LESSON 1 | WHAT CONCERNS ETHICS1

Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
− Know the primary concerns of ethics.
− Differentiate ethics from other schools of thought.
− Discuss ethics through its principles first before being applied.

SELF TEST!
Q: What is the difference between the terms ETHICS and MORALITY?

1. ETHICS is about —
2. MORALITY is about —

Answer using your initial thoughts on this topic.

LESSON CONTENT

What QUESTIONS are Addressed?

There are two questions identified by philosopher William James that is the concern of philosophical thought: DEAD and
LIVE issues such as: Are we good or evil? Is there a God? Is there life after death? Are we free or determined?
We will put our concern on LIVE issues or BIG QUESTIONS.

We are “Arguing Backward” Instead of “Arguing Forward.”

When we do Ethics, we will employ the process Arguing Forward. This form of thinking involves the use of principles when
assessing situations, also called as casuistry. We can think of this as the resolving of specific cases of conscience or duty or conduct
through application of moral principles. Questions that could be argued “forward” are ones such as: Are certain wars just? Is abortion
just? etc. However, what concerns in for now for the duration of the semester is with Arguing Backward, i.e., the form of thinking
which involves exploring the foundations of our principles.

Arguing Forward has some meets some complications: (1) this process tries to apply values to complex situations, and (2)
this process does not require the study of the history of ethical thought, which Arguing Backward does. In this case, history [of ethical
thought] becomes a beneficial tool for doing ethics since the wisest philosophers in our history (Gautama, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Confucius, Aquinas, Kant, etc.) speak to us and for us; they are involved in the way we think, whether we are conscious of it or not. They
are our teachers. And, “there is nothing new under the sun”—even when we consider “modern” issues such as genetics, weapons of
mass destruction, terrorism, etc., at the heart of all these problems, both their theory and practice, we find perennial (enduring or
continually recurring) principles.

Where Moral Values Come From?

There are two possible answers to this most basic and important question in Ethics: that values are OBJECTIVE or
SUBJECTIVE. Do we discover these values like a scientist would in objective reality or do we create these values like the rules of a game
or a work of art?

If we look at history, we can see that pre-modern societies saw these values as objective, and as universal, absolute and
unchanging. At the onset of modern Western society, philosophers began to claim such values as subjective, meaning that they are
culturally relative, changing and man-made.

If we continue does this route in uncovering the origins of moral values, we find ourselves asking if they are natural or
artificial—Where do we find them? Nature is the milieu of our human existence; there’s no other place to start looking but from there.
But we don’t find them in physical nature. If the definition of nature includes HUMAN nature, we are then forced to ask if human
nature is unchanging. If the answer is “no,” that human nature is not unchanging, then objective, and unchanging, moral values cannot
come from humans. We haven’t answered the question yet.

Be like Socrates, an Example of the True Philosopher.

Socrates, the “Father of Philosophy,” believes that there were objective moral values, but thought it was very hard to prove
them. He was neither a dogmatist nor a skeptic and this is what propelled him to ask questions. A dogmatist thinks he already has all
the answers, and the skeptic thinks there aren’t any. He’s the balance of how a philosopher does subscribes to existing ethical
principles while, at the same time, being inquisitive enough to challenge its impact or influence to certain circumstances.

Seven Things Ethics is NOT!

1. Ethics is not a “check-up.” It is not a checklist of rules that determine whether or not something is right or wrong. Instead, it
is an investigation into real and substantial questions of eternal importance, e.g. “What is a good person?
2. Ethics (or “morals”) are NOT the same as “mores.” Mores are how we do behave; moral are how we ought to behave. Mores,
or social norms, are facts, whereas morals are values. Mores are patterns of behavior, whereas morals are principles of
behavior. Mores are common in both man and beast, while morals are proper to man alone. This point corresponds to the
distinction between Shame (mores) and Guilt (morals). Shame is social and guilt is individual. Dogs feel shame, but not guilt.
3. Ethics is not psychology. Ethics is not about feelings.
4. Ethics is not ideology.
5. Ethics is not the same as Meta-Ethics. Ethics is thinking about Good and Evil. Meta-Ethics is thinking about Ethics per se.
6. Basic Ethics is not Applied Ethics (casuistry). Ethics is like a theoretical science while applied ethics is like technology.
7. Ethics is not religion. One does not need religious faith to study ethics.

1 The following contents of this lesson is taken from Peter Kreeft’s book Ethics: A History of Moral Thought, p. 6-9.
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Just What is ETHICS, Then?
Ethics is about three things:
1. Good—the thing desired, the ideal.
2. Right—the opposite of wrong as defined by some law.
3. Ought—personal obligation, duty, responsibility.

These are the three ethical dimensions of any question. But what are the questions? C.S. Lewis supplies us a good way to
understand the questions Ethics asks with the metaphor about a fleet of ships and ethics are our sailing orders. These orders tell the
ship (us) three things:
• How to cooperate with one another and thus avoid bumping into each other. This is Social Ethics.
• How to keep each ship afloat and in good condition. This is Individual Ethics or Virtue Ethics. It asks the questions:
What is a good person? What is moral character?
• What the ship’s mission is. This is the most important “order” of all, for it gives us our ultimate purpose and goal
in life. If we don’t know or care about where we are going, it doesn’t make a difference what road we choose. (Quo
vadis? “Where are you going?)

LESSON 2 | WHY DO WE CALL IT “ANCIENT WISDOM?”2

Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
− Distinguish ancient wisdom from modern philosophical thought.
− Realize how ancient wisdom continue to influence and shape our moral thought until today.

SELF TEST!
Q: What do you think are factors or indicators for us to say that an idea/thought to be considered ancient wisdom?
Provide two (2).

• ______________________________.
• ______________________________.

Is it really ancient wisdom though?

LESSON CONTENT

The term “ancient wisdom” refers to philosophies of pre-modern times in contrast to “modern knowledge.” Why is this the
case? Does this mean we are less “wise” than we once were? Below is a summary of the most important points in pre-modern ethical
wisdom and the differences on those point in relation to contemporary conventional wisdom which might show us some reason for
this judgment.

Twelve Important Differences between Typically Ancient and Typically Modern Philosophies.

1. For ancients, Ethics comes first. They saw ethics as the single most important ingredient to a good life. Virtue for them was
considered essential while it has often become an afterthought for modern man. For ancients, morality is not a means to an
end, it IS the end.

2. Within “ancient wisdom” is a profound respect for tradition and authority. To the ancients, the idea of conformity to
tradition was not a negative idea. Over the last 500 years, however, Western culture has made conformity a very unpopular
word. New moralities have sprung up everywhere. Man now often believes in creating his own values (self-invention3), and
different cultures create different values (cultural relativism). The ancients were not cultural relativists. They thought you
could no more create or invent a new morality than a new universe or color. The ancients believed in an obedience or
conformity to authority not in the sense [tyrannical] “power” but of “goodness.” They believed that right makes might, not
that might makes right.

3. The ancients did ethics by reason and with the mind not with feelings or emotions as is often done in the modern world.
The ancients believed the maxim—“LIVE ACCORDING TO REASON.”

4. Ancient ethics was more connected to religion, while modern ethics is more deliberately secular. Religion had a virtual
monopoly in most ancient societies and there was a religious consensus that no longer exists. Modern society is much more
pluralistic and tolerant, in no small part due to the suffering it has witnessed in the form of religious war and strife over the
centuries. It is for this reason that modern philosophy tends to shy away from ethical questions that seem to have a religious
underpinning to them e.g. “What is the meaning of life?” But historically, religion has always been the strongest source of
morality. Dostoevski said, “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Most of our ancestors did not think an atheist
could be ethical, but many today would disagree with this.

2The following contents of this lesson is taken from Peter Kreeft’s book Ethics: A History of Moral Thought, p. 12-14.
3This is a term I often hear from Bishop Robert Baron when he points our contemporary culture that is based off on postmodern
thinking. He attributes this phenomenon to Friedrich Nietzsche and the postmodern project.
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 5. Because of their deeper concept of happiness as objective perfection and not just subjective contentment, and their deeper
concept of ethics as not just rules but virtues, the ancients did not contrast ethics and happiness as we often do today. Ethics
was not a set of rules that interfered with what you felt like doing and thus with your happiness. Rather, ethics was a
roadmap to the country of true happiness.

6. All ancients based their ethics on human nature. This is one of the meanings of the term “natural law.” It is true that different
ancients thought differently about the nature of “human nature.” For instance:
a. Epicurus, Lucretius and their followers thought human nature was much the same as animal nature, and therefore
deduce the ethical conclusion that the highest values were pleasure, comfort and peace.
b. Plato, Plotinus and their followers thought human nature was essentially the same as the nature of gods or spirits,
and so came to the conclusion that the only true values were spiritual and not material.
c. Aristotle and his followers thought human nature was neither the same as animals’ or the gods’ but both at the
same time, and deduce that both spiritual goods like wisdom and virtue and material goods like pleasure and
wealth are counted.

