Right Reason

We Need Edifying Characters, Not Mary Sue's

 

From “Rey Was Comic-Con’s New Favorite Cosplay, and We’re Loving It”:

Over the course of the con it felt like you couldn’t swing a lit lightsaber and not hit someone dressed like the Force-sensitive young scavenger from Jakku. And considering how important Rey’s character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens was to an entire generation of young female Star Wars fans, it was a wonderful thing to behold. 

There's good fantasy and then there's bad fantasy. Fantasy is not just escapism. It is the telling of myths. 

 

Good fantasy teaches us about virtue and inspires us to pursue it. Both Faramir's refusal of the one ring and Princess Leia's willingness to carry out dangerous espionage for the sake of others' liberty are edifying examples that teach the audience about the excellent conduct we should strive for and the sacrifices necessary to achieve it.

The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars alike are modern myths that will, much to the exasperation of their critics, live on as among the supreme cultural works of our era. Both will be read and watched in a thousand years—as long as our species survives that long, that is. They provide their modern readers with the myths to make sense of the ethical questions defining our lives in a similar way that the Illiad served for classical readers. To provide their readers with guidance, those myths need virtuous characters, such as Faramir and Princess Leia, through which their audience can understand their own lives and come to transcend their own vices by empathizing with the heroes of their myths.

 

Bad fantasy is simple wish-fulfillment and the desire to be the center of attention. It is when we write ourselves into our favorite stories as the all-powerful hero everybody loves. These characters do nothing but allow for us to indulge in our own narcissistic impulses. They teach us that the world, and all its inhabitants, shall always revolve revolve around our own particular plot-lines. Rather than pointing its audience to virtue, these myths teach them to worship themselves.

Rey is bad fantasy incarnate, a specimen of that Mary-Sue trope best relegated to fan-fiction than actually written into a serious narrative. The character was written for the sole purpose of the audience, especially the girls of the audience, to identify with her, and yet her only quality is the plot serving her every. Critics of previous stories are right to point out that women have rarely held the role of main protagonist. However, it is equally sexist to not critique a female character by the same standards as a male character.

 

Every event Rey is involved with in The Force Awakens only serves to give her an opportunity to display how perfect she is. Does a starship need to be piloted? Well, Rey has those skills? Does Rey need to escape from what I can suppose is one of the most fortified compounds in the universe? Rey has suddenly learned jedi mind tricks. And on, and on, and on. The invisible hand of Providence serves to guide her every move into making her appear a heroine, without all of the sacrifice that being a heroine entails.

 

The celebration of her character is little but the the egotistical desire to be the plot's preferred (female) character. Rey being a favorite just tells us how shallow people are in their love of characters—and that should not be praised.

So no, I for one am not loving that she is a Comic-Con favorite, and I think an attraction to her character reveals moral dystrophy: The desire to have the fruits at the end of the hero’s journey without the journey, to jump ahead to the confident Luke Skywalker who walked into Jaba’s palace as a Jedi without starting as a whiny farm-boy from Tatooine.

The American Bro

From Vice's "This American Bro: A Portrait of the Worst Guy Ever":

He is always eating. Not anything in particular, just FOOD. Things. Condensed matter. He is all about CONSUMPTION. Every decision is dictated by the pursuit of this. He consumes women, exploits weaknesses, spends 23 dollars at In-N-Out and posts a picture of the receipt to Instagram. To him, everything is a dick pic, a flex, a look-how-hard-I-get, a watch-me-fuck-the-universe. Fast food restaurants and insecure redheads from Murray Hill—there is no difference. Not because he really wants the thing, but because no one else should have it, because he wants the world to know that he will attain it if he pleases. Everything is a display of dominance; he conquers things, he rolls deep. He is bench reps, maxing out, calorie arithmetic, choking down cans of tuna fish, contorting his body in the mirror to see that one specific muscle articulation.

...

