In the opening pages of the Alan Kazdin textbook that you read, we heard the story of poor Baby Albert who used to think white rabbits were no big deal, until the neutral stimulus of a white rabbit got paired with the unconditioned stimulus of a loud noise that produced terror in him. And when that happened, Albert came to associate what had previously been neutral, the white rabbit, with a feeling of fear.
Human beings are capable of coming to have associations that have valence, either positive or negative, associations that produce in them positive or negative emotional responses.
And they are capable of coming to have those associations with entities that previously had no value to them. So with that fact in mind, psychologists began thinking more generally about the relation between objects and behaviors, on the one hand, and outcomes that those objects or behaviors are associated with, on the other. So whereas classical conditioning is concerned with the passive consumption of some item in the world—food is presented to you, a rabbit is presented to you, and a certain association arises— operant conditioning is concerned with the relation between behaviors that you yourself perform and the outcomes to which those behaviors typically give rise.
So we have, in our behavioral repertoire, a bunch of things we do that are desired behaviors. And we also have undesired behaviors. And what psychologists noticed is that we have resources available to us using the mechanisms that conditioning provides for increasing differentially various types of behavior. In particular, if we are attentive to the consequences that behaviors typically give rise to, and if we intervene to control those consequences, we can increase the incidence of certain kinds of behavior, and decrease the incidence of other kinds of behavior.
You can pair with it a positive reinforcer. I can reinforce your efforts on writing a paper by providing you with the positive reinforcer of a letter on your transcript that has signaling value to future employers. So I can provide you with positive reinforcement for desired behavior. Or one can reinforce a desired behavior through what is technically known as negative reinforcement. The removal of an aversive stimulus. So we can increase behaviors that we want to increase by associating with them consequences that serve to increase the value, subjectively, that that behavior has to the individual, as the result of pairing something that the individual likes already with the behavior.
We can, in addition, decrease the likelihood of an undesired, or in fact of a desired, behavior by associating that behavior with some consequence that is a negative consequence. And we will, in the final two lectures before, or just after March break, talk about punishment and how it works. So behaviors can be associated with positive consequences, or they can be associated with negative consequences.
And sometimes, that happens naturally. So when I eat chocolate cake, that is associated with the positive consequence of the flavor that it provides me. It is positively reinforced, because the behavior, eating the cake, gives rise to a natural consequence, the taste of the cake. It increases the amount of arterial blockage on the way to my heart.
Making salient to people what the natural negative consequences of their behaviors are is one of the ways one can make use of this paradigm. So we can take behaviors that occur, that we want to have more of, and associate them with positive consequences. We can take behaviors that occur that we want to have more of and associate them with negative consequences.
We can help make people aware of the positive or negative consequences that these behaviors already have. And finally, we may discover that unbeknownst to ourselves, a certain kind of reinforcer is, in fact, preserving a behavior for us that we wish to get rid of. So a parent may discover that the reason a child is continuing to whine is because whining, an undesired behavior, is in fact associated with a reinforcer, parental attention. And one might come to recognize that the removal of that reinforcer will reduce the behavior.
So in this regard, operant conditioning takes our capacity for association and uses it in familiar ways to increase desired behaviors and decrease undesired behaviors. And the third thing that operant conditioning attends to are the antecedents that gave rise to behaviors. So whether a behavior is likely to occur depends first of all on the setting events.
Moral principles like these focus primarily on people's actions and doings. We "apply" them by asking what these principles require of us in particular circumstances, e. We also apply them when we ask what they require of us as professionals, e. In the last decade, dozens of ethics centers and programs devoted to "business ethics", "legal ethics", "medical ethics", and "ethics in public policy" have sprung up.
These centers are designed to examine the implications moral principles have for our lives. But are moral principles all that ethics consists of? Critics have rightly claimed that this emphasis on moral principles smacks of a thoughtless and slavish worship of rules, as if the moral life was a matter of scrupulously checking our every action against a table of do's and don'ts.
If the state of your soul is in the mean in these matters, you are neither enslaved to nor shut out from the pleasure of eating treats, and can enhance the visit of a friend by sharing them.
What you are sharing is incidentally the 6 ounces of chocolate mousse; the point is that you are sharing the pleasure, which is not found on any scale of measurement. If the pleasures of the body master you, or if you have broken their power only by rooting them out, you have missed out on the natural role that such pleasures can play in life.
In the mean between those two states, you are free to notice possibilities that serve good ends, and to act on them. It is worth repeating that the mean is not the 3 ounces of mousse on which you settled, since if two friends had come to visit you would have been willing to eat 2 ounces.
That would not have been a division of the food but a multiplication of the pleasure. What is enlightening about the example is how readily and how nearly universally we all see that sharing the treat is the right thing to do. This is a matter of immediate perception, but it is perception of a special kind, not that of any one of the five senses, Aristotle says, but the sort by which we perceive that a triangle is the last kind of figure into which a polygon can be divided.
The childish sort of habit clouds our sight, but the liberating counter-habit clears that sight. This is why Aristotle says that the person of moral stature, the spoudaios , is the one to whom things appear as they truly are.