However, moderns tend to be skeptical of basing ethics on any philosophical anthropology or view of human nature.
Modern philosophers tend to base their ethics either on desire and satisfaction—calculating the consequences of an act in
terms of the greatest satisfaction for the greatest number of people (utilitarianism)—or on a justice which is not based on
human nature but on pure reason abstracted from experience and human nature. Immanuel Kant posted this latter idea
and based all of ethics on “The Golden Rule”—Do unto others whatever you want them to do to you.4

7. For the ancients the most important question in ethics was not how to treat other people, or how to have a just society, or
how to improve the world, or even how to be a good person, or what virtues to have (despite all of these are important
questions). To them, it is the question of the meaning of life. What was life’s ultimate purpose or final goal or greatest good,
the summum bonum? This question can’t be dealt with by modern scientific reasoning. If the scientific method is the only
reliable method for finding the truth, it is impossible to prove what is “good.” Moderns sharply distinguish questions of
(scientific) “fact” from questions of (moral) “value.”

8. Most of the ancients believed that politics was social ethics. This is meant that there was no radical difference between
societal and individual ethics. The aim of society according to the ancient philosophers was virtue. Almost no major modern
political philosopher believes that. It was Machiavelli who effected this change. Most modern systems of political philosophy
are modifications and revisions of the Machiavellian revolution.

9. Most of the ancients believed that human nature had both good and evil tendencies in it. Many moderns believe this too,
but three other views have become more popular which were rare in ancient philosophy:
a. The idea of Pessimism, that man is innately bad and it takes force to make him act well. In this case, ethics is
unnatural and acts as a curbing agent to rectify the essential badness of man. Machiavelli and Hobbes are
representative of this view.
b. The idea that we have no essence. Human nature is just a word that is ever-changing and malleable. Marxism,
Deconstructionism, and Sartre’s Existentialism are examples of this view.
c. The idea of optimism, which holds that man is innately good, but may act badly when a victim of circumstance and
social structure. Rousseau is the original proponent of this view.

10. Moderns tend to rely on science as being more reliable than religion. Thus, the ethics of the typically modern philosopher
has changes from a basically religious ethic to a scientific ethic.

11. In ancient philosophies, ethics was based on metaphysics. Ethics, or your “life view,” depended on your “world view,” or
metaphysics. Modern philosophers usually attempt to do ethics without metaphysics.

12. Most of the ancients would say that what makes a society survive and prosper is ethics. A modern would say it is economics.
Plato’s Republic has only one paragraph about economics and ten books about ethics. The irony is that modern society gives
an average individual more freedom, more money and more knowledge than any ancient society even did, but it gives that
individual far less moral meaning.

We must choose between the ancient and modern ways of thinking about ethics in each of these twelve (12) ways within
ourselves and our society. And to do that we must force ourselves to think for ourselves. We must all, in a sense, be philosophers.

4
However, a much earlier attribution of the Golden Rule comes from the Oriental philosopher Confucius in his teachings on
ren or “humaneness” document by his disciples in “The Analects.”
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 LESSON 3 | EASTERN ETHICS5

Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
− Explain the important ethical ideas from the four major religions of East.
− Understand how ethics and religion in the East is intertwined with each other.
− Highlight ethical ideas that we can learn from the Oriental religions.

SELF TEST!
Q: Are there any ideas or beliefs in our culture that is influenced by Eastern religions? Give me one (1) and explain what
it means.

• ________________________ — ______________________________________________.

Answer in brief.

LESSON CONTENT

If ethics is universal, if it depends on universal laws or universal reason, then one should look to the East as well as the
West, for the same reason that one should look at the past as well as the present.

East vs. West

In the West, philosophy in general, and ethics in particular, distinguished itself from religion, largely due to Socrates and
his successors. In the East, there was no Socrates and so ethics in particular, and philosophy in general, is not regarded as purely
rational science but is more closely tied to religion.

The Four Major Religions of the East and Ethics

The four most influential, lasting and popular religions in the East are:
1. Hinduism
2. Buddhism
3. Confucianism
4. Taoism

Each of these religions contains a moral code, and though each differs greatly on theoretical questions like the nature of
God, they don’t differ very much on practical questions, or how one should live one’s life. Yet, although the content of ethics in Eastern
religious traditions is similar to the content of ethics in Western religions, the status of ethics is these religions is different. In Western
religions, morality comes from the “top,” that is to say God. The ultimate reason for human morality in the West is the nature of God.
This isn’t found in the Eastern religions. The purpose for morality here is to wipe bad dust off the mirror of the human mind so that
we can see God and have a mystical experience. The Eastern religion is mysticism and the goal of Western religion is sanctity. In the
East, the moral will has to be purified so that the mind is clear. In the West, man has to be enlightened so that the will is better.

Hinduism
In Hinduism, the ultimate reality is called Brahman. Brahman is a person in some form of the religion, and in others it is not
a person, but the one and only reality, of which we are all manifestations. The ultimate end of Hinduism is realizing our unity with
Brahman, realizing that in the depths of our soul, known as Atman, that we are all one, and that the one we really are is Brahman,
God, infinite and absolute and indefinable perfection. The formula for this is:
“Thou Art That”/ “Tat Tvam Asi” = Atman is Brahman

The Road to Brahman

There are four roads to Brahman. These roads are more precisely called YOGAS, which means deeds or works, or ways of
life. Each of these yogas is an interior journey of self-discovery that leads to Atman and thus to Brahman, and each is for different
personalities. Each has its own moral code and each code is similar—purification from all kinds of evil and impurity and selfishness—
but the psychological emphasis differs:

Jnana yoga is a mental, intellectual path by which you learn to understand yourself differently and learn to detach your
thoughts from your body and your ego and its desires.

Karma yoga is a path to Brahman through ordinary daily work and fulfilling your duties with a new motive, sheer obedience
to your Karma or fate.

Bhatki yoga is a personal, emotional path of love and attachment to Brahman instead of yourself.

Raja yoga is careful, difficult, experimental and detailed path, that combines elements of all the others.

What is the ethics of the paths? While the focus for each path differs slightly, they all have the same goal: detachment from
ordinary selfishness and self-consciousness and attainment of unselfishness and unself-consciousness. Some Hindus believe that
when you reach your goal, you see that you simply are Brahman, while other Hindus believe that you then attain a union with
Brahman, a kind of spiritual marriage.
Reincarnation

5 The following contents of this lesson is taken from Peter Kreeft’s book Ethics: A History of Moral Thought, p. 81-86.
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 The major specific difference between Hindu ethics and most Western ethics concerns the value for individual human life.
For Hindus, this life is not the only one, so a man dying is only passing out of one body and will soon get another one, by reincarnation.
Reincarnation state that after you die your soul gets another human body and comes back to Earth to learn the lessons you didn’t
learn last time, to fulfill the karma, your destiny and cosmic justice, to reap the rewards for virtue and punishments for vice from
your last life. Hindus believe that we should fear death less, and love life less, then we naturally do because both are only temporary
and repeatable.

The West ethics emphasizes right action which is more involved and practical, while Hindu ethics emphasizes right
understanding which is more detached and contemplative.

Buddhism
Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism, a kind of simplified and purified Hinduism. Siddhartha Gautama or Buddha’s ethics,
summarizes in his “Noble Eightfold Path,” is in many ways similar to raja yoga, but Buddhism rejects Hindu theory of Brahman and
Atman. It says that our belief that we have souls, or egos, or selves, stems from our practice of selfish desire. If we stopped desiring,
we would stop thinking there was anyone there doing the desiring. So the ultimate end of all Buddhist ethics is to stop all selfish
desire, to purify our thoughts and actions from selfishness, in order to reach the state of consciousness called Nirvana. Nirvana means
“extinction.” Once you reach Nirvana, you are not god or bad, you simply are not. So even though there is a strict ethics on the Noble
Eightfold Path to reach Nirvana, and once that is similar of perfecting the self but of destroying it, or rather destroying the illusion
that there is a self.

Four Noble Truths

This is the essence of Buddhism, summarized by Buddha himself:
• All life is infected with dhukka or suffering. To live is to suffer.
• The cause of suffering is greed, or tanha. We have selfish desires and that sets up a gap between desire and
satisfaction, and that gap is what suffering is: wanting what you don’t have.
• To eliminate the effect, eliminate the cause. The way to extinguish suffering is to extinguish selfish desire.
Nirvana is the cure.
• The prescription for this cure is the Noble Eightfold Path. Life is divided into eight aspects and egotism is
deliberately reduce to zero in each.

Buddhism is a way of salvation but not salvation from sin as Christianity is, but from suffering [in this life]. There is no
notion of sin, divine law, or a personal God in Buddhism. The ultimate purpose of the Buddhist ethics of the Noble Eightfold Path is
not to be virtuous or charitable or happy or pleasing to God, but to transform our desires and our consciousness so that we can escape
suffering and illusion and find Nirvana.

Wisdom and Compassion

The two greatest virtues of Buddhists are wisdom and compassion, or pranja and karuna. Wisdom means enlightenment,
which consists in seeing your identity with everything else, overcoming the habitual illusion of distinct individuality; and compassion
means feeling one with all suffering beings and overcoming the habitual desires of the separate self.

Karuna is not the Same as Agape (Charity)

Buddhist compassion is not the same as Christian charity, which is active and personal. They both negater the same thing
(selfishness) but do not affirm the same thing. Karuna is the feeling of empathy with all the suffering beings, which is a matter of
feeling and thought and intuition. Agape is active love, willing the good for the other. Agape is a matter of the will. Both karuna and
agape are to be given to all people, both good and bad, but karuna is to be given to animals too, since they suffer also.