He wants to be recognized, to participate in a ritual. That is the only way he understands success. He is in San Juan or Key West or Señor Frog's or some cookie-cutter debauchery enclave. He is going to the Groove Cruise and to Holy Ship!, literally exceeding the domestic capacity for his bro requirements. He needs another country to sustain his biological need to be awful.  He is wearing rosary beads, loving his grandmother, keeping a prayer card in his room somewhere, feeling passionately about State College athletics, going HAM on jet skis, having some vague job at a company that is named VERITAS FINANCIAL or CENTURION. He is trips to Cancun, apps at the Cheesecake Factory, theme parties in off-campus apartments, tailgating, quoting Will Ferrell movies, drinking shitty light beers that he can disparage for being shitty, though he feels proud because he drank them anyway. He is at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, at Santacon, at happy hour on Cinco de Mayo, in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. He owns more hoodies than books, more hoodies than there are torsos throughout the entire planet. He is pre-gaming in the hotel room, believing in the concept of pre-gaming in the first place, unbuttoning his shirt and popping his collar at the casino. He is howling from a megaphone that there is nothing that can contain him, while simultaneously tiptoeing along a rigid standard of COOL.

What is it that Socrates said? Oh yes, an unreflected life is not worth living.

Smith and Kierkegaard on the Sickness Unto Death

 

In all the liberal and ingenious arts, in painting, in poetry, in music, in eloquence, in philosophy, the great artist feels always the great imperfection of his own best works, and is more sensible than any man how much they fall short of that ideal perfection of which he has formed such conception, which he imitates as well as he can, but which he despairs over ever equalling. It is the inferior artist only, who is ever perfectly satisfied with his own performances. 

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments 

 

A human being is spirit? But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between the two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self.

-Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

 

 

When compared to the immortal standard of virtue, all human behavior will be found lacking. Whether it is because of a lack of knowledge or a lack of self-command, human beings will never be able to perfectly correspond with the injunctions of that standard, and so any impartial spectator will always find something to be desired in humanity. The emphasis that Smith puts upon the impossibility of the standard that a truly virtuous man grasps at is reminiscent of Søren Kierkegaard’s later writings on despair, which he called the sickness unto death. The sickness was found in a person in the midst of despair willing to be rid of himself, which was an act that would lead to death, the elimination of the self, if it could. Thus despair is the sickness unto death. 

 

An example Kierkegaard used was the example of Caesar Borgia whose motto was “Either Caesar or nothing.” Borgia never would become Caesar, so did he despair about who he was since he wished to be someone else? If so, this despair was a desire for Borgia to lose who he was. Kierkegaard, being a Christian religious writer at heart, believed that everyone was, by nature, immortal, and that therefore no one could actually lose themselves. By virtue of immortality, no one could rid themselves of themselves. The sickness unto death, was thus impotent. According to Kierkegaard the realization of this impotence was a reason the Christian understood human nature whereas someone who does not accept the immortality of the soul would not. 

 

Returning to Smith, when someone judges themselves according to the immortal standard out there, it is natural that such a judgment brings along with it the opportunity for the sickness unto death. Not only is there ignorance about what is good and beautiful in the world, but there is also outright rejection of what is good and beautiful. In addition, human beings have often failed to reach the immortal standards of virtue because of weak wills, and the inability to actually follow through with what their prudence informed them to do. When a human being sees just how much he has failed to live up to virtue, there are bound to be times when he wishes to no longer be himself. This desire need not express itself in outright suicidal thoughts, but it can also express itself in people withdrawing from the world, and becoming all but dead to the world. The one who struggles from the sickness unto death is no longer human being striving to reach up to the immemorial standard of virtue, but now someone who has given into the sickness unto death by abandoning that pursuit.

Of Pygmalion

 

It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds. 

-St. Augustine

 

From “Love’s Turing Test”:

By this point, the film has turned into a particularly clever Pygmalion story, one that is more attuned to what a modern man might actually want in a fantasycompanion, as opposed to a mere sexual fantasy. And Samantha is very much a Galatea: her personality starts with coding set up by her programmers, but it develops very much in response to the way Theodore interacts with her. Interaction by interaction, she is created by him.

There are A.I. questions to ask about how plausible Samantha is as a construct – how close to passing the Turing test can you get with little more than lots of processor power and fairly simple algorithms for machine learning. It’s still an open question, though bets are being placed as we speak. But the movie doesn’t really focus on those questions, but on questions of how well we humans pass the Turing test these days. Or ever have. Or, to the extent we do, how we have managed to pass for human for so long.

Samantha is designed to adapt her personality in response to interaction with her user. But we all do that. Anybody who’s been married or in a relationship for a long time can recognize the ways in which we learn how to behave, even how to feel, from how our partners respond to us – for good and for ill. Theodore himself talks about how he is who he is because of his history with his ex-wife, whom he knew from his youth – she created him as surely as he created Samantha. We’ve all got fairly simple algorithms for machine learning. We’re all Pygmalions, and we’re all Galateas. And Theodore’s world seems to have made its melancholy peace with this understanding of themselves. One of the striking things about the film is the degree to which everybody pretty much accepts Theodore’s relationship with Samantha – with one very important exception.