The mean state here is not a point on a dial that we need to fiddle up and down; it is a clearing in the midst of pleasures and pains that lets us judge what seems most truly pleasant and painful. Achieving temperance toward bodily pleasures is, by this account, finding a mean, but it is not a simple question of adjusting a single varying condition toward the more or the less. The person who is always fighting the same battle, always struggling like the sheep dog to maintain the balance point between too much and too little indulgence, does not, according to Aristotle, have the virtue of temperance, but is at best selfrestrained or continent.
In that case, the reasoning part of the soul is keeping the impulses reined in. But those impulses can slip the reins and go their own way, as parts of the body do in people with certain disorders of the nerves. It is the old story of the conflict between the head and the emotions, never resolved but subject to truces. A soul with separate, self-contained rational and irrational parts could never become one undivided human being, since the parties would always believe they had divergent interests, and could at best compromise.
The virtuous soul, on the contrary, blends all its parts in the act of choice. This is arguably the best way to understand the active state of the soul that constitutes moral virtue and forms character. It is the condition in which all the powers of the soul are at work together, making it possible for action to engage the whole human being. The work of achieving character is a process of clearing away the obstacles that stand in the way of the full efficacy of the soul.
Someone who is partial to food or drink, or to running away from trouble or to looking for trouble, is a partial human being. A person of character is someone you can count on, because there is a human nature in a deeper sense than that which refers to our early state of weakness. Someone with character has taken a stand in that fully mature nature, and cannot be moved all the way out of it. But there is also such a thing as bad character, and this is what Aristotle means by vice , as distinct from bad habits or weakness.
It is possible for someone with full responsibility and the free use of intellect to choose always to yield to bodily pleasure or to greed. Virtue is a mean, first because it can only emerge out of the stand-off between opposite habits, but second because it chooses to take its stand not in either of those habits but between them. In this middle region, thinking does come into play, but it is not correct to say that virtue takes its stand in principle; Aristotle makes clear that vice is a principled choice that following some extreme path toward or away from pleasure is right.
In our earlier example, the true glutton would be someone who does not just have a bad habit of always indulging the desire for food, but someone who has chosen on principle that one ought always to yield to it. He is serious, even though he is young and still open to argument. But the only principled alternative he can conceive is the denial of the body, and the choice of a life fit only for stones or corpses.
What, for example, is the virtue of a seminar leader? Is it to ask appropriate questions but never state an opinion? Or is it to offer everything one has learned on the subject of discussion? What principle should rule? Is there a hybrid principle? Or should one try to find the mid-way point between the opposite principles? Or is the virtue some third kind of thing altogether? Just as habits of indulgence always stand opposed to habits of abstinence, so too does every principle of action have its opposite principle.
If good habituation ensures that we are not swept away by our strongest impulses, and the exercise of intelligence ensures that we will see two worthy sides to every question about action, what governs the choice of the mean? The origin of virtuous action is neither intellect nor appetite, but is variously described as intellect through-and-through infused with appetite, or appetite wholly infused with thinking, or appetite and reason joined for the sake of something; this unitary source is called by Aristotle simply anthropos.
This brings us to the third word we need to think about. Aristotle says plainly and repeatedly what it is that moral virtue is for the sake of, but the translators are afraid to give it to you straight. Most of them say it is the noble. One of them says it is the fine. If these answers went past you without even registering, that is probably because they make so little sense.
But Aristotle considers moral virtue the only practical road to effective action. The word the translators are afraid of is to kalon , the beautiful. And he explicitly compares the well made work of art to an act that springs from moral virtue. Of the former, people say that it is not possible add anything to it or take anything from it, and Aristotle says that virtue differs from art in that respect only in being more precise and better.
This is not some special usage of the Greek language, but one that speaks to us directly, if the translators let it. And it is not a kind of language that belongs only to poetic tragedy, since the tragedians find their subjects by recognizing human virtue in circumstances that are most hostile to it. Aristotle is always alert to the natural way that important words have more than one meaning.
In the Physics the various senses of motion and change are played on like the keyboard of a piano, and serve to uncover the double source of natural activity. Hackett Publishing Company, n. Newton Arvin. New York: Vintage Books, Stein, William Bysshe. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company Inc. Thus the role of Book I is to turn the minds from the customary evaluation of justice towards this new vision.
Though their views are different and even opposed, the way all three discourse about justice and power reveal that they assume the relation between the two to be separate. They find it impossible to understand the idea that being just is an exercise of power and that true human power must include the ability to act justly.
Book I starts off with Polemarchus saying justice is obedience to some kind of principle. Socrates counters with the fact that justice involves an act of evaluation and the creation of evil. Thrasymachus enters the argument and says justice is nothing but the interest of the stronger, injustice can gain more than justice. Socrates ends the book by saying injustice destroys individuals and states. In Book II, Glaucon joins the argument. The Human Function Argument Aristotle argues that the human function is activity of the soul that expresses or requires reason.
This argument is found in Nicomachean Ethics approximately between Bekker lines b24 and a9. Humans must have a function, or else they would be idle, which is absurd. Aristotle directly asks the reader if humans might have no important overall function other than a chosen occupation in society but suggests that this would not be expected of nature.
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