Some Conclusions:
In Buddhism as well as Hinduism, there is not the great priority put on human life and individuality and certainly not on
human bodily salvation, that there is in the West. The Buddhist sees the human body as a boat and the sailor is apparently the soul
or self or ego. Since there is no ego, we are empty boats, driven by the wind. Since there is no one there, there is no one to hate and
when we see this, we no longer hate. We can no longer hate. But the price you have to pay for this is that there is also no one there to
love.

Confucianism
Confucian ethics is much less mystical than Hindu or Buddhist ethics, and much more practical and political. Its central idea
is harmony. Justice does not mean equality or rights, but a kind of social music, each person singing the note that is right for them.
Confucius took this central idea of harmony and constructed a social ethic that transformed China from a period of civil war to relative
peace and unity for over 2000 years until Mao Zedong destroyed it and replaced it with the opposite philosophy of Communism,
based on class conflict. Confucius’ influence is unparalleled in history: he was the single most successful thinker in the field of social
ethics in the history of the world.

Some Differences between Confucianism and the West

1. In a Confucian society, everything is done with elaborate and precise correctness. There is a right way to address your older
brother which is different from the way to address your older sister, which is different that the way to address your younger
brother, etc.
2. In Confucian ethics, the basic unit is not the individual but the family. The individual is subordinate to family and social
roles and patterns of acting, like dancers at a formal ball. Preserving family loyalties and structures is primary while
individual happiness is secondary.
3. There is much greater emphasis in a Confucian society than in the West on tradition and respect for the old. Confucianism
envies the old more than the young because it values what the old are better at—wisdom—more highly than what the
young are better at—pleasure or health.
4. Where the West places an emphasis on distinguishing things, clearly and logically (the Creator and the creation, good and
evil, etc.), the East, and especially Confucianism, is flexible and has a talent for mediation and compromise.

Taoism
Taoism is opposite to Confucianism in many ways. Its founder Lao Tzu was a romantic and a mystic while Confucius was a
rational pragmatist. Lao Tzu was leaving civilized China, disenchanted with the rule and regulations of Confucianism, when the
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gatekeeper of the Great Wall refused to let him through until he paid, not in money, but in wisdom, Lao Tzu agreed to his “tariff” and
wrote 81 short poems, gave them to the gatekeeper, and left, never to be heard from again. Those 81 poems constitute the Tao Te
Ching, the second most popular book in the world next to the Bible. (Ching means “book,” Te means “spiritual power,” and Tao means
“way.”

The concept of Tao has three dimensions:

• The way ultimate reality works.
• The way nature works in its manifestations of ultimate reality.
• The way of the wise individual and the wise society that initiates the way of nature, as nature imitates the
Tao.

This pattern is similar to Christian charity and Hindu/Buddhist mysticism in that it is selfless, or self-giving. The greatest
power or te, according to Taoism, is in the feminine side of our being, or in our womblike receptivity. Rigid things die, flexible things
live. The favorite Taoist model in nature is water. It always goes to the lowest place and it has no form of its own, as it takes the form
of its container. But it is the source of all life, and its wave, dashing themselves to extinction on the hard rocks, are not change by the
rocks, but the rocks are changed and turned to sand by the patient water. The Tao Te Ching says that “nature is a sacred vessel and
that those who only want to use her do not succeed.”

Yin and Yang

Yin and Yang are the basic polarity found everywhere in nature, the law of opposites: hot and cold, day and night, male and
female and ultimately, life and death: Western ethics is life-affirming and death denying. It is an either/or ethics or choice. But Eastern
ethics, and especially Taoism, takes its model from nature and the law of Yin and Yang, not only concerning light and dark but even
life and death. In Taoism, life and death are not enemies but allies. At the heart of life, there is death and as soon as we are born, we
begin to die.

East vs. West

In the Eastern philosophies, ultimate reality is beyond moral good and evil. This Oriental metaphysics has great ethical
consequences. In this philosophy, you don’t take the difference between good and evil with absolute seriousness, just relative
seriousness. In the West, ultimate reality, is infinitely good and not evil. God does not have a dark side. The meaning of life is Him, or
being like Him, or surrender to His will etc. So, morality is taken with ultimate seriousness, because moral goodness is not relative,
like biological goodness or physical goodness. Whether in pre-Christian classical, Christian, or post-Christian humanist form, the
West tends toward moral absolutism. Even if everything in the physical universal is relative, morality is not relative to immorality as
Yin to Yang.

LESSON 4 | SOCRATIC TEACHING vis-à-vis PLATONIC ETHICS

Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
− Understand the basic principles from Socratic teaching and Platonic metaphysics that led to ethics.
− Compare and contrast Socrates’ understanding of virtue from Plato’s understanding of virtue.
− Provide examples that will demonstrate the perennial implication of both Socratic and Platonic thought.

SELF TEST!
Q: While growing up, how did you learn certain actions are bad and certain actions are good? Did you learn it by
realizing from experience or were they taught to you?

• [Learned or Taught?] ________________________________________________.

Provide a brief explanation.

LESSON CONTENT

Socrates6
Socrates was born in the 5th century BC, during the Golden Age of Athens. He died in 399 BC at 70, condemned to death by
a jury of 501 citizens for crime of not believing in the gods of the State. All philosophy stems from Socrates and at least half of the
Western Culture has been influenced strongly by the teachings of Socrates. He was the first person in history to have a clear idea of
what constituted a logical argument.

Interestingly, Socrates chose to apply his method of argument and deduction to only one subject—ethics. His most
important and essential teaching in this realm states two things:
1. Virtue is knowledge.7

6The following contents are taken from Peter Kreeft’s book Ethics: A History of Moral Thought, p. 16-21.
7According to Greek culture, virtue (arete) is tied up with function (ergon); virtue is what enables something to perform excellently its
proper function. And so, a virtuous person is someone who has the ability to live excellently, e.i, to live a full, productive, and happy life
(Prof. Sally Haslanger, Ancient Philosophy). The knowledge Socrates equates to virtue is the knowledge that we gain through the process
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 2. Vice is ignorance.

Apologetics is the art of defending one’s belief and has nothing to do with an admission of any sort of guilt. It was Socrates’
“Apology” he described how it is that he became a philosopher. On trial for the charge of impiety [to the Greek gods], Socrates tells a
story to prove that, on the contrary, he was devoutly pious. It was because of the Oracle of Delphi that he knew no one was wiser
than him. Astounded by the answer because he knew he had no wisdom and not wanting to dismiss the Oracle as a fraud, assuming
that a god could not lie, he set out to look for anyone who is wiser than himself, but was never able to find anyone. Through cross
examination, he discovered that the people who claim to be wise in fact did not possess true wisdom. Thus, there are two kinds of
people according to Socratic teaching:
1. Fools, who think they are wise.
2. The wise, who know they are fools.

And so, the first step to moral virtue is to know yourself and know how unwise you are. This search for wisdom you know
you don’t possess is the beginning of philosophy—love of wisdom.

In Socrates’ death, there lies a paradox. First of all, Socrates was the most pious man Athens ever produced and yet the only
one executed for impiety. Second, to Socrates, evil cannot be done to a good man because of what man is, because of his essence, giving
us this riddle:
Q. What can’t be taken from a good man?
A. His virtue and his wisdom.
Q. Where is his virtue and his wisdom? In his reputation? In his possessions? In his body?
A. No. In his SOUL.

The true self is the soul. This is why no evil can happen to you, and why bad people can’t harm good people. What can be
harmed is the body only. The only evil that can harm your very self comes from you. No one else can make you foolish and wicked, as
well as make you wise and virtuous aside from yourself.

If happiness comes from goodness, from having a good self, then happiness cannot just happen, it is chosen. We are
responsible for our own happiness.

Three Assumptions and Their Results

1. We always seek our own good and not our own harm. We always see happiness.
2. If you know yourself, then you know that the self is the soul and your own true good is the good of your soul.
3. If you know your soul well enough, then you know that virtue is the only way to happiness because virtue is the “health
of the soul.”

Reason
When Socrates calls reason the key to practicing virtue, he is speaking of understanding. If you really understand that you
are essentially your soul and that the happiness of your soul comes only through virtue, then you will love virtue, as you love yourself
and happiness. If you don’t love virtue that way and you love vice instead, it must be because you don’t really understand. Evil only
comes when reason is not working properly. If ignorance is the cause of evil then wisdom is the cure. One can remove the effect of
evil by removing the cause (ignorance), and since philosophy is the love of wisdom it is the cure for moral evil. That was Socrates’
conviction, and he died defending it.

Virtue can be TAUGHT!

Meno asks Socrates, “Can virtue be taught, or does it come to us in some other way?” Do we get virtue by:
1. Teaching
2. Habit and practice
3. Innately, by nature
4. By going against nature

Other philosophers would answer different to this question. The most optimistic response is from Rousseau: we become
virtuous by nature. A less optimistic response would by from Plato: it requires teaching to be virtuous. A even less optimistic response
would be from Aristotle: it requires work/practice. A pessimistic response would be either from Hobbes or Machiavelli: it is only by
force/against nature that one becomes virtuous.