The best stories are those which reflect our attention back to the human condition. Ovid’s retelling of the story between Pygmalion and Galatea in The Metamorphoses is one of those stories. Ovid writes about the relationship between the scultper Pygmalion and the infatuation he comes to feel for his work in progress, Galatea. Venus, though, intervenes on Pygmalion’s behalf, and bringing the sculpture to life, unites the two in marriage. 

The story of Pygmalion and Galatea helps reflect our attention back to what he desire in our own lives. Especially in a world of computer programs and tailor-made interactions, it is easier to become a Pygmalion, and to become enamored with simply one’s own fantasy rather than having to address the actual world, which largely doesn’t care for own own individuality. Despite that, part of being an adult, as compared to an adolescent, is the asceptance of that cold fact, and still managing to live in the world despite it.

Furthermore, it is in learning to allow that world - the one beyond our interior fantasies - to influence us that we can grow as human beings. By retreating to a world created to serve our own peculiarities, we are retreating to a world defined by our own virtue and vice, and we may therefore become blind to our own failings. 

Aristotle and Adam Smith on Virtue

 

Nature, accordingly, has endowed (men), not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men. 
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Every craft and every line of inquiry, and likewise every action and decision, seems to seek some good; that is why some people to describe good as what everything seeks.

-Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics

 

Adam Smith and Aristotle provide two different ways to look at virtue. While virtue serves as a standard for judging the praiseworthiness of conduct in Smith’s writing, it serves as a description of the ideal functions of human beings, determined by their nature, for Aristotle. 

The difference is reflective of the different perspectives which the two take in their ethical inquiry. Aristotle begins The Nicomachean Ethics by thinking about what is the good for humanity in terms of means and ends, and how people, as craftsmen, can attain the human good. Adam Smith begins The Theory of Moral Sentiments with a description of the importance of sympathy and empathy to human interactions. The Nicomachean Ethics is a book about what virtue is, and how people can attain it, The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a book about how people’s moral sentiments lead them to sympathize and judge one another, and while both descriptions certainly neglect much to be found in both works, it captures the difference between the two. And this difference leads to a radically different conception of the nature of virtue.

 

The vision of virtue that Aristotle provides in The Nicomachean Ethics is one in which virtue is the key to human happiness. “Since happiness is a certain sort of activity of the soul in accord with complete virtue, we must examine virtue; for that will perhaps also be a way to study happiness better” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1102a). Here and throughout his corpus, Aristotle uses the term “εὐδαιμονία” which we today translate as “happiness.” “Happiness”, though, does not capture the full breadth of the meaning of “εὐδαιμονία.” “Εὐδαιμονία” can perhaps be better translated as “flourishing.”  It is characteristic of a life worthwhile. It requires activity in accordance with reason, and so is contrasted with the pleasant, yet passive, emotion of fulfillment which characterizes “happiness.” 

Virtue, in turn, was the necessary condition for that flowering of the human condition which makes εὐδαιμονία possible. The virtues virtues, therefore, are the ends which we should all be orientated towards in our behavior if we are to truly live a life worth living.  

 

For Adam Smith, on the other hand, virtue is not something towards which human beings are orientated. Instead, virtue is a standard by which we can judge the behavior of ourselves, and others. Important to Smith’s entire moral framework in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is the notion of propriety with respect to the impartial spectator. 

The impartial spectator is a moral construct, and he is the one who is the spectator to the behavior which is to be judged. He starts first simply as a thought experiment of what would be the reaction of the person who is there to judge the conduct: If Bob saw Sally kill Jim, what would Bob’s reaction be. The impartial spectator then becomes a demigod as the book progresses, and the thought experiment becomes more and more about what the great Impartial Spectator in the great firmament of heaven of human conduct. 

Virtue in Adam Smith’s thought is therefore a matter of creating a standard for conduct. Whereas in The Nicomachean Ethics, virtue is a matter of what is the constitution of the moral agent, and whether he is flourishing according to his nature, it is a matter of standard of conduct, and whether a moral agent is deserving of praise. 

