic with respect to everyone's utility functions, then the location of the median is as golden as Aristotle said.

My second book, Incremental Polarization, concluded with some moral observations on polarization, and I noted that while we speak of polarization as though it is intrinsically bad for the parties to adopt divergent positions, and as though the location of the midpoint between the two parties is intrinsically morally good, and intrinsically right, we cannot derive from first principles, as Aristotle would say, the claim that the midpoint between the two parties' platforms would solve any problems.  Indeed, perhaps a position we label as "extreme" would actually produce what we sometimes call a "valence" outcome, and hence, isn't it better that at least one party endorses that position, regardless of how we think of it in spatial terms?

We cannot derive from first principles, for example, the claim that GDP growth is maximized by the midpoint between the two parties' platforms, nor that the midpoint between the two parties' platforms on crime reduces crime most effectively.  Worse, would anyone argue that the midpoint between the 1860 Democratic and Republican platforms on slavery was the Aristotelean golden mean?

We could, of course, turn to various conflicts around the world, and ask whether or not one should seek an Aristotelean golden mean.

The concept of the Aristotelean golden mean works nicely at the personal level, in many ways.  Imperfectly, but nicely.  It allows you the capacity to understand, and perhaps even empathize with those who wrong you, which is both vital, and about as difficult as it gets.  This has happened to you, I am sure.  We all know how hard this is, but if you do not try, you are a shit person.  You have to try.  Aristotle helps, by providing a model.  Even if you do not decide that you agree with who wronged you, at least you can understand the challenges faced, because as the Peripatetics say, steering the course to that golden mean is hard.  You, too, will fail, so perhaps try to understand when someone else fails.

One of the places where Aristotle failed, though, was in his attempt to extend the metaphor to politics, given insufficient credit for the median voter theorem because really, the golden mean is the social welfare side of spatial theory.  Aristotle.  Smart guy.  Anyway, the problem is that the middle cannot be definitionally good, and the extremes cannot be definitionally evil.  Once you do that, you start looking at any polarized system, including the US Civil War, and deciding that the abolitionist party must have been just as evil as the pro-slavery party, and I'm gonna give a hot take here and say that my man, Lincoln, was a righteous dude.  We all adore him.

Amid a polarized system today, in which I frequently write about my distress at the polarization, it does not follow that the midpoint between the polarized positions on any issue is necessarily right.  Not everything is a social construct, but ideology is.  Why are taxes and abortion linked?  Because we say so, and a simple twist of fate could have made one party the tax-cuts-and-abortions-for-all party.  Indeed, in 1976, pro-choice voters voted Ford, and pro-life voters voted Carter.  It wasn't until 1980 that the abortion sort happened.  Many things are not social constructs, but ideology is, and it can be, and has been constructed differently.  Hence, the notion that morality comes from splitting the difference as the parties diverge follows from nothing.

And the higher the stakes, the more important it is to use actual principles rather than the pseudo-principle of the golden mean.  Yes, you will see two opposing groups.  It does not follow that there must be a balance, both sides, etc.  The idea of splitting the difference is an attempt to follow something like the Aristotelean golden mean, which is not even quite what he meant.  Remember that the concept comes from two specific vices.  Courage is the middle between cowardice and rashness.

That logic does not work unless you can define, as first principles, cowardice as a vice, and rashness as a vice.  Aristotle cheats a bit, periodically, but those who attempt to apply golden mean-ism to politics in order to split the difference as pseudo-moral reasoning skip the part where they define the poles as vices.  It doesn't work if you say "both sides have a point."  The golden mean principle is based on the notion that no, neither extreme has a point.  They are vices, by definition/assumption.

But so often, the attempt to appeal to this kind of reasoning is a way to avoid the harder call and to signal cheap virtue through Aristotelean posturing.

Jonas Hellborg, Shawn Lane and V. Selvaganesh, "Who Would You Like To Be?" from Good People In Times Of Evil.