But what about Socrates? What does he say? Learning is remembering. At first instance, virtue is knowledge and can
therefore be taught, but then proves that virtue cannot be taught because there are no teachers of it, and so it is not knowledge. After
his dialogue he suggests that virtue is neither certain knowledge nor mere ignorance but “right belief” (orthodoxy), a sort of quasi-
knowledge. He says that only God can teach it but we can help.

Somehow, Socrates suggests that virtue is a kind of faith. If you believe that you are a soul, and that virtue makes you happy,
then that will work as well as knowledge. Virtue then can be a knowledge by faith rather than a knowledge by reason and
proof.
Plato8
Theory of Reminiscence
Man, for Plato, is a reflection of the duality of the sensible world and the ideal worlds—composed of a body and a soul. The
body is made up of the four traditional elements – earth, water, air, and fire. The soul consists of three distinct faculties, three levels
of knowledge and desire. (1) There is, at the lowest level, sensation (aesthesis), ordered to the cloudy reflections of the ideal forms
in sensible things. On the level of sensation, there is the corresponding sense desire (epithumia), seeking satisfaction in the ever
changing and thus formless, endlessly frustrating material things. (2) There is the second, opinion (doxa), which in itself is not free
from error but is sufficient for ordinary practical matters such as hypothetical sciences and the government of communal life. The
corresponding desire is spirit (thumos), a kind of spontaneous tendency towards everything beautiful and good. (3) Thirdly, there is

of “questioning and examining ours and others' beliefs” that makes a life an examined (or examining) life (Jörg Hardy, Is Virtue
Knowledge? Socratic Intellectualism Reconsidered).
8 The contents in this section are taken from Ramon Castillo Reyes’ Ground and Norm of Morality: Ethics for College Students, p. 32-34.

7
the mind or intellect (nous), the immortal part of the soul, the capacity for truth and wisdom. Its corresponding desire is the will
(boule), which is the soul’s tendency toward the Good.

Given this composition of man, Plato explains by way of myth that there was a time when soul, living in the spiritual world
of ideal forms, was not bonded to the body. However, due to some Fall of man, consequent upon some evil deed, the soul was exiled
to the material world and thus imprisoned in the body. In this fallen state, man is forgetful of the world of ideas of his previous
existence. However, insofar as the material world is a shadowy reflection or participation of the ideal world, the sojourn of the soul
in the material world serves as occasion for it to reminisce, to recall the ideal forms of its previous state. The encounter with
the material world serves as an occasion for the soul to remember what in a sense it had always known from the beginning.

The myth of the soul’s pre-existence and the Fall allows Plato to explain the moral dimension of man. In the Fallen state,
man is torn between two tendencies. On the one hand, by virtue of its imprisonment in the body, the soul finds itself dragged down,
as if by some leaden weight, toward a life of mere sense and physical pleasure. On the other hand, the soul is marked by a
certain deep disquietude, a fundamental yearning for that which is beyond. for what is ideal. This “tendency of the soul” is for
Plato the expression of the soul’s con-naturality with the Good and its pre-existence in the world of ideas.

On Justice9
For Plato, justice is the most essential virtue. All other virtues are components of justice. It meant not just giving people
their rights but more importantly, “right order” or “cosmic harmony.” Plato considered the moral values for the individual and for
the state as being the same patter in two different places. It is important to notice the distinction between how politics was seen in
ancient Greece as opposed to how it is seen in more modern times. For the Greeks, politics was inherently moral and idealistic. Politics
was in fact moral ethics.

Plato thought that there had to be a common pattern for the good individual and the good community because communities,
after all, are made by individuals and of individuals.

In his book the Republic, Plato seeks clarify what is the true essence of justice by refuting the following claims by (1) a
conservative, (2) a moderate10, (3) radical skeptic:
1. Definition #1: Justice is paying your debts and telling the truth. In this conversation, Socrates is challenged this by
asking whether it would be just to return a weapon to its rightful owner if that owner were a homicidal maniac.
2. Definition #2: Justice is giving people what they deserve—helping friends and harming enemies. Socrates points
out that sometimes we mistakenly take our enemies for friend and vice versa. The definition is the tightened to
helping true friends and harming true enemies. Socrates suggests, however, that justice should do good even to
enemies. This is because justice is a virtue and a virtue is good and good can only do good, not harm, to everyone
that it touches.
3. Definition #3: Justice is whatever the strong man wants—might makes right. Justice is only a mask painted on the
face of power. If justice is only a name for power, then it is naïve and foolish to try to be just [or fair]. Wouldn’t it
make more sense to skip the justice mask and go straight to the power? For sometimes injustice is more profitable
than justice. The end justifies the means and there is no moral absolute. Morality is not real. We make the rules
and we can change them. We can cheat and sometimes cheating wins. It was weakness that made man create
morality, and so in the strong man there is no need to be moral.

Then we have the position of a moral relativist (Glaucon), using the image of “Gyges’ Ring,” a magic ring that gives power
to do whatever one wants and allows the bearer to get away with everything by turning invisible. Socrates says that it is not wise to
use the ring. Power corrupts and the ring needs to be destroyed. The fact remains, though, that the ring is alluring because it seems
to bring happiness. Socrates goes on then to make another point: I is true that everyone wants happiness, so what gives you
happiness? What means attains the end of happiness? Is it: (1) Justice or (2) Injustice with the power to do whatever you want and get
away with it?

If we didn’t believe that doing wrong was going to make us happy, we wouldn’t do it. If sin didn’t look fun, wouldn’t we be
all saints? Plato’s high aim in the Republic is to convince us that sin is never fun, that injustice is never profitable and that being good
is the only way to be happy.

The Theory of Education

According to Plato’s image of the divided line and the prisoner escaping the cave of ignorance, we learn to be virtuous, in
this case to be just, through these steps:
1. Tradition and authority. Accepting conventional opinions and others’ ideas without ever seeing things for yourself.
You know only images of reality, not reality itself.
2. Seeing things for yourself through personal experience and using our own senses.
3. Logical reasoning. Proving it, not just seeing it.
4. Wisdom or understanding the natures or essences of what you see and prove.

Justice. the State and the Soul

Plato must prove that justice is always more profitable than injustice and must be able to reach certainty about this. He
searches them in two places: (1) in individual soul; and, (2) in the State. He then searches for the essence of justice in the State first.

Plato believes that the State is natural and not artificial through specialization. Different people are good at different things.
This efficiency in specialization leads to wealth, which leads to the advent of a class of people needed to control the distribution and
safety of this wealth Three classes then naturally evolve from this process and corresponds to three natural functions of any society.
Each also possess a virtue necessary for their job.

9 From the segment onwards was taken from Kreeft, p. 28-33.

10 Someone who holds popular ideas but avoid extreme ones.
8
 CLASS FUNCTION VIRTUE
The Producers of Wealth law abiders Moderation
Supervisors/Keepers of Order law enforcers Courage
Rulers/Legislators law makers Wisdom

Justice comes with the harmonious functioning of all three of these classes/functions/virtues. Justice is to a community as
health is to a body. Therefore, a just society has moderation, courage, and wisdom. The same pattern can be seen to be present in
every soul. This “map of the state” can be applied to the individual and become a “map of the soul. He finds that the soul, like the
state, has three powers:
SOUL STATE
Desire Moderation
Will JUSTICE Courage JUSTICE
Reason Wisdom

It is reason that is in-charge of the powers of the soul, thus it is wisdom that should lead the state. Plato then posits that
the idea of the “Philosopher-King,” that the just state would be ruled by truly wise philosophers, saying: “Until philosophers become
kings, or kings become philosophers, we will have no rest from troubles in the world.” And so, for Plato, a just state is an aristocracy—
ruled by the best (aristos); democracy—ruled by the masses (anarchy), an unjust and disordered state that also got Socrates killed.
A just soul is a soul ruled by wisdom instead of a soul ruled by desires and obsessions.

Above Justice?—Goodness
Greater than even justice is “The Good.” This is Plato’s absolute. You cannot define goodness, as you can define justice,
because it is infinite, like absolute perfection. The Good is like the sun; you can’t stare at the sun, but it is only by the sun’s light that
you know everything else. The absolute good is not intelligible but it is the origin of all intelligibility.

LESSON 5 | ARISTOTLE’S NICOMACHEAN ETHICS11

Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
− Understand the role of desire/happiness in Aristotle’s ethics.
− Discuss the importance of friendship as a model of virtuous personal and societal relationship.
− Use the Golden Mean in learning what virtue is life.

SELF TEST!
Q: What makes you HAPPY? And why do you desire such things? Provide one (1) and explain why.

• ________________ — _______________________________________.

Just give me an idea why it makes you happy and all.

LESSON CONTENT

Difference Between Plato and Aristotle

Metaphysics: Plato and Aristotle agreed that reality was full of order, structure, species, natures, forms, or essences; the
philosopher needed to know and define them. However, Plato believed that these essences existed in a separate dimension from
everything else because they were changeless and everything else was changing. Aristotle, on the other hand, said that they were the
reason the essences of changing things.

Anthropology: Plato sharply separated the body from the soul, while Aristotle said the soul is the form of the body and the
body is the matter of the soul.