  

Compare how Aristotle and Smith speak of the cardinal virtue of prudence: “In his steadiness of his industry and frugality, in his steadily sacrificing the ease and enjoyment of the present moment for the probably expectation of the still greater ease and enjoyment of a more distant but more lasting period of time, the prudent man is always both supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the impartial spectator…” (TMS, VI.i.11). Aristotle on the same subject: “The remaining possibility, then, is that prudence is a state of grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about things that are good or bad for a human being… That is why Pericles and such people are the ones whom we regard as prudent, because they are able to study what is good for themselves and for human beings…” (Nich. Ethics, 1140b). 

 

All-in-all, whereas Adam Smith uses virtue in order to determine who would be worthy of the praise of the impartial spectator, Aristotle uses it in order to talk about the character of a moral agent. Virtue, for Smith, is a matter of standards of conduct. Virtue, for Aristotle, is a matter of the flowering of a certain possibilities within human nature

 

Neuroscience, Rationality, and Virtue

 

 

"If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying the god, you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virute every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less."

-Socrates as recorded by Plato in the Apology

 

 

In his book, How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 2009), Jonah Lehrer uses recent evidence from neuroscience to argue that morality is not a matter of reason, but rather a matter of emotion. Like Hume, who argued that reason was the slave of the passions and argued morality to be but feelings of approval and disapproval, Lehrer finds moral judgments as less a conscious deduction and more an emotivistic response. In his argument, Lehrer primarily takes Kant, and the Enlightenment tradition as his opponents, but he argues that the ethical consensus for thousands of years from the Ten Commandments to the categorical imperative are based upon a the erroneous assumption that “our moral decisions are based on rational thought” (How We Decide, pg. 173).

According to Lehrer, when we make a moral judgment, the motivation for the decision is not a rational deliberation, but rather a unconscious emotional reaction. Within his vision of morality, our reason serves not as a guiding light, but rather as a post-hoc apologist which serves to make our emotional reactions seem reasonable. The thrust of Lehrer's argument is thus that it is a mistake to find the source of morality in reason because people's actual moral judgments are actually based on emotional reactions.

 

 

However, all of this in turn misses the thrust of the Socratic maxim that a life unreflected is a life not worth living. What Plato is emphasizing in the Apology through Socrates is not that at every single point in our moral lives we make moral decisions based on deductive reasoning taking all of the evidence into account, but rather that we can reflect on previous moral decisions in order to shape our character to make better decisions in the future. This perspective is echoed in Charles Darwin's description of a moral being in The Descent of Man as something that can reflect back on past actions with either approval or disapproval.

Furthermore, in the Nichomachean Ethics (trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd edition), Aristotle finds virtue not in singular acts and feelings but a habit of action that causes the person in question to perform her functions well. Leaving aside the question of what the proper functions of a human being are, this is a much different vision of morality from the vision that is tacit within Lehrer's account in How We Choose. To suggest, as Lehrer does, that the essential use of reason in a moral agent's life comes at the moment of decision making thus ignores a large strand of ethical inquiry, from Aristotle to Darwin, that places more emphasis on reflection and the cultivation of proper habits.

 

Rather than morality being about singular judgments of the rectitude of an action, morality within Plato and Aristotle's tradition of virtue ethics is about the formation of a character able to habitually make the right decisions. In a classic article in the American Journal of Psychology, “Habit,” B.R. Andrews defined “Habit” as “a habit, from the standpoint of psychology, is a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience." (American Journal of Psychology,Vol. 14. No. 2. (1908) pp 121-149). Today, “Habit” is first defined in the Oxford American English Dictionary as “A settled or regular tendency or practice.” The point of a reflected life was not we would be able to make deductive judgment for the propriety of each action. Instead, it was that, by proper reflection, we would be able to form a character that could reflexively make such decision based on our habits.

The virtue-ethical tradition does not reject that moral decisions are often made by emotional responses within the moment; instead, it teaches that we need to grow a virtuous character that can make proper emotional responses informed by our previous reflections. Rather than denying how moral decisions are made, as does the Enlightenment tradition, it harnesses and improves upon it. By living a life well reflected upon, we are able to train our moral intuitions and shape our emotions to react in the ways that reason determines to be right. The virtuous person then doesn't need to deliberate on most moral decisions; rather, she has trained herself to be able to react almost automatically in a proper manner. It is not for no reason that Charles Darwin wrote, again in The Descent of Man, that the perfect moral being is able to act in the most noble manner possible purely by reflex.

 

Explaining this vision of the moral life in terms of neuroscience would have been interesting, especially considering that Lehrer has an earlier chapter about how in decision making ("The Predictions of Dopamine," pp. 28-56). When someone has consistently repeated a pattern of behavior, he can rely on emotion in making that decision because of how dopamine in the brain created expectations we are often only partially to. This echoes the process that Aristotle wrote virtue is required in the opening of the Nichomachean Ethics' second book when he wrote: 

Virtue, then, is of two sorts, virtue of thought and virtue of character. Virtue of thought arises and grows mostly from teching; that is why it needs experience and time [i.e., of ēthos] results from habits [ethos]; hence its name 'ethical', slightly varried from 'ethos'. (1103a15-18)

The similarities between the two are striking. Striking enough that I doubt Lehrer became familiar with the Aristotelean literature before opening up a broad-side assault on all of Western moral philosophy.

He misses a great opportunity, though. Since Aristotle relies on a metaphysical understanding of the human person, much of it rooted in his biological thought, within his writings that could be critiqued and improved upon with a modern understanding of the cognitive sciences. Lehrer could have helped provide that; instead, he simply launches on an attack of an entire tradition of inquiry he is not familiar with.

Moving backto the main topic, that each moral judgment may rely more on an aesthetic sense of the world than a rational deduction does not mean that moral decision making is fundamentally divorced from reason. What commentators like Lehrer, even though it may be working off of the correct neuroscientific perspective, fail to take into account are the lessons of the Classical virtue-ethical tradition. As taught by Plato and Aristotle, the use of reason within moral decision making is not a matter of on-the-spot decisions, but reflecting upon previous decisions in order to make possible the gradual growth of a habitual character that can make such on-the-spot decisions properly. By ignoring both the role of habits and reason's reflective capacity, not as simply something able to calculate but to look back on actions, Lehrer's critique of reason in morality falls short by his ignorance of virtue ethics.

 

The Imperative of Doxastic Commitment

 

 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”

 -Matthew 10:34-38 (Revised Standard Edition)

 

 

Doxastic (from the Greek word δόξα -“Doxa” - meaning “belief”) commitment, a steadfast allegiance in action to the beliefs one holds, is an intrinsic precondition of honor. After all, one of the fundamental demands of honor is the condition of skin in the game, that the person in question be exposed to the costs of her actions. When an honorable human beings acts, she does so in a fashion that exposes her to not only the benefits, but also all of the costs, no matter how bitter, of that action.

The honorable person is thus fully exposed to all of the harmful consequences that result from her behavior. Just as she has her skin in the game when it comes to her ventures in the world exposing her to the harmful effects of those ventures going belly up, she has her soul in the game when it comes to her moral beliefs exposing her to being hurt by them. Nevertheless, doxastic commitment demands that we put our full soul into the game, and be willing to take whatever hurt that follows.

 

No one likes being hurt, and no one especially likes consciously opening himself to harm in the future. Soul in the game exposes the very fiber of our ethical being and identities to wounds, uncertain in their severity, so it should be no surprise that so many want to avoid identifying themselves with clear-cut moral propositions that doxastic commitment requires. As Cicero noted in On Duties: “From the beginning nature has assigned to every type of creature the tendency to preserve itself, its life and body, and to reject anything that seems likely to harm them...” Our animal nature thus expresses itself when we hedge on our believes and remove our whole soul from the game in order to avoid pain.

However, if doxastic commitment leads to a great chance of being hurt in the future, then would it not be rational to protect oneself against that pain by hedging one's beliefs? We need not abandon all of our moral commitment to do this; rather, we only need to be a bit wishy-washy on key matters that would bring up conflict. Our soul need not completely out of the game, but it could just play the game less intensely. However, this ignores the twofold importance of doxastic commitment. Not only is it a laudable trait for a human being to have, but doxastic commitment is conducive to the selection of the best moral practices across societies.

For one thing, fear of pain is never a virtuous motivation. It may illicit sympathy from an onlooker, but the impartial spectator would never applaud it. There is simply no honor in it. That being willing to accept great costs for one's beliefs is so important to honor is displayed in dueling traditions in history. Those customs demanded that a duelist be willing to sustain great bodily harm, and even death, to display their doxastic commitment and therefore their honor.