Epistemology: Plato separated reason (the soul’s tool for knowing), from sense experience (the body’s tool for knowing).
He believed that we all have an innate knowledge of the Platonic Ideals in our minds always, and philosophizing is the process of
pulling up these ideas by recollection. Aristotle, however, felt that all knowledge begins with sense experience, and that we abstract
these essences from our sense experience of concrete things because that is where they exist—in concrete things.

Conclusion: Plato is always looking for a perfect abstract definition, while Aristotle is looking more to concrete “real” life. In
content, Plato taught that the good life was simply the virtuous life and that bodily goods don’t matter, whereas Aristotle believed
they did.

The Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle explains two important questions necessary for his ethics: What is Good? What is the purpose of life? Let’s look at
the word “good.” Its definition is known based on looking at how people use the word, by what things call “good,” and what is common

11 The following contents are taken from Peter Kreeft’s book Ethics: A History of Moral Thought, p. 35-39.
9
to all of them. The good is always what we desire, the aim of all activity, whether moral or not, and whether it is really good or just
apparently good.

There are some things that we desire only for the sake of other things: money, medicine, etc. Then there are some things
we desire for their own sake: pleasure, beauty, truth. This is the distinction between means and ends. There must be something
worth desiring for its own sake in order to motivate us to desire all the “means” that lead to that end. What is that end? This, in fact,
is what is being asked when we ask, “What is the meaning of life?” For Aristotle, then, this question is a very practical one. As he
states: “Will not the knowledge of it have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, hit upon what
is right?

Like Socrates, Aristotle believes there is a universal, objectively real good, but that it is not clear and easy to find. “It is the
mark of an educated man to look for as much clarity in each kind of things as the nature of the subject permits.” Aristotle sees ethics as
neither something akin to mathematics (which is very certain and clear) nor something like rhetoric (which is not certain and clear
at all). He finds ethics to be somewhere between the two.

What is Happiness?
Modern people think of happiness as something that “happens” to them like good luck. Happiness, in this sense, has nothing
to do with how good we are, it happens by chance and is temporary. For Aristotle, happiness is:
1. Dependent on how good you are.
2. It happens by choice, not chance.
3. It is lasting and not temporary.

Happiness is not just contentment because you can’t be truly happiness unless you are wise, and you can’t be wise unless
you suffer.

It may be easier for a modern mind to use the word “blessedness” as being closer to the Greek concept of happiness.
Happiness in the Aristotelian sense is assumed to be essentially the same for everyone because it is the fulfillment of our deepest
desires, which in turn come from our essential nature, which is the same fore everyone—as the same species.

To answer the question on happiness, Aristotle begins by considering three candidates for happiness: Pleasure, Honor, and
Contemplation.
• Pleasure: All men want it, but it can’t be the highest good for man because it not distinctly human since it is common
to both man and animal.
• Honor: Many people seek honor, but it cannot be the ultimate good because the person who seeks honor is dependent
on those who bestow the honor rather than on himself. Also, people pursue not for his own sake but to be assured of
their merit.
• Contemplation: This is a higher happiness, but few people seek this level of wisdom.

Every occupation of man has an end, a purpose, a function, as does every organ in the body. How then can there not be an
ultimate “end” to man as a whole? Can we say then that being good, being happy and being fully human are three ways of saying the
same thing? Reason makes us distinctively human. Living according to reason is the human good, which includes moral and
intellectual virtues.

Does Luck Play a Part?

You can’t control bad luck (or good), and if luck plays a part in happiness, then you can’t be sure that your life won’t be
miserable no matter how good you are. Socrates himself had some very bad luck and we can assume that he was very good. How true
is the statement: “If activities—are what determine the character of life, then no blessed man can ever become miserable, because
he will never do the acts that are hateful and mean?”

Aristotle resolved the question of whether good fortune was part of human happiness or not by a compromise between
answering yes and answering no: “Small pieces of bad or good fortune clearly do not weigh down the scales of life one way or the
other, but a multitude of great events if they turn out well will make a life more blessed, while if they turn out ill they will crush and
maim blessedness.”

Aristotle then goes to define virtue as the most important means to the end of happiness. He finds common pattern in all
the virtues.

The Principle of the Golden Mean between Two Extremes

Virtues are chosen, Aristotle says, by the reason and the will that imposes the right form on the matter of material actions
and desires. This form avoids the two extremes of excess and deficit, too much or two little of the material action or passion. He says
we must steer down the middle of the road and avoid the ditches on either side. For every virtue, there are two opposite vices. For
instances: Courage is the mean between too much fear (cowardice) and too little fear (recklessness). Temperance is the mean
between being too sensitive or too insensitive to pleasure and pain. “Proper Pride” is the mean between vanity and false humility.

However, is EVERY virtue a mean between two extremes? Thomas Aquinas said no, there are three virtues that are not:
Fides, Spes, et Caritas (Faith, Hope, and Love/Charity)

On Friendship
Aristotle mentions a form of love that he takes very seriously—Friendship. He says that friends transcend justice and that
it is the highest form of love.

He delineates (outlines) friendship into three types: Friendship of Mutual Pleasure, Friendship of Utility, and Friendship of
Respect.

He derives these three kinds of friendship from the three kinds of good: The Good that Gives us Pleasure, the Good that is
Useful, and the Good that is Moral.

10
 Here is a very practical application of Aristotle’s reasoning. There are only three good reasons for doing or loving something:
Either is it morally good, or it is practical necessity, or it gives you some kind of joy. If something is not one of these things, Aristotle
argues, why bother with it? A practical way to simplify your life!

LESSON 6 | ON BEING SUCCESSFUL: AQUINAS’ ON THE MEANING OF LIFE12

Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
− Learn Aquinas’ ethics through an ordering of values and finding the ultimate good in life.
− Realize our personal difficulty in a meaningful life through our choices because of our inability to order values
and distinguish means from ends,
− Pinpoint where Aquinas’ ethics lies in the ability to discern and choice higher values from lesser values.

SELF TEST!
Q: What are the five (5) things you consider in your life right now? Rank them first to last where first is most important.

1st ________________, 2nd ________________, 3rd, ________________, 4th _________________, 5th ________________

Let’s see what is most valuable to you at this point.

LESSON CONTENT

Why should we be good people and lead a good life? Is there a value and a purpose to human life? If there is, then what do
we mean exactly by the word “success?” If success in life means attaining life’s end, then we have made the assumption of life does
have an end and a meaning. Ancient thinkers and modern ones’ response to this question have a disparity. Ancient thinkers assumed
that life had a goal or ultimate good to it, while modern philosophers are much more unsure of this assumption.

Thomas Aquinas and How Philosophy can Help Distinguish True and False Values
In order to even begin to answer the above question, it is important to first ask another question: Why is the question “What
is the meaning of life?” an important question?

The most universal form of all human art is storytelling. This is because we know stories are like life, and if stories are like
life, then life is like a story. What kind of story, then, are we in? Is our story meaningful, or is it just “sound and fury, signifying
nothing?” If there is no real meaning or point or purpose to life, then it doesn’t really matter who we are or what we do.

We can think of life as a story and the three dimensions of ethics as the three dimensions of the story: SOCIAL ETHICS is
about the PLOT. INDIVIDUAL ETHICS is about the CHARACTERS. The SUMMUM BONUM (Greatest Good/Purpose) is about the
THEME.

If a story has no theme, then the character cannot be heroes or villains. A life with no purpose cannot have villains or heroes
either. The hardest story to write today is the serious heroic epic. And the hardest life to lead today is the purposeful heroic one.

“First and Second Things”

In C.S. Lewis essay First and Second Things,” he wrote that if we rank the good things in life and put the first things first and
second things second, we can hope to achieve both. BUT if we put second things first and first things second, we will most likely no
only miss out on the first things, but also on the second ones as well. For example:

Alcoholism perverts the proper pleasure of alcohol, which is there in the first place to gladden our hearts, so the alcoholic
not only has a miserable heart rather than a glad one (a “first thing”), but he also can no longer enjoy the proper pleasure of alcohol
(a “second thing”).

Lewis goes on to say that our society puts survival first. But if we don’t truly know why we should survive, it follows that
we can’t be expected to survive for very long.

So, on the question “What is the meaning of life?” we realize that at the very least it is the most practical question we could
ever ask. Without an answer to this first question of the summum bonum, it is unlikely that we will attain lesser goods, for these lesser
goods are all “second things” and are relative to the “first thing.”

Means and Ends

Everything we think worth doing is either a means or an end, and some ends, when looked closely, are also means to further
ends. For instance, money is a means to food, which is a means to health. Or, a rifle sight is a means to using the rifle, which is a means
to fighting a battle, which is a means of winning the battle, which is a means to winning a war, which is a means to having peace,
which is a means to…?

12 The following contents are taken from Peter Kreeft’s book Ethics: A History of Moral Thought, p. 41-47.
11
 The will to live requires a reason to live. It follows that if you have a reason to live, then you also have a reason to suffer. If
life has a meaning, then suffering has a meaning simply because it is part of life.
Aquinas’ Eight Answers
Aquinas’ methodology was to look at both sides of every question before deciding which side had proved its point. Each
unit of his Summa Theologiae is called an “article” and is a single question with a “yes” or “no” answer, like a miniature debate.