 

Another aspect of doxastic commitment is that it is much easier to keep people accountable for their beliefs in a community that adheres to that custom. Doxastic commitment thus allows for the efficient communication of desired moral conduct because a person with her full soul in the game is open to social cues that alert her to the desirability of her conduct. Why this is so can be understood in light of systems theory. In a complicated system in which paths of concatenation twist and turn this way and that, simple signals that illicit certain responses from the constituent parts of the system are a means of ensuring that the constituent parts of that system are operating as they need to ensure the health of that system. Thirst and hunger are two mundane examples by which an animal body, itself a system of many constituent parts, ensures that it is kept well fed and satiated. An animal need not take measurements of either hydration or nourishment to maintain its health; instead signals within the system provide controls that keep it acting towards the overall wellbeing of the whole system.

A moral community is also a complex, adaptive system since there is a constantly changing frequency of moral habits within it, and those frequencies can change based on the signals of approbation and censure they interact with. In order for the best patterns of conduct to multiply within the community, people need to learn what those best patterns of conduct are, and be put into a situation in which they are likely to actually go through with adopting them. Both are critically necessary. In order to discover them, people need to have their moral character open to critique. So much in human knowledge proceeds via the process of conjecture and refutation. This is especially true when all of the knowledge necessary to come to the final judgment is rarely at the disposal of any one person, which is certainly true in practical ethics. We may never have the knowledge to determine the judgment of the impartial spectator, but he social process of conjecture and refutation, of approbation and censure, can help us come close.

 

However, moral learning by approbation and censure can only function when there's soul in the game. When people do not put their whole soul in the game, they weaken the signals that they receive about the desirability and propriety of how they live their lives. When people choose to associate themselves with moral propositions that are so indefinite that they can be twisted to suit almost any situation imaginable, then they are unaccountable. Any attempt to criticize them is like trying to grip water: It will always frustratingly slip between one's fingers, ever in metamorphosis to accommodate the circumstances.

Worse, people are more likely to put their whole soul in the game when they are likely to receive praise than when they are to receive condemnation. So now not only is not holding to the habit of having soul in the game not only because it delays the process of the discovery of the best morals by conjecture and refutation, but it also corrupts that process because people will act so as to get a positive signal without truly having the trait that would bring that positive signal about. Not only do they not have their whole soul in the game, but the soul they put there is not their own.

 

As a result, doxastic commitment lends itself not only to personal virtue, but also the efficient operation of an ethical society in which everyone gets not only the benefits, but also the costs, of their moral beliefs, which in turn helps to weed out the least proper and least cleaved-to moral beliefs.

Doxastic commitment is thus not only a sine qua non for a human being's virtue, but also a rule that helps the efficient discovery of the best moral beliefs. Without soul-in-the-game, not only is an individual really incapable of standing for anything because he is incapable of being wrong on anything, but an individual is not accountable for what they have said before because they have not committed to it. A human being without soul-in-the-game is either too afraid of the pain that being open to the costs of one's beliefs or simply does not have any. The impartial spectator would certainly applaud neither.   

Good, Evil, and Human Capability

 

 

 

 

The best and worst specimens of humanity are two sides of the same coin. Heroes and villains are not categories that are divided by the expansive sea of morality never to have their shores meet. To the contrary, both the most exalted heroism and diabolical villainy are manifestations of a human spirit that has become capable of great things. And great things need not be good things. Alexander the Great, a man whose accomplishments helped to create the very foundation of the Hellenistic world, was given the epithet “Gujastak”, “Accursed”, by the Zoroastrian tradition in the Ardā Wirāz Nāmag for the great destruction his army wreaked marching on a war-path through Persia. Despite what evil he may have inflicted upon the world in his prideful thirst to conquer the world, Alexander the Great was still someone who activated the human potential within him for greatness.

A tragedy it is then that such a person would dedicate his efforts to the ultimately destructive and evil desire for conquest and deification. That it is even a tragedy shows that villainy and heroism are both channels of human capability, and that those who unlock that human excellence within them may become some of the worst monsters to walk the Earth. Excellence in capability is then the coin and both heroism and villainy, the capability of great good and evil, are the opposing sides. Both are united by the necessity of being capable of great things, but the two are distinguished by the paths that the person decides to channel that capability towards. Some create businesses that will make possible the use of a revolutionary product, become great teachers of morality, and inspire others to do good as well while others will become conquerors, and harbingers of other great evils upon the world.

Those who have done the greatest good in the world and those who have committed the great evil have both activated the human potential within them for greatness. Those who do not have the capability for great evil thus do not have the capability for great good. The best and worst of humanity are thus manifestations of the same human spirit and testaments to the power of human choice in the world.