The eight Articles or Candidates for the Summum Bonum:

• Wealth: The most popular but most inadequate. Why does happiness seem to consist in wealth?
o “All Things Obey Money.” This may be true, but if it is, it is because fools obey money. Just because it’s the
first thing that comes to mind does not mean it is the best answer.
o Money is life an umbrella spread over everything. It can be exchanged for many good things and services. But
this is its limit. It can only buy things money can buy. It can’t buy peace or wisdom or neighborliness, etc.
“What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own self?”
o The desire for money is unlimited. There are two kinds of wealth—artificial and natural. Artificial wealth is
the money per se. Natural wealth is the real things money can buy. We can only enjoy a finite amount of
material goods and therefore our desire for the things money can buy is limited. But the desire for artificial
wealth is unlimited, even though it is only a means to an end of buying natural wealth.
o Money is “a means of exchange.” It is a means and not an end, and so not the “last end, or summum bonum.
• Honor: Happiness seems to consist in honor because it is a reward for virtue. Honor, however, is only a sign that you
have something honorable. A sign signifies something else but you’re a fool if you seek the sign and not what is signifies.
o People will suffer the loss of almost anything but their honor. But Aquinas observes that people seek to be
honored for a further reason. People want to be honored for having some virtue.
o Happiness can’t consist in honor because happiness is in the person who is happy—it’s internal. But honor
comes from the person giving the honor and so it is external.
• Glory: Glory or fame seems to be the reward for being great, which, in turn, gives you a sort of immortality. Aquinas
argues, however, that glory can be false and given by fools so it can’t be the true good. In addition, the glory you have
after you die is in others’ minds, not your own, so it can’t make you happy. And even the most famous person will
eventually be forgotten. Finally, human knowledge can only reflect reality, unlike God’s knowledge, which creates, so
human glory, which comes from human knowledge, cannot possibly create happiness.
• Power: Happiness may seem to consist in power because this is the way that we tend to think of God. We think of him
first as “all-mighty.” If happiness is being like God and God is power, then we want power first of all. Aquinas, though,
argues that God’s power is nothing but his goodness. All of his attributes are on with his essences and thus one with
each other. This means that God cannot use power for evil. Man, however, can.
o Happiness may also seem to consist in power because we fear losing power more than almost anything else.
We will even endure suffering as long as it’s freely chosen (within our own power). But, answers Aquinas,
why do we hate powerlessness and servitude? He answers, because it hinders our good use of power, not
because power is the supreme end. Power, like wealth, is a means to an end.

All the first four candidates don’t constitute true happiness because: they are all compatible with evil; their satisfaction is
only partial; they all can have harmful results; they are external, not internal.

• Health: “If you have your health, you have everything.” Aquinas says that this is only relatively true. It is true that bodily
health is greater than anything external, but it’s less than the good of the soul. Like the words in a book, the body is
also just the matter, not the meaning.
o Bodily good cannot be happiness because man is surpassed in bodily good by many animals (for instance, the
longevity of the turtle, the strength of the lion, etc.) but his happiness can surpass that of any animal.
• Pleasure: Pleasure seems to be an answer to what happiness is because both pleasure and happiness are sought for
their own sake, as ends and not means. It is also true that whenever we have happiness, we are pleased. So pleasure
can be considered an attribute of happiness, though Aquinas argues that pleasure is more precisely a consequence of
happiness. He says: “Our desire rest in our real good.” The reason we are pleased is because we possess something
good. Pleasure, then, doesn’t yet tell us what happiness essentially consists in.
o Pleasure and happiness aren’t the same because we often regret pleasures, but never happiness. If there is
such a thing as harmful pleasures, then pleasure cannot be the same as our true good.
• Wisdom/Virtue: By this point we must deduce that happiness is internal, not external, so happiness must consist in the
good of the soul. The good of the soul is wisdom (the good of the mind) and virtue (the good of the will). But, argues
Aquinas, the soul itself cannot be its own last end, because it grows and attains, maturity, if successful, and fails to
attain it, if unsuccessful. It is like an arrow shot to a target. We still have not found what the target is. It’s true that it’s
by the soul that happiness is attained, but what is that happiness? To say that it is soul itself is like saying that the
bullseye is the arrow—that the arrow is its own target.
• God: Aquinas observes that no one in this world is perfectly happy. This means that either there is something more
than this world, or there is no such thing as perfect happiness anywhere. However, we have a natural desire for perfect
happiness, and if nature makes nothing in vain, then this desire for happiness correspond to something that actually
exists. Since nothing in this world can fill the void, there must be something more. The goods, then, of this world and
of ourselves are limited but our desire is unlimited, therefore, there must be an unlimited good which alone satisfy all
our desires. This is Aquinas’ argument for the human good being nothing less than GOD—the summum bonum.

12
 LESSON 7 | ON BEING FAIR: THE ETHICS OF KANT13

Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
− Understand the important ideas that justify Kant’s ethics.
− Differentiate Kantian justification for morality over the Christian perspective of being virtuous.
− Acknowledge the complications of a purely subjective-rationalist theory to enable ethics to work for real
world problems.

SELF TEST!
Q: Supposed your mother asked to you run an errand and she tells you that she will give you the change as a reward:

• Will your run the errand? Yes or No? Why? — ______________________________________________.

• Are you going to keep the change then? Yes or No? Why? — _________________________________________.

Just be honest, seriously.

LESSON CONTENT

Immanuel Kant was as much a child of the scientific Enlightenment as Descartes, Hume and Mill. He too saw science as the
paradigm of human knowledge. He wrote three great books: The Critique of Pure Reason; The Critique of Practical Reason; and The
Critique of Judgment. These dealt respectively with epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. However, his most influential book was
entitled Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. It is this much shorter book on ethics that will be explored in this lecture.

The Assumptions of Ethics

The title is misleading for Kant’s ethics like all philosophers’, Kant’s depend on his metaphysics or on his critique of
metaphysics. The technical term for Kant’s ethics is “deontological” ethics. For Kant denied that ontology (referring to metaphysics)
is possible: there is no metaphysics for him.

Kant claimed that his Rationalist and Empiricist predecessors had both failed to explain how our minds could know truth
because they assumed mistakenly that truth was the conformity of the mind to objective reality. He suggested otherwise.

A “Copernican Revolution in Philosophy”

Kant offered a radical redefinition of truth as reality’s conformity to mind and not vice versa. According to Kant, thought is
like art rather than science in that it actively structures the world rather than passively mirroring it. It creates rather than discovers
structure and meaning. The world is like a cookie batter and the mind’s categories are like cookie cutters, all the shape comes from
the cutters and not from the batter. He agrees with Hume’s basic premises14 that led Hume to his skepticism, but he himself is not a
skeptic, because he says that the job is not to know objective reality but to MAKE the world’s form and meaning.

This process of knowing by actively structuring the known world has three parts:
• The forms of sense perception: space and time.
• The categories of abstract logical thought.
• The three most fundamental ideas of self, world and God.

All these categories, according to Kant, are subjective rather than objective; that is, there are in the mind, though Kant says
that they are in ALL minds universally and necessarily. We only know appearance, not objective reality (which he called “things-in-
themselves”), and we know these appearances by making them, every time we think.

Kant and the “Ought”

When he turns to ethics Kant emphasizes the “ought” or obligation. His fundamental datum is that we are absolutely
obliged to be morally good. What, then, is the ground of our absolute obligation to be moral? For Kant’s epistemology tells him that
we do not know either the nature of man or the circumstances of the world as “things in themselves,” so we can’t base our ethics on
either the “nature of man” in Plato and Aristotle’s anthropology and metaphysics or the “circumstances of the world” in John Stuart
Mill’s utilitarian approach based on empirical observation and mathematical measurement motivated by pleasure/happiness.

Three Initial Steps in Kant’s Argument

1. He identifies the absolute good will a good will. It is through a good will that qualifies things as good or evil.
2. For Kant, what makes a good will good is not through practice or its ability to attain an end or purpose, but through its
willing, and that willing is a good motive. And the motive that makes the will good is duty, a duty with respect to a moral
law. Feelings or inclinations have no bearing in a good will. An act is good because of what comes before it, the principle
that motives it.
a. Although Kant claims that a pure motive of duty is not too idealistic to work, good acts are done less
often in this regard because of rewards and if the reward isn’t there, people stop doing the right thing.
3. Kant identifies moral duty with respect for moral law as such. This is most general moral law calls the “categorical
imperative,” or absolute moral obligation. Kant states: “There is only one categorical imperative and it is this: act

13The following contents are taken from Peter Kreeft’s book Ethics: A History of Moral Thought, p. 68-72.
14Humes basic premises: (1) what we know is our experiences of the thing and not the substance of the thing itself; (2) there is no such
this as causality or cause-effect relationship; (3) our sense of good and evil is not something experience but our subjective feeling onto
the acts and call it either good or bad; and, (4) we never sense ourselves in a substantial way because we look within and all we find are
thoughts, feelings, desires and choices.
13
 only according to that maxim [principle] whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a
universal law.”
a. This is the Universal Law which in other words mean to do only what you want (will) everyone else to
do, or “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” We do not will robbery or murder or any
other evil deed done to us. So if we only did what we willed to be a universal law, if we did what we
willed all people to do so, we would do only good and not evil. It is simply a law of justice and equality.

A Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative

Persons are not merely subjective ends, whose existence has a value for us, but objective ends, that is, ends in themselves,
and should be treated as such. Kant states: “The practical imperative therefore will be the following: Act in such a way that you
treat humanity, whether in our own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end, and never simply
as a means.”

These two formulations of categorical imperative are widely recognized as a landmark in ethical thought, as a basis for
universal human rights and for a moral world order that transcends differences in religion, culture, history, race or temperament.
The first formulation of his “categorical imperative” is very much like the law of non-contradiction in logic, while the second
formulation gives us a humanism that is equally acceptable to atheists and theists, Muslims and Jews, Christians and Buddhists,
liberals and conservatives.

Some Problems with the “Categorical Imperative”

1. The categorical imperative is abstract, in the sense that it doesn’t tell us what or what not to do concretely and
specifically. There is no substantive content. The categorical imperative in its first form tells you that being good is
being logically consistent. It’s not based on human nature, human needs, the nature of God, or the nature of anything
real. But it does not allow for exceptional cases. How could celibacy (in the case for priesthood) be a moral choice, for
instance? One couldn’t will that for the whole race. What if everyone wanted to torture animals, or to commit suicide,
how could the categorical imperative forbid it?
2. A second problem with Kant concerns the motive of duty. Can motive be the one and only moral determinant? It may
be the most important factor, but is it the only one? Traditional morality said there were three moral determinants:
the act, the motive or intention, and the circumstances. Legalism says its just the objective act. Utilitarianism says it’s
just the circumstance which determines the consequence. Wouldn’t that be as one sided as legalism or utilitarianism?
3. He makes duty the only moral motive. Common sense says that there is also moral worth in right inclinations, especially
in e.g., instinctive love which doesn’t take any deliberate active will. If mother’s instinctive love for her baby is lacking,
we find it not only biologically unnatural but also morally blameworthy.
4. Do we love persons because we love principles the most, and our principles tell us to love persons? Or do we love
principles because we love persons the most, and principles define how to love persons?
5. Kant’s morality is one of equality: the right is what everyone should do. But what about making an exception for
yourself if you want to do MORE than your duty, for instance, a heroic act? For acts beyond the call of duty, will there
be moral worth in that? Logically, Kant must deny that heroism has any moral worth, or must say it is everyone’s duty
to be a hero and go beyond the call of duty, which is illogical, not to mention burdensome for all.
6. Kant cannot account for the fact that the better you are the more joy you get in doing good. If two people refuse to do
evil but the saint finds joy in not doing evil and the sinner finds pain in not doing evil, do you say that there is less moral
worth in the saint because he is happy? Kant ignores human nature and only looks at human deeds, and then only at
the motives for the deeds. What about character?

Three Necessary Postulates

There are three postscripts that Kant adds to his categorical imperative, that he says are presuppositions of morality: God,
freedom and immortality. He doesn’t think we can prove any of these things and therefore argues that we cannot know whether they
exist or not, but we must act as if they did in order to be fully moral.

Kant insists that God is the ideal but not the ground of morality. He says that it is man’s will, not God’s will, that is the source
and origin and cause of moral law. Kant calls this the autonomy of the will. But how can our will be both over and under the law,
both the creator of the moral law and subject to it?

If God, or freedom, or immortality does NOT exist, should we believe they do in order to justify morality? Should we live a
lie in order to live well?

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 LESSON 8 | ON BEING PIOUS: ETHICS AND RELIGION15

Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
− Learn the essential arguments that separate and intertwine religion and ethics.
− Differentiate ethics that relies on reason alone and one that includes faith.

SELF TEST!
Q: Can a religion stand apart from ethics or can ethics stand by itself apart from religion?

• __________________________________________________.

Provide a brief explanation on this question.

LESSON CONTENT

The Case of Euthyphro

Socrates, on his way to court where he will be tried for impiety (of which he was later on convicted and sentenced to death),
comes across Euthyphro, a young man on his way to court as well. He is on his way to testify against his own father who has killed a
slave. Socrates finds this shocking, for in ancient times the word “piety” meant respect for the family as much as respect for the gods.
He asks Euthyphro how he could possibly be taking this impious stand against his father and Euthyphro replies that he is able to do
it precisely because he is pious. Socrates asks Euthyphro for a definition of “piety” to which Euthyphro replies that piety is “doing
what the gods love, doing what the gods do.” Because there is a story in Greek religion about a god who prosecuted his father for
murder, Euthyphro thinks he is pious for imitating this god. Socrates asks him if piety is imitating all gods or only some, for being
pious to one could mean having to be impious to another. Euthyphro changes his definition of piety: being pious must mean agreeing
to do what all the gods agree to do. Socrates goes on then to ask the central question of the dialogue: Is something pious or good
because the gods will it, or do they will it because it is good?

Euthyphro, at first stumped by this question, replies that a thing is only good because the gods will it. This has come to be
known by philosophers as The Divine Command Theory of Morality. It is the theory of “God as boss,” that is represented in history
most strongly by thinker such as John Calvin, Martin Luther, and Soren Kierkegaard. Socrates argues that a thing isn’t good because
the gods command it, but rather the gods command it because it is good. Socrates implies that morality is higher than religion and
therefore religions can be judged by moral standard. He implies that sine we know morality by reason and religion by faith, we judge
faith by reason rather than reason by faith.

All this leads to a certain dilemma in which the question begs to be asked: Which goes on top, then, religion or morality? Is
God above goodness or is goodness above God? The traditional Jewish, Christian and Muslim answer to this is: neither. God and
goodness are equally absolute, because goodness is God’s nature. In other words, goodness is goodness.

In the final analysis, Socrates sees contradictions between Greek religion and reason. He creates philosophical thought that
becomes, in essence, a new kind of religion to fill the hole of the dying Greek religion which he sees as lacking in two fundamental
qualities: (1) Rationality and (2) Morality.

Thomas Aquinas: Religious Faith and Philosophical Reasoning

St. Thomas Aquinas puts the relation between religious faith and philosophical reason very clearly. He says there are two
kinds of truths:
1. Those we discover by reason.
2. Those we can know only if God reveals them supernaturally and we believe them.

However, these two sets of truth can never contradict each other. Nothing we can discover by reason can ever contradict
anything God has revealed to be believed as faith because the same God is the author of both: The truths known by reason and the
truths known by faith are like two books from the same author.

Socrates, Dostoevski and the Role of Religion in Ethics. Or is it the Role of Ethics in Religion?
In an earlier lecture we pondered Dostoevsky’s assertion that: “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” It is helpful
to investigate this statement from opposite philosophical viewpoints. In the most basic sense, it seems Socrates makes ethics
independent from religion, while Dostoevski makes ethics dependent on religion.

Religious scholars agree that there are three visible dimensions to all religions: CREED, CODE, CULT or WORDS, WORKS,
WORSHIP.

And even though creeds and cults differ greatly, moral codes do not. Different religions share a common universal morality.

Three Levels of Morality

1. The lowest is the morality of enlightened self-interest or calculated egotism. This is the morality that says: “I won’t
hit you if you don’t hit me.” It is a morality based on an argument between human beings. However, if the
agreement doesn’t work, then neither does the morality. The consequence of failing at this morality is only public
shame.
2. A higher level of morality is the morality of justice, the morality that says: Do the right thing because it is the right
thing to do. The consequence of failing at this morality is personal guilt.

15 The following contents are taken from Peter Kreeft’s book Ethics: A History of Moral Thought, p. 23-26.
15
 3. The highest level of morality is morality beyond justice: the morality of mercy, charity, unselfishness, self-sacrifice,
and even martyrdom.

Interestingly, every major world religion teaches this third level of morality. In fact, this third level of morality is specific to
these religions and rarely seen outside of them. All of this can be considered the subjective or psychological connection between
morality and religion. In other words, “How we learned it,” We learn “level 1 morality” by experience, “level 2 morality” by moral
reason, and “level 3 morality” by religious faith. The objective or logical connection between morality and religion comes up when
people are asked to justify their morality. Some turn immediately to religion. For instance, when people ask the following types of
questions: “Why should all people be treated as valuable?” “Why should people be loved rather than used?” and they answer these
questions with something like the following answer: “Because we are all God’s children.”

What is implied in this answer is that religion and ground for one’s ethics. Is religion, however, the only real reason or round
or justification for ethics? Dostoevsky would say: “Yes, religion is the ONLY ground for ethics. If there is no God, then everything is
ethically permissible.” But what would Socrates say? Socrates would probably answer that religion is not the only ground for ethics
and that ethics can be grounded in a rational philosophy.

Adding Jean-Paul Sartre to the Debate

Dostoevsky asserts that if there’s no God then there is no real reason for being moral, Socrates is both religious (pious) and
moral, but he does not ground his morality in religion. It is interesting to compare Sartre, an atheist, to see a third view on this
question. Sartre agrees with Dostoevsky’s assertion that, “If there is no God, everything is permissible,” but unlike Dostoevski he
believes that there is no God and therefore everything is permissible. However, this causes his enormous distress because it follows
that human life itself is morally meaningless.

And Now Camus…

In the 20th century, Albert Camus seems to have taken a position similar to Socrates but in relation to a Christian God rather
than the immoral gods of Socrates’ Athens. Camus, not a Christian but an atheist or at least an agnostic, believes in morality, but
without God. This leads to a dilemma, for Camus holds that (1) the true meaning of life is to be a saint, but (2) one can’t be a saint
without God, and (3) there is no God. This, of course, is a paradox, an apparent self-contradiction.

So, in the end we are left with four possibilities. We can believe:
1. That Dostoevsky is right, but that there is no God (Sartre, Nietzsche).
2. That Dostoevsky is right and there is a God (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).
3. That Dostoevsky is wrong because there may or may not be a God but that there is morality anyway (Socrates,
Camus).
4. That Dostoevsky is wrong because God exists, but nevertheless, everything is permissible, that God makes no
difference to morality (modern society perhaps?).

The Moral Argument for God

If there is a real morality—if we are absolutely obligated to obey our moral conscience—then where does this absolute
obligation come from? From a godless universe that is made up of only blind atoms? How can there be real good and evil? If
conscience is not the voice of God and only the voice of society, or one’s parents, then why do we believe that it is always wrong to
disobey one’s conscience? Is it possible to argue: If morality is absolutely binding on your conscience, then what explains this,
if not God?

Summary
If we were to step back and look at all these arguments, it would seem that we started with Socrates’ substitution of rational
philosophy for religion but that we’ve come full circle and ended with an argument from rational philosophy FOR religion. While this
may seem confusing, it is probably safe to assume that Socrates would approve of such confusion as evidence that you are thinking
for yourself.

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 LESSON 9 | ON BEING GOOD AND BEING EVIL: IS HUMANITY NATURALLY GOOD?16

Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
− Explain the ideas regarding good and evil through Hobbes and Rousseau’s position on human nature and
social contract.
− Distinguish moral good and evil from innate/ontological goodness.
− Demonstrate free will/free choice can make either good and evil deeds and situations in life.

SELF TEST!
Q: Which position will you take: A human being is naturally good, or a human being is naturally evil?

• ____________________________ — __________________________________________________.

Are you convinced about this position?

LESSON CONTENT

Hobbes vs. Rousseau on Pessimism Versus Optimism

To explore whether man is innately good or evil, it is important to look at two contrasting philosophers who came after
Machiavelli: Hobbes and Rousseau.

Hobbes seems to be a pessimist. He believes that man by nature is selfish and bad and that is society that makes him good.
He says that man invented civil society in order to force himself to be good. This is why one needs a rather totalitarian society, which
he called The Leviathan (Great Beast).

Rousseau seems to be the optimist. He believes that man by nature is essentially good and that society makes him bad. He
believes man is a “noble savage” but has been taught to act badly, contrary to his nature, by society.

Natural Law Theory Out/Social Contract Theory In

Both Hobbes and Rousseau, however, share a common modern assumption: that society is not natural but artificial. They
both contrast “the state of nature” and “state of civil society.” They believe that society began at a certain time in early human history
when social contract was made. Social morality is an artifice17 or contract.

Optimism vs Pessimism
Ethics is about good and evil, so whether you are an optimist or a pessimist about human nature in your anthropology will
make a great difference in your ethics. For instance, it will make a difference to the question of how much government there should
be. The optimist will tend to say, “that government governs best, that governs least;” that man is good and should be left alone. The
pessimist, however, will say you need more government, even force, because on his own man is brutish and selfish. The optimist
would favor less order and structure in a society. He would tend towards libertarianism, while the pessimist would ask for more
order and structure to tame the beast within us.

Good and Evil Defined

There are two different kinds of goodness:
• Ontological goodness, which is the goodness in your being or nature, apart from your will and choices, deeds,
or lifestyle.
• Moral goodness, which is your virtues, or your virtuous acts, deeds, or choices.

These two kinds of goodness correspond to two kinds of evil also:

• Ontological evil, which is worthlessness, misery, suffering or death.
• Moral evil is wickedness and sin.

Moral evil is what we do. Ontological evil is what we suffer. “It” happens.

Since there are two kinds of goodness, and two possible answers to the question of whether man is good or evil, there are
four possible anthropologies to investigate:
1. The Traditional/Classical View: This view says that man is ontologically very good—great, in fact. He was created in the
image of God and he has intrinsic rights, dignity, and worth. However, he is also a sinner and can act contrary to his
nature. This means that in this view there is much moralizing and preaching, and need for repentance and reformation.
Man’s moral badness is not tolerated because of his ontological goodness.
2. Hobbes’ View: Hobbes, like Machiavelli, denies that we are ontologically good or morally good. Morally, man is selfish
and competitive. Ontologically, we are just clever animals. Hobbes is a materialist: everything real is made of matter.
Thought is just refined sensation, and love is just refined animal lust. Matter is competitive, since no two bodies can
occupy the same space at the same time. If there are two people and only enough food for one, one must die. Material
goods can be shared only by being divided, so that the more that I give to you, the less I have for myself. So, a
materialist’s metaphysics necessitates an anthropology of selfishness.
3. Sartre’s View: Sartre’s view is that man is ontologically bad but morally good; that there is no such thing as intrinsic
human dignity/worth/value, and that there is no such thing as sin or vice or moral life. Life is meaningless and absurd

16 The following contents are taken from Peter Kreeft’s book Ethics: A History of Moral Thought, p. 56-59.
17 Artifice can be substitute by the word “pretense” or “ploy.”
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 with no God and thus no purpose or value. We create our own laws and values, so a thing becomes good simply by
choosing it. Morality is entirely subjective.

Addressing Plato’s Question in the Meno | “Can Virtue be Taught?”

There are four options:
• Pessimism says that virtue comes only against our nature because our nature is evil (Hobbes, Machiavelli).
It’s not taught but conditioned by fear and force, physical or legal.
• Optimism says we have it by nature (Rousseau). Virtue doesn’t need to be taught; it’s innate.
• Another, lesser kind of optimism says virtue comes by teaching—enlighten the mind and virtue will follow
(Plato).
• The middle view (Aristotle) says that both virtue and vice come y training and practice. We have potential for
virtue by nature, but it takes work to actually become virtuous [and make it a habit].

Rousseau vs Hobbes: A Case on Evidence in Experience

The issue of optimism vs pessimism has to be settled not be emotional preference or prejudice but by evidence and
argument. Here is a way to find evidence: To find out what is in man, let it come out. Give him freedom and power as catalysts to
release whatever is in him. Both freedom and power are neutral, in that either can be used for good or evil. What are the effects on
man when is given more freedom and power? What are the effects when he is given less freedom and power? Assuming that modern
democratic society, along with the advancement in technology, has given us more freedom and power than ever before in the history
of man, we can then ask ourselves some important questions: Is modern man better? More moral? Happier? Wiser? Less prone to
suicide, despair, family and social breakdown? Less warlike and violent? Do we observe that power and freedom unlock more evil
than good? Does power corrupt?”

If we then look at situations where power and freedom have been diminished, what do we find? What was morality like
during the Pandemic? What happens to morality in times of crisis or national emergency? Do we act better when suffering deprives
us of freedom and power? Did the lockdowns make us more heroic?

It seems that there is both surprising good and surprising evil in us, and that seem more prone to evil that we get what we
want. Rousseau would seem to be refuted from this standpoint. If power does corrupt, does suffering ennoble? Power, remember, is
neutral, not evil, so that good or evil must come from us when we use power. And suffering is neutral, not good in itself, and therefore
the good or evil must come from us also when we experience suffering.

The answer seems to be that too much power or too much suffering is hard to take, but we do tend to act more virtuously
under moderate poverty, or occasional emergencies. Human goodness seems to come out best when there is neither too much or too
little power, money, and freedom.

Arguments for Innate/Ontological Goodness

If we didn’t have innate goodness, we wouldn’t know. And if we didn’t know it, we couldn’t use it to judge evil by. So, unless
we were good, we could not recognize evil, even in ourselves. So the fact that we recognize and condemn evil in ourselves, even
though we are evil, proves that we are also good. Why do we all agree that murder, torture, rape and cruelty are morally evil? If man
is not ontologically good, why is harming him morally bad?

What is the Origin of Our Evil?

If we are so good ontologically, why are we so bad morally? What is the origin of evil? Four easy answers:
1. We don’t know the origin.
2. We aren’t really evil at all. Evil is an illusion.
3. Society is to blame.
4. “The Devil made me do it.”

If these answers seem inadequate, we are left with a more honest answer: our own free will. To find the origin of evil, look
in the mirror.

Free Will or Free Choice

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.”
Why did God give is free will, if He Knew we were going to misuse it? Because we can’t be morally good without free will
either. Do we have free choice? If we believe that we have free will, we must ask how it is compatible with the fact that we are
conditioned by our hereditary and our environment. And is free will compatible with fate or destiny? Modern thinkers tend to place
emphasis on hereditary and environmental aspect while the ancients placed more weight on destiny. If we deny free will, however,
you cannot reasonably judge or blame anyone. There is no moral responsibility if there is no free will. But if there is nothing like
destiny [or purpose or calling], life seems to be just “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Free will and something like destiny
both seem to be pre-suppositions of morality. No meaningful story can lack either of the two.

Summary
Hobbes and Rousseau are important because they questioned assumptions of traditional views. Hobbes questioned innate
human goodness and Rousseau questioned innate human badness. They opened more options and in so doing have enriched and
greatly complicated our view of ourselves